One Hundred Philistine Foreskins Read Online Free

happened, the behavior over the course of the last few days of this wretched Mazal they were hauling between them had attracted even Temima’s attention from across the street, who could not but notice her coming out onto the upper balcony of the Satmar girls’ school Beis Ziburis with a squeegee and a bucket splashing with a dark sudsy liquid, and she would mop furiously, screaming shrilly the whole time, “ Schmutz , schmutz , this place is stinking with schmutz , must get rid of all this schmutz ,” using, oddly enough, though she was Sephardi from the Arabian Diaspora, the Yiddish word for dirt, filth. She would overturn the bucket on the stone parapet of the balcony, dumping the slop and contagion onto the street below, onto the head of whoever was passing by; with any luck it would merely be a woman, but it could also be a man, ranging from a schnorrer with his hand out begging for a shekel to a rabbi of great reputation with his hand out making a point, a sage before whom everyone rose when he stepped into a room, from the top of the black hat you couldn’t tell who was who—she did not discriminate but continued dumping the offal in this way until she was dragged back inside the school building. After an interval, when she reckoned no one was looking, her eyes darting in this direction and that, she would come out again with her squeegee and her sloshing pail and start her whole routine all over again, yelling, “ Schmutz , schmutz !”—swabbing the floor and dumping the fetid liquid on unfortunate heads, male and female, young and old, Arab and Israeli, Jew and gentile, holy and unholy, passing below, never looking up as they ought to have done.
    â€œShe claims that we Satmar Hasidim stole her babies from their hospital bassinets after she gave birth to them and told her they were dead,” one of the righteous matrons said to Temima in Yiddish. “I’m not saying yes, I’m not saying no. But just between us, it would not have been such a bad thing for these poor dark kinderlakh to be handed over to families that would raise them in the proper religious way. Sometimes extreme measures are necessary in the name of the Master of the Universe.”
    Temima said, “Leave her here with me. I will call her Rizpa.”
    â€œRizpa—very nice. It means ‘floor’ in Loshon Kodesh—no? Good. She mopped our floors, so now she’ll mop yours.”
    In Beis Ziburis across the street, as Temima knew only too well, they instructed the girls in how to kosher a chicken and the laws of niddah relating to menstrual impurity and ritual bath procedures, all the rules and regulations regarding getting rid of the blood, the chicken’s blood, the woman’s blood, and so on and so forth, that was education enough for them. Why should Temima have expected them to recognize this reference to the concubine of King Saul, Rizpa daughter of Aya, whose two sons were impaled on the mountainside in a political deal to appease the enemy? Spreading her sackcloth over the rock by the mountainside, Rizpa sat guard there from the beginning of the barley harvest until the rains came pouring down, and she would not allow the birds of the sky to touch the bodies of her sons by day, or the beasts of the field at night.
    So here was another womb made crazy by the important affairs of men. Ima Temima ordered that Rizpa be put to bed and that simple, familiar Yemenite foods be carried in to comfort her until she regained her strength, sweet mint teas and malawah breads. And once in a while, in those pre-computer days when she still moved from room to room, Temima herself would come and sit at her bedside and listen to her stories about her life in Rosh HaAyin as one of the four wives of the revered teacher Baba Rakhamim, and about all the hens in her backyard with only a single cock who ruled over them, bothered them day and night, wore them out so utterly that, one after