The Collected Stories

more than forms of perception, as Kant argues, and quality, quantity, causality are only categories of thinking, why shouldn’t Hitler confer with his Nazis in a cafeteria on Broadway? Esther didn’t sound insane. She had seen a piece of reality that the heavenly censorship prohibits as a rule. She had caught a glimpse behind the curtain of the phenomena. I regretted that I had not asked for more details.
    In Toronto, I had little time to ponder these matters, but when I returned to New York I went to the cafeteria for some private investigation. I met only one man I knew: a rabbi who had become an agnostic and given up his job. I asked him about Esther. He said, “The pretty little woman who used to come here?”
    “Yes.”
    “I heard that she committed suicide.”
    “When—how?”
    “I don’t know. Perhaps we are not speaking about the same person.”
    No matter how many questions I asked and how much I described Esther, everything remained vague. Some young woman who used to come here had turned on the gas and made an end of herself—that was all the ex-rabbi could tell me.
    I decided not to rest until I knew for certain what had happened to Esther and also to that half writer, half politician I remembered from East Broadway. But I grew busier from day to day. The cafeteria closed. The neighborhood changed. Years have passed and I have never seen Esther again. Yes, corpses do walk on Broadway. But why did Esther choose that particular corpse? She could have got a better bargain even in this world.
    Translated by the author and Dorothea Straus

The Joke

    I

    W HY should a Polish Jew in New York publish a literary magazine in German? The magazine,
Das Wort,
was supposed to come out every three months but barely made it three times a year and sometimes only twice—a little volume of ninety-six pages. None of the German writers who appeared there were known to me. Hitler was already in power and these writers were all refugees. Manuscripts came from Paris, Switzerland, London, and even Australia. The stories were ponderous, with sentences whole pages long. No matter how I tried, I could not finish one of them. The poems had neither rhyme nor rhythm, and as far as I could judge they had no content.
    The publisher, Liebkind Bendel, came from Galicia, had lived for years in Vienna, and had become rich here in New York on the stock market and in real estate. He had liquidated all his stocks about six months before the 1929 crash, and at a time when money was a rarity he possessed a lot of cash, with which he bought buildings.
    We became acquainted because Liebkind Bendel was planning to publish a magazine like
Das Wort
in Yiddish; he wanted me to be his editor. We met many times in restaurants, cafés, and also in Liebkind Bendel’s apartment on Riverside Drive. He was a tiny man with a narrow skull without a single hair, a long face, a pointed nose, a longish chin, and small, almost feminine hands and feet. His eyes were yellow, like amber. He seemed to me like a ten-year-old boy on whom someone had put the head of an adult. He wore gaudy clothes—gold brocade ties. Liebkind Bendel had many interests. He collected autographs and manuscripts, bought antiques, belonged to chess clubs, and considered himself a gourmet and a Don Juan. He liked gadgets—watches that were also calendars, fountain pens with flashlights. He bet on the horses, drank cognac, had a huge collection of erotic literature. He was always working on a plan—to save humanity, to give Palestine back to the Jews, to reform family life, to turn matchmaking into a science and an art. One pet idea was a lottery for which the prize would be a beautiful girl—a Miss America or a Miss Universe.
    Liebkind Bendel had a German wife, Friedel, no taller than he but broad, with black curly hair. She was the daughter of a laundress and a railroad worker in Hamburg; both her parents were Aryan, but Friedel looked Jewish. For years she had been writing a dissertation on Schlegel’s translation of Shakespeare. She did all the work at home and in addition was her husband’s secretary. He also had a mistress, Sarah, a widow and the mother of an insane daughter. Sarah lived in Brownsville. Liebkind Bendel once introduced me to her.
    Liebkind Bendel’s only language was Yiddish. To those who didn’t know Yiddish he spoke a lingo that combined Yiddish, German, and English. He had a talent for mangling words. It didn’t take me long to realize that he had