Der Nister is best-known for his epic family-saga novel, Di Mishpukhe Mashber (The Family Mashber), written in the 1930s and during the war. In 1943, Der Nister published a small collection of short stories on the Holocaust under the title Korbones (Victims). Most of his wartime stories, however, were collected in book form only after his death: Dertseylungen un eseyen (Stories and Essays; New York, 1957) and Vidervuks (Regeneration; Moscow, 1969). He was arrested in February 1949 for overt nationalism and died in a labor camp of an acute blood disease on June 4, 1950.

Faithful to Der Nister’s kaleidoscopic literary style, Butler’s translation prompts readers to consider literary responses to the Holocaust within the Soviet Union, a topic fraught with tension both in Soviet and contemporary Russia. Der Nister’s heroes were often orphans—either children orphaned by the loss of their parents or parents orphaned by their children—who went off to fight with the partisans. For the heroes and Der Nister himself, loss and destruction fueled a sense of nationalism, messianism, and a re-awakening of Jewish allegiance. This motif of national rebirth subverted the master narrative of wartime Socialist Realism espoused by the Stalinist Soviet State.

Der Nister’s vision of rebirth is perhaps most readily apparent in his 1945 short story “Vidervuks,” or “Regrowth,” which explores a re-awakened nationalism engendered by loss and death. More literally, “Regrowth” is about “a man without a wife, and a wife without a man” who live “with facing doors, on the same floor of the same building, in a Soviet capital city.” The heroes of the tale, Dr. Zamelman and Mrs. Zayets, “have grown estranged from their Jewish origins and all that occurred in the thicket of their people.” The man and the woman share similar fates as both their son and daughter leave their homes in order to fight the Great Fatherland War. From the very beginning of the story we know that Dr. Zamelman and Mrs. Zayets’ fate is intertwined: Their doors face one another, they live on the same floor, and they both lose their children in the war. Toward the end of the story, Dr. Zamelman’s reconnection with the kehilla, or Jewish community, motivates him to adopt a young boy.

The figure of an orphan was a literary favorite for Soviet wartime fiction. Losing his biological parents in the war, the child had the full potential to be reborn—to claim his new Soviet family with Stalin as father. Valentin Kataev’s 1945 novel, Son of the Regiment, which won the Stalin Prize in 1946, tells the story of a young orphan who, upon enlisting in a partisan group, goes through a process of re-awakening. By the end, the boy realizes his full political self-awareness as Stalin visits him in his dream. Kataev’s equally revealing 1951 novel, For the Power of the Soviets, tells a story about an orphan who joins a partisan group. The narrative ends with the young boy listening to Stalin’s Nov. 1943 speech on the radio. Unlike Kataev’s heroes, for whom loss stimulates the hero to gain political awareness, Der Nister’s orphans join partisan groups in order to avenge the deaths of their Jewish parents.

“Regrowth” ends with a union between Dr. Zamelman and Mrs. Zayets, which brings the characters closer not to their Soviet homeland but rather to their Jewish heritage. Throughout the story, Dr. Zamelman awakens from several dreams. We may read this literary trope as another example of revived nationalism.

The tension between the individual Soviet Jew and the collective is addressed in “Rive Yosl Buntsies,” a story about a woman who loses both her father and husband. Rive, we are told, “was a marvel—a kind of historical relic—to be displayed in a museum.” The author’s acute awareness of destruction haunts his characters. Rive’s appearance in the story is always in the context of the community. She is present at births, marriages, and deaths. Before dying, Rive’s father gifts her candlesticks, which “served her both as a remembrance of what she had lost and as a guide for her everyday thoughts.” So important are the candlesticks for Rive that, when her life is interrupted by the arrival of the Nazis, she takes them with her to the ghetto. The story ends with Rive being led by Nazi SS soldiers to her death. She walks alongside a group of women; recalling that it is Friday, Rive leads the women in a Sabbath prayer. The tale ends with a Nazi police officer relieving “himself on the candles—whether for the sake of his personal needs or in order to share something with others—it’s all the same.”

The image of light, which is replete with multiple meanings in the narrative, reaches its apex in this chilling moment of desecration. The Hebrew phrase, “or l’goyim,” or “light for all nations,” originated from the prophet Isaiah. Der Nister’s conscious allusion to this expression reveals the author’s grappling with the loss of an entire nation and by extension, a moment of darkness for humanity.

Der Nister’s wartime nationalism was accompanied by an equally powerful call for vengeance. Der Nister explores the theme of vengeance in stories such as “Heshl Ansheles” and “Flora.” In “Heshl Ansheles,” vengeance is packaged in moments of acute violence and rage. Humiliated by Nazi soldiers, Heshl Ansheles, who is respected for his immense knowledge and ability to abstract from the biblical canon, bites off the finger of a Nazi policeman. His mouth filled with blood, Ansheles, “full of contentment,” closes his mouth with satisfaction.

Unlike “Heshl Ansheles,” which recasts Jewish national revival through madness and rage, “Flora” reveals the power of language as a form of resistance. “Flora” tells a story about a young girl who, upon losing her father and being thrown into a ghetto, joins an underground group of partisans. Initially told by Flora herself, the narrative abruptly ends and is picked up by a professional narrator. “There ends Flora’s record,” writes this second narrator. “And it is also understandable why: she went off to where there was neither room nor time to hold a pen in one’s hands—just a chance for something better: a rifle.” The author here makes a conscious play using the sounds of the Yiddish word for book, “bukh,” and the word for gun, “biks.” The rifle is the logical extension of the pen.

The Hidden One makes occasional brief appearances in his texts in the guise of a man “hidden among a crowd.” Uncomfortable in any one circumscribed space, this figure finds solace in the space in between things. In the famed short-story “Under a Fence: a Revue,” the protagonist is lured by a “dustman,” who resides “within walls.” In “Flora,” the father gazes lovingly upon his daughter “as always, hidden in a crowd.” In his Holocaust works, we may discern the author in the character of the Messiah who lingers in the ghetto vicinities. There, he is present as “a rider on a poor donkey headed toward Jerusalem,” who imparts meanings into the world of destruction by ushering in the messianic epoch. Der Nister’s subtle yet bold process of articulating a difference by manipulating vocabulary, literary tropes, and dominant rhetoric forges a path between acceptance and resistance.

The author’s penname, “The Hidden One,” features an additional layer of irony: Since his death, he has remained virtually unknown to both the Russian and American reader. In Butler’s translation, the strength and importance of Der Nister’s work is clearly revealed.

If he were to turn into what was later to become Rue Sauton but was then still Rue d’Amboise, about halfway along the street, between a brothel masquerading as a brasserie and a tavern that served dinner with foul wine for two sous (cheap even then, but all that was affordable to students from the nearby Sorbonne), he would have found an impasse, or blind alley, which by that time was called Impasse Maubert, but up to 1865 had been called Cul-de-sac d’Amboise, and years earlier had housed a tapis-franc (in underworld slang, a tavern, a hostelry of ill fame, usually run by an ex-convict, and the haunt of felons just released from jail), and was also notorious because in the 18th century there had stood here the laboratory of three celebrated women poisoners, found one day asphyxiated by the deadly substances they were distilling on their stoves.

At the end of that alleyway, quite inconspicuous, was the window of a junk shop that a faded sign extolled as Brocantage de Qualité—a window whose glass was covered by such a thick layer of dust that it was hard to see the goods on display or the interior, each pane being little more than 20 centimeters square, all held together by a wooden frame. Beside the window he would have seen a door, always shut, and a notice beside the bell pull announcing that the proprietor was temporarily absent.

But if, as rarely happened, the door was open, anyone entering would have been able to make out, in the half-light illuminating that dingy hovel, arranged on a few precarious shelves and several equally unsteady tables, a jumble of objects that, though attractive at first sight, would on closer inspection have turned out to be totally unsuitable for any honest commercial trade, even if they were to be offered at knock-down prices. They included a pair of fire dogs that would have disgraced any hearth, a pendulum clock in flaking blue enamel, cushions once perhaps embroidered in bright colors, vase stands with chipped ceramic putti, small wobbly tables of indeterminate style, a rusty iron visiting-card holder, indefinable pokerwork boxes, hideous mother-of-pearl fans decorated with Chinese designs, a necklace that might have been amber, two white felt slippers with buckles encrusted with Irish diamantes, a chipped bust of Napoleon, butterflies under crazed glass, multicolored marble fruit under a once transparent bell, coconut shells, old albums with mediocre watercolors of flowers, a framed daguerreotype (which even then hardly seemed old)—so if someone, taking a perverse fancy to one of those shameful remnants of past distraints on the possessions of destitute families, and finding himself in front of the highly suspicious proprietor, had asked the price, he would have heard a figure that would have deterred even the most eccentric collector of antiquarian teratology.

And if the visitor, by virtue of some special permission, had continued on through a second door, separating the inside of the shop from the upper floors of the building, and had climbed one of those rickety spiral staircases typical of those Parisian houses whose frontages are as wide as their entrance doors (cramped together sidelong, one against the next), he would have entered a spacious room that, unlike the ground-floor collection of bric-a-brac, appeared to be furnished with objects of quite a different quality: a small three-legged Empire table decorated with eagle heads, a console table supported by a winged sphinx, a 17th-century wardrobe, a mahogany bookcase displaying a hundred or so books well bound in morocco, an American-style desk with a roll top and plenty of small drawers like a secrétaire. And if he had passed into the adjoining room, he would have found a luxurious four-poster bed, a rustic étagère laden with Sèvres porcelain, a Turkish hookah, a large alabaster cup and a crystal vase; on the far wall, panels painted with mythological scenes, two large canvases representing the Muses of History and Comedy and, hung variously upon the walls, Arab barracans, other oriental cashmere robes and an ancient pilgrim’s flask; and a washstand with a shelf filled with toiletry articles of the finest quality—in short, a bizarre collection of costly and curious objects that perhaps indicated not so much a consistency and refinement of taste as a desire for ostentatious opulence.

Excerpted from The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco. Copyright © 2010 RCS Libri S.p.A. English translation copyright ©2010 by Richard Dixon. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

This kind of traumatic awakening comes to everyone, of course, but for a Jewish child learning about the Holocaust it comes early and in an especially personal form. In David Bezmozgis’ scandalous, compassionate story “An Animal to the Memory,” a Hebrew school student is punished for wrecking a display on Holocaust Remembrance Day; the story ends with the rabbi holding the child in a painful grip and shouting, “Now, maybe you understand what it is to be a Jew.” Not since Philip Roth’s “The Conversion of the Jews” has a writer so economically expressed the sense that initiation into Jewishness means the infliction of pain—a pain that can’t be rejected, like most parental impositions, as gratuitous or neurotic, but that history forces us to acknowledge is necessary and true.

To grow up into a world in which the Holocaust was possible is a difficult burden. No wonder, then, that readers have always been drawn to stories of children who grew up during the Holocaust itself. When it comes to exploitatively sentimental works like the movie Life Is Beautiful, the appeal of a child-centered story can seem cynical: The suffering of the innocent is a surefire way of delivering an emotional charge. But the most serious books about the Holocaust are also disproportionately about young people, from The Diary of Anne Frank to Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness to Louis Begley’s Wartime Lies. Even fraudulent memoirists like Benjamin Wilkomirski and Misha Defonseca pay a twisted tribute to the power of the genre by inventing Holocaust childhoods for themselves.

Two novels, above all, helped to establish the moral authority of the child’s perspective on the Holocaust. Night, by Elie Wiesel, was first published in France in 1958; seven years later, Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird appeared in the United States. Both writers were child survivors of the Holocaust—Wiesel was deported at 15 from Romania to Auschwitz, while Kosinski, born in 1933, lived in hiding with his family in Nazi-occupied Poland. Both men drew on these early experiences in their books, producing works that were widely read as factual autobiographies, even though they were technically novels and employed clearly novelistic techniques.

Yet as Ruth Franklin points out in her superb recent study A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction, the reputations of the two books, and of their authors, could not be more dramatically different today. Night marked the beginning of Wiesel’s long career as a public sage, a living reminder of the moral and political lessons of the Holocaust; in 1986, he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Thanks in part to its brevity and simplicity of style, Night has been a staple of high-school reading lists for decades. In 2006, the book won a new generation of readers when it was selected for Oprah’s Book Club, sitting atop the best-seller list for a year and a half.

Kosinski, on the other hand, fell dramatically from grace in the last decade of his life, dragging The Painted Bird down with him. Always a mysterious and theatrical man, he became embroiled in accusations that he had not lived the experiences in his book, despite his claims that “every incident is true.” What’s more, it began to be whispered that Kosinski had not even written his books, but employed teams of assistants to turn his Polish into stylish English prose. When Kosinski took his own life in 1991, it was seen less as a belated martyrdom—as in the case of another Holocaust writer, Primo Levi—than as the aftermath of scandal.

If someone handed you copies of Night and The Painted Bird and asked you to predict, strictly on the basis of reading them, which book’s author would end in sainthood and which in scandal, the answer would be all too easy. Wiesel’s book is lucid, convincing, heartbreaking, morally serious, and explicitly Jewish; Kosinski’s is shadowy, dreamlike, grossly exaggerated, bizarrely erotic, and leaves the Jewishness of its protagonist a standing mystery. Night, one might say, represents the superego of Holocaust fiction, while The Painted Bird is its roiling id. But this very difference is what makes it so revelatory to read the books side by side—and to discover how much they have in common as primers on a world defined by the Holocaust.

***

One of the chief ambitions of the modern novel was expressed by Stendhal, almost 200 years ago, in The Red and the Black: “A novel, gentlemen, is a mirror carried along a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your view the azure of the sky, sometimes the mire of the puddles on the road.” When he wrote this manifesto for realism, Stendhal was on the defensive; he was urging the reader who objected to his immoral story to blame not the novelist but the world he reflected, in which evil could flourish. When a survivor writes a novel about the Holocaust, however, the defense is no longer necessary: No one thinks to blame Wiesel or Kosinski for depicting the horrors they lived through. On the contrary, now it is the absolute, unblemished clarity of the mirror that becomes a moral imperative. The more detailed and unstylized picture a Holocaust novel presents, the more likely we are to trust it.

Lucas is right, of course. In the 1950s, getting the scoop on someone like Noel Field, an American Communist who played a leading role in the Stalinist show trials in postwar Czechoslovakia, would have made a journalist’s career and maybe even changed world history. Fifty years later, Field’s name is known only to a handful of academics and ideologues—the same tiny but committed group who continue to debate the guilt of the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss.

For the same reason, the potency of cutting-edge, politically informed spy fiction tends to weaken over time. John Buchan’s novels about Anglo-German rivalry before World War I, or John le Carré’s Smiley tales, were read on first publication as bulletins from the front of an ongoing battle; today, they offer the quainter pleasures of genre fiction. Stone’s gamble in Damascus Gate was that a spy novel set in Jerusalem would be different. That is because, as many characters in the book have occasion to muse, Jerusalem itself is different. “Other cities had antiquities,” Stone writes, “but the monuments of Jerusalem did not belong to the past. They were of the moment and even the future.” The rivalry between the United States and the USSR lasted 44 years, but the contest between Jews, Christians, and Muslims for physical and spiritual ownership of Jerusalem is still going strong after millennia.

It stands to reason, then, that the new paperback edition of Damascus Gate (Mariner, $15.95) should be as timely as the original. In fact, the identity of past and present is the key doctrine of the religious cult at the novel’s heart. The leader of this cult is Adam de Kuff, a middle-aged American Jew turned spiritual seeker, who we first see waiting in a psychiatrist’s office. He is, Stone makes clear, a schizophrenic and manic-depressive, prey to the delusion that he is the Messiah. Such delusions are common enough in Jerusalem; indeed, the novel opens with Lucas encountering a deranged German tourist in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

What sets de Kuff above such garden-variety lunatics—in Arabic, Stone writes, they are called majnoon—is his partnership with Raziel Melker. Melker, who was born Ralph, is another American Jewish seeker, the son of a congressman who has been by turns a yeshiva student, a jazz musician, a drug addict, and a Sufi master. Stone leaves it deliberately ambiguous whether Melker actually believes that de Kuff is the Messiah or is just preying on a madman for his own hidden purposes, or some combination of both.

In any case, Raziel acts as the Saint Paul to de Kuff’s Jesus, building a cult around him and formulating a new, syncretic theology. “They talked about Zen and Theravada and the Holy Ghost, the bodhisattvas, the sefirot and the Trinity, Pico della Mirandola, Teresa of Avila,” and on and on, Stone writes, in a passage whose bop Ginsbergian rhythms remind us that he is essentially a product of the 1960s. (“You’re one crazy mixed-up chick, baby,” Raziel says at one point.) And there is a genial ’60s-ish eclecticism, not to say fogginess, about the de Kuff cult. He declares himself to be at once the Jewish Moshiach, the Second Coming of Christ, and the Muslim Mahdi: “So as the Almighty is One, so also are the believers,” he explains. The cult’s emblem is the ourobouros, the Greek image of a serpent swallowing its tail: It is meant to symbolize the unity of all times and all ways of worshiping God.

It was on the road to Damascus, of course, that Saul had the epiphany that led him to embrace Christianity and change his name to Paul. The title of Damascus Gate alludes to that conversion, and one of the novel’s main themes is appeal of faith to the nonbeliever. Christopher Lucas, as a journalist, an American, and an earnest liberal, holds himself immune to the blind faiths and sectarian loyalties that determine Jerusalem’s history. (“In the United States people are what they choose to be,” says a minor character in the novel. “It’s not that way here, unfortunately.”) Yet Lucas is also half-Jewish, and he was sent to Catholic school by his mother; the impulse to believe is vestigial in him, and the de Kuff cult makes him at least nostalgic for faith. “He could not resist the little flutter of mindless hope,” Stone writes. “In what? In nothing he could remotely conceive.” On a more worldly level, he is drawn to the cult by his passion for Sonia Barnes, a half-black, half-Jewish jazz singer who succumbs to Raziel’s persuasion.

