The End of Everything (New Yiddish Library Series) Read Online Free Page B
Author: David Bergelson
with its sharply pointed nose and gold-rimmed spectacles thrust a little upward, and his dark, forked beard blown to left and right by the wind.
Velvl felt profoundly distressed and shocked and wondered:
—Did this mean that the engagement was over? … Irrevocably over? …
The next day he rose very early and ordered his buggy harnessed up.
Outdoors it was cloudy and cool, and a late autumn shower dripped down intermittently, starting, stopping, and starting all over again.
All the way into town he was visibly angry and distressed, thought about Nokhem Tarabay’s proud, unpleasantly sullen daughter whom he’d once seen in the provincial capital, and came to a decision:
—Nokhem Tarabay’s daughter wouldn’t want him—she definitely wouldn’t want him.
The night before, thinking about Mirele, he’d made up his mind:
—He’d go over to the man who should’ve been his father-in-law and pay him his share of the money.
This decision pleased him so much that he was even keen to know what other people would say about it, above all, what Nokhem Tarabay would say about it …
But while he was still in the passage as he entered his father’s house, he could hear Reb Gedalye Hurvits’s appointed arbitrator yelling heatedly from his father’s little study, and the way his father kept interrupting him with the softly-spoken argument of an unlettered man:
—What if things had happened the other way around?
He stood there for a while listening to the arguments.
Mentally he turned over the same question yet again:
—Did this mean that the betrothal was really over, that this was the end of everything?
And for some reason, instead of going into the little study he went into the dining room where his mother was reviling his former fiancée to visiting strangers. With a severe and displeased expression, he rebuked her angrily but politely:
—Hush! Just look at her!
* Reb is a Yiddish title of respect accorded to older men or strangers; it is the equivalent of the Polish term Pan .
* Marienbad is a spa town in the Carlsbad region of what is today the Czech Republic. During the second half of the nineteenth century, when the town was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, many European celebrities and aristocrats came to enjoy its curative carbon dioxide springs. Wealthy and assimilated Jews went there to seek well-connected matches for their daughters and sons. Before World War I it averaged about twenty thousand visitors every year.
† This kind of large farm, known in Polish as a folwark , was operated in the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth from the fourteenth until well into the twentieth centuries to produce surplus grain for export. The first folwarks were created on church-owned land; later they were adopted by both the Polish nobility ( szlachta ) and rich Polish peasants, and the export grain they produced was a central part of the economy.
* Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, coincides with the harvest festival and is celebrated, according to the Hebrew calendar, on the sixth day of the month of Sivan (usually corresponding to the secular month of June).
* Because the root of the sugar beet contains a high concentration of sucrose, it was grown commercially for sugar in the tsarist empire.
* A light four-wheeled open carriage with one or two seats facing forward, drawn by a pair of horses.
* An imperial Russian unit of distance approximately equal to one kilometer or twothirds of a mile.
* The Russian Orthodox Church permits some categories of its priests to marry.
* A Polish-Russian open carriage with a folding hood in which passengers can recline on long trips.
Part 2
Mirel
2.1
Reb Gedalye Hurvits’s business affairs plunged into ever greater confusion, and an ill-concealed disquiet troubled this preoccupied Torah scholar and his entire aristocratically reserved, well-to-do household.
With his worldly cousin, who was also his bookkeeper and closest intimate, Reb Gedalye now spent night after
Velvl felt profoundly distressed and shocked and wondered:
—Did this mean that the engagement was over? … Irrevocably over? …
The next day he rose very early and ordered his buggy harnessed up.
Outdoors it was cloudy and cool, and a late autumn shower dripped down intermittently, starting, stopping, and starting all over again.
All the way into town he was visibly angry and distressed, thought about Nokhem Tarabay’s proud, unpleasantly sullen daughter whom he’d once seen in the provincial capital, and came to a decision:
—Nokhem Tarabay’s daughter wouldn’t want him—she definitely wouldn’t want him.
The night before, thinking about Mirele, he’d made up his mind:
—He’d go over to the man who should’ve been his father-in-law and pay him his share of the money.
This decision pleased him so much that he was even keen to know what other people would say about it, above all, what Nokhem Tarabay would say about it …
But while he was still in the passage as he entered his father’s house, he could hear Reb Gedalye Hurvits’s appointed arbitrator yelling heatedly from his father’s little study, and the way his father kept interrupting him with the softly-spoken argument of an unlettered man:
—What if things had happened the other way around?
He stood there for a while listening to the arguments.
Mentally he turned over the same question yet again:
—Did this mean that the betrothal was really over, that this was the end of everything?
And for some reason, instead of going into the little study he went into the dining room where his mother was reviling his former fiancée to visiting strangers. With a severe and displeased expression, he rebuked her angrily but politely:
—Hush! Just look at her!
* Reb is a Yiddish title of respect accorded to older men or strangers; it is the equivalent of the Polish term Pan .
* Marienbad is a spa town in the Carlsbad region of what is today the Czech Republic. During the second half of the nineteenth century, when the town was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, many European celebrities and aristocrats came to enjoy its curative carbon dioxide springs. Wealthy and assimilated Jews went there to seek well-connected matches for their daughters and sons. Before World War I it averaged about twenty thousand visitors every year.
† This kind of large farm, known in Polish as a folwark , was operated in the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth from the fourteenth until well into the twentieth centuries to produce surplus grain for export. The first folwarks were created on church-owned land; later they were adopted by both the Polish nobility ( szlachta ) and rich Polish peasants, and the export grain they produced was a central part of the economy.
* Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, coincides with the harvest festival and is celebrated, according to the Hebrew calendar, on the sixth day of the month of Sivan (usually corresponding to the secular month of June).
* Because the root of the sugar beet contains a high concentration of sucrose, it was grown commercially for sugar in the tsarist empire.
* A light four-wheeled open carriage with one or two seats facing forward, drawn by a pair of horses.
* An imperial Russian unit of distance approximately equal to one kilometer or twothirds of a mile.
* The Russian Orthodox Church permits some categories of its priests to marry.
* A Polish-Russian open carriage with a folding hood in which passengers can recline on long trips.
Part 2
Mirel
2.1
Reb Gedalye Hurvits’s business affairs plunged into ever greater confusion, and an ill-concealed disquiet troubled this preoccupied Torah scholar and his entire aristocratically reserved, well-to-do household.
With his worldly cousin, who was also his bookkeeper and closest intimate, Reb Gedalye now spent night after
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