The Collected Stories

altogether? Is it worth losing the world to come because of such evil passions? What becomes of the body after death? It’s eaten up by the worms. As long as one breathes, one can still repent. In the grave there is no longer free choice.”
    “Rabbi, I’m ready to fast and to do penances. I have one explanation: I lost my senses. A demon or evil spirit entered me. I got entangled like a fly in a spider’s web. I’m afraid people will take revenge on me and no one will enter my store any more.”
    “Jews have mercy,” my father said. “If you repent with all your heart, no one will persecute you.”
    “Absolutely true,” Shmuel Smetena agreed.
    I left the men and went back to the kitchen. The old woman, Naomi’s mother, was saying, “Rebbetzin, I didn’t like him from the very beginning. I took one look at him and I said, ‘Naomi, run from him like from the pest. He’s not going to divorce his wife. First let him divorce her,’ I said, ‘then we will see.’ My dear lady, we are not just people from the gutter. My late husband, Naomi’s father, was a Hasid. Naomi was an honest girl. She became a seamstress to support me. But he has a quick tongue that spouts sweet words. The more he tried to please me with his flattery, the more I recognized what a serpent he was. But my daughter is a fool. If you tell her that there is a horse fair in Heaven, she wants to go up and buy a horse there. She had bad luck in addition. She was married and became a widow after three months. Her husband, a giant of a man, fell down like a tree. Woe what I have lived to see in my old age. I wish I had died a long time ago. Who needs me? I just spoil bread.”
    “Don’t say this. When God tells us to live, we must live,” my mother said.
    “What for? People sneer at us. When she told me that she was pregnant from that mooncalf I grabbed her hair and … People, I’m dying!”
    That day, all three women agreed to divorce Koppel Mitzner. The divorce proceedings were to take place in our house. Koppel signed a paper and gave my father an advance of five rubles. Father had already written down the names of the three women. The name Naomi was a good Jewish name. Gutsha was a diminutive of Gutte, which used to be Tovah. But what kind of name was Pola? My father looked the name up in a book with the title
People’s Names,
but there was no Pola there. He asked me to bring Isaiah the scribe and they talked it over. Isaiah had much experience in such matters. He told my father that he drew a circle in a notebook each time he wrote a divorce paper and recently his son counted over eight hundred such circles. “According to the law,” Isaiah said, “a Gentile name is acceptable in a divorce paper.”
    Naomi was supposed to be divorced first. The ritual ceremony was to take place on Sunday. But that Sunday neither Koppel nor his wives showed up. The news spread on Krochmalna Street that Koppel Mitzner had vanished together with his youngest wife, Pola. He deserted the three other wives, and they would never be permitted to remarry. Where he and Pola went, no one knew, but it was believed that they had run away to Paris or to New York. “Where else,” Mother said, “would charlatans like these run to?”
    She gave me an angry look as if suspecting that I envied Koppel his journey, and, who knows, perhaps even his companion. “What are you doing in the kitchen?” she cried. “Go back to your book. Such depravities are not for you!”

The Psychic Journey

    I

    I T happened like this. I stood one hot day uptown on Broadway before a fenced-in plot of grass and began to throw food to the pigeons. The pigeons knew me, and ordinarily when they saw me with my bag of seed they surrounded me. The police had told me it was forbidden to feed pigeons outdoors, but that was as far as they went. One time a huge cop even came up to me and said, “Why is it everybody brings food for the pigeons and no one stops to think that they might need a drink? It hasn’t rained in New York for weeks, and pigeons are dying of thirst.” To hear this from a policeman was quite an experience! I went straight home and brought out a bowl of water, but half of it spilled in the elevator and the pigeons spilled the rest.
    This day, on my way to the fenced-in plot I noticed the new issue of
The Unknown
at a newspaper stand and I bought a copy, since the magazine was snatched up in my neighborhood almost as soon as it appeared. For some reason, many readers