When the Night is New, Marvin Rabinovitch [intellectual books to read .txt] 📗

the power of her insight. “Yes, hard work is essential, but without imagination you’ll always be stuck in the present, the same dreary old you.”

“I guess it took a lot of imagination to make a high school teacher,” Yashe said dryly.

“You wouldn’t be so doubtful if you read Mr. Chips,” Adele said.

“Why don’t you read it to me,” he suggested. “My ear is much sharper than my eye.”

“That’s the singer in you,” she reflected admiringly, and opened the book to the first page. Taking a deep breath, she was about to begin the story when the door flew open and in swept a scrawny, narrow-headed, almost chinless youth, unkempt, disreputable, with a hank of hair flopping over one eye.

“Ikey, you there?”

A bright beady stare scanned the foreground of the place and then the middle distance until it settled on the heads and shoulders of the pair rising above the backrest of the wooden bench fronting one of the alleys.

“What’s up, Toby?” Yashe asked in a calm, well modulated voice.

“Better cheese it fast, brother. The old man’s on the warpath and he’s plenty farbrent.”

He used the Yiddish word for burning with rage. It was the family joke, though not usually funny.

“What is it this time?”

“There’s a fiver missing from his change purse. Somehow he got the idea you took it.”

“And how did such a thing enter his mind?”

“Fuck, it was yours in the first place, wasn’t it? He stole it from you so he figures you stole it back.”

“Whereas it was you all the time, wasn’t it? My light-fingered little brother. Adele, meet Tuvia Heisswasser, the pride of our family.”

The two exchanged glances but no gesture of acknowledgement. A wide, apologetic grin split Toby’s face.

“I told him it wasn’t you, Ike. He wouldn’t listen.”

“But you never took the blame yourself, did you?”

“Listen, I’m always on your side. Never forget that.”

“Which is the reason why he knows I hang out at Westmain Alleys.”

The younger man shook his head emphatically. “I never told him. It was Shaiva.”

Yashe grimaced with distaste. Neither brother could stand their eldest sister, Bathsheba. In the fullness of time, Adele would join their non-admiration society.

“He’s on his way here?”

“Foaming at the mouth.

“Then I’d better make myself scarce.”

“And stay away from home a couple of days. Until he cools down, at least.”

“Wonderful. Maybe you’ll lend me my five bucks for a flophouse.”

Anger made his sarcasm a blunt instrument. His voice trembled with indignation and fear dried it to a hoarse croak.

Toby had the grace to be embarrassed. He hung his head like a small boy caught in some shameful act.

“Lost it at pool,” he mumbled.

Yashe shook his head helplessly. “Thanks for the warning, anyway,” he sighed, unable to keep the bitterness from his tone.

Adele felt an upwelling of pity and maternal concern.

“Pick me up at the factory at five,” she said. “We’ll think of something together.”

She already had an inkling of what could be done. Mondays and Tuesdays her father spent at a small hotel in St. Jerome for an early start on the back roads of his territory in the Laurentian foothills. The Murphy bed would be vacant for the next forty-eight hours.

“Your reputation will be mud,” Yashe protested when she told him as they left Tartan Garments at quitting time. “What, you’re willing to have a strange man spend the night in your room? The neighbors will love that.”

“You’re not so strange,” she said with a shy smile. “Anyway, I’ll say you’re my cousin, if anyone asks. The son of my father’s brother.”

His answering smile was tentative. “Your father has brothers?”

“Five, all of them unmarried.”

That night after supper they exchanged family histories. Yashe hailed from a village near Kiev. He grew up during the Bolshevik revolution and had fond memories of the Cheka, the precursor of the NKVD. His mentors, the subcommissars and their minions who ruled the district, indoctrinated him into the mysteries of the Soviet state and the rites of Leninolatry. Almost without exception, they were Jews, apostates from the faith of their fathers.

“Just like I am,” he told her proudly.

“Are you still a communist?” she asked with bated breath. These were people for whom the newspapers, even the Yiddish ones her father read, had little time or patience. Of course, she would try to keep an open mind. Miss Grendling always insisted on an open mind.

“Don’t be afraid, it isn’t a dirty word,” he said with a slightly mocking smile. Perceiving her distress, however, he took pity and reassured her. “You don’t have to worry, I’m not plotting against the state. In fact, I plan to be a millionaire before the age of thirty.”

She was thrilled that he would confide in her like this. Such heroic ambitions!

“With a voice like yours, I’m sure you’ll go far,” she encouraged him, a little abashed at her own presumption.

“Nah, the voice is nothing special,” he scoffed. “I’ve got acting talent, though. Mitzi Posner says I could be a star of the Yiddish stage if I put myself in her hands. Already done some bit parts in plays she directed and boy, did I impress her.”

“Who’s Mitzi Posner?” she asked innocently.

He scowled at her ignorance. “Just the biggest personality to come out of Poland in the last decade. One of the real artistes from classical Europe.”

Classical Europe, it was a phrase he savored, having picked it up from his patroness. He had caught her eye – or, rather, ear – with a bit of business he used in the Slichot portion of the High Holiday services, the little sob he coaxed from his hard-pressed voice a la Yosseleh Rosenblatt in the most piquant of the beast-beating laments.

