The Collected Stories

her good deed. She also specialized in warding off the evil eye and removing the pips from chickens, thus enabling them to eat again.
    Leah was already past forty when my parents and I arrived in Shebrin. Tall and broad like her father, she had the hands of a man and a face that was as wide and as brown as the pumpernickel loaves she baked. It was difficult to get a word out of her. Her strength, too, was that of a man. She chopped wood, brought water from the well, and carried sacks of flour from the mill on her back. In spite of all this, one could see that she was quite good-looking, with regular features and black, fiery eyes.
    I heard it told that one day when she carried a sack of grain to the mill, she was attacked by two brigands. One of them held a rifle to her chest. Leah grabbed the gun, broke it in two, and with the butt hit the brigands until they passed out. The culprits were caught, taken to the hospital, and later jailed.
    Rachel, who was younger than Leah, resembled her physically; but all that was hard, strong, and resolute in Leah appeared weak, soft, and indecisive in her sister. No one dared ask Leah why she had never married but everybody asked Rachel. Her reply was always the same: “When you serve dinner, you serve the soup first, then the meat.”
    I remember my mother once said to her, “Is it so terrible if one serves the meat first? There’s no law against this.”
    Rachel listened and replied, “It is the custom, first you serve the soup and then the meat.”
    Leah kneaded the dough, shaped the loaves, shoveled them into the oven, and then removed the finished baked goods. Selling was Rachel’s job. On Thursdays she stood in the marketplace with a basket of loaves, flatcakes, bagels, and rolls. Fridays she sold hallah and Sabbath cookies.
    Feigel, the youngest, was only twenty-nine years old at that time and the matchmakers had not yet given up on her. Her mother had died at her birth. Unlike her sisters, Feigel was fair, small statured, and bore no resemblance to the rest of the family. She was supposed to have taken after a great-aunt from Janov. Three times she was engaged. Her first fiancé died, she returned the engagement contract to the second, and the third one went to war and was never heard from again.
    Leah and Feigel were not on speaking terms for more than ten years. They even avoided looking at each other. Feigel liked to sing. She had a cat. Her father bought her a sewing machine and she became a seamstress, making shirts, men’s underwear, and brassières. She had long discussions with the matchmakers. From time to time introductions and meetings were arranged with a potential suitor, but somehow nothing came of them. Feigel often visited my mother. She told horror stories about the 1915 cholera epidemic and gossiped about the girls and young women in Shebrin who became smugglers during the war. The Austrian gendarmes frequently made them undress when they searched them, and they touched intimate parts of their bodies, where no decent woman allows herself to be touched by a strange man. My mother nodded her bewigged head. “It’s all a result of our long exile.”
    Feigel accused Leah of witchcraft, saying that Leah didn’t desire marriage herself and that she had prevented Rachel from getting a husband. Every time Feigel became engaged, Leah cast an evil spell. Feigel would say to my mother, “My dear aunt, that Leah is a male, not a female.”
    “What are you talking about?” My mother winced. “She has breasts.”
    “She has the feet of a Cossack. God made a mistake.”
    “How can you say this? The Almighty doesn’t make any mistakes.”
    “If so, she’s a mooncalf.”
    This family did not come up to our standards. My uncle Jekhiel had fallen in love with his second wife, though she was much beneath him, and when Feigel called my mother “aunt” it was like a slap in the face. But my mother had compassion for Leizer’s daughters because they were orphans. She sent me to buy baked farfel from them and ordered my shirts to be sewn by Feigel. Her fingers tickled me when she took the measurements and I had to laugh. My mother’s comment about Leah having breasts preyed on my mind. Until then I thought that only women who nurse children have breasts. Yes, Leah had a huge bosom, but she had the deep voice of a man. Could she be what the Talmud called androgynous? I was as fearful of her as of the dark gateways that was full of holes and ditches. From