The Collected Stories

not heard a word from Kava. He stopped coming to the Writers’ Club altogether, and this was a sign for me that he was busy working on the essay. One day I got a telephone call from him. He asked for an extension of two weeks on the delivery of the manuscript. I asked him how the work was going and he said, “I’m afraid it may be somewhat longer than fifty pages.”
    “How much longer?” I asked.
    “Nine and a half pages.”
    I knew that Zeitlin would be angry with me. Even fifty pages was too long. But I also knew that if a work is good the reader and the critics will accept any length. There was a moment when I wanted to ask Kava to let me have a fragment of his work but I decided not to show impatience. When I told Zeitlin what had happened he said, “I’m afraid Kava will bring us not fifty-nine and a half pages but fifty-nine and a half lines.”
    The day came and I met Kava in the Writers’ Club. He brought the manuscript. It was fifty-nine and a half pages. I could see that it had many erasures as well as quotations in German, French, and even in English, which could be a problem for a printer of a Yiddish magazine. Also his lines were written so close together that the fifty-nine and a half pages in Kava’s longhand might make eighty pages in print. He said, “I’m giving this to you under the condition that you don’t read it here, but go home and read it by yourself. Only then can you give it to Zeitlin.”
    I took the manuscript and ran home as quickly as I could. I was possessed with the desire to prove to Zeitlin that I was right. The moment I entered my furnished room, I threw myself on the sofa and began to read. I read three or four pages and everything pleased me. Kava began with a characterization of literature generally, and of Yiddish fiction specifically. The style was right, the sentences short and concise. I’ve never enjoyed reading a manuscript as much as I did those first five pages. On page 6 , Kava wrote something about a “full-blooded writer.” He had put the expression in quotation marks, noting that this term is used to categorize racehorses, not to evaluate talent. It is odd that in Yiddish, of all languages, this idiom should be applied to levels of the mind.
    I read further and to my astonishment saw that Kava dwelled too long on the explanation of this borrowed idiom. It is certainly a digression that could be cut, I thought, if Kava wouldn’t mind. But the further I read, the more perplexed I became. Kava had written an entire essay on horses—Arabian horses, Belgian horses, racehorses, Appaloosa horses. I read names I had never heard. I literally could not believe my own eyes. “Perhaps I’m dreaming,” I said to myself. I pinched my cheeks to make sure that it was not a nightmare. Vanvild Kava had done excessive research, quoted scores of books, for an article on horses, their physiology, anatomy, and behavior, their various subspecies. He even added a bibliography. “Is he mad?” I asked myself. “Was this a game of spite?” The idea that I would have to bring this manuscript to Zeitlin made me shudder. There was no question that we could never publish it. I would have to break my word of honor and give the manuscript back to Kava. In all my anguish I felt like laughing.
    After long brooding, I called on Zeitlin. I will never forget his grimaces when he reached the pages where Kava began to elaborate on the expression “full-blooded.” He lifted his yellowish eyebrows and never let them down until he finished. For a while his face reflected a mixture of irony and disgust. Then I saw in his eyes something like the grief of a doctor when a patient comes to complain about a head cold and it turns out to be a malignant tumor. He said to me, “What did I tell you? How could you expect anything else from Kava?”
    I had no choice. I had to return the manuscript. I asked Kava why he did what he did and pleaded with him to give me some explanation. He sat there motionless and pale. Then I heard him say, “I told you I was excommunicated from Yiddish literature. Don’t come to me anymore with invitations to write. I will have to live out my years without your magazine.” There was a moment when I was tempted to call Mrs. Kava and tell her of my predicament, but I was sure that she knew about this essay and that she would most probably defend her husband. Over the years a distorted outlook on things may become contagious.
    It was kind of Kava that he did