The Collected Stories

such a shrew for twenty years. He was a sieve-maker. In those days, in the wintertime, work started when it was still dark. The sieve-maker had to supply his own candle. He earned only a pittance. Of course, they were poor, but they were not the only ones. A wagonload of chalk would not suffice to write down the complaints she hurled at him. I lived next door to her and once, when he left for work at dawn, I heard her call after him: “Come back feet first!” I can’t imagine what she blamed him for. He gave her his last penny, and he loved her too. How could one love such a fiend? Only God knows. In any case, who can understand what goes on in the heart of a man?
    My dear people, even he finally ran away from her. One summer morning, a Friday, he left to go to the ritual bath and disappeared like a stone in the water. When Henne heard he was seen leaving the village, she fell down in an epileptic fit right in the gutter. She knocked her head on the stones, hissed like a snake, and foamed at the mouth. Someone pushed a key into her left hand, but it didn’t help. Her kerchief fell off and revealed the fact that she did not shave her head. She was carried home. I’ve never seen such a face, as green as grass, her eyes rolled up. The moment she came to, she began to curse and I think from then on never stopped. It was said that she even swore in her sleep. At Yom Kippur she stood in the women’s section of the synagogue and, as the rabbi’s wife recited the prayers for those who could not read, Henne berated the rabbi, the cantor, the elders. On her husband she called forth a black judgment, wished him smallpox and gangrene. She also blasphemed against God.
    After Berl forsook her, she went completely wild. As a rule, an abandoned woman made a living by kneading dough in other people’s houses or by becoming a servant. But who would let a malicious creature like Henne into the house? She tried to sell fish on Thursdays, but when a woman asked the price, Henne would reply, “You are not going to buy anyhow, so why do you come here just to tease me? You’ll poke around and buy elsewhere.”
    One housewife picked up a fish and lifted its gills to see if it was fresh. Henne tore it from her hands, screaming, “Why do you smell it? Is it beneath your dignity to eat rotten fish?” And she sang out a list of sins allegedly committed by the woman’s parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents back to the tenth generation. The other fishmongers sold their wares and Henne remained with a tubful. Every few weeks Henne washed her clothes. Don’t ask me how she carried on. She quarreled about everything: the washtubs, the clotheslines, the water pump. If she found a speck of dust on a shirt hanging up to dry, she blamed it on her neighbors. She herself tore down the lines of others. One heard her yelling over half the town. People were afraid of her and gave in, but that was no good either. If you answered her she raised a rumpus, and if you kept silent she would scream, “Is it a disgrace to talk to me?” There was no dealing with her without being insulted.
    At first her daughters would come home from the big towns for the holidays. They were good girls, and they all took after their father. One moment mother and daughter would kiss and embrace and before you knew it there would be a cat fight in Butcher Alley, where we lived. Plates crashed, windows were broken. The girl would run out of the house as though poisoned and Henne would be after her with a stick, screaming, “Bitch, slut, whore, you should have dissolved in your mother’s belly!” After Berl deserted her, Henne suspected that her daughters knew his whereabouts. Although they swore holy oaths that they didn’t, Henne would rave, “Your mouths will grow out the back of your heads for swearing falsely!”
    What could the poor girls do? They avoided her like the plague. And Henne went to the village teacher and made him write letters for her saying that she disowned them. She was no longer their mother and they were no longer her daughters.
    Still, in a small town one is not allowed to starve. Good people took pity on Henne. They brought her soup, garlic borscht, a loaf of bread, potatoes, or whatever they had to offer, and left it on the threshold. Entering her house was like walking into a lion’s den. Henne seldom tasted these gifts. She threw them into the garbage ditch. Such people thrive on fighting.
    Since the grownups ignored her, Henne