But if Lucas can’t bring himself to believe, he is surrounded by people who are dangerously convinced. Like a detective in a film noir, he gradually unearths an ever-ramifying conspiracy: a plot to blow up the Temple Mount, in order to clear the way for the construction of the Third Temple. It becomes clear that Raziel has set up Adam de Kuff as the fall guy for this plot, whose real movers are a combination of hard-right Jewish settlers and messianic American Christians. Along the way, Stone spins a dense web of connections and betrayals: Lucas encounters a gun-running Irish NGO worker, and a Palestinian Communist doctor, and a fascistic British archeologist, and a close-mouthed American diplomat, and many more. In the novel’s frenetic last hundred pages, Lucas and a handful of other characters race to a chamber under the Temple Mount, where some are planning to detonate a bomb and others hope to stop it—and it remains unclear, until the very end, exactly who is on which side.

Damascus Gate’s combination of abstruse theological speculation (Stone clearly researched the Kabbalah) and screen-ready action sequences won it a lot of praise when it appeared in 1998. Taken together, they made the novel a good match for its pre-millennial moment, when old fears about the end of the world were taking new forms, and readers responded in kind: To Annie Dillard, for instance, Damascus Gate was “a narrative of good and evil written in letters of fire.”

Certainly no one could say that Jerusalem has calmed down in the last 13 years, or that the religious passions in the city have stopped being explosive. Indeed, just two years after Damascus Gate appeared, Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount helped to set off the so-called “al-Aqsa Intifada,” named after the mosque that Stone’s fictional terrorists hoped to blow up.

Yet that event also helps to show how Damascus Gate misunderstands the very passions it means to analyze. To Stone, the danger of religion is that it is apocalyptic: At the core of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, he argues, is a belief that the world as we know it will someday end, to be replaced by something infinitely better. The most religious people, in Stone’s novel, are those who take this promise seriously and try to hasten the Messiah’s arrival. “We change, we fail,” Raziel tells Lucas, “but the Torah remains, never changes under its garment. The chance to restore tikkun comes again and again.”

Because this dynamic is common to all faiths, Stone suggests, it can best be embodied in a movement like the de Kuff cult, which is post-sectarian and even New Agey in its blending of religious symbols. This licenses the biggest and, at times, most ludicrous failure of realism in Damascus Gate: the fact that its messianic plotters are not mullahs or Lubavitchers but hipsters. Raziel and Sonja are both jazz musicians and ex-druggies, and when they’re not planning the end of the world they jam at a Russian-owned club in Tel Aviv. Even the minor characters in the novel are generally cool and sexy—from Nuala Rice, the seductive Irish leftist who ends up dangling from a noose, to Janusz Zimmer, the aging womanizer and ex-Communist who seems to be masterminding the Temple plot.

Surprisingly, however, in this novel about Jerusalem, none of the main characters is Israeli or Palestinian. At one point Lucas refers to himself as being “in country,” and this foreign-correspondent’s or aid-worker’s phrase sums up the relationship of Stone’s American protagonists to Jerusalem and its inhabitants: They are sources, interlocutors, or obstacles, but seldom peers. This distance allows Damascus Gate to maintain a certain grim neutrality about the Arab-Jewish conflict. The Israeli soldiers we see in the novel are habitually brutal, and one of them—a mysterious figure who operates under the nom de guerre Abu Baraka—leads a vigilante gang in random attacks on Palestinians.

Yet these characters are at least individualized, and Stone balances them with other Jewish Israelis who are benevolent, such as the human-rights worker Ernest Gross and the worldly psychiatrist Dr. Obermann. Palestinians, on the other hand, appear most forcefully in Damascus Gate in the form of superstitious, murderous mobs: Two of the novel’s most powerful scenes involve Lucas fleeing for his life from Arab crowds chanting, “Kill the Jews.” Lucas seems to speak for the novel as a whole when he says that the Israelis, for all their flaws, are “people more like me, in the end. They may not be Knights of the Round Table, but they won’t kill me for being a Jew. Or a djinn.”

To really come to grips with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, would take a novelist more interested in history and less interested in apocalyptic mysticism. After all, when Ariel Sharon went to the Temple Mount in 2000, it was not in an attempt to hasten the End Times, but as a way of claiming sovereignty over territory and signaling his intentions to the Israeli public; that is, his motives were political. So were the motives of the Palestinians who responded with massive violence and suicide bombings. And the militant zealots among Jewish settlers and Palestinian Muslims are not in search of some tantalizing new spiritual insight, like Raziel’s synthesis of Sufism and Buddhism and Judaism; they do not stand for hybridity but for purity and tradition. A fundamentalist is someone who is exactly what he says he is. And that makes fundamentalism a terrible subject for a spy novel, where the narrative suspense comes from the reader’s uncertainty about whether anyone is what he claims to be.

Damascus Gate fails as a book about Jerusalem, one might say, because it is too interesting—more interesting than the city it aims to describe, or else interesting in the wrong way. The best antidote to its fever-dream is to open a book like Zeruya Shalev’s Thera, an Israeli novel in which Jerusalemites get divorced and raise children and argue and suffer, just as people do all over the world. Or, for that matter, to open the newspaper and read about how tens of thousands of Israelis are taking to the streets of Jerusalem—not to build the Third Temple, but to protest the high cost of housing. These are the kinds of human stories that keep getting told in novels, long after the flashy conspiracies are forgotten.

Hoffman is also the deputy editor of Nextbook Press, the book imprint affiliated with Tablet Magazine. He joined Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to talk about the book, how his two careers—novelist and editor—influence one another, and his own experience finding acceptance as a gay Jew. [Running time: 16:09.]

Hemon spoke with Tablet’s predecessor Nextbook in 2008, upon the publication of The Lazarus Project, about Bosnia, immigrants, and xenophobia.

Related: Raising the Dead [Tablet Magazine]
A Few of Our Favorite Things

In the spring of 2007, I was fortunate enough to enroll in his final class at Columbia University and experience his teachings first hand. While the class was primarily made up of devotees—and make no mistake, he had many—as a philosophy major, this was the first and only history class I ended up taking. Even for me, a history novice, his clear thinking and beautifully wrought narratives brought life to the stories he told.

Praised primarily for his historical writings (most famously, Zakhor) and his teachings at Columbia, Yerushalmi hadn’t been known for his fiction. Until now. This week’s New Yorker features his posthumous debut, Gilgul (subscription required). The story within a story deals with themes familiar to Yerushalmi, touching on messianism and reincarnation (or gilgul).

In the story, Ravitch, himself a historian who has written a study on the Jewish tales of Sacher-Masoch, visits the sorceress Gerda at the behest of one of his friends. While at the time he has no interest, life’s events four years later, including the divorce from his wife and his father’s death, leave him overwhelmed with the need to visit her again. Gerda speaks in riddles of sorts, as all good sorceresses do, and tells him the story of a man who was “pathologically rest-less.” While he had no desire to travel, the man felt a strange compulsion that would constantly drive him away from wherever he was settled. Gerda explained to him that while he was born in Bucharest, his soul was the soul of Isaac Benveniste, a 15th century physician born in Spain and exiled during the great expulsion of 1492. He tried to reach Israel, but ended up dying in Rhodes. His restlessness is what inhabited him. Ravitch, captivated by the story, asks her if this is the source of his troubles as well. But all Gerda tells him is, “this story was meant for you, but is not about you.” Like Ravitch, we are left wondering about the meaning of such a tale and how this fits into our lives.

On the New Yorker website, Yeushalmi’s widow, Ophrah, discussed her husbands work with fiction editor Deborah Treisman:

Do you know whether this story—or, at least, the story within the story, the history of Isaac Benveniste, the fifteenth-century Spanish Jewish physician—was drawn from his historical research?

It calls on some basic themes that occupied him, such as exile, Israel, the Diaspora, and more. And the choice of a Sephardic name—Benveniste—hints at that; his major historical research was in Spain, and resulted in his book “From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto: Isaac Cardoso,” about a seventeenth-century Spanish Jew, who abandoned his post as court physician in order to live openly as a Jew in Italy.

Ophrah goes on to explain that Yerushalmi never expressed any desire to publish the story (“if Yosef hears of this somewhere…he will be astounded”), but a colleague convinced her of the merits of publishing posthumously. She also expressed the hope that the story would “bring him out of his ‘professor’ box and to a new audience.”

This Week in Fiction: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi [New Yorker]
Related: History and Memory

“There are two of me,” Blume told Haaretz: “Me the grown-up, the grandmother, and me who still sees the world through the eyes of a child. I can be 4 years old or 12 years old. That’s not something I think about, but when I am writing I guess that’s where I go. To that part of myself which is still at that age.” Great news for the inner tweens in all of us, who now never have to stop listening to Party in the U.S.A. What?

Of Margaret, the title character in one of her most well-known books, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Blume recalls: “Margaret was the kind of a child I was. It was my relationship with God I wrote about. I had that kind of relationship with God. I actually felt the presence of God when I was alone in the room talking to God. It is not my story though.”

And for those of you looking for your next Judy Blume fix, the film version of Tiger Eyes, which Blume adapted with her son, who also directed it, is reportedly in post-production. Talk about the circle of life. And winning!

Relatedly (maybe) in the world of things written about young adults, Motherlode, the Times’ parenting blog, asks parents: “Are you your child’s ATM?” The answer, according to a survey on personal finance web site The Mint, is overwhelmingly yes: “The poll results show that 63% of today’s kids 17 and younger are “always” given extra money when they asked for it, and 26% of children 17 and younger “sometimes” receive extra money when they ask.”

And just what are our future leaders doing with their newfound funds? “Overall, the most commonly selected reason why kids today ask for extra money is to buy tickets to a movie/concert/sporting event (40%), followed by food/drink (24%) or to buy a toy/game/phone (19%). Only 15% answered that extra dollars are spent on school/educational purposes, and 1% wanted funds to give to or participate in a charitable effort.” Way to go, 1%!

(Also, mom, if you’re reading this, I’m going to need some cash. The LIRR doesn’t pay for itself.)

The novelists take their dystopian visions in radically different directions—Shteyngart has written a fast-moving love story, while Cohen’s is more stream-of-Jewish-consciousness, dense with wordplay and religious and cultural references. Tablet Magazine Editor-in-Chief Alana Newhouse sat down with the two of them for a sometimes bookish, other times bawdy, conversation over drinks and smoked fish, on a sweltering summer day on the boardwalk of Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach.

The rabbi rewarded their grateful indulgence with intimate touches, caressing one’s shoulder while pinching another’s cheek, paying special attention to the younger students—such as the ingenue in her red Lycra body stocking, who asked the holy man to please interpret her aura.

“You were in your last life a flower,” croaked old Eliezer, pressing her forehead with bony fingers, “that plucked it the prophet Elijah, may his name be for a blessing, and stuck in his buttonhole.”

The girl turned the color of her costume.

Overcoming his customary reticence, Bernie hailed the rabbi, hoping that once the master set eyes on his erstwhile apprentice he would shake off all his hangers-on. But Rabbi Eliezer merely acknowledged the boy with a nod, then turned back to his admirers.

“Rabbi,” called Bernie, who didn’t like drawing attention to himself, but he was convinced that his predicament called for an urgent audience. “Rabbi, I need some advice.”

The rabbi glanced over his shoulder. “Get why don’t you a pair long pants,” he replied, and upon reflection, “also maybe a haircut.” His sarcasm incited titters among his devotees, who assured him he was a rascal and a scamp. Bernie stood rooted to the spot, cheeks burning, as he watched his mentor borne off on a tide of worshipful women toward a door marked PRIVATE at the far corner of the sanctuary. They were squeezing his pasty flesh (which stayed squeezed) and teasing his sparse hair, the ladies, who appeared to Bernie like devils tormenting a saint—though in this case the saint seemed to be greatly enjoying their petting. Always surprised by the way bits of scripture came back to him now at odd moments, Bernie recalled a verse from Deuteronomy, the one in which Moses says, “Just as I learned without payment, so have you learned from me without payment, and thus you shall teach without payment in the generations to come.” Feeling it was incumbent upon him to remind Rabbi Eliezer of the patriarch’s decree, Bernie charged after the holy man to apprise him accordingly.

“Boychik,” said the rabbi, serene in the midst of the women, “they pay by me only for the time that I lose which I would otherwise devote to earnink a livelihood. As it is written, ‘Torah is the best of merchandise.’ ” Then assuring the boy he would ask if ever he required his advice again, he passed through the doorway along with his entourage.

Mortified, Bernie slouched past the curtain and out the front door of the House of Enlightenment. But on the way home, still crestfallen, he observed the shadow of a day lily shaped like a jester’s cap on the side of a house, and the image propelled him straight into the realm of the sublime.

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The low-ceilinged room on the other side, most likely a former dance studio, was surrounded by mirrors. In it, sitting on yoga mats before the rabbi, were a score of women, mostly in their middle years, though there were younger ones as well, some as sleek as greyhounds, a couple in the final stages of pregnancy. There were also a handful of men who may have been uxorious husbands dragged along against their will, though they and the ladies seemed equally engrossed. It was an altogether impressive turnout (multiplied to infinity by the wall mirrors) given that the meditation center’s grand opening had been only weeks before—a testament to the success of the marketing campaign underwritten by Julius Karp. Rabbi ben Zephyr himself was seated on a raised dais in one of the Karps’ surplus Naugahyde armchairs, its creases reprising the furrows of the old man’s face. He was wearing a belted white satin kittel, wielding the scepter of a cordless microphone, a fancy pillbox kippah cocked like the cap of an organ-grinder’s monkey atop his dappled gray head. In place of a prayer shawl, a lei of tropical flowers draped his turkey neck; stray flowers entwined the weathered whiskbroom of his beard. The women were dressed in tracksuits and gym shorts, a few in spandex leotards with gauze skirts, their eyes closed in concentration as the rabbi began to warble various prayers. Bernie recognized the prayers as a hodgepodge of penitential slichot, with lashings of the mourner’s Kaddish and the El Mo-lay Rachamim.

Then the rabbi broke into a singsong, chanting the Ani le-dodi ve-dodi li (“I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine”) refrain from the Song of Songs, repeating it over and over like a mantra while encouraging his would-be intitiates to do the same. Bernie, for whom such prayers had become second nature, wondered if the others knew what they were parroting. But while there were one or two faces of a darker Semitic cast, the assembly as a whole didn’t look particularly Jewish. Not that it mattered, since the rabbi’s hypnotic chant apparently required no comprehension to inspire a collective euphoria—as was evidenced by several women who appeared to be in transports, a few showing shadows under their tushies that revealed them to be sitting in midair.

The receptionist came forward to draw the curtain back into place, tugging it with a prim gesture as if to cover up an indecency. But no sooner had she admonished Bernie once again with her zippered smile and returned to her post than the curtain was reopened from the other side. The session was over and the rabbi’s disciples began streaming into the vestibule, most of them still looking half-entranced like an audience leaving a cinema. Some, however, had the presence of mind to pause and browse the display case, purchasing items from the receptionist who doubled now as salesclerk.

“But Hepzibah,” pleaded a pie-faced woman whose tights above her leg warmers appeared to be stuffed with cottage cheese, “you know I don’t read Hebrew.”

Hepzibah, clearly well rehearsed, assured her customer that such knowledge was overrated, if not entirely unnecessary. “As the Rebbe says, ‘Power is in the hands and the eyes.’ You have only to trace the letters with your fingers for their healing power to enter your soul.” When another asked if the outrageous price of a prayer shawl could possibly be correct, she was told that its ritual fringes were colored with an indigo dye derived from the rare purpura snail found only at the bottom of the Aegean Sea. “You can read about it in Numbers 15:38.”

Now that Hepzibah was preoccupied, Bernie took the occasion to duck through the curtain into the so-called sanctuary, which was hung with banners bearing Hebrew characters like an array of military standards. With the aid of a couple of women at either arm, the rabbi was stepping down from the platform, where he was immediately encircled by more adoring ladies, some of whom bore votive offerings in the form of homemade peanut brittle and casseroles.

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There were framed testimonials from satisfied customers on the paneled walls, though Bernie wondered that the place had been open long enough to satisfy customers. The testimonials were flanked by mounted diagrams of the Sefirot, the kabbalistic Tree of Life, resembling the configurations of painted Tinker Toys. An air-brushed portrait of Rabbi ben Zephyr himself, the bronze plaque beneath it reading simply The Rebbe, loomed above bookshelves bowed from shrink-wrapped sets of the Zohar in its Moroccan binding. A glass display case presented an assortment of Judaic kitsch: ceramic hamsas and amulets with labels advertising their occult powers, bobbins of red thread for warding off demons, Heroes of Kabbalah trading cards and drinking cups—everything tagged for sale at inflated prices. There was also some standard religious paraphernalia: prayer shawls and kippot, phylacteries hanging from hooks like gauchos’ bolas, all marked up exorbitantly. Seated on a stool behind the display case was an attractive middle-aged lady, wisps of iron gray hair peeping from under a lavender turban, her matronly figure enveloped in a matching kaftan like a vestal gown. She looked up from a graphic-novel edition of Tales of the Baal Shem Tov when Bernie came in.

“Can I help you, dear?” she asked, squinting over her bifocals with a simper that seemed to assume he was in the wrong place. Oriental elevator music dribbled from a quadraphonic sound system.

Feeling suddenly self-conscious, the tail of his T-shirt poking from under his windbreaker like a skirt, Bernie hesitated; there was something very wrong about this place. “I’d like to see the rabbi,” he muttered.

The woman informed him in a tone of honeyed condescension that she was sorry, the Rebbe was conducting a transformation-of-self-through-dynamic-stillness session at the moment. “Would you care to wait?”

The answer was no, but Bernie held his peace and continued to shuffle in place. Beyond a paisley curtain he could hear the master’s amplified voice, exhorting the faithful with words and images that the boy already knew by heart: He was citing the significance of each of the four rungs of Jacob’s Ladder, the four faces of Ezekiel’s angels, how the student must concentrate on the letters of Torah until they appear like black fire upon white; there were words whose pronunciation ought to be growled like a lion, others meant to be cooed like a dove. The rabbi told them, himself croaking like an asthmatic frog, to “Be still like the wife of Lot when with salt from the Dead Sea she was encrusted; be lit up like Moses his ponim when he came down from Sinai . . .” They were the same visualization exercises the rabbi had dispensed so offhandedly to Bernie; only now he uttered them with an emphasis that (whether earnest or feigned) made the boy jealous. Why jealous when he knew that Eliezer ben Zephyr was a certified tzaddik, and the tzaddik’s mission was to function as God’s go-between, a conduit between heaven and earth? Bernie ought to be ashamed of himself. But while the receptionist had assured him that no one was allowed to enter or leave the “sanctuary” during a session, he couldn’t stand the suspense. As the turbaned lady resumed her reading, Bernie edged toward the curtain and parted it a hair.