“If she wasn’t touring the Eastern Townships, I could be crashing in her pad right now instead of your little room,” he boasted.

Crashing? Pad? These had a sinister sound, though their exact meaning was beyond her ken. Their flavor of unhallowed intimacy did not escape her, however.
“I’m sorry you’re disappointed I’m not Mitzi Posner,” she said stiffly.

He chuckled at her discomfiture. “Never mind. Any port in a storm. Anyway, my old man knows where she lives, but he never heard of you. That’s your big advantage.”

“Well, I’m certainly glad you find me useful,” she sniffed, unmollified.

“Sure, we’re cousins, ain’t we?” He lit a cigarette and grinned at her. “I forget now, is that on your mother’s or father’s side?”

On his own father’s side, he had no cousins but two half brothers, ten and fifteen years his senior, almost total strangers. His mother was the old man’s second wife, a child bride she had been. Jeroboam Heisswasser had been induced to take her off the shelf by a legacy of land that turned out to be subaqueous real estate after the local Pooretz diverted a small tributary of the Don to irrigate his fields. Nevertheless, he had fathered three children on her, of whom Yashe had the honor to be the second.

She noticed that he gritted his teeth unconsciously whenever the conversation veered in the direction of the shadowy patriarch.

The old man had an eye for business. Ritual slaughter, the trade to which he had been apprenticed, held no attraction for him. It was too smelly a vocation and insufficiently lucrative. Hazzanut, sacred cantillation, was something quite otherwise. Prestige and money beckoned, if he could only get a foot in some synagogue door. His own talent, unfortunately, was small. Ah, but the boy! The boy was a nightingale. The boy was a gift from heaven, even more precious than the rich black loam that turned into river bed. The boy was a find. Jeroboam blessed all the angels in heaven when the elders of Kehillat Yeshurun on Slope Hill Road gave ear to the pure soprano and nodded with approval and delight.

“Enough about me,” he said at last. By now, the room was foggy and acrid with cigarette smoke and Adele was coughing softly in counterpoint with his recitation. She raised the window sash to its maximum height. “Your turn,” he prompted her.

“Oh, gosh, I haven’t had any life at all,” she demurred. “Nothing to compare with yours anyway.” She fussed in the tiny kitchen to divert his attention from her insignificance.

“Everybody has a life,” he corrected her. “Maybe we’re not all from classical Europe, but that doesn’t mean we don’t amount to anything. Start from the beginning.”

In the beginning was Bessarabia. She remembered little of that, except Pa’s enormous handlebar mustache, a glossy roan in color, and Ma’s evanescent presence. The convent school she attended until the age of nine.

In nomilei fiului, eyoo tatelui, eyoo shvintoloy dookh, ameen.

That huge, sad-eyed effigee, spread-eagled on a golden cross. Crossing herself with the first two fingers of her right hand.

“They sent you to the nuns?” he asked, almost in disbelief.

“There was no other school in our town,” she explained. “It was a very good education. I learned French and German.”

“Say something in German,” he challenged.

She laughed uncomfortably. “It’s very like Yiddish. I’ve forgotten most of it.”

“Still,” he insisted.

She complied with a little frown and reddening cheeks. “Das ist var.”

“Meaning?”

“That’s the truth.”

“Doos is der emess,” he translated in Yiddish.

“Du host recht,” she continued.

“That’s the same thing,” he said, exulting in his own perspicacity.

Of the old country, she remembered little beyond the church, the gorgeous vestments of the priests and deacons, the cloying smell of incense, and Gypsies.

“I remember, the first thing I asked my Pa when we stepped off the ship was ‘where are the Gypsies?’.

“Maybe I’m a Gypsy,” Yashe mused, blowing smoke from his nostrils. He would emit smoke from his eyes, ears and pupik if he could.

“You don’t look like a Gypsy,” she said, eying him with a sidelong glance. “Though maybe the Gypsies kidnapped you as a baby and sold you as a foundling.”

He showed some excitement at this conjecture. “You know, I’ve often thought that myself. I really belong to a rich family, a family of nobles. Thieves in the night stole me from my cradle and left me with a pack of lousy Jews.”

She couldn’t hide her shock at this bitter hypothesis. “What a way to talk! You should be happy to be of our people. Anyway, you look very Jewish.”

This judgment made him very irritable. “No, I don’t. Mitzi Posner says I look just like a Polish count she once knew. Look at this nose. Have you ever seen such a short nose? Look at this skin. As light as old ivory.”

“Is that what Mitzi Posner says?” she asked with a mischievous smile.

He gave her a sullen look. “Stick to what you know.”

She didn’t know much. It was an admission very easy to make. She knew how to comfort her Pa. She knew how to please her teachers and make good grades in high school. She knew how to prepare simple dishes like the salad and scrambled eggs Yashe had wolfed down for supper. Best of all, she knew how to make buttonholes.

“The years have gone by very quickly,” she told him. “Now I’m all grown up, almost