The Collected Stories

months epidemics raged in town. The people lived in filth, knew nothing about hygiene, science, or art. This was no town—I spoke dramatically—but a graveyard.
    Rivkele’s blue eyes with the long eyelashes gazed at me with the indulgence of a relative. “Everything you say is the pure truth.”
    “Escape from this mudhole!” I cried out like a seducer in a trashy novel. “You are young and a beauty, and I can see that you’re clever, too. You don’t have to let your years waste away in such a forsaken place. In Warsaw you could get a job. You could go out with whoever you please and in the evenings take courses in Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish—whatever you wish. I’ll be there, too, and if you want we’ll meet. I’ll take you to the Writers’ Club, and when the writers get a glimpse of you they’ll go crazy. You might even become an actress. The actresses who play the romantic parts in the Yiddish theater are old and ugly. Directors are desperate to find young, pretty girls. I’ll get a room and we’ll read books together. We’ll go to the movies, to the opera, to the library. When I become famous, we’ll travel to Paris, London, Berlin, New York. There they’re building houses sixty stories high; trains race above the streets and under the ground; film stars earn a thousand dollars a week. We can go to California, where it’s always summer. Oranges are as cheap as potatoes …”
    I had the odd feeling that this wasn’t I talking but the dybbuk of some old enlightened propagandist speaking through my mouth.
    Rivkele threw frightened glances toward the door. “The way you talk! Suppose someone hears—”
    “Let them hear. I’m not afraid of anybody.”
    “My father—”
    “If your father loved you he should have found you a better husband than Yantche. The fathers here are selling their daughters like the wild Asiatics. They’re all steeped in fanaticism, superstition, darkness.”
    Rivkele stood up. “Where would I spend the first night? Such a fuss would break out that my mother couldn’t endure it. The outcry would be worse than if I converted.” The words stuck in Rivkele’s mouth; her throat moved as if she were choking on something she couldn’t swallow. “It’s easy for a man to talk,” she mumbled. “A girl is like a—the slightest thing and she is ruined.”
    “That’s the way it used to be, but a new woman is emerging. Even here in Poland women already have the right to vote. Girls in Warsaw study medicine, languages, philosophy. A woman lawyer comes to the Writers’ Club. She has written a book.”
    “A woman lawyer—how is this possible? Someone’s coming.” Rivkele opened the door. My mother was standing at the threshold. It wasn’t snowing, but her dark kerchief had turned hoary with frost.
    “Rebbitsin, I brought over the glass of salt.”
    “What was the hurry? Well, thank you.”
    “If you borrow, you have to pay back.”
    “What’s a glass of salt?”
    Rivkele left. Mother looked at me suspiciously. “Did you talk to her?”
    “Talk? No.”
    “As long as you’re here, you must behave decently.”
    II

    Two years passed. The magazine of which my brother was editor and I the proofreader had failed, but in the meantime I managed to publish a dozen stories and no longer needed a guest pass to the Writers’ Club, because I had become a member. I supported myself by translating books from German, Polish, and Hebrew into Yiddish. I had presented myself before a military board, which had deferred me for a year, but now I had to go before another. Although I often criticized Hasidic conscripts for maiming themselves in order to avoid being accepted for service, I fasted to lose weight. I had heard horrible stories about the barracks: young soldiers were ordered to fall in muck, to leap over ditches; they were wakened in the middle of the night and forced to march for miles; corporals and sergeants beat the soldiers and played malicious tricks on them. It would be better to sit in jail than to fall into the hands of such hooligans. I was ready to go into hiding—even to kill myself. Pilsudski had ordered the military doctors to take only strong young men into the army, and I did everything I could to make myself weak. Besides fasting, I went without sleep; I smoked steadily, lighting one cigarette from the butt of the last; I drank vinegar and herring brine. A publisher had commissioned me to do a translation of Stefan Zweig’s biography of Romain