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Bernie felt himself begin to shudder and grow dizzy at the sight, felt the familiar thrumming in his loins, the pressure building toward a seismic discharge. He fought helplessly against the coming release, imagining the subsequent stain he would try to conceal with an unavailing shirttail. But in the moment when his whole body was braced against the inevitable convulsion, the pressure reversed itself, and Bernie was catapulted clear out of his skin. In the quiet that ensued, he viewed the study hall, which included his own inert self, through the eyes of his soul from the vantage of eternity.

This was the first of several such experiences, each of which had the result of projecting Bernie into an element of radiance compared to which his sexual longings seemed incidental. Nor was sex the only spur to these ethereal sojourns: A phrase of music from an open window, a candy wrapper borne on a breeze, a red ribbon flickering like a serpent’s tongue out of a knothole in a twisted tree—any of these might serve as the trigger for a spontaneous out-of-body experience. Of course, while in his transports, there was the matter of the body that Bernie had left behind, which would appear as dumb and insentient as a stroke victim to the ordinary observer. It left him wholly unresponsive to a teacher’s questions and vulnerable to the malign scrutiny of his fellow students, for whom he was both an object of suspicion and a figure of fun. As a result, his abandoned corpus might be subject to abuse, to being graffiti’d with Magic Markers or plumaged like a bird in yellow Post-its bearing unkind messages. He might be carried in his cataleptic state to the urinals and his head flushed in a function called a “swirlie,” after which he would exude an odor no shampoo could dispel. Not that Bernie, when in the throes of rapture, cared much about what became of his physical self, though on his return—and always he had to return—he felt pity for the offenses his body may have suffered in his absence. Rather than feeling injured in spirit, however, he tended to view the abuse more as a persecution that lent poignant meaning to his extramundane flights. Still, this occasional absentee relationship to his own mortal form required skills he had yet to master; and the shell of his forsaken self was a spectacle that had prompted more than one teacher to recommend medical attention. In the event, resolving to learn how to manage his flights with more dexterity and tact, Bernie swallowed his pride and set out to seek the counsel of Eliezer ben Zephyr, the Boibiczer Prodigy, in his place of business.

Bernie had thus far studiously avoided the strip mall where the rabbi had established his House of Enlightenment. In truth, he’d felt completely abandoned by his mentor and bore him a petulant grudge, just as he did for his greedy father who was guilty by association. Bernie had even stopped watching TV for fear of seeing the rabbi’s puckered phiz smeared across the screen, reading awkwardly from a teleprompter as he guaranteed his audience that the wisdom of the ages could be theirs for only pennies a day. All this had galled the boy to the verge of disaffection, though his recent transcendental experiences had put him in a forgiving mood, and in the first brisk breeze of October, he walked the mile or so from his school to the Rebel Yell Shopping Plaza.

The House of Enlightenment, with its six-pointed star dan-gling like a neon watch fob in the plate-glass window, was sandwiched between Uncle Ming’s Chinese Take-Out and Layla’s Little Piggies Pedicures. Bernie pushed through the door to the sound of tinkling chimes and stepped into a vestibule that was equal parts gift shop and doctor’s waiting room, with a nod toward a Carpathian study house.

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You couldn’t have called it eavesdropping, since Bernie was standing by the open French doors in full view of his father and the rabbi in their parallel chairs. Still, he felt as if he were listening to things not meant for his ears. The experience revived the sense of being invisible that had plagued him for much of his life, though the self-inflicted curse seemed lately to have been lifted. Now, however, ignored by both father and mentor, he was hurt, resentful at being excluded from a project concerning which the two of them appeared to be suddenly as thick as thieves. How had this happened? And for that matter, how could Rabbi Eliezer plan to give away (for a price) the secrets that Bernie had struggled so hard to learn? He realized he was being selfish: The old holy man was a resource whose wisdom should be available to all. Certainly Bernie appreciated that the tzaddik was a repository of worldly as well as sacred learning, his knowledge recently expanded to include a lively critique of the modern age. Still, he couldn’t shake his attitude that Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr belonged to Bernie Karp alone and that the worshipful spiritual program he’d imparted to the boy should stay in the family. Moreover, though he couldn’t put his finger on it, Bernie felt there was something unkosher about marketing enlightenment in the same way a person might trade in used automobiles.

Days passed, and in the face of the frosty treatment by his mentor, Bernie fell back on old habits. Slothful again, he took to the rumpus room sofa; he abandoned his reading and thought often of abusing himself, though the admonition against Onan, who had “threshed on the inside and cast his seed without,” stayed his hand for the time being. But now that school had resumed, he was eyeing the girls with a fish-eyed yearning, as fearful of them as ever. He was more fearful, in fact, since, now that he’d lost his flab and his acne had subsided, his face had taken on a little definition, and the girls for whom he’d been beneath contempt now looked at him with only mild disfavor. Now, when he stared at their blue-marble thighs beneath the hems of kicky skirts, their midriffs and jeweled navels, the butterfly tattoos fluttering out of low-slung waists, they might look back with a measure of curiosity. They noticed him in a way that caused Bernie to feel he’d finally shed his mantle of nonentity, which made his condition all the more disquieting and aggravated the desire, which in turn increased the ache.

Though Bernie’s high school was situated in a tree-lined suburban neighborhood, its population comprised mostly of white kids from affluent families, it was nonetheless a purgatorial place. Neanderthal bullies built like brick incinerators body-checked you into lockers without warning, while preppies sporting the heraldic insignia of fraternal orders skewered you with a look. There were golden girls with their coteries of drab hangers-on; hipsters with dreadlocks and tie-dyed accessories reeking of weed, with spiked hair in primary colors, hardware piercing nostrils and lips like fish who’ve been caught and thrown back again. Young seductresses lured willing boys into the stalls of lavatories whose mounted cameras were rendered sightless by chewing gum; fledgling satyrs, their mouths shredded from entanglements with orthodontia, dragged dewy girls into the office of the guidance counselor, she herself having been sacked for inappropriate behavior with students. Having sleepwalked those chlorotic corridors from his tenderest years, Bernie, now in the eleventh grade, was alert to menace everywhere.

He no longer sought the company of those sad cases who fastened their belts just beneath their armpits and, belonging nowhere, belonged by default to each other; there was no refuge for an unaffiliated type such as Bernie Karp—not in homeroom, where the frazzled teacher’s imminent breakdown was the subject of wagers, nor in the library study hall, where monitors patrolled the aisles like prison guards. On this particular afternoon in the library not long after the rabbi’s return, Bernie was browsing—for want of Mosaic texts—aboriginal photos in a National Geographic magazine to avoid his Household Mechanics homework. (Tracked as a dullard on account of his feckless academic performance, he’d been sentenced to the gulag of vocational training.) As he glanced about in his boredom, careful not to make eye contact, Bernie’s gaze lit on the notorious Patsy Bobo, seated at an adjacent table chewing the segmented tail of her peroxide braid. Her legs were slightly splayed under the table’s surface to accommodate the spidery fingers of Scutter Eubanks, which were inching up her tender thigh beneath her skirt toward the juncture that was mystery incarnate.

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“Julius,” began the rabbi. “May I call you Julius?” His ingratiating air fooled no one. “I ain’t talking your zayde’s study house. I’m talking Rabbi ben Zephyr’s House of Enlightenment, where I’m dispensing on demand ecstasy.”

Mr. Karp went livid. “You mean like drugs?”

Now it was the rabbi’s turn to sigh. “Julius,” there was the patronizing note again, “today religion is good business. Give a look by the gentile revivalist with his double-breast polyester in the stadium, and even the Jewish boys and girls, that they sacrifice to some barefoot swami all their possessions, who tells them, ‘Go dress in shmattes and dance in the street.’ And it ain’t even Simchat Torah! Wants to acquire everybody, along with the BVD and the satellite dish, a bissel the living God, but for the years discipline they ain’t got time. So now comes a tzaddik ha dor, which it’s yours truly, to give them in a few easy steps a taste sublime.”

“Are you trying to tell me that you intend to peddle . . . ,” Mr. Karp searched without success for the word, which the rabbi supplied:

“Be-a-ti-tude,” tasting every syllable on his glaucous tongue. Then he allowed that he might also sell a few specialty items on the side—books and talismans, red string to ward off the evil eye, everything marked up and elegantly repackaged of course . . .

“Slow down!” said Mr. Karp. “What’s a two-hundred-year-old greenhorn know about markup?”

“You would be surprised how much business deals is in Talmud. Take for instance the Tractate Baba Batra, which it tells us from dinei memonot that it is permitted to be given for a gift cash money.” He began to cite the avot, the principle categories, concerning partnership, sales, legal documents, and so forth. Judging himself a canny man of commerce, with a level head and an eye for the main chance, Mr. Karp cursed his own creeping credulity: How could he entertain for even an instant that such a cockeyed proposition might in fact have some sound fiscal basis? But the old man was relentless, rubbing together the dried kindling of his palms as he described the plans for his ecumenical prayer and meditation center where, for a fee that might be adjusted along a sliding scale, he would provide the tools by which his clients could obtain the practical means to regenerate their wretched lives. And if in the process the rabbi should himself make a tidy profit whose dividends his prudent investors would share, then where was the harm? All he needed was a little seed money that might be readily acquired by Julius Karp’s signature on a loan application from the bank.

Disinclined to relinquish an ounce of his native skepticism, Mr. Karp nevertheless had to admit that he was impressed with the rabbi’s mercantile savvy, so much so that he forgot he was talking to a freak of nature. Trying his best to rein in his own entrepreneurial instincts, he put it bluntly: “So you want me to put my reputation on the line to bankroll an illegal immigrant that don’t even have a green card?”

Flashing his few remaining teeth, the rabbi was unctuous. “You’re a man of integrity, Julius. Du farshteyst, you understand how it works, the system; you can put to the squeaky wheel the grease.”

Resist as he might, Mr. Karp found himself succumbing to the rabbi’s blandishments. Wasn’t this after all a way to kill two birds with one sharp bargain? He could get the seedy old specimen out of his hair while at the same time enjoying the benefits of a scheme that just might be crazy enough to work. Turning back toward the television, he tried to recover some vestige of his reasonable doubt, but aware that the rabbi (asking, “Have we got a deal?”) had proffered a talonlike hand across the end table, Julius Karp extended his own without looking. As they shook, the beleaguered TV husband, still dressed as a woman, had ventured into the street, where he was solicited by a very butch lady dressed as a man.

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“Oh,” replied Mr. Karp. “I thought you might have something really ambitious in mind.” He sniggered over his witticism.

Unfazed, the rabbi went on. “A betmidrash, a study house I will establish, that they can come in it, both yehudim and goyim, and be born all over again. I got already my eye on a little place by the Rebel Yell Shopping Plaza . . .”

“Take it easy!” cautioned Mr. Karp, raising his hand like a traffic cop. “Now let me get this straight: You want to open up some kind of a religious institute where people come to study? Study what?”

“ ‘Study’ I don’t use in the traditional sense. More like, what you call them, exercises.”

“You mean like those Plottie classes my wife took once and went to bed for a week? Aren’t you a little out of shape for that sort of thing?” Again he chuckled.

“I’m talking spiritual exercises,” said the rabbi, with dignity. Then he complained that his feet were sore and asked if Mr. Karp would mind if he took a load off.

“Be my guest,” said the appliance merchant, though the invitation resonated unpleasantly in his gut.

The old man lowered himself with a grunt into the armchair that Mrs. Karp had vacated, so that both men now sat facing the TV. On its screen the put-upon family man, importuned by a marriage counselor to get in touch with his feminine side, had been moved to don his wife’s apparel in secret. An invisible audience guffawed like honking geese.

“‘There shall not be a man’s garment on a woman, nor a man wear a woman’s gear,’” cited the rabbi, like a wistful reminiscence; then returning to the matter at hand, he offered Mr. Karp the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to invest in his enterprise. “On the ground floor I’m willing to let you.”

Mr. Karp turned down the volume with his remote, shoved his glasses back over the hump of his nose, and swiveled his chair in the direction of Rabbi Eliezer. “Whoa,” was all he said.

“You can take out from the bank a loan so you ain’t got to spend a shekel, and will come back to you the money in spades.”

The retailer was frankly dazzled by the rabbi’s command of the vernacular, let alone his loquacity. “Let me get this straight. You want me to risk my capital, to say nothing of my good name, so that you can start up a . . . whadidyoucallit? ”

“A betmidrash.”

Mr. Karp took a breath. “Look, Rabbi, I’m not an unreasonable man. If you wanted to open a little shop, say a mom-and-pop sundry, then maybe we could talk. But let’s face it, you’re maybe what, a century and a half past the age of retirement? And even if you weren’t, this idea of yours, excuse me, is pretty screwy.”

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1999.

Bernie was beside himself with relief at the rabbi’s homecoming, though the delinquent holy man scarcely acknowledged him, brushing past the open-mouthed boy in his haste to talk with Bernie’s father. It seemed that in his three days of wandering, the old man had seen a lot of life, and returning bug-eyed and bathed in sweat—the fedora battered, the sportcoat soiled, the loud parrot necktie hanging from his throat like a noose—Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr had reached a stunning conclusion about the world he’d recently awakened to.

“Shopping bazaars it’s got, and Dodge Barracudos and Gootchie bags made I think from the skin of Leviathan, churches from Yoyzel it’s got big as Herod’s Temple, but it ain’t got a soul.”

All this he communicated breathlessly—less judgmental than plainly impressed—to Mr. Karp, who, relaxing in his postprandial recliner, appeared confused at first as to just who the intruder was. He was doubly disturbed, once he’d recalled the prodigal’s identity, that the old man should have planted himself directly between his chair and the wide-screen television—on which he was viewing his favorite program, a comedy called Nobody Likes Larry about a harassed family man. When his wife, looking up from a novel whose cover featured a woman swooning into the arms of a grenadier, reminded him that this was the fugitive from the deep freeze, Julius Karp snapped that he knew perfectly well who it was. On that note Mrs. Karp popped a Spansule from her heart-shaped pillbox and rose to tiptoe exaggeratedly out of the room. Meanwhile the bedraggled rabbi kept on reporting his reconnoitering of latter-day America, or at least the representative slice of it he’d seen.

“The people, they are such chazzers, all the time gobbling: gobble gobble; they feast on everything that it’s in their sight. They eat till their bellies swell by them like Goliath his hernia, and shop till their houses bulge from the electronic Nike and the Frederick of Hollywood balconette brassiere, but they ain’t satisfied.”

Jerking a lever as if shifting a gear, Mr. Karp brought his Stratalounger to an upright position. He was mightily irked at the way the old freeloader added insult to injury, compounding the crime of his return with an uninvited lecture on ethics. A firm believer in free-market economy, Mr. Karp resented the notion, tired as it was, that there was any higher principle on earth than goods and services. How dare this phantom of the ice box presume to instruct him, Julius Karp, citizen merchant—and in his own borrowed finery yet.

“Riches they got would make a Rothschild blush,” continued the rabbi, who seemed more gleeful than provoked; in fact, he seemed intoxicated, “but they ain’t got what makes them happy.”

“So?” said Mr. Karp, trying to keep a lid on his impatience. He’d heard the same commonplaces from Rabbi Birnbaum in his High Holiday sermons, though Birnbaum had the discretion to qualify his assaults on mammon so as not to offend the comfortable congregation who paid his salary. But from the perspective of his thronelike recliner, in front of which the wizened petitioner stood hat in hand, Mr. Karp (subvocally groaning) felt obligated to hear the old man out. “What exactly are you getting at?”

“I’m proposing,” the rabbi humbly submitted, “to restore to the people their soul.”

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“Wait a minute!” Pisgat shouted. “What’s a matter, you never heard from negotiation? Or maybe you mean to bluff a bluffer?”

Jocheved turned again, searching her mind for more leverage; she was after all doing the old fortz a favor—but just as she was about to offer that insight, another man shouldered his way through the office door. This one wore the sealskin reefer that was a common livery in the twilight world of which the girl had some bitter knowledge.

“I got outside in my wagon a shipment beluga caviar, three-quarters pood fresh off the boxcar from Vilna,” the man informed the proprietor, who told him shah, couldn’t he see they were not alone? Tapping a sharpened tooth with the handle of his horsewhip, the man continued to disregard the youth as he issued his ultimatum: “You want it, you don’t want it? I got other customers standing in line. The g’vir Poznanski, him with his palace on Piotrkowska, is prepared to pay top zloty, no questions asked. Make up your mind, the stuff won’t wait.”

Snapped Pisgat: “Didn’t I tell you I have already a buyer with an order from the millionaire Belmont in America, USA? This is guaranteed. Only a few arrangements I got first to make.”

Pisgat’s visitor, heavy-set, with greasy hair like matted seaweed straggling from under his cap, chewed impatiently on his braided whip. “I gah arery arraymum uh my om.” Unclamping his teeth, “And don’t think I don’t know what happened to the sevruga that got seized at the border last month.”

“Then why you even came here?” barked Pisgat.

The middleman relaxed into irony. “Think of it as a courtesy call.”

Kibbitzing, Jocheved was only just able to catch the drift of their discourse, while the worldlier Max seemed to comprehend more. By “arrangements” the ice mensch meant contacts for smuggling contraband undetected over an obstacle course of customs agents and border guards. In this instance the shipment involved a case of black market caviar transported by land to Lodz from the Gulf of Riga. The legal export of such a luxury item was apparently out of the question: International tariffs and duties would be prohibitive, and the taxes alone on imported delicacies—or so Max assumed—could be excessive to the extent of canceling one’s return on the initial investment. There might even be a loss of revenue. You could camouflage the caviar along with other less levy-heavy perishables, but those items would still warrant transport by sealed boxcar and later in a ship’s refrigeration hold, thus inviting careful scrutiny. Besides, since the aforementioned seizure, Pisgat’s network had by his own admission broken down.

