The Collected Stories

other houses and was encircled by lawns. The ocean was only a block away. Because of the howling wind I couldn’t hear its sounds earlier, but the winds had subsided and now I heard the waters churning, foaming, like a cosmic stew in a cosmic caldron. In the distance, a tugboat was towing three dark barges. I could barely believe that just an hour away from Manhattan one could reach such quiet.
    Esther spoke haltingly. “You wanted to give me an advance before, but I refused to take it. If you are serious about the room, I will accept one, just to make sure that …”
    “Will twenty dollars be enough?”
    “Yes, enough. I ask for it only so that you won’t change your mind,” she said, and she laughed self-consciously.
    In the night light, I counted out twenty dollars. We walked together to the gate. I recognized one of the policemen who had been on duty when I arrived. He looked at us and our suitcases knowingly, as if, like a wizard, he had guessed our secrets. He smiled and winked, and I heard him say, “Are you two going back to civilization?”
    Translated by the author and Ruth Schachner Finkel

Vanvild Kava

    I F a Nobel Prize existed for writing little, Vanvild Kava would have gotten it. During his lifetime he published one thin brochure and a few articles. Half of the brochure consisted of writer’s names and titles of books. Just the same he was a member of the Yiddish Writers’ Club in Warsaw and even belonged to the P.E.N. club.
    When I acquired a guest card to the Writers’ Club, Kava had already been there for many years. He was known as a strange character and the most severe critic possible. He declared such Yiddish classics as Sholom Aleichem and Peretz to be half-talents, and Mendele Mocher Sforim talentless. Sholem Asch he called a promising young man who didn’t keep his promise. My brother, I. J. Singer, and my friend Aaron Zeitlin he considered barely beginners. Like a schoolteacher, Kava liked to grade achievements in numbers, and he gave them both two sevenths. I could not bargain with him about my brother, but I told him that Zeitlin was the closest thing to a master that I could think of. I compared him to such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Lermontov, and Slowacki. But Kava’s opinion of even these poets was not too high. He found faults in everyone. Kava maintained that since civilization and culture are only some five thousand years old, literature is still at the beginning of its development, actually in its infancy. It may take another five thousand years for a full-fledged literary genius to appear. I argued that every artist must start from the beginning; unlike science, art does not thrive on the information and qualities of others. But Kava replied, “Art has its mutations and selections, its own biological growth.”
    It seemed unbelievable that such an angry critic could exist in the Warsaw Yiddish Writers’ Club. Every Friday in the book sections of the Yiddish newspapers, reviewers revealed at least half a dozen new talents. They were as lenient as Kava was strict. After he was willing to grant me .003 as my rating (quite lavish praise for a fledgling like myself), we had many conversations about literature. Kava pointed out to me that Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
may be quite rich and accurate in description and dialogue, but is poor in construction. Dostoevsky had a greater vision than Tolstoy, but he had only a single accomplished work—
Crime and Punishment
. Shakespeare’s value was in his poetry—not as much in his sonnets as in the few poems that appear in his plays. Kava admitted that, as a primitive, Homer was readable. He called Heine a jingle writer. In his brochure he listed all the literary and scientific works that needed to be translated into Yiddish in order for it to be more than a dialect. The Yiddishists attacked him as their worst enemy, but the professional translators praised him. Some literati felt that Kava should be thrown out of the Yiddish Writers’ Club, and others defended him, saying that he was too ridiculous to be taken seriously.
    Fate and Kava himself did their best to make him appear as a clown. He was small, emaciated, had a crooked mouth, and lisped out of its corner. The jokers in the Writers’ Club specialized in mimicking him, his extreme understatements, his use of scientific phrases, and his pedantic style of talking. To Kava, Freud was a mere dilettante and Nietzsche a would-be philosopher. The literary wags gave Kava a