This house belonged to an old tinsmith, whom they used to call the widower, for when his first wife died in childbirth during the first year of their marriage, he did not marry again, and remained a widower all his life — which was not customary in the early days, when a man would bury a wife and marry another.
By the time we moved into his house, the tinsmith had given up his trade. He and his only son lived in the festival succah in the attic, which he had made into a kind of room, and the rest of the house he rented to Father. In this succah he lived, cooked for himself and his son, and attended to all their needs. We never heard his voice all day, except in the morning, when he would come down from the attic and say “Good morning,” looking at us through his spectacles with great affection, and go away.
These spectacles occupied my attention a great deal, because one eyepiece was made of tin and I wanted to know why, until one of my friends explained. According to his story, once after the festival a handsome child came to him and said to him, “Father, make me a lantern; the winter is coming and we study at night.” Now that child was not born of woman and the tinsmith did not perceive it, though he should have, as we shall see later on. Three days later the child came to take his lantern. “Wait until I make a holder for the candle,” said the tinsmith. “I do not need a candle,” said the child, “Father’s eye will serve me as a candle.” The child took the lantern and went away. A wind blew and the tinsmith’s eye began to throb. “What is this?” said he. “The wind is blowing into my eye, as if it were empty.” His neighbor looked and said, “Your eye has come out.”
I stand in this street, where I dwelt in my childhood, and I remember days gone by when I went to the cheder classes and Kuba the tinsmith’s son went to the Baron Hirsch school. So long as he went to school and I to cheder we were not friends, for there was an iron barrier between the cheder children and the pupils of the school, for the first were preparing for the study of the sacred books and the others for trades or professions. When he started high school and I went to the Beit Midrash, and from there to the Zionist group, we drew closer and became friends. First, because I wanted to hear from him about Homer and Mickiewicz, and second, because he wanted to hear from me about Zionism. Where he is now, heaven only knows.
Since I had told Zippora that I was going to Genendel, I said to myself that it would not be right to deceive the child, so I left the street of the Stripa and went to Genendel.
Genendel was better, but had not recovered. She sat on a chair, all wrapped up, with a woollen blanket on her knees. Her eyes were open and her lower lip quivered incessantly. Beside her sat her brother Aaron, stroking her cheek, while she stroked his hand. It was three days since he had come to town but he had not yet gone out, so he had not come to see me. His cheeks were fallen in and his eyes sunken in their sockets. “Only think,” said Schutzling, “for twenty years I did not see you, and when I saw you it turned out that I should see you again. Come here, my friend, and let me kiss you.” And while he was embracing and kissing me, I was afraid, for some reason, that he might suddenly smile.
Meanwhile he looked at his sister and said, “She has fallen asleep again. I’ll tell you how it happened. That was a very strange day. Whatever I tried to do didn’t succeed. I said to myself: Let me go about my business. I went into a certain office where I buy my merchandise, and my heart was sad, my friend, infinitely sad. Suddenly a shot was heard. It startled me; I got up and asked, ‘What sound was that I heard?’ Before anyone answered, a second shot was heard, and a third. I pressed my hand to my heart and ran into the street. I met two men and asked them, ‘Where did those shots come from?’ But they said, ‘We don’t know.’ I said to myself: Why do they say they don’t know? — and asked two others. Or perhaps I didn’t ask them, for in a moment they had vanished. I met three men I knew and asked them. Their faces were white as chalk. They pointed to one side and said that the shots came from there. ‘Isn’t that the direction of the prison?’ ‘Perhaps,’ said they, and tried to slip away. I shouted, ‘Tell me who was shooting and who they were shooting at?’ ‘It seems that there was a stray bullet,’ replied one of them. ‘Tell me what you know,’ I said to him. ‘A prisoner has escaped from prison,’ he stammered, ‘and was shot.’ ‘A man or a woman?’ I asked. Their eyes streamed with tears and they nodded their heads. I went up to my office and took my hat, then I ran to the prison and found out what happened.”