In an effort to stall the middleman, the ice mensch allowed that things were difficult, but he needed only a couple of days to reestablish his connections and pave the way for the shipment. Until then the sturgeon roe might be kept safe from spoilage in his icehouse.

“A couple days and Poznanski returns to his Black Sea dacha,” said the middleman, taking another bite out of his whip.

The ice mensch sputtered that the rich man should burst from pleasure. “May disease enter his gums!”

Meanwhile Jocheved, her confidence increased several fold by Max’s ingenuity, had concluded that here was a chance that would not come again. The idea she’d hit upon and refined while giving ear to their felonious exchange was this: It would be more economical to facilitate the legal transport of a dead relation for burial in a family plot overseas than to finance a clandestine consignment with all the elaborate palm-greasings that entailed. And what better cover for the fish roe than the rigid rabbi (his casket reinforced and lined with lead, or better zinc), whose frozen condition would ensure the freshness of the merchandise upon disembarkation in the Golden Land? As the self-possessed Max Feinshmeker, Jocheved stepped forward to present her alternative.

“Gentlemen,” she began, clearing her throat, lowering her voice an octave or two. “Gentlemen, perhaps I can be of service.”

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Agitated, the girl nevertheless managed to keep Max’s sober façade from cracking apart. “The daughter is indisposed,” was all she was willing to say.

“A shame,” said old Pisgat, finally too busy to pursue the subject further. He was glad at any rate of an opportunity to rid himself of an incommodious object that had taken up precious space in his icehouse these many years; though on the other hand he was reluctant to engage in any transaction without realizing a profit.

“So what do you want the thing for?” he inquired cagily, as if he might have designs of his own on the relic.

The girl shuffled in her outsize shoes. Why indeed was she so intent on making herself the curator of her father’s archaeological curiosity? “I want,” she squared her shoulders, expanding her straitened chest, “to give the rebbe a proper resting place.”

Pisgat took a pinch of snuff from a briar box, stuffed it into a hairy nostril, and sneezed, wiping his nose on a sleeve. “What’s wrong with here?” he asked, batting his red-rimmed eyes, for it had occurred to him that he might extend an imaginary lease on the storage area.

“I want to put him someplace,” her answer framed itself as a question, “more permanent?” She winced internally at her own lack of conviction.

The proprietor raised a shaggy brow. “Pisgat’s icehouse is going away somewhere?” No reply from the lad forthcoming, he leaned back in his swivel chair and grew thoughtful: It was indeed a scandal that the frozen tzaddik’s remains had been kept above ground for such an unconscionable time; he should have been interred long ago. “But you, excuse me, don’t look like a religious; takhe, you don’t even look like a Jew. So what’s the old fossil to you?”

“He’s . . . ,” the girl floundered, then rallied, recalling her mother’s mandate, her father’s blind faith; the rabbi was, for better or worse, her destiny too. “He’s a sacred trust of our family that I owe it to my Uncle Salo to take care of him.”

“Hmph.” Pisgat shrugged, reassuming his professional demeanor. “Call for the legacy, you pay for the funeral. Naturally there’s a fee to convey the thing from my place of business, plus the outstanding rent on the space it’s occupied since your uncle’s passing.” He named an extortionate sum.

The girl was momentarily taken aback, but despite all she’d been through Jocheved still had an instinct for fair and not-so-fair trade, and where her shrewdness left off, Max Feinshmeker’s (she felt) began. “On second thought,” she said considering, “forget it,” and started to turn on her heel.

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But these questions, rather than overwhelm her, seemed to pose a merely abstract problem, just as in her uncustomary attire the girl felt the weight of her grief reduced to an almost hypothetical burden. What was more, beyond the lightening of her leaden heart, her masquerade offered obvious practical advantages. For one thing, it would be easier to deal with the perils of travel as a man . . . as, say, Max Feinshmeker. She pulled the name out of thin air and immediately warmed to it, how its jaunty consonants mocked her own somber aspect, lifting her spirits. If not quite a perfect fit, it was a name that, like her new suit of clothes, she would eventually grow into. She would be Max Feinshmeker, nephew of the deceased Frostbissen couple on the family’s distaff side, a young man for whom the complications of the journey to the Golden Land would constitute a great adventure. Jocheved felt the slightest twinge of excitement at the prospect.

Of course, one could argue there were any number of favors that might be more easily obtained by a woman—a notion that turned Max Feinshmeker’s stomach and filled him with disgust. This early evidence of her dual disposition prompted a fluttering in Jocheved’s breast: She was Max, a skeptical, forward-thinking youth, a staunch adherent of Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment movement, and disdainful of the outdated tradition the girl had been raised in; though that tradition, like the persistence of the girl herself, still cramped his modern attitudes and worried his bones. Jocheved’s thoughts then returned ruefully to the matter of capital, to the documents that might have to be forged, the unfriendly world that must be navigated between her ramshackle ghetto street and America. With all this in mind she rose from the chair and propped the stiff-crowned derby at a gallant angle on her handsome cropped head. Then she set off in the direction of Pisgat’s icehouse without a clue as to how she would proceed but with a lightness of step that the defeated daughter of Salo Frostbissen would never have been capable of.

She rapped at the wire-glass window in the door of Zalman Pisgat’s disordered office, while behind her porters in leather aprons shouldered sides of beef like wounded comrades and wheeled trolleys stacked with leaky produce crates.

On being admitted Jocheved announced tentatively, “I’m Max Feinshmeker,” and inspirited by her own declaration, “a near relation of the Frostbissen clan on the maternal side. I’ve come to relieve the proprietor of this establishment of the casket and its contents abandoned by my Uncle Salo at his demise.” It was the speech she’d rehearsed all the way from Zabludeve Street.

The ice mensch scratched the prickly pear of his jaw. Like everyone else he’d heard the tale of Salo’s bloody quietus; he’d even been questioned by the police concerning his employee of some twenty-odd years, though as long as Jewish crime didn’t spill beyond the confines of the ghetto, such investigations remained largely a formality. Salo’s death had reminded Pisgat, first, of the existence of the watchman, a timeworn fixture who barely earned his keep, and then of a long-forgotten item stored on his premises; he’d been half-expecting that someone might turn up to reclaim it. Old goat that he was, he had hoped it might be the girl, the story of whose fall had also reached his ears, and he was visibly disappointed that another representative of the family had come in her stead. Turning up the flaps of his plush cap to release his jug ears, he wondered aloud what had become of Jocheved.

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Without a word—had they ever exchanged a word?—the hag took in the situation. Jocheved looked on sniffling, hugging her bare breasts as if she meant to stifle them for good and all, while the old woman went straight to the clothes press and in a gesture that had about it something of the miraculous (she was regarded by many as a kishefmakherin, a sorceress) lifted the lid. From its camphor-reeking confines she withdrew a man’s suit of clothes—the dark navy worsted with an alpaca lining and rolling lapel that Jocheved had purchased for her father during better days. Salo, who slept in his peasant smock and sheepskin, had never found occasion to wear it; though he took pride in possessing the suit and pledged to put it on when Mashiach finally arrived, or on the day the rabbi disenthralled himself from the ice, whichever came first. His wife sneered that he was waiting to be buried in his gladrags and, seized with a sentimental urge that he realize that end, had quarreled with the burial society, which pronounced such off-the-rack apparel a desecration.

Passive after the energy she’d expended in cutting her hair, Jocheved looked on with detached curiosity as Shulamith laid out the garments on the sagging featherbed. Nor did she resist as the midwife helped her into first the warm woolen gatkes, then the short-bosomed white dress shirt with its upstanding collar. Next came the hair-line trousers with their double-sewn buttons at the crotch and the single-breasted, round-cut sack coat. There was also a pair of leather bluchers, several sizes too large, whose interiors the old woman padded with newspaper whose headlines described the stewpot of Europe building toward a boil. Still relatively benumbed, Jocheved supposed it was fitting that the vartsfroy who had supervised the girlchild’s delivery should also attend at her rebirth as a pallid young man. Though the clothes hung somewhat baggily on her slender frame, the girl had the odd sensation that she would grow into them. An alien in her own skin, she experienced a composure she hadn’t known since before her abduction; it was a feeling that, while it had little in common with a homecoming, gave her the sense of having been liberated from her outworn self.

Shulamith, notwithstanding her smoky eye and hirsute upper lip, had once had a husband, and with gnarled fingers she meticulously knotted the ash gray cravat at Jocheved’s throat. Then she took up the shears and trimmed the uneven edges of the hair the girl had so recklessly hacked off. Afterward they stood gazing at each other with the sodality of coconspirators who together have defied the law; for even unread women knew the Torah’s prohibition against wearing the clothes of the opposite sex, how it deceives not only others but oneself, confounding the soul that finds itself trapped in a stranger’s body.

“Azoy,” said the midwife in a voice whose girlish lilt was chilling for its incongruity, “now you are again brand new?” From the pocket of her calico apron she fetched the couple of gulden she’d received for pawning Basha Puah’s embroidered challah cloth and porcelain cuspidor, plus the curio of a cedar ice cream freezer. In return the girl bestowed a kiss on the kishefmakherin’s wrinkled brow, who (for an instant in Jocheved’s vapory imagination) was a maid again.

After the old woman’s departure Jocheved dropped onto her cot to take account of her circumstances. She was clearheaded enough to realize that the pittance Shulamith had given her would not begin to defray the expense of her project. It was barely enough to bribe a customs official, never mind purchase a passport or shifscarte ticket. And even had she had the funds for the journey overland from Lodz to the port of Hamburg, then on across the North Atlantic, how would she manage to drag along with her a box containing a saint-size block of ice?

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Her first outing after having risen from her convalescent cot was to attend her mother’s funeral. Still muzzy and unsteady on her feet, bundled in a beaver shawl that covered her desolate head, Jocheved was astonished at how many mourners were gathered at the gravesite. This was especially surprising given that Basha Puah’s burial followed so hard upon the heels of her husband’s, to say nothing of her reputation as an incurable shrew. But in death both Salo, the working stiff, and his joyless widow were transformed respectively into hero and helpmate, the wife so devoted she was unable to endure the cruel demise of her spouse. It was a story worthy of the improbable tales that Salo had told his young daughter long ago in the arctic environment of the icehouse. The morning of the funeral had dawned blustery and overcast, the ground still hard in the cemetery behind the textile factory walls, but here and there a crocus had broken through the crust of the earth. Having been so long away from the natural world, Jocheved almost resented how it persisted without her, squeezing the clod of dirt she was meant to drop into her mother’s grave until it crumbled in her palm and was scattered by the wind. After the ceremony the mourners, some of whom were strapping teamsters and bare-boned yeshivah scholars, escorted the girl back to Zabludeve Street. They were solicitous of her frailty, protective of her personal safety; and letting her guard down, Jocheved felt that, for the daughter of her parents, there would always be a place in the ghetto. Perhaps she might yet revive the halcyon satisfactions of her ice-making enterprise. But as the teamsters crowded about her with a brazen forwardness and the scholars kept their distance as if from a contagion, the girl remembered the shame that could never be erased, let alone the lingering danger. She was appalled by her selfishness, that her grief over her own corruption should have displaced, if only momentarily, the grief for her family, for whose deaths she was in large part responsible.

In Jocheved’s absence old Shulamith had dusted and cleaned the cellar, having removed (no doubt as her due) some of the luxury items—the Tuscan bronze egg beater, the enameled douche pan—that the girl had lavished on her mother in more prosperous times. May they serve the old ganef well, thought Jocheved, noting that in exchange for what she’d taken the woman had also contributed, beyond her labors, some pot cheese and a bottle of schnapps for the guests. The stench of the cheese helped neutralize the stench of sickness and death that still pervaded those recessed rooms. After the chalk-faced men of the Chevra Kadisha had finished saying Kaddish, the guests departed and Jocheved was finally alone. Utterly spent, she slumped onto a wooden stool, laid her head on a noodle board, and slept a while, dreaming of a despondent child with wings too heavy to flap. When she awoke she heaved a ragged sigh, got slowly to her feet, and took down the large copper kneading trough that hung from a ceiling beam. Since the apartment’s single mirror was turned to the wall, she gazed at her distorted reflection in the trough’s tarnished surface and saw only a ghost gazing back at her. Having already ritually torn the pongee collar of her mourning dress, the only store-bought frock in her wardrobe, she tugged at the lapel until she’d ripped the bodice from her shoulders. Then with both hands she tore the cambric corset cover underneath, wrestling herself out of her ravaged garments until she stood naked and shivering on the cold flags of the cellar floor. Further compelled by the tattoo of her pounding heart, the girl located her mother’s teak sewing box, extracted from it a pair of tailor’s shears, and with only the ill-defined reflection in the copper pot to guide her hand, she clipped off her mane of crow-black hair. Thus shorn, she flung the pot and kicked at the fallen hair that encircled her, releasing a sob that collapsed her chest as would a wrecking ball. This was her sorry state when the door to the hallway scraped open and Shulamith, midwife, rootworker, and sometime enema lady, crept in.

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Though her mama’s own manifest determination to do the same made her reasoning seem somehow redundant, almost as if the crossgrained Basha Puah were physically blocking death’s door. Besides, it wasn’t so easy to die, and while she tried to resist the nourishment the old vartsfroy prescribed, her body (whose craving for narcotics had been gradually replaced by an appetite for solid food) overcame her mind’s obstinacy. Then a literal death seemed frankly not worth the trouble, since she judged herself already as good as kaput. But self-pity aside, her physical survival was a haunting reminder of the dreadful journey her father had made to recover her, barging into an underworld from which he’d shuffled back in his mangled body only, while his soul had perhaps departed along the way. The girl had the mad impulse to return the favor by setting out in search of her father’s lost soul, at which point she remembered the old artifact on ice.

He’d been included in her mother’s injunctions that she leave behind the slough of the Balut. “And don’t forget to take with you your papa’s farshlogener rebbe, it should be for you a blessing.”

Jocheved was amazed to hear such a thing from her mother’s cracked lips, which before had only cursed the icebound ancient as evidence of her papa’s narishkeit. Now her insistence that the girl take him with her seemed to signal the extremity of Basha Puah’s condition. Jocheved herself had demurred, recalling her father’s laughable assertion that all the family’s blessings came from the frigid saint. “What blessings?” she would have asked him now. “Our life is an abomination.” She remembered how he’d alleged that, if you took care of the rebbe, the rebbe would take care of you. He was convinced that the refrigerated relic gave meaning to their spare existence, as if the old man’s rotting crate were not a casket at all but the Ark of the Covenant itself and Salo Frostbissen the high priest charged with its maintenance. It was all claptrap, of course. Moreover, if you had a mind to, there were other means by which you might atone for your sins; there were rituals of purification, scape-beasts you could heap your trespasses upon. But the frozen rabbi was Salo’s sole bequest; it was his legacy, and having sullied the name of her family beyond redemption, there remained only one gesture left by which the unclean girl might honor her papa’s memory.

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But that was sometime after Jocheved had woken from the nightmare that trailed her like the raveled train of some spectral gown into consciousness. Her body ached from what she now understood were injections—the subcutaneous pinpricks and intravenous invasions of the hypodermic syringe—that Zygmunt the Pimp had administered to break her spirit and render her his virtual slave. Over the indefinite weeks of her captivity, almost no part of her anatomy had remained unpenetrated by needles, and her arms, legs, and buttocks bore the angry cipher of those marks. Now the inflammation of her flesh had infected her insomniac mind, which could no longer confine the horror of her waking to a faraway dream; and in her increasing awareness the horror grew until the dream took dominion everywhere, supplanting the mean interior of their basement flat. In the throes of her morphine withdrawal, Jocheved thrashed and flailed, fighting her exhausted mother, who was forced with the aid of the midwife to tie her daughter with leather straps to the sides of her cot. It was during this period that the girl, recalling another instance of being bound, came to realize that the worst she could imagine was true.

The facts revealed themselves by degrees through her mother’s running rant. “Oy, your papa, the yold, the mule,” keened Basha Puah. “I tell him go to the authorities, but he says they don’t care, the police, what uses the Jews put their daughters to. Your daughter’s lost, I tell him, so why’s he got also to lose himself? But he don’t listen, di zikh onton a mayse, the suicide; he sets out all alone for Gehenna, to hell he goes alone to fetch you back.” The tears she refused to release scalding her eyes.

And so the thread of her mother’s piecemeal narrative provided a logic that strung together the fragments of Jocheved’s dream, an awful logic through which she understood that she no longer belonged in the broken bosom of her family. She was a fallen creature, soiled and defiled, and must return to the sty whence she’d been snatched. Her whole body affirmed the urgency, though she was too weak to act on her need, and during the occasions when she attempted to rise from the bed, her mother and Shulamith, the vartsfroy, tightened her bonds. Then it was as if the girl had to be lashed to this world lest she escape to another—though it was paradoxically to another world, a new one, that Basha Puah in the end enjoined her daughter to flee.

For the time being, however, she and Shulamith kept the girl fastened to the cot, force-feeding her broth, herbal decoctions, and purgatives, examining her stools as though they were auguries. They applied leeches to her armpits, heated cups in whose glass globes (or so the midwife maintained) homunculi drawn out of Joheved’s soul had been trapped, until after a couple of weeks the girl began to calm down. When the several levels of wakefulness she was straddling started to resolve into one, Jocheved looked in her infirmity across the cellar to where her mother, beyond weariness herself, had taken to the bed from which her husband’s corpse had only recently been removed. Then there was just the old hag in her florid babushka emptying slop pails and stoking the stove, while Basha Puah cried out in her fever for her daughter to leave this place: “Gay avek! Go already to the Golden Land.” For America was the place her mother had fixed upon as her daughter’s salvation. But as her father’s girl, wasn’t it Jocheved’s duty to follow her papa whither he had gone?

