The Collected Stories

and his calculations has driven him out of Paradise, back to Hell, I decided. He did not even go to the Friday-night services. He was hostile not only to people but to the Sabbath itself. I finished the coffee and left.
    A few weeks later, I read among the obituaries that Joel Yabloner had died. He was buried somewhere in Brooklyn. That night I lay awake until three o’clock, thinking about him. Why did he return? Had he not atoned enough for the sins of his youth? Had his return to East Broadway some explanation in the lore of the Cabala? Had some holy sparks strayed from the World of Emanation into the Evil Host? And could they have been found and brought back to their sacred origin only in this cafeteria? Another idea came into my head—perhaps he wanted to lie near that teacher with whom he exchanged eyeglasses? I remembered the last words I heard from him: “Man does not live according to reason.”
    Translated by Alma Singer and Herbert Lottman

A Quotation from Klopstock

    T HOSE who have to do with women must boast. In literary circles in Warsaw, Max Persky was known as a woman chaser. His followers contended that if he hadn’t spent so much of his time on females, he might have become a second Sholem Aleichem or a Yiddish Maupassant. Although he was twenty years older than I, we became friends. I had read his work and listened to all his stories. That summer evening we sat in a little garden café, drinking coffee and eating blueberry cookies. The sun had already set and a pale September moon hung in the sky above the tin roofs. But remnants of the sunset were still reflected in the glass door which led to the interior of the café. The air was warm and smelled of the Praga forest, freshly baked babkas, and the manure that peasants gathered from the stables to dump into the fields. Max Persky smoked one cigarette after another. The tray filled with ashes and butts. Even though he was already in his forties—some maintained he was nearly fifty—Max Persky looked young. He had a boyish figure, a head of black shiny hair, a brown-complexioned face, full lips, and the penetrating eyes of a hypnotist. The two lines at the sides of his mouth gave him an air of fatalistic awareness. His enemies gossiped that he took money from wealthy women. It was also said that a woman had committed suicide over him. Our waitress, middle-aged, with a young figure, kept staring at him. From time to time she smiled guiltily at me as if to say, I can’t help it. She had a short nose, sunken cheeks, and a pointed chin. I noticed that the middle finger was missing from her left hand.
    Max Persky suddenly asked me, “What happened to that woman who was twelve years older than you? Do you still see her?”
    I wanted to answer him but he shook his head. He said, “There is something about older women that the younger ones cannot supply. I, myself, had one, not twelve years older than I but thirty. I was a young man of about twenty-seven and she must have been in her fifties. She was a spinster, a teacher of German literature. She also knew Hebrew. In those years the rich Jews in Warsaw wanted their daughters to be versed in Goethe, Schiller, and Lessing. If they weren’t, they lacked
kultur.
A pinch of Hebrew did no harm either. Theresa Stein made a living teaching these subjects. You most probably have never heard of her, but in my time she was well known in Warsaw. This was a woman who took poetry very seriously, which proves that she was not too clever. She certainly was no beauty. To enter her small apartment on Nowolipki Street was an experience. Poverty hovered all around it, but she had turned her rooms into a kind of old maid’s temple. She spent half of her earnings on books, mostly gold-embossed with velvet bindings. She bought paintings also. When I was introduced to her she was still a kosher virgin. I needed a quotation from Klopstock’s
Messiah
for one of my stories, and I telephoned and she asked me to visit her that evening. When I arrived, she had already found the quotation I needed and many others. I brought her my first book, which had just been published. She knew Yiddish quite well. She worshipped Peretz. Whom did she not worship? She spoke the word ‘talent’ as solemnly as a pious Jew mentions God. She was small and roundish with brown eyes, from which radiated goodness and naïveté. Women like that don’t exist any more. Since I was young and played the part of a cynic, I immediately did