The old woman awoke and said, “Aaron, do you want to go to see your friend off? If so, go and come back right away.” I beckoned to him to sit still. “Wait a little while,” said Genendel, “I want to ask you something. A few years ago a Jew came from the Land of Israel and sold me some earth from the Land. If I show you the earth will you recognize whether it came from there? That Jew was the emissary of a certain society they call ‘Midnight,’ because they get up at midnight to bewail the destruction of the Temple, and he had a box full of earth from various places, arranged like a kind of pharmacy. What do you think, should I believe he brought the earth from the Land of Israel, or perhaps he took it from a rat’s hole?” “Well,” I replied, “there is a Land of Israel, and in the Land of Israel there is earth, and that Jew you spoke of came from the Land of Israel, so why should you not believe that he brought the earth from there?” “If I have the choice of not believing him, why should I believe him?” said Genendel. “So why did you buy it from him?” ‘That’s a great question you ask,” said Genendel. “Why did I buy? If a person knew in advance what he was doing, the world would be a real paradise.”
On my way out, I went in to speak to Leibtche Bodenhaus. His room was small and neat, with a table, a bed and a chair, a little lamp, and a picture of Moses our Teacher hanging on the wall, with two tablets in his hand inscribed with the numbers from one to ten in Roman figures and two majestic horns issuing from his head. There were two books open on the table: one the Pentateuch, and the other — not to be mentioned in the same breath — the poems of Schiller; also some blue ink, and three pens, and a little ruler, with copybooks and notebooks lying beside them, neat and clean. A room so neat and fine you could not find in the whole town.
Leibtche got up anxiously and said, rubbing his hands, “I am so happy you have come here, my dear sir. Something I had not the courage to ask has come to me unsought. Sit down, my dear sir, sit down, and I will stand in front of you.” “You are really living like a philosopher,” said I. “Oh, my dear sir,” said Leibtche, “what kind of philosopher am I if I have not yet achieved a single one of the philosophic qualities. Spinoza teaches us not to laugh, not to weep, not to be enthusiastic, but to understand — and can I say that I fulfill his teaching, except for laughing? In the other qualities, my dear sir, I am a total transgressor, and I have not been privileged to fulfill even the slightest part of them. Now, he tells us not to weep, but how should I not weep when we are surrounded by troubles, whether they come from man, from his evil instincts, or from his Creator. The same applies to enthusiasm. Is it possible not to give way to enthusiasm when I see clearly how my God above bestows His mercy upon me, on me, a lowly creature, a worm and not a man, gives me inspiration and sends me rhymes for every single verse in the Torah — besides my enthusiasm for the words of the Torah themselves, which have been handed down to us from the Deity? So how is it possible not to give way to enthusiasm? And now, my dear sir, I come to the end of the words of the sublime philosopher. He says, ‘but to understand’—and surely, however hard we try, we shall never understand. Let us take, for example, the verse, ‘God is angry every day’—is it possible to understand why He is so angry? And if we have sinned against Him, does He have to make our lives a misery and direct all His blows against us? And would it not be better if He treated us according to the philosophic principle, which means: to understand? Don’t regard what I say as impudence against heaven, my dear sir. Believe me, my dear sir, I do not have the least touch of impudence in me, or anything like it, and if you were to put your foot on my neck I would bend down low so as to give you no trouble. But what shall I do? This heart is a heart of flesh; it has not reached the heights of philosophy yet; it suffers and weeps, and sometimes it brings up ideas that are foreign to philosophy. When I sit in my room, at my table, and rhyme verse after verse, chapter after chapter, it seems to me that everything is right; when I put down my pen and put my head on my hand or my hand on my head, it seems to me that nothing in the world is right, and even the world itself, my dear sir, is not right. And how can it be right if its Creator is angry with it? Our sages, of blessed memory, have consoled us a little by saying: ‘And how long is His anger? — a moment.’ My dear sir, He is angry for a moment a day, and His creatures are angry twenty-four hours a day.