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The pain spread until it was general throughout her body, whose very skin seemed to plead for an even greater portion of hurt. Her skin invited further punishment while her brain, as if swathed in damp gauze, remained at a distant remove. Although she recognized that she was in a state of authentic agony, the agony was itself as remote as the memory of her dream, images of which reemerged only to retreat back into their fog. But some of the images persisted, assuming more clarity, and again she saw her naked father with his gorse-like clumps of hair and beard, his concave chest, his genitals like eggs in a nest. It was a picture that did not square with the ferocious image of the watchman in the dream parlor, where he behaved as he had in the stories he’d told of laying waste to the enemies of the icehouse, stories that even as a child she’d understood to be lies. Again she saw him swinging his crowbar in those tawdry rooms, smashing the skull of a character whose name she seemed to recall: Wolfie, it was, the walleyed famulus of Zygmunt the Yentzer, the Pimp. Then Wolfie went down, though not before he’d delivered a slash or two to the intruder’s chest and cheek. Her injured papa had nevertheless gathered up his daughter from the sofa where she lay in her rucked chemise, just as Zygmunt himself stormed into the room yammering scripture and attacking her papa, who bled already from a dozen wounds. Still, he had managed to carry the languid girl out of the brothel and down the stairs into the slushy streets, stumbling past a thousand witnesses: the poulterers and lottery-ticket peddlers, rusty-eyed millworkers and market wives, the pimp himself in his earlocks and lemon spats, who followed but dared not assault the watchman further before the gawking audience. Thus did Salo stagger with his burden all the way back to Zabludeve Street, where he deposited the girl, wrapped in his bloody sheepskin, on the cot behind the stove, drawing the curtain to give her some privacy. Then, while his wife excoriated him for a hopeless ninny and threatened to increase his wounds, he lay himself down on his own bed and slipped away.

Or had he been a walking dead man all the while he was carrying his daughter home from the shandoiz? For that was the version that evolved in the ghetto, a story that thrilled its citizens, some of whom still recalled how Salo had entered their city preceded by legend; he’d been the guardian of a celebrated tzaddik’s remains, hadn’t he? though there was still some controversy as to whether the holy man was actually deceased. This was all long ago, but the memory, vague though it was, supplemented the perception that Salo Frostbissen was a holy warrior, come forth from his dormancy in Pisgat’s icehouse to do battle with the evil element. So emboldened was the local population by the tale of Salo’s martyrdom that, when Zygmunt the Pimp returned to claim his stolen property, he was met by a party of implement-brandishing neighbors standing outside Jocheved’s door. Zygmunt swore on his hip-pocket siddur that he would come back with reinforcements and proved as good as his promise, returning with a cadre of crime-syndicate shtarkers to break the heads of those who’d dared to defy him. But as he’d been in no special hurry to stage his reprisal (and was himself not exactly a popular cause), by the time he reappeared Jocheved’s mother had already followed her husband’s lead: Having hounded him throughout his days, she had apparently no intention of allowing death to come between them, and so pursued him into the hereafter with a stinging fund of leftover abuse that she’d neglected to unload on him in life. She had expired (this was the coroner’s diagnosis) of a ruptured heart that few gave her credit for having, and her daughter had since vanished without a trace.

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Oscillating between horror and disbelief, Mr. Karp turned again to his son. “You knew all the time he was still around?”

“Uh-huh,” replied Bernie, surprising himself by his utter lack of contrition. “Can I keep him?”

His father exploded: “He’s not a pet!”

Upon which Mrs. Karp, who seldom concerned herself in domestic mat-ters, for once made to advise her husband, “The responsibility might be good for the kid.”

“Who asked you!”

“Touchy, touchy.”

Bernie twisted his head back toward the rabbi in the hope of gaining some show of support, but the old man was already gone. It was three days before he turned up again. In Bernie’s late addenda to the annals of the Boibiczer Prodigy that Grandpa Ruby had detailed in his ledger book, old Eliezer’s absence is referred to as “the three lost days.”

1907.

Jocheved awoke on her woven-rope cot after a terrible dream. In the dream she had been in a strange house full of unfamiliar women and men—the women mostly stationary in loose kimonos and wrappers, lounging on moth-eaten divans in an ill-lit parlor, while the men came and went, came and went; though what their purpose was in the house she wasn’t sure. Her father had figured in the dream in a frightful fashion, bursting with an unwonted fury into the parlor where she reclined. The years of sitting vigil in the icehouse and patrolling its frozen merchandise had replaced the marrow of Salo’s bones with rime, leaving his joints stiff and his back as curved as a shepherd’s crook. But in the dream he charged like a bull into the parlor, wielding a crowbar of the type used to pry apart ice cakes, which he swung at the head of a man who was pawing a disheveled Jocheved. Other men assaulted her papa, bloodying him with dirks and blows, since, having dropped the bar in order to lift his daughter, he was now defenseless. In fact, he seemed almost to welcome the knife blades, turning this way and that to receive them, protecting the girl from injury in an improvised waltz. This vision of her papa shielding her as the blood jetted from his wounds seared Jocheved’s brain like a signet in hot wax, the wax losing the vision’s imprint as it seeped into her breast and bowels. She was aware of her lantern-jawed mother hovering over her in their cellar flat, bathing her forehead with a compress and babbling complaints, but this did not seem to be part of the dream. She was also aware of the half-drawn patchwork curtain and beyond it the featherbed, a deflated cloud in its enameled iron frame, on top of which lay the naked body of her father. His ivory-white limbs were chevroned with gashes the size of open mouths, which a gathering of dour men endeavored to stitch closed, swabbing him with sponges dipped in brine. Jocheved thought it curious how her father’s lacerated body had been transported out of a dream and into the cellar crowded with milk churns in cobweb skirts; then having observed as much, she groaned aloud and sought the deeper, dreamless depths of sleep.

When she woke again, her mother was still attending her, wetting her lips and insisting she take a spoonful of barley broth, against which her stomach rebelled. Alongside her mother stood the midwife with her hussar’s mustache, the same old crone who had presided at the girl’s nativity nearly two decades before; but the bed where her father had lain was now empty. Jocheved took this as proof that the bad dream was finally over and she was awake indeed; it was a conclusion corroborated by the ache in her heart and vitals, which yearned for something her murky mind could not name.

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Came the evening meal when Mr. Karp asked his son if he knew anything about certain books that had been checked out of the library at Congregation Felix Frankfurter. It seemed he had had a phone call from Rabbi Tommy Birnbaum expressing concern about some volumes of “mysticalism” (the rabbi could scarcely contain his distaste at pronouncing the word) that Miss Ribalow had brought to his attention, which had yet to be returned.

“He wanted me to know I should always feel free to talk to him, called me Julius, this Rabbi Whosits who don’t know me from Adam. Then he asks me do I think it’s appropriate that I should send a boy to fetch such books. Son, you got something to say to me?”

There had, of course, been other clues to the effect that all was not as it had been in the Karp household. For one thing, while Bernie continued to clean his plate each night and ask for more, the kid had begun to lose weight, his amorphous body assuming a more recognizably human form. Moreover, his pimples had started to retreat like a defeated army from his forehead and cheeks, leaving behind a pitted visage revealing rudimentary traces of character. But Julius Karp and his wife, otherwise engaged, had never been especially sensitive to changes in their son’s physiognomy. What Mr. Karp was aware of, however, was that certain items of his own sartorial wardrobe—a bathrobe, a shirt, a houndstooth jacket, a pair of Dacron slacks—had gone missing, an absence he attributed to the newly hired schwartze’s presumed kleptomania; and he had duly ordered his wife (who ignored him) to confront Cleopatra, the maid.

“Well, young man,” pressed Mr. Karp, slightly uncomfortable in the role of interrogator, “I’m all ears.” Which he flapped Dumbo fashion to ease the tension. “So what’s the story?”

Bernie assured him there was no story, then muttered some excuse about researching a social studies paper on the Jews.

“Jews?” Mr. Karp made a face as if sampling some foreign dish. Bernie’s school, whose season had recommenced, was in any case largely run by Southern Baptists who gave short shrift to the very idea of Jews, let alone inviting papers on their habits and mores. “Isn’t that an awfully broad topic?”

“Yessir,” said Bernie, which was a bit of a give-away, since nowhere in memory had he ever said “sir” to his father. “But I only have to name the main attractions,” digging himself a deeper hole. To try and climb out of it, he began to cite highlights from the Judaic tradition in both its normative and antinomian aspects, remarking upon the influence of various saints and religious geniuses. In the midst of a discourse that threatened to run away with him, he realized that his parents’ mouths were hanging open in response to their son’s unnatural erudition, so Bernie shut up. Still the jaws of Mr. and Mrs. Karp remained mutually agape, though their eyes had shifted from the boy to the middle distance beyond Bernie’s left shoulder. Bernie swiveled in his seat to follow their gaze, which lit upon Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr himself, standing squarely beneath the dining room’s proscenium arch. He was wearing a felt fedora and a houndstooth jacket several sizes large, a burgundy shirt with a parrot necktie fastened about his wattled throat (visible now beneath his unevenly trimmed beard) in a combination of a Windsor and a Gordian knot.

“I think,” announced the old man, his flesh as translucent as beeswax, marsupial pouches beneath his rheumy eyes, “I will like now to see for mayn self the Golden Land.”

Oscillating between horror and disbelief, Mr. Karp turned again to his son. “You knew all the time he was still around?”

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He was told of the true significance of Torah, which had spawned the seraphim. It was through Torah that all worlds were sustained, though no one could have beheld the Law if it had not clothed itself in the garments of this world. Those garments were composed of fine-spun Hebrew characters that contained God’s essence, and by shifting the letters anagram-fashion—Bernie pictured swapping sleeves for pantlegs as if to fit impossible beings—you could alter the course of galaxies. When he was fairly bursting from a surfeit of magical wisdom, the rabbi told the boy to be still already.

“Concentrate now on the Hebrew word for ‘I,’ ani (אני),” counseled the old man, explaining that the word should then be reconfigured in the mind to form another word: ayin (אין), “nothingness.” When he’d meditated on this awhile, Bernie began to grow light-headed and uncrossed his eyes to regain his bearings, only to have the rabbi introduce another exercise. He should focus next on the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter name of God, whose characters, once visualized, he should then rearrange. He was given the numerical equivalents of the four possible spellings of the written letters, which comprised the rainbow threads of the garment of Torah with its 231 buttonholes, called, since the destruction of the Temple, the Gates of Tears.

Even as he followed the rabbi’s instructions, Bernie wondered what such arcane practices had in common with his unspoken desires, whose object he could no longer identify. But he could not deny the tingling that had commenced in his brain, which felt as if the lid of his skull had been raised like a convertible’s roof to expose its contents to the elements. Then, as if borne on the warm breeze from an open window that invaded his simmering brain, the visions started to come. He could hear the voice of the rabbi, syntax no longer scrambled; but though he comprehended fully, the boy was uncertain what language the old man spoke: “As the hand before the eye conceals the mountain, so does our little life hide the mysteries of which this world is full.” He heard the riddles the rabbi put to him: What eagle has its nest in maidenhair, where its young are plundered by creatures not yet created and taken to places that don’t exist? Who is the beautiful virgin with two left breasts? And Bernie thought he knew the answers! He saw connections everywhere: how, for instance, the redbreast on the honeysuckle just outside the window had its own appointed star and each star its designated celestial being, who represented the bird according to its rank before the Holy One, blessed be He. He saw how certain stars trailing peacocks’ tails held sway over certain herbs called “delirious elixirs,” not to mention certain bodily discharges and women’s hairstyles; that the diameter of one’s penis and the circumference of one’s third eye were influenced by the phosphorescent trajectories of comets across the firmament. Bernie saw the Throne of Glory, which, though vacant, resembled a giant La-Z-Boy in need of dusting, and the Divine Chariot with its tractor tread; he saw the Shekhinah, the celestial presence in Her female aspect, wearing a schoolgirl’s uniform. When She lifted her kilt, Bernie felt his flesh ignite, his sinews blazing, retinas turning to embers, eyelashes flashing lightning, follicles sprouting flames. He was surrounded by hybrid beings, with cloven hooves and ivory wings, so that he cried out the words of the patriarch Jacob that he had not known he knew: “They compass me about, yea, they compass me about like bees .” When the creatures had finished collectively urinating on the conflagration that was Bernie Karp, they vanished, leaving him a smoldering heap. Then, as his senses began gradually to return to the mundane world, he saw again the old man in an outsize bathrobe watching reruns of The Dating Game.

Rabbi Eliezer cackled and pointed at Bachelor Number Two, a teetotaler, who had just expressed a wish to drink prune juice from the bachelorette’s shoe.

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He bade the boy to sit on the carpet between him and the TV, whose volume he turned down but not off, and admonished him, “Everybody that don’t stop searching after things too hard for him, or seeks things that from him should be hid, it’s better he should never be born.” That said, he told Bernie that the criteria for studying the mystical texts were three: one must have at least forty years, a wife and family, and a paunch as a hedge against involuntary levitation. “To my knowledge only the belly you got.” And it had begun lately to shrink. Then Eliezer told the cautionary tale of the four rabbis who entered paradise: how one dropped dead, one went meshuggah, the third forswore his faith, and only the sage Rabbi Akibah escaped in one piece—“and you, sweetheart, are no Akibah.” But as the boy remained rapt, showing not the least inclination to heed his warnings, the rabbi emitted a sigh, then proceeded to explain the notion of the Etz Chayim, the Tree of Life—each of whose branches, called sefirot, corresponded to the rungs of Jacob’s Ladder, which corresponded in turn to their respective astral realms.

“The rungs for all I know are shoyn farfoylt. Nu? they’re rotten already. The nimble can still ascend, but they break from under your weight every rung, which it means you can’t come back again down. . . .”

Eliezer’s nasal voice, despite the jumbled syntax and foreign phrases, was melodious to Bernie, who hung on every syllable, oblivious to the TV dialogue that filtered through. In this way, over a number of days he lost count of, the boy was initiated into certain mysteries. He was introduced to the kabbalistic concepts of kavanah and devekut, intensity and cleaving, techniques that enabled you to swing with a simian grace from limb to limb of the Tree of Life. He was told of the tzimtzum, God’s retreat from His own universe, like a landlord who, disgusted with the tenants who had trashed his premises, rather than evict them, exits slamming the door. The noise of his withdrawal is the big bang, the shevirah, behind which the whole house of cards collapsed, the dust from the rubble rising to heaven where it caused the Lord to sneeze. The shower of sparks that ensued from his divine sternutation lodged in crannies throughout the detritus, and it is our lot, saying endless gezundheits for the gift of God’s luminous snot, to retrieve those sparks from their hidden places. Then fanning them into flames, we make sufficient light by which to begin restoring the fallen world to its former splendor.

“Such is on Earth our task,” said Eliezer, with more than a hint of boredom.

Of course, this world was only one of several alternative worlds, not the least of which was the Yenne Velt, the Other Side, populated by creatures at once more feral and more complex than ourselves. It was a realm that intersected our own, its denizens sometimes invading our very beings in the form of dybbuks, malign spirits that take up residence in the organs and apertures of the living, or ibburs, which inhabited the recently deceased in order to complete the mitzvot they’d left unfinished on earth. There were dizzying categories of demons, including jester demons that played tricks on the soul during its posthumous journey toward Kingdom Come: They turned the laws of reincarnation, the gilgul, helter-skelter, giving false directions to souls already bewildered by the mapless thoroughfares of the afterlife.

“It’s from below that the yetser horeh, the yearning,” revealed Eliezer, suppressing a yawn, “brings about the completion above.”

Listening, the boy understood that all his reading to date had been mere amateur dabbling.

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“Miss Ribalow here says you want to check out the Zohar?”

Bernie repeated his refrain, “It’s not for me,” resisting an urge to pry the rabbi’s jeweled fingers from his shoulder. Again he explained that his father wanted to “get in touch”—that was the phrase he’d heard bruited about—with his Jewish heritage.

The rabbi exchanged meaningful glances with Miss Ribalow, both of them familiar (as was the entire congregation) with Julius Karp’s aggressive TV marketing campaign, which seemed incompatible with the notion of a spiritual quest. But in the end the rabbi delivered some sanctimonious banality about the function of a lending library in a free society, and issuing a transparently breezy caveat—“Tell your daddy not to conjure up any whatchamacallem, any golems, heh heh”—permitted Bernie to check out his heretical volumes. Back in the basement the boy opened them with the same palpitating excitement he’d felt when opening Madeline’s underwear drawer, but even in their abbreviated English editions, the books were impenetrable, full of sphinxlike symbols and cryptic diagrams. Bernie assumed that the books contained recipes for spells and incantations meant to result in supernatural effects; and though he’d never been especially superstitious, he wondered whether, if you followed the recipes, it might be possible for a person to enter a trance that would allow him to, say, survive a hundred years undisturbed in a block of ice. But his ignorance of mystical discipline prevented him from exploring further, and Bernie was mortally frustrated at having arrived at such an impasse. The keenness of his frustration amazed him, and he could scarcely believe that his desire for the flesh (and intimate garments) of young girls had been so readily replaced by a hunger for obscure learning.

He appealed again to Rabbi Eliezer. There was a joke among the congregants of the Reform synagogue the Karps annually attended that their temple was so progressive it closed its doors on Jewish holidays. While an exaggeration, it was true that the time-honored traditions of the Jewish people, largely expunged from the synagogue liturgy, had scarcely left a dent in Bernie’s consciousness. But the unlighted past, as represented by the fusty rabbi, now consumed the boy’s waking hours, and though most of Eliezer’s tutelage consisted of unhelpful remarks made during the less sensational TV ads, Bernie credited the rabbi with the responsibility for all his new knowledge, and thought of himself as the holy man’s protégé.

When the preoccupied Rabbi ben Zephyr waved away his solicitations, however, Bernie made a deliberate pest of himself. While the old man was absorbed in watching Your Money or Your Life or The Killing Machine or the yeasty sitcom Menage à Melvin, Bernie would station himself next to the sofa and practice religion. Experimentally, he donned the accessories he’d obtained for Eliezer, who seemed to have no use for the stuff. These included a silk kippah, a striped prayer shawl, and a set of leather phylacteries with whose complicated straps Bernie wrestled as with serpents—all items purchased with several installments of his allowance from the gift shop at the Orthodox shul in its crumbling downtown quarters, to which Bernie had made a Saturday-morning sojourn by bus. Thus attired, the boy would take up a borrowed hymnal and, nodding as he’d seen the men nod (like bobble-headed dashboard figurines) in the shopworn shul, recite the phonetically transcribed Shmoneh Esreh, a prayer intended to be said silently. The rabbi managed for the most part to ignore him, so long as he stayed out of his direct line of vision, but when Bernie began showily attempting to read in their original the Hebrew books that had already defeated him in English, an irked Eliezer was finally distracted. Provoked by the kid’s clumsy progress, the old man reluctantly disengaged himself from Love Bytes, a soap opera he followed religiously, and condescended to advise Bernie regarding a few shortcuts to enlightenment.

