The Collected Stories

Dvosha had come to her in a dream and shrieked that she couldn’t rest in her grave. Her Yankele didn’t say Kaddish for her, and she wasn’t being admitted into Paradise.
    Tzeitel hired a beadle to say Kaddish and study the Mishnah in her daughter’s memory, but, even so, Henia Dvosha came to her mother and lamented that her shrouds had fallen off and she lay there naked; water had gathered in her grave; a wanton female had been buried beside her, a madam of a brothel, who cavorted with demons.
    Father called three men to ameliorate the dream, and they stood in front of Tzeitel and intoned, “Thou hast seen a
goodly
vision! A goodly vision hast thou seen! Goodly is the vision thou hast seen!”
    Afterward, Father told Tzeitel that one dared not mourn the dead too long, or place too much importance in dreams. As the Gemara said, just as there could be no grain without straw, there couldn’t be dreams without idle words. But Tzeitel could not contain herself. She ran to the community leaders and to the Burial Society demanding that the body be exhumed and buried elsewhere. She stopped taking care of her house, and went each day to Henia Dvosha’s grave at the cemetery.
    Selig’s beard grew entirely white, and his face developed a network of wrinkles. His hands shook, and the people in the courtyard complained that he kept a gaberdine or a pair of trousers for weeks, and when he finally did bring them back they were either too short or too narrow or the material was ruined from pressing. Knowing that Tzeitel no longer cooked for her husband and that he lived on dry food only, Mother frequently sent things over to him. He had lost all his teeth, and when I appeared with a plate of groats, or some chicken soup or stuffed noodles, he smiled at me with his bare gums and said, “So you’re bringing presents, are you? What for? It’s not Purim.”
    “One has to eat the year round.”
    “Why? To fatten up for the worms?”
    “A man has a soul, too,” I said.
    “The soul doesn’t need potatoes. Besides, did you ever see a soul? There is no such thing. Stuff and nonsense.”
    “Then how does one live?”
    “It’s Breathing. Electricity.”
    “Your wife—”
    Selig interrupted me. “She’s crazy!”
    One evening Tzeitel confided in my mother that Henia Dvosha had taken up residence in her left ear. She sang Sabbath and holiday hymns, recited lamentations for the Destruction of the Temple, and even bewailed the sinking of the
Titanic.
“If you don’t believe me, rebbetzin, hear for yourself.”
    She moved her wig aside and placed her ear against Mother’s.
    “Do you hear?” Tzeitel asked.
    “Yes. No. What’s that?” Mother asked in alarm.
    “It’s the third week already. I kept quiet, figuring it would pass, but it grows worse from day to day.”
    I was so overcome by fear that I dashed from the kitchen. The word soon spread through Krochmalna Street and the surrounding streets that a dybbuk had settled in Tzeitel’s ear, and that it chanted the Torah, sermonized, and crowed like a rooster. Women came to place their ears against Tzeitel’s and swore that they heard the singing of Kol Nidre. Tzeitel asked my father to put his ear next to hers, but Father wouldn’t consent to touch a married woman’s flesh. A Warsaw nerve specialist became interested in the case—Dr. Flatau, who was famous not only in Poland but in all Europe and maybe in America, too. And an article about the case appeared in a Yiddish newspaper. The author borrowed its title from Tolstoy’s play
The Power of Darkness.
    At just about that time, we moved to another courtyard in Krochmalna Street. A few weeks later, in Sarajevo, a terrorist assassinated the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand and his wife. From this one act of violence came the war, the shortages of food, the exodus of refugees from the small towns to Warsaw, and the reports in the newspapers of thousands of casualties.
    People had other things to talk about than Selig the tailor and his family. After Sukkoth, Selig died suddenly, and a few months later Tzeitel followed him to the grave.
    One day that winter, when the Germans and Russians fought at the Bzura River, and the windowpanes in our house rattled from the cannon fire and the oven stayed unheated because we could no longer afford coal, a former neighbor from number 10, Esther Malka, paid a call on my mother. Issur Godel and Dunia, she said, were getting a divorce.
    Mother asked, “Why on earth? They were