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Never more than a mediocre student, unmotivated and lazy, Bernie was becoming daily more driven in his pursuit of the knowledge that would help him understand old Eliezer’s provenance. Seated beside the rabbi on the harvest plaid sofa adjacent to the squawking TV, he read his parents’ copies of The Joys of Yiddish and The World of Our Fathers, books that were standard issue in Jewish households but appeared never to have been opened in this one. He read their coffee-table edition of Abba Eban’s Heritage, a profusely illustrated history of the Jews that was a companion book to a TV series, videos of which were available in the Temple library. But Bernie never bothered viewing them: there would have been little opportunity to watch them on the downstairs VCR without interrupting the rabbi’s programs, and besides, he was coming to prefer the printed word to the video image. Unsatisfied by the generic texts on his parents’ sparsely populated shelves, however, he lugged home from the Temple library (to the librarian’s tacit disapproval) several moldy volumes of Heinrich Graetz’s comprehensive history of the Jews. These Bernie entered gingerly at first, feeling like an interloper in their forensic pages, then impressed himself by devouring the books as greedily as the doughnuts he’d habitually bolted in the days before the rabbi’s defrosting. In fact, his desire for physical nourishment seemed to have been deposed by his burgeoning intellectual appetite.

In the Graetz history there were references to other books of dubious repute, with bizarre titles such as The Cockscomb of Rabbi Yahyah or The Book of the Face that gave Bernie a peculiar itch. They were books the author of the magisterial history derided as hokum, though the boy, whose association with the wayward rabbi had given him a taste for maverick perspectives, couldn’t help but be curious. They were books of hermetic mysteries and forbidden knowledge, some of which—The Book Bahir, The Sefer Yetzirah—Bernie was astonished to find in abridged translations in the Temple library. Only, this time when he tried to check them out, the librarian sniffed her displeasure and told him to wait, then marched out of the glaringly lit room and returned after some minutes with Rabbi Birnbaum himself. He was a man in his middle years with a hairpiece and an artificial tan, his heliotrope shirt open at his slightly crepey throat to reveal a gold mezuzah.

“So . . . Bernie, is it?” placing a ring-laden hand on Bernie’s shoulder. The boy nodded. “What seems to be the problem?”

“There’s a problem?” asked Bernie, somewhat disingenuously.

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But having admitted that televised fare fell short of the spiritual reaches of his once glorious meditative flights, of the life of the spirit he claimed now to have had his fill. Just then there came on the screen a commercial in which a man in a sharkskin suit, eyeglasses sliding down the slope of his needle nose, earnestly promised not to be undersold. Opening the doors of refrigerators and ovens to display their spacious interiors, he intoned, “Don’t be square; be sharp, shop at Karp’s . . .”

The rabbi groaned oy and switched channels with the remote, in the use of which he’d become quite adept.

Surprised at his own unwillingness to let the matter go, Bernie pressed the old man for details of his visionary experiences. Without deigning to look at his questioner, Eliezer answered in due course, “Maybe on TV you don’t see them, the Merkabah or the Throne of Glory; you don’t see the divine ponim—which it is the face of God—but I seen already the face of God, and I can tell you it ain’t that pretty.”

A little chilled by the old man’s disparagement, Bernie nevertheless remained single-minded. He persisted in his haphazard reading exclusive of the rabbi’s supervision, feeling that, in his sallies into the world the rabbi came from, Eliezer ben Zephyr was still his mentor and guide.

From the well-endowed library in the prairie-style synagogue a shady half mile walk from his home, Bernie checked out the standard Weinreich Yiddish grammar. The volunteer from the Temple Sisterhood, a maiden lady whose helmet of hair was riveted to her skull by plastic barrettes, seeing that the book had not been checked out in living memory, gave him a regular third degree.

“It’s not for me,” Bernie assured her, concocting a story about his father’s wanting to get back to his Jewish roots—getting back to one’s roots being a fashion frequently touted in celebrity interviews. Why he didn’t confess his own desire to decipher what his dead grandfather had scribbled in his ledger book, he couldn’t exactly have said, though his instinct was not to arouse suspicions. Besides, embroidering the truth was a talent for which Bernie had only just discovered he had a knack, and it was bracing to realize more of his hidden potential. His answer had merely elevated the inchworm of the librarian’s brow. Once home he was frustrated by the grammar’s initial inscrutability and thought he would never get past the alef-bais, but with dogged perseverance he eventually began to make some progress. While he still got nowhere with the spiky cursive in Grandpa Ruby’s age-yellowed ledger, Bernie was at least able to reconstruct in his mind the night the rabbi had tumbled forth from the freezer—when the old gent wondered aloud, on looking about at the beaverboard paneling, the beanbag pouffes, and the bowling-pin lamps, whether he was dead and the insulated cabinet was his casket. Had he arrived at last body and soul in gan eydn, in paradise?

And was Bernie, he had inquired, a zaftige malech?

“Nisht kayn malech, Rabbi,” Bernie would have apprised him if the scene were repeated. “I’m no angel. Ich bin a yiddisher kind, a Jewish kid.”

Now he was a little sorry that the old man had been disabused of his original illusions. He almost wished he could take back the information that, rather than paradise, Rabbi Eliezer was in Tennessee.

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Such questions and a score of others Bernie was hard put to answer; the permissiveness of his culture, from which he felt himself unfairly excluded, was something he and everyone else took for granted. But what struck him most about the rabbi’s inquiries was that, prickly as the old man could be, he seemed more interested in than outraged by what he witnessed on television. In fact, there was an empirical tone to Eliezer’s interrogations, as if he already acknowledged the old judgments to be obsolete and was anxious to learn the nature of the new in a depraved western world.

After several weeks of this routine it was clear to Bernie that the rabbi had recovered sufficient strength to leave his confinement and walk abroad. But despite an intermittent restlessness, the old man showed no inclination to travel farther from his bed than the paneled basement across the way, and the boy, happy to prolong their present circumstances, did not encourage him to do more. Meanwhile Rabbi ben Zephyr continued his acculturation on the sofa in the rumpus room (where Bernie’s parents never ventured), absorbed by the parade of assumed infidelities that turned out to be misperceptions; the heated embraces in which the lovers were most certainly not thinking of Torah; the ads for depilatories, male enhancement, and bladder control. Mostly the old man watched with an owlish objectivity, though once there came a moment when something in the hysterical nature of the canned laughter, provoked by a German coinage, clearly disturbed him. This was when the Jew who fornicated with shikses made a joke about his girlfriend’s gaudy earrings, which clattered like a Kristallnacht.

“Vos iz Kristallnacht?” the rabbi asked Bernie a bit rhetorically, since he was unaccustomed to receiving satisfactory information from that quarter.

And it was true that only a few weeks earlier the blockish Bernie Karp would not have been able to provide an adequate answer; but owing to the Judaica that the rabbi’s venerable presence had prompted him to bring home from the Temple library, the boy was now prepared to marshal a response. In fact, he had a large book with shadowy black-and-white images, which he showed the old man. Eliezer studied the book as intently as he might once have pored over holy texts, and Bernie thought that here was the rabbi in a posture that bespoke his authentic past. Of course, the rabbi was unable to interpret the English captions, but while he seemed enthralled by the documentary photographs, he declined with a firm shake of his head Bernie’s offer to read to him. Then, without a word, he closed the book and shoved it aside, turning back to the TV, which he gazed at as one might look toward a sunrise from the prow of a ship. It was at this juncture that Bernie chose to ask once again how the rabbi had survived so long in a block of ice.

Appearing at first to ignore the question, Eliezer scratched a cheek whose skin flaked into his beard like blistered paint, then said, “I was fed on visions that even The X-Files and Extreme Makeover, l’havdil, couldn’t touch them.”

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Nothing in his listless history (or anyone else’s he knew of) had prepared him for such an event, and it seemed to him that prior to the rabbi’s resurrection nothing of note had happened in his life at all. It was as if he’d only been marking time, waiting all his 15 years for the rabbi to come forth from his retirement. While the old man lay in bed regaining his strength, or sat sunk in his chair by the window in a shaft of sunlight that made his paltry bones appear as nearly pellucid as the ice he’d emerged from, Bernie would coax him to converse. Normally reticent if not downright fractious, the boy was at times a little stymied by his own uncharacteristic behavior, but his newfound curiosity had acquired a momentum that would not turn around. It was an awkward process in the beginning, since neither understood the other’s spoken language; in addition, the old man, who appeared perpetually vexed from his rude awakening, could be moody and not always inclined to indulge Bernie’s efforts to draw him out. But in the end he tolerated the kid’s graceless gestures and crude indications and with a little persuasion would return them in kind, until they’d commenced an exchange that passed for communication. At length, each had gathered enough scraps of the other’s mother tongue to allow for a tentative dialogue. Bernie was delighted by his gradual acquisition of his guest’s fruity idiom, but even more than with his own, he was impressed with the rabbi’s rapid and seemingly effortless progress. Of course Eliezer ben Zephyr—it had taken the old man a while to recall his own name—had the added advantage of exposure to the TV, which had captivated him from the moment he’d tumbled out of the freezer.

It had been Bernie’s inspired idea to lead the rabbi, once his stick legs were ambulatory again, back across the covered walkway into the basement whose ground-level entry was at the rear of the house. Not only did the television in the rumpus room give the old man a leg up on the language, but it also introduced him to a culture he might have been ill equipped to apprehend at first hand. It was a culture that seemed to intrigue him as much as his own murky origins interested Bernie, who pestered the rabbi for information about his past at every opportunity. Such opportunities had to be taken more often than not during commercial breaks, though commercials could provide their own brand of entertainment, discouraging interruptions. But over time the two developed a kind of quid pro quo, as Rabbi Eliezer put more questions to the boy about America, which he’d come to understand was the place in which he found himself.

It seemed to fascinate him, this America, or at least the part of it that he viewed through the bowed window of the cabinet that was the centerpiece of the rec room, the passage to and from which was Eliezer’s only exercise. Having initiated the rabbi into this passive orientation to his new world, Bernie was a little chagrined that, fresh from an immemorial slumber in one box, he was so quick to be transfixed by another. But whatever pleased Rabbi ben Zephyr (and subdued somewhat his crusty exterior) was also gratifying to the boy. In the omnipresent news broadcasts the old man showed little interest: The relentless advance of the Horsemen of Apocalypse was already a stale subject on earth even before the rabbi had entered his suspended condition. But about the splenetic woman who conducted a daily din toyreh, splitting hairs over laws concerning two-timers and clip artists with the perspicacity of a Daniel; about the smug gentleman who encouraged public loshen horeh (gossip) and orchestrated encounters between parties guilty of mutual betrayal; about the portly schwartze who invited intimate confessions from her guests and wept openly over their Job-like afflictions; about antic surgeons, garrulous chefs, faithless couples, deceitful castaways, teenage exorcists, and the Jew repeatedly duped into fornicating with shikses, old Eliezer was deeply inquisitive. He was especially interested to observe the willingness of citizens to air their indiscretions in public forums.

“If a man to other men will sell his wife,” he might ask in the crossbred Yinglish to which Bernie was starting to grow accustomed, “is not obliged Reb Springer to cleave open his breast and tear out his farkokte heart?” “When they shimmy, these daughters in their supple skins in the orgies of the MTV, do not their fathers say already Kaddish for them?”

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Bernie, too, was greatly relieved, feeling that he now had a license to continue his sub rosa relationship with the defrosted old gentleman he was harboring in the guest-house apartment behind the family domicile.

Bernie himself would have been hard pressed to explain why the secret had to be so diligently guarded, but aware that one person could not technically belong to another, he nevertheless felt that the rabbi belonged to him. It was an attitude he’d conceived almost from the instant the old man had emerged from the freezer, when Bernie had overcome his initial repugnance to swaddle the rabbi’s frail bones in bath towels. Then he’d outfitted the creaky old party in a pair of his father’s flannel pajamas before installing him in the guest house out back. This was the independent efficiency unit that had remained unoccupied (excluding Nettie’s periodic dustings and Madeline’s romantic rendezvous) since the death of his Grandpa Ruby soon after Bernie was born.

During his first few days in the world the hand-me-down holy man had remained in a relatively stuporous condition, stunned and cranky after his sudden awakening, while his convalescence stirred the boy to action as nothing in his experience ever had. At first he’d brought the rabbi table scraps, which were meager during the period between Nettie’s departure and the hiring of a new maid-of-all-work. Later, squirreling away portions of his own meals in napkins, Bernie was able to smuggle the old man more substantial fare: a sparerib, some boiled shrimps in cocktail sauce, a nibbled ham and cheese omelet, cookies rich in butter and animal fat. Weak from having fasted for over a century, the rabbi could at first only manage to pick at the food, but soon his appetite returned with a healthy gusto and he began to gobble up everything the kid set before him. Bernie, whose religious education was limited to a few Bible verses from his forgotten Sunday school days, nevertheless sensed that these offerings might be in violation of some primitive dietary code. Feeling he ought perhaps to research the rabbi’s care and feeding, he made an unprecedented excursion to the library at the suburban temple his family attended on high holidays, where he checked out an illustrated volume entitled To Be a Jew. Perusing its pages, the boy came to understand that he’d been sustaining the old man on filth. Though his vocabulary even in his native English was not extensive—conversation was never his forte—Bernie made an effort to apologize to the rabbi for his trespass in the droll language he had begun to pick up snatches of.

“Ich bin nebechdik, rabbi,” he offered in an unusual foray into humility, and further testing the water, “Hab rachmones?”

“Moychl,” responded the rabbi dismissively, slouched in a morris chair examining the piping on the lapel of Mr. Karp’s cotton batik bathrobe. “A deigah hob ich.” And as he was himself a quick study: “Takhe, think of it nothing.”

After that Bernie tried assiduously to separate meat from dairy in the dishes he smuggled to the old man. Viewed suspiciously by the lady volunteer at the temple library, who was unaccustomed to borrowers of any age, least of all adolescents, Bernie checked out several kosher cookbooks and, despite having never made anything more ambitious than toast, expressed his readiness to attempt broiled udder, stuffed spleen, tripe, liver, lungs, and pupiklekh. The recovering rabbi suffered the kid’s good intentions with a minimum of irritation but asked when he might have the opportunity to taste again “the insects from the sea.”

These were the great days for Bernie Karp.

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Mrs. Karp raised a tweezered brow, let it drop, and resettled herself on her chaise to continue reading. “Good riddance,” she was heard to say to herself.

But Nettie was unappeased. Having apparently mustered all her tolerance to abide the old man in the freezer over the years, she was past consoling now that he was at large and possibly dangerous. Grumbling that it was more than her job was worth to remain in their employ, she plodded down the stairs and out of the Karps’ haunted house forever.

That night Mrs. Karp served her family a meal of canned applesauce and pork ’n’ beans that she had been compelled to prepare herself.

“What’s this?” asked her husband.

“It’s called dinner,” replied Mrs. Karp.

“Maybe at the county penal farm,” said Mr. Karp, pleased with his riposte, “but on Canary Cove”—which was their bosky residential enclave—“we call it something else.”

When she was satisfied that her husband’s patience was sufficiently stretched, Mrs. Karp plumped her frosted shag and explained that Nettie had quit.

“That’s impossible.” For Nettie had been a fixture in the family for nearly a decade.

Mrs. Karp gave her signature shrug, as if to imply that the impossible had become the order of the day. Then she let it drop that the maid was upset on account of the disappearance of the frozen old man.

“What’s that you say?” exclaimed Mr. Karp in disbelief. His wife asked languidly if he were deaf and repeated the information, which her husband challenged. “Do you think he could just up and walk away?”

Mrs. Karp shrugged why not.

For the second time in as many months, Mr. Karp was moved to interrupt his evening meal with a peevish harrumph. He rose, removing the napkin from his collar, descended the stairs to the rumpus room, and returned after some moments to announce, “This is a calamity,” though without much conviction. He sat back down and heaved another sigh, which seemed to signify (along with his puzzlement) a measure of heartfelt relief. Because if the heirloom had truly vanished—never mind how—it was now somebody else’s responsibility, for a change. Of course, as head of the family, it was incumbent upon him to get to the bottom of this enigma, wasn’t it? He couldn’t in good conscience simply let the matter drop. “Bernie,” he asked, “you don’t know anything about this business, do you?”

Since his father’s words were more statement than question, rather than contradict him, Bernie assured Mr. Karp that he knew nothing about anything—a response nobody would gainsay. Then he darted a glance at his sister, whom he had silenced with threats of revealing her late-night basement trysts. Clearly counting the minutes until she could quit this bughouse and return to college, Madeline took the cue from her loathsome little brother and volunteered her ignorance as well.

Mr. Karp made an authoritative moue, which his wife parodied with a lopsided face of her own, and that seemed, for the moment, to be that. Then it was as if the thing in the basement had never existed at all.

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1999.

The evening after their return from Las Vegas, Mrs. Karp served a dish of meatloaf whose fetid taste no one could stomach. “Don’t blame me,” she said, still woozy from jet-lag and the phenobarbitol of the night before. “I’m not the cook.” Nettie was the cook, a hard-bitten, church-going woman with swollen ankles, who had once barged into the bathroom where Bernie sat in flagrante with a lingerie ad torn from a newspaper. “I ain’t seen nothin,’” she assured him, and slammed the door, though she tended to avoid him ever after, as Bernie did her. Sometimes she could be heard muttering under her breath about the trials of working for “Jewrish” folk—though there was nothing especially Hebraic about the Karp household unless you included the old-world relic in cold storage, which Nettie, if she knew anything of it, never mentioned. But she was familiar enough with the deep freeze, and had taken out the ground beef for the meatloaf that very morning, still (as Mrs. Karp attested) frozen solid.

Mr. Karp tugged at a drooping earlobe as if to aid his powers of deduction and asked his son, “Bernie, was there any kind of an electrical failure during the storm?” For he and his wife had returned from their weekend trip to find evidence of the tempest’s damage strewn all over town.

Bernie replied that yeah, there had been a kind of an electrical failure, then immediately had second thoughts.

“Eureka!” declared Mr. Karp in full gloat. “The meat in the freezer must have thawed, then spoiled, and froze again. Mystery solved.” He showed horsey teeth, then frowned at the realization that the family trove of turkeys and roasts, now tainted, would have to be jettisoned wholesale. “Tell Nettie to clean out the freezer bin in the morning,” he advised his wife, who told him to tell her himself.

The next morning, having complied with orders, Nettie toiled up the carpeted staircase to report the outcome of her appointed task to the missus, who was reposing in her aerosol-scented bedroom with the curtains drawn. Mrs. Karp, still in her dressing gown at half-past eleven, looked up vacantly from the steamy pages of a novel by Arabesque Latour, as the bull-necked servant informed her,

“He gone.”

“Who gone?”

“The man in the ice box.”

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But although Jocheved humored her mother, she dismissed her warnings, so preoccupied was she with an undertaking that promised to lift her family out of their long-standing wretchedness.

In the climate that had followed the failed revolution, however, the ghetto remained apprehensive. Jews, daily accused of collaboration and betrayal, were shipped in increasing numbers to the salt mines and labor camps; others fled to America, the Golden Land, from which stories were heard of limitless possibilities and untold wealth. But Jocheved, happily engaged in her flourishing trade, was unaffected by the millennial currents that had swept her brothers away. She’d recruited the services of a couple of neighborhood girls to help prepare her product and peddle it farther afield, and in rare idle moments she might even indulge the dream of expanding her cottage industry into an empire—though it alarmed her somewhat, the extent of her own aspirations. Then, miragelike, the promise of prosperity began to recede. Crackdowns and layoffs in the wake of more textile strikes, plus the purges of so-called undesirables, had left many families unemployed; and as the Jews liquidated their savings and pawned their valuables in exchange for shifscarte passages to America, there proceeded a creeping exodus from the ghetto. Who, in the face of such circumstances, could justify even the slight indulgence of a sugarplum sorbet? Meanwhile the first biting blasts of the coming winter also did their part to undermine Jocheved’s energetic marketing endeavors. But for her would-be suitors (whom she should perhaps not be so quick to dismiss?), the girl had difficulty finding customers in Franciszkanska Street, and after discharging the assistants she could no longer afford, Jocheved herself began to seek business in other neighborhoods.

One late afternoon, under a sky leaking the tapioca-thick flakes of the season’s first snowfall, Jocheved, enveloped in shawls, wheeled her clattering handcart through a part of the ghetto she generally avoided. But she was tired, having spent the day in the more genteel districts from which she was returning nearly empty-handed, and thought she would take a shortcut home. The unfamiliar streets with their anarchic angles and blind alleys confused her, however, and as she veered beneath an arcade to avoid a fallen truck horse whose putrescence stained the icy air, she realized she was lost. Turning a switchback corner in an effort to retrace her steps, she was accosted by a hollow-cheeked youth whose temple curls dangled from his ears like convolvuli. In his short alpaca jacket and the further affectation of a pair of lemon spats, he looked like some half-caste creature, part yeshiva bocher and part swell.

“You should have in these unsafe streets an escort,” he offered in a sibilant voice, taking her arm.

She abruptly reclaimed the arm and replied, shakily, “I never needed one before.”

“You’re the hokey-pokey girl,” as if assigning her the role she had already assumed, “the one that won’t give the boys a tumble.” He ungloved a hand to dip his middle finger into a tub of parfait on her cart, stirring slowly before licking the finger with a tongue Jocheved half-expected to be forked. Then closing his eyes to smack his sensuous lips, he tugged down the leather bill of his cap and grabbed her arm again, this time with a firmer grasp. She tried to pull away and, for the first time in her memory, Jocheved was afraid. At that point another man in a ratty fur ulster and hat, his face like cracked crockery, appeared from nowhere to grab her other arm. He pressed a piece of damp cheesecloth with a sickly sweet smell to her nose, which caused Jocheved to shake her head violently, snorting to clear her nostrils of its fumes. But the more she struggled to resist the almondine odor, the deeper she was forced to inhale, her brain careering free of its axis. Houses whose listing walls were propped up by warped timbers reeled about her like beggars on crutches, and the sun showed its guttering flame just in time to expire.

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The Feuchtwanger clan, about to depart for America, would soon be vacating their apartment, which consisted of two cramped rooms in the same reeking hive of a tenement. Still, their flat had a window overlooking the courtyard, which, foul though it was, was at least a few yards removed from the blight of Zabludeve Street.

Among Basha Puah’s catalogue of grievances was the complaint that her daughter was working too hard and, while she bestowed her bounty on others, did nothing for herself. But for Jocheved the success of her labors was reward enough, and as for the absence of personal ornamentation, her beauty shone all the brighter in contrast to her drab apparel. It was a winsome beauty that seemed almost her own invention, since neither of her herring-gutted parents could have taken credit for it. They could never explain the luxuriant black curls with their auroral lights, or the skin like the clarified cream from her freezing pail, the satiny eyes that flickered with a lambent green flame. Sometimes, despite her modest attire, perspiration in the heat of the day revealed certain contours of her slender form; then the dovelike breasts beneath her coarse linen bodice looked as if they yearned for release. While the girl, in her industriousness, was only vaguely aware of her tantalizing appeal, this was far from the case among the ghetto lads, who fell over each other in their eagerness to purchase her frozen custards and sorbets. They flirted with her, the bold ones, inviting her to go for strolls along the river or accompany them to the cafés; but borrowing a text from her mother, albeit tempered with humor, she would admonish them not to waste her time, there were customers waiting. A couple of the more persistent had even tried to present themselves as bona fide suitors, assuring her that they expected no dowry and promising her a comfortable future. But while a husband and children did seem an inevitability, for the time being, clearly prospering without them, Jocheved only laughed at the young men for the nuisances they were.

Most accepted her chastening in the good-natured spirit with which it was given, though some of her more fervent admirers became bitter. Basha Puah, on whom little was lost, noted their truculent attitude and cautioned her daughter that looks such as hers could be more of a curse than a blessing.

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These were the dog days of the month of Tammuz and, impoverished as they were, the citizens of the Balut stood in line to shell out a few coins for a taste of Jocheved’s flavored winter. They queued up, according to the goyim (who queued as well), with their tongues lolling as if they were waiting, God forbid, to take communion. The thriving progress of her business venture fueled the girl’s ambition, and seeking to improve her product, she obtained some recipe pamphlets from the local book peddlers, which (as unread as the rest of her family) she nevertheless set herself to decipher. When she’d laid by a little extra capital, she bought from a general merchandise catalogue an item called a Fuller’s freezing pail. This was a wooden bucket with a zinc interior and a rotating central handle for mixing the preparation of egg yolks, cream, and sugar, and whatever exotic ingredients (jasmine, musk) she might wish to add. The operation involved surrounding the vessel in an azure moat of ice and sal ammoniac, churning with one hand while scraping off the crystals as they formed on the pail with the other. It was strenuous work, to which Jocheved was of course no stranger, and she thrilled at the alchemical process of converting her raw ingredients into sweet confections—a transformation as stupendous as the wonders in her father’s tales. As she expanded her repertoire, so did she increase the volume of her production, crowding the cellar flat with vessels like paint pots filled to the brim, the entire stock of which she sold every day.

Soon she was able to contribute significantly to the family coffers, but rather than simply turn over her profits, Jocheved preferred to present her parents with gifts they would never have purchased for themselves, such as a clothes wringer, a tea urn, a rotary flour sifter, and a japanned coal hod for her irascible mother. Then there was the controversial mohair walking skirt with a flounce and the pair of mercerized lisle stockings, which Basha Puah complained were an insane extravagance and must be returned—though she was seen wearing both skirt and stockings with a touch of hauteur in the women’s gallery of the Vlada Street shul on Tisha B’av. In that same shul her husband, relegated to the rear of the congregation in the pews reserved for the common laborers, could be seen sporting a new pair of knee-high chamois boots. In addition, Jocheved had begun seeking more salubrious accommodations for her family.

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“Elected to what?” the girl had replied, brushing crumbs from her father’s beard—because, didn’t her family live in an unrelieved penury due to the universal injustices that her absconded brothers had made the girl so keenly aware of?

But while she paid lip-service to her brothers’ sentiments, she never invoked their anger, for like her father she was possessed of an amiable disposition, and like her mother she had a practical turn of mind. What interested Jocheved most about Pisgat’s establishment, with its goggle-eyed heads of herring and carp staring out of their frozen cataracts, was the ice itself. Early on in her visits she’d begun to cultivate the idea that there were more things one might do with ice than cool drinks and preserve the carcasses of dead animals and old men. Taking a cue from a moonstruck anecdote of her father’s about how the rebbe’s disciples had chipped “saintsicles” from his lucent block, the girl brought with her to Pisgat’s one evening a sealed tin cylinder acquired from a rag and bone man. While her father slept, she shaved slivers from the stacked ice cakes and packed them into the container, which she tucked away among the demijohns of chilling schnapps. The next morning on the way to the market, under cover of the hectic loading and dispatching of wagons, she retrieved the tin drum from the icehouse. She had a scribe scratch GEFROYNS in charcoal on a piece of bunting and flew the banner from a pole over her mother’s stall. Then for a grosz she scooped the crushed ice into paper twists and flavored it with treacle and nutmeg, with powdered ginger, vanilla syrup, and lemon juice. In subsequent days she began to sprinkle the ices with almonds, raisins, and runny fruit jams as her customers desired.

Once she had determined that there was a demand for her product, Jocheved ended her furtive activity at the icehouse. Unbeknownst to her father, she sought an audience with Zalman Pisgat in his office, its walls plum-aged in orange invoices. She offered him a most reasonable percentage of her profits in exchange for the few kilos of ice upon which her business daily relied. As impressed with the maiden’s pulchritude as with her ingenuity, the grizzled old ice mensch suggested a salacious arrangement of his own; but, a little ashamed of himself, when the girl seemed not to know what he was talking about, the old lecher agreed to her generous terms. In this way Jocheved was launched in her career as merchant and manufacturer.

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Between working and dreaming, Salo was unaware of his sons’ political activities. On those infrequent occasions when he saw them, he could only marvel at how much they had grown; he admired them for having turned into some rare new breed of Jew, no longer anemic and long-suffering but muscular and purposeful, while Basha Puah grumbled that they were becoming so gentile she wondered if they were still circumcised. She couldn’t help but hear the news that percolated throughout the marketplace: There was a failed revolution in Russia, and dozens of Lodz citizens sympathetic to the insurrectionists had built barricades and been wounded in clashes with the police; after which both Polish and Jewish youths, sentenced without trial, had begun to vanish from the city streets by the score. Then all of a sudden the twins came in from the cold; they were back in the cellar, looking over their shoulders, stuffing clothes into canvas knapsacks and informing their mother and baby sister that they were off to found a Jewish state in Palestine. They referred to Zion as if it might have been their original home, which they’d have argued that in a sense it was. For the opiate of religion they of course had little patience, their reasons for going having nothing to do with “holy” lands; nothing was sacred in this unjust world, they contended, but the human will. Full of the zeal of their righteous new ideology, they neglected to say that they were wanted by the authorities.

Basha Puah marched to the icehouse to fetch her husband, insisting—when she’d managed to pry him loose from his post (an increasingly difficult operation due to his stiffening joints)—that he do something to prevent the boys from leaving. But Salo was perplexed; hardly conscious of the passage of so many complacent years, he still thought of the twins as impish little pishers incapable of serious mischief. As for their newly minted ideals, their father never presumed to discourage them, though he wondered why anyone would want to go elsewhere when life was so unquestionably headquartered right there in Lodz.

“Yachneh, Yoyneh,” he appealed, “I mean, Yoyneh, Yachneh. What return? You were born in the Balut, which may I remind you rhymes with galut—the Diaspora. What business have Jews got in Jerusalem?”

But when it became apparent that there was no dissuading them, Salo, to his wife’s profound vexation, fell to regarding his husky sons as figures of romance and grew excited at the prospect of their formidable journey. Before they left, though, they must first come to the icehouse: He had something to show them; and if only to get him off their backs, the twins promised to stop by Pisgat’s on their way to the Promised Land. But arrangements had to be made, smugglers of human beings to be contacted, old gambling markers called in to gather money for bribes—all this while Salo waited in vain in his far corner of the cooling room beside the aged cedar casket. In the end, instead of his sons in their broad-belted tunics and visored caps, the watchman was visited by the police in their helmets like blackened lamp chimneys, who bullied him to no avail with questions and threats. In time the twins sent back letters from Palestine, recounting Herculean labors. They were formal epistles written by scribes to be read aloud by scribes (“To our esteemed and virtuous parents, long life!”), standard propagandistic accounts of draining swamps and irrigating deserts that bloomed with date palms and tamarind, of triumphant battles with mosquitoes and hostile Bedouin tribes. While his wife dismissed these chronicles as pure fabrication, Salo thrilled to their letters as if his intrepid boys had entered the pages of The Book of Legends itself. But the letters, sporadic at best, eventually ceased to come at all, and Basha Puah, eyes brimming with tears she refused to acknowledge, raged against her husband with an unprecedented vitriol for having lost their sons.

Meanwhile Jocheved had grown apace, her vibrant presence a perpetual reminder to her mother that the twins were gone. Still, Basha Puah was relatively frugal with her rebukes to the girl, who was after all an obedient daughter and a help in the market, her comely figure and natural charm an abiding inducement to commerce. But though she spent her days at her mother’s side hondling with the wives and rolling dough for kreplach, Jocheved was finally her papa’s girl. It was she that brought to the icehouse in the evenings his covered dish of lukewarm pupiklekh and sat beside him on melon crates in the arctic cold while he ate. Though she had grown too old for them, Salo continued to regale her with the stories he’d told her when she was a child: preposterous tales of his pitched battles with the ice pirates who raided Pisgat’s repository (which, please God, was deadly quiet at night), of his adventures and narrow escapes on the long and arduous road from Boibicz to Lodz. The stories often had a soporific effect on the teller, who sometimes nodded off, and Jocheved was amused at how her heavy-lidded papa’s narratives sedated him like self-inflicted lullabies. They created such an air of unreality in the lamplit chill that the first time Jocheved lifted the lid of the casket while Salo dozed, the frozen rebbe seemed no more authentic to the girl than her father’s extravagant tales.

“Our family has been elected,” Salo once solemnly informed her, meaning they were chosen to be stewards of a sacred trust he would reveal to her when the time came. (The time came shortly after the twins’ departure, but by then Jocheved had long since preempted the revelation.) “Elected to what?” the girl had replied, brushing crumbs from her father’s beard—because, didn’t her family live in an unrelieved penury due to the universal injustices that her absconded brothers had made the girl so keenly aware of?

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But the truth was that, while the marital mattress sagged between its creaking slats to the earthen floor and was only a few feet from the clay stove on which the twins slept, there were opportunities enough. And though Basha Puah would hiss at Salo for disturbing her much needed sleep and complain of a woman’s travail, she never once refused her husband’s advances.

This time the child was a rosy bundle of a daughter whom they called Jocheved, and Salo basked in the undiluted light of her countenance. “Give a look,” he exclaimed, “how like the ner tamid she shines!” His wife asked him what did he know from an everlasting lamp, so rarely did he set foot inside a synagogue. This was not entirely fair: for a man who worked day and night, Salo had always kept Shabbos as best he could. If only from habit, he took the requisite ritual dip in the brackish waters of the Vlada Street mikveh and attended shul on high holidays. Deeming himself a most fortunate man, he had assembled a ragged minyan (its members as disreputable as a police lineup) to say the conventional prayers of thanksgiving at Jocheved’s birth, and again at her naming ceremony. But while the prayers were ostensibly addressed to God, Salo reserved his real gratitude for the blessed Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr. It wasn’t that he worshipped the rebbe—he wasn’t so pagan as that; but after years of lifting the casket lid to ensure the security of its contents, after staring so long at the suspended tzaddik, Salo sometimes imagined himself staring back through the tzaddik’s eyes (which remained tightly shut) at the swiftly aging watchman. Sometimes he felt as if he viewed the world from inside the block of ice, from a prismatic vantage that made everything appear lustrous and holy. Away from the icehouse, however, performing the tasks that bowed his spine and deepened the bags beneath his eyes, Salo wondered if perhaps he and the rest of the world were merely figments in the rebbe’s dream.

With the passing years rumors of tottering empires and imminent apocalypse reached even the netherworld of the Balut. The graybearded alter kuckers, as usual, predicted the advent of Messiah (waiting for whom was their principal vocation), and the worse conditions became for the Jews, the more convinced were they that Messiah’s arrival was at hand. But the young tended to read the signs differently, and many were fed up with a religion predicated on anticipation and the suffering one must endure in the protracted meantime. In cellar coffeehouses and shtibls where printing presses had replaced the ark of the Torah, they whispered sedition and conspired to carry it out. The Frostbissen twins, Yachneh and Yoyneh, were among those infected by the revolutionary fever. They had never bothered to assemble separate identities, and despite their tender years they were already sated with the stew of vices the ghetto afforded—they’d shared women with the same cavalier indiscretion with which they might have shared a bottle of contraband cognac or a wager in a game of shtuss; and now, susceptible to loftier passions, they had become enamored of the doctrines of radical change. They joined the socialist labor Bund and, barely literate themselves, distributed Marxist pamphlets on the streetcorners of the Balut. They mouthed the prevailing rhetoric, inveighing against the capitalist cockroaches among their own people. “The Jewish bosses, once they cease their blood-sucking exploitation, will be regarded as equal partners in the proletarian struggle for an independent Poland!” and so on. While they’d scarcely lifted a finger to alleviate their parents’ ceaseless toil, they now took unskilled jobs throwing silk and stirring the vats of synthetic dye in the fabric mill, where they attempted to organize the workers into unions. Their efforts and those of their comrades resulted in havoc, sparking strikes and subsequent lockouts that led to battles between protesting workers and hired thugs, to beatings at the hands of police and mass arrests, which the twins only narrowly escaped. And lately, though they had only a nodding acquaintance with their own mother tongue, they had begun to disparage Yiddish as zhargon, espousing the revival of Hebrew as the official lingua franca of the Jews.

Between working and dreaming, Salo was unaware of his sons’ political activities

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For her part Basha Puah fulminated against their lot with every breath she took, cursing her husband’s irrepressible spirits, though she was herself galvanized by the ghetto’s raucous atmosphere. Despite her violated sense of entitlement, which she never ceased from registering with God and Salo, she was an enterprising woman. By the time their celebrity had expired, she had managed to parlay nothing into a couple of turnips and eggs, which she peddled in the Franciszkanska Street market—battling the other wives over coveted locations—for the price of another couple of turnips and eggs. Then a day came when she sold an egg at a profit and used the surplus capital to increase her inventory. Eventually, by shrewd reinvestment in the produce the peasant farmers sold wholesale from the wallow of their wagon-yard, she established a modest pushcart business; she sold vegetables and eggs whose freshness her husband extended by storing them in the icehouse overnight. In a matter of weeks her market stall was a going concern, and full of admiration for his eruptive wife’s industry, Salo helped her as best he could, though it meant that he seldom slept. He carted merchandise from the wholesalers to the marketplace and shlepped to and from the bakery the boolkies Basha Puah rolled at home and left to rise like inflating airships on top of the neighborhood oven. For gratitude Salo received his wife’s habitual grousing that he was always underfoot. She also chafed at his solicitude with regard to her inconvenient condition, which she refused to let hamper her labors or leaven her poisonous tongue.

Then the twins were born and Basha Puah cursed the incontinence of her own womb, which she threatened, if her husband did not cease his mawkish cooing and fawning over the infants, to stitch shut. She savaged the mustachioed midwife for her complicity and Salo for having saddled them with more mouths to feed. Euphoric nonetheless, Salo bankrupted his expanded family by laying in schnapps and spongecake and inviting every ganef and teamster in their putrid trough of a street to witness the circumcision. He named the boys, in the face of his wife’s indifference, Yachneh and Yoyneh after his ill-fated father.

Even as she carried them dangling from either udder to her market stall, Basha Puah excoriated the twins for their rapacious appetites. “Fressers, you suck like leeches and bite like asps!” Rascals that no one ever bothered to distinguish from each other, they were running wild in the unpaved alleys of the Balut before they were weaned. Early on they learned to ignore their mother’s threats and jeremiads, or rather—following their father’s blithe example—to be amused and even tickled by the lash of her tongue. From the first they were conspicuous for their cheek among the swarms of marauding ghetto urchins; they were foremost in teasing the blowsy whores who graced the windows and doorways of Žvdowska Street, and in tormenting the mendicant amputees till their flaring tempers enabled them to sprout latent limbs and give chase. From hanging about the slaughterhouses and tanneries, they brought home new varieties of noxious odors, and vile language that rivaled even their mother’s. They rode the obsolete mill wheels and were baptized in the seething river that bubbled with acids like a sorcerer’s retort. Basha Puah charged her husband to discipline the young savages, but in his eyes the boys, high-spirited and reckless, did no real harm. Besides, when did he have the time to be more than a benign spectator to the progress of his sons, whom (like everyone else) he’d never troubled to try and tell apart? He did attempt, for the sake of form, to see to it that they attended a local cheder, but the old melamed Yankl Halitotsis was unable to keep them (or their peers, for that matter) confined to an airless study house during the day. They were forgiven their truancy by their father, who harbored his own unpleasant memories of the village kloiz. To placate his wife, however, Salo assured her that, when they were old enough to appreciate him, he would introduce the twins to the Boibiczer Prodigy, whose aura had a moral effect on any Jew that beheld him. Basha Puah called him every manner of fool, then accused him of being a wanton beast as well for making her pregnant again.

“How did this happen?” she demanded to know. “When are we in bed, the two of us, at the same time?”

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The peasant screwed up his doughy features thoughtfully; here was a language he understood. “Fifteen zlotys,” he said at length, “and she’s yours.”

It was an astronomical sum, which the peasant was of course aware of, but Salo continued to keep up his end of the bluff. He sucked a tooth and gave the woman a once-over as if to assess her value. Then he was surprised to find that her spindly frame and sour face, furious despite her oppressed situation, engendered in him a mellow throb of desire. Here was a new sensation and, vibrating like a plucked fiddle string, Salo marveled at the range of passions the wide world afforded. He turned his head to spit an imaginary plug of tobacco.

Meanwhile the peasant had begun to eye the weathered casket in the bed of the wagon. Salo followed his glance, anticipating what would come next: how the man would ask to see what was concealed in the box, and Salo would comply to encourage further negotiation, after which the peasant would promptly cross himself and make tracks along with his captive. To avoid this eventuality the young man blurted, “Tell you what I’ll do,” and offered a straight swap. “This fine brood mare for your broken-down hag, what do you say?”

The peasant was caught off guard. He looked first suspiciously at Salo, then swiveled his head from the mare to the woman, as if torn between the audacity of such an offer and a horse-trading impulse he couldn’t resist. “Which is more broke down?” he wanted to know.

“Why, just look at her,” said Salo, beginning to find his stride. “What use can you expect to get from her? A few months, a year at the most, and she’s finished—you’ll dig her grave. Whereas, the mare will probably outlive you.”

The peasant was incredulous. “The nag is more decrepit than the hag! It’s already glue. Besides,” with a simper that invited Salo’s collusion, “women are better for fucking.”

Uncomfortable with this turn in the conversation, Salo nonetheless rallied. “Are you crazy? The woman’s bones will snap like matchsticks, while the mare will bear you a fresh foal every year.” He was himself a little unclear as to the implied paternity of the foals.

“I’m crazy?” The peasant could scarcely believe what he was hearing.

“That’s right,” said Salo. “You would settle for a moment’s pleasure with a tainted female whose pox I can sniff from here”—he was conscious that even in harness the woman was seething—“when you could enjoy the years of prosperity that only a good draft horse can provide?”

Amazingly, the peasant was beginning to waver, though he stiffened again when Salo began to lay it on a bit too thick, making claims for Bathsheba’s thoroughbred bloodline. In the end, though, the youth moderated his tone, and the yokel, making a great show of reluctance, accepted the deal, handing over the tether in exchange for the reins of the unhitched mare. Once the bargain was struck, however, the peasant began to gloat, saying “Good riddance” to the woman as if he had suckered Salo all along: He had out-Jewed the Jew. Watching the man leading away his father’s gangle-shanked jade, her tail raised like a mophead as she dropped a load in the muck, Salo felt sorry for the animal; her fate would not be a happy one. But life, though harsh, was full of unexpected gifts, and pleased with what he deemed (despite the peasant’s response) a successful transaction, the young man turned to face his prize.

She spat at him, at first actual sputum, then a venomous stream of execrations: “Shtik drek! Gruber yung! I pish in the milk of your mother!” But Salo, as he endeavored to remove the taut noose from around her neck, took no offense. If anything, he felt a pang of nostalgia for the curses his father used to heap on his head.

“A finsternish, may your testicles soon toll your death knell!”

Then even as she continued spewing bile, she took up the traces, without prompting or inquiring as to what the coffin contained, and began to help Salo pull the wagon along the furrowed road. In the name of her martyred family and herself, Basha Puah Bendit Benchwarmer’s, she denounced her rescuer as she did the God of Abraham for his discourteous treatment of Jewish daughters. She lamented her lost dowry—which had consisted of some pewter spoons, a milch cow, and an Elijah’s chair—and reviled the world that had deprived her of her due. Enjoying the music of her waspish tongue, Salo wondered how she might look with a little meat on her bones, though he expected that her raw bones would always shun flesh. But vinegar-pussed harridan that she was, at least a decade older than he, she was still a woman, and having never spent time in the society of women, Salo was greatly excited, his loneliness dispelled.

Warmed though he was by her litany of complaints, the young man begged leave to interrupt. “I respectfully submit,” he said with a bashful formality, “that for the sake of decency we should marry as soon as we can.”

Snarling as she resolved never to forgive him for the humiliation of having been traded for a horse, and for all the future offenses she anticipated in his miserable company, Basha Puah ungraciously accepted Salo’s proposal.

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Meanwhile he starved, though occasionally some sympathetic old baba yaga would scuttle forth from her kennel to spare him a stale pierogen or a potato as soft as a powder puff. These he would dine on for days, storing the leftovers under the burlap in the refrigerated casket to extend their relative freshness. Lightheaded from hunger, Salo sometimes daydreamed: The river he had just been ferried across (for the price of reading scripture aloud to an illiterate ferryman) was the lost Sambatyon, on the other side of which lay the land of the immortal red-headed Jews. Or had he strayed off the map of the known world entirely and crossed the border into Sitra Achra, the kingdom of demons, which was beyond God’s jurisdiction? But even as he indulged them, Salo recognized such notions as merely the shades of dead fancies, lingering vapors of the bubble-brained boy he had been only a short time ago. Moreover, with every meal he missed, a bit more of his vestigial baby fat melted from his bones, and although there were no available mirrors, Salo could feel that he was becoming somebody else: He was a young man transporting a sacred burden through a menacing winter landscape, the hero of his own unfolding story, who had no need of encumbering himself any longer with superstition and grandmothers’ tales.

Sometime during the third week after the departure from his native shtetl, Salo came across a thickset peasant in sheep pelts shambling along the road, clutching one end of a rope that trailed over his shoulder. At the other end of the rope was a noose that circumscribed the neck of a woman whose haggard features—nose protruding like a cucumber from the folds of a ragged shawl—identified her as a suffering Jewess. Salo’s first impulse was to nod deferentially to the peasant and pass by. The journey had taken a toll: His empty belly whistled to rival the flatus of his rattle-boned mare, and his feet ached as if he were trampling glass; to say nothing of how the relentless cold froze his brain. But prey to a stronger urge than self-preservation, Salo addressed the man in the Polish he’d heard since birth, and scarcely recognized his own brash voice.

“What’s that you got there, friend?”

“Are you blind, friend?” said the peasant, giving the salutation a hostile emphasis as he continued to walk on.

At that Salo gripped Bathsheba’s bridle to halt her, and turned to inquire in as diplomatic a tone as he could muster, “Beg pardon, but has no one challenged your right to the woman?”

The peasant abruptly paused and turned about, bristling, his flat face as flushed as a purple onion. “I found her in the village of Plok,” he barked. “She’s mine.”

“Who’s arguing?” said the young man, conciliatory, then gently submitted, “But isn’t she, excuse me, a human being?”

The peasant peered at Salo as if he were a half-wit. “I knew she wasn’t a goat.”

Salo grinned, deciding to try another tack. He cleared his throat and assumed an attitude he thought of as strictly business. “So what’ll you take for her?”

The peasant cocked an ear. “Is she for sale?”

Shrugging what he supposed was a mercantile shrug, Salo replied, “Everything’s for sale, friend.”

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Even had he been able, Bernie would not have known how to respond.

Groaning and soaked to the skin, his hands and face the consistency of wet papier-mâché, the old man endeavored to rise, only to fall back splashing into the freezer. “Dos iz efsher gan eydn?”

Again Bernie, his heart rattling the cage of his ribs, could only shake his head.

“A glomp,” said the rabbi decisively, “a chochem fun Chelm,” as he held out his scrawny arms for the boy to help him up. Bernie remained motionless with awe, but as the old man’s anticipation had an air of authority, he took an involuntary step forward. The rabbi was no more than a featherweight, but his saturated ritual garments hung on him heavily, and, in attempting to lift him, Bernie felt as if he’d become involved in a wrestling match. When he’d managed to drag the old man from his sloshing sarcophagus, his decaying garments clinging to his body like bits of eggshell to a fledgling bird, the boy and the elder tumbled together onto the hooked rug. Just then the lights came back on and the TV began blaring, its screen displaying a smug master of ceremonies making a face as contestants held their noses in order to swallow the placentas of voles. The defrosted rabbi, lying sprawled atop Bernie, who had yet to release him, squinted with interest at the show.

“Voo bin ikh?” he inquired.

At that moment Bernie’s sister, leading her escort in his Bermudas and crested blazer by the hand down the basement stairs, spied the half-naked old party in the process of extricating himself from her brother’s embrace and screamed bloody murder.

1890 – 1907.

Since progress was slow along the czar’s highway, glutted with so many displaced souls, Salo took to the less traveled back roads. This was the more hazardous course, for there was some safety in numbers, whereas alone he was more vulnerable to attacks by brigands and peasants who’d missed their chance to plunder Boibicz—or Shmedletz or Smorgon or Zhmirzh, all of which had also been emptied of Jews. But Salo, his head cowled in his filthy tallis and crowned by a peaked cap to protect him from the needles of falling sleet, preferred the risk to the ranks of his fellow refugees. He had grown impatient with the pall that overhung their caravan like the poor relation to a pillar of flame, their forced march toward some new oblivion that the Jews seemed born for. Should he feel guilty? Was he perhaps an apikoyros, a heretic, that he should experience such exhilaration on the heels of his father’s homicide and the destruction of his hometown? But having spent the past seventeen years in nearly uninterrupted mooning about, he was thrilled, God help him, at having waked up to find himself at large in history. He was Salo Frostbite, self-appointed guardian of a slumbering saint, and while he might look like a schnorrer, his holey boots wrapped in rags to keep his feet from freezing, he felt he had become overnight a man of substance and parts.

It was a status corroborated by those who might otherwise have done him harm: the mounted Cossacks in their braided cloaks and astrakhan hats, who cantered alongside his wagon and threatened Salo with conscription, which for a Jew amounted to a life (if not a death) sentence in the army. They would lift his weak chin with their swagger sticks and accuse him of the Jewish trick of concealing treasure in unlikely vessels, then demand to know what he had hidden inside the casket. During the earliest encounters Salo wondered if he ought to refuse their request on principle, even if it meant imperiling his person; for wouldn’t allowing these bullies to ogle the casket’s contents amount to a type of desecration? But as his mission of maintaining the rebbe required his staying alive, he would concede in the end to raise the lid (the soldiers would have raised it in any case)—whereupon all questions would cease. Confounded by the revelation, the Cossacks would dig spurs into the shuddering flanks of their steeds and gallop away in a spray of mud. Eventually soldiers and peasants alike began to give the youth with his strange cargo a wide berth, a state of affairs Salo attributed to the gelid rebbe’s disturbing effect on the goyim, word of which must have spread abroad in the land.

He had the conviction that so long as he took care of Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr, the tzaddik would take care of him.

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1999.

Finding an old Jew in the deep freeze did not at first alter Bernie Karp’s routine in any measurable way. Overweight and unadventurous, he had no special friends to tell the story to even if he’d wanted, which he didn’t: It was nobody’s business. But even Bernie had to admit to himself that something had changed. It was still late summer and he continued, as was his custom, to spend most of each day in front of the TV, munching malted milk balls and digging at himself. Images passed before his eyes without leaving distinct impressions: In a comic sketch a failed suicide bomber was comforted by his veiled mother to gales of canned laughter; in another a little girl kept God in her closet; a heart-warming Hallmark drama portrayed a Navy SEAL romancing a mermaid; and a reality-based program dispatched a disabled couple on a blind date to Disney World. There were elections, massacres, celebrity breakups, corporate meltdowns—all of which tended to evaporate like snow on a hothouse window upon entering Bernie’s brain. Still, he remained a passive captive of the flickering screen in the faux-paneled basement, which was largely his private domain. The only new wrinkle in the fabric of his days was that, while surfing the myriad channels, Bernie would also fan the pages of the ledger book in which the grandfather he’d never known had chronicled the history of the frozen rabbi in an alien tongue. He riffled the pages the way you might finger worry beads, and periodically he would rise and shuffle over to the freezer, where he rolled aside the game hens and packaged ground round to make certain that the old man was still there.

Then came the weekend his parents went to Las Vegas, all expenses paid, for a home appliance convention. They naturally had no problem with leaving the adolescent Bernie alone, since the boy had never demonstrated the least propensity for mischief, and at 19 the headstrong Madeline, on vacation from college, would do as she pleased. It was Friday night around eight in the evening when the storm hit, one of those semitropical electrical storms with typhoon-force winds that often swept through Bernie’s southern city in August. The television reported that funnel clouds had been spotted about the perimeter of the city, their tails corkscrewing the muddy ground like augers, sundering mobile homes. Lightning crackled and thunder rumbled like kettledrums, rain hammered the roof of the two-story colonial house, while Bernie sat more or less oblivious in the recessed cushions of the rumpus-room sofa. It wasn’t that he was devoid of fear; it was rather that primary events had little more impact on him than events—save the odd Playtex commercial or his father’s prime-time pitches for discounted appliances—on TV.

There was a violent sound like a fracturing of the firmament, after which the lights went out and the image on the TV shrank to a blip, then disappeared. Bernie continued sitting alone in the windowless dark, clutching the ledger, as what else was he supposed to do? His sister was out with one of her boyfriends, not that her company would have been much consolation; so there was nothing for it but to sit there listening patiently to the propeller-like drone of the wind and waiting for the floodwaters to rise above the eaves. When after some time had passed the storm began to abate, the boy was almost disappointed. The power, however, had still not come back on, and in the wake of the squall he could hear the sound of a hollow knocking nearby. Bernie listened awhile as if the faint but persistent rapping were an attempt to communicate by code; then he lifted himself from the depths of the sofa and groped his way to the shelves that housed the overflow of his father’s framed civic citations and loving cups. Perspiring freely due to the shutdown of the central air, he stooped to open a cabinet beneath the shelves, foraging blindly among dusty wine bottles and photograph albums until he’d located the ribbed handle of a plastic flashlight. He switched it on and aimed its beam toward the source of the thumping….

Standing over the freezer cabinet, Bernie slowly lifted the chromium handle that released the lid. Instantly the lid flew open, soggy steaks and tenderloins sliding onto the floor, as up sat a sodden old man like an antiquated jack-in-the-box, his fur hat stinking like roadkill. There was a moment when the old man and the boy with his hanging jaw were transfixed by one an-other; then the old man’s scarlet eye grew narrow and gimlet sharp, and shaking himself, he asked in a rusty voice, “Iz dos mayn aroyn?”

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