Every woman within range of her lilting Yiddish malediction gasped and gave a mighty head-shake. Then stepping back, they cleared a space in the center of which my mother stood alone.
She turned slowly to face Old Mrs. Mokkeh. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” she pleaded. “He’s only a little boy—not even five years old. Take it back.”
Mrs. Mokkeh spat calmly on the stoop. “May it happen ten times over. Ten and twenty and a hundred times over. May he wither, may he rot. His arms, his legs, his lungs, his belly. May he vomit green gall and no doctor should be able to save him.”
This was battle irrevocably joined. My mother dropped her eyes, estimating the resources of her arsenal. She must have found them painfully slender against such an opponent.
When she raised her eyes again, the women waiting for action leaned forward. My mother was known to be clever and had many well-wishers, but her youth made her a welterweight or at most a lightweight. Mrs. Mokkeh was an experienced heavy, a pro who had trained in the old country under famous champions. If these women had been in the habit of making book, the consensus would have been: even money she lasts one or two rounds; five to three she doesn’t go the distance.
“Your daughter, Pearlie—” my mother began at last.
“Oh, momma, no!” shrieked the girl, suddenly dragged from non-combatant status into the very eye of the fight.
“Shush! Be calm,” her mother commanded. After all, only green campaigners expected a frontal attack. My mother had been hit on her vulnerable flank—me—and was replying in kind. Pearl whimpered and stamped her feet, but her elders ignored this: matters of high professional moment were claiming their attention.
“Your daughter, Pearlie,” the chant developed. “Now she is fourteen—may she live to a hundred and fourteen! May she marry in five years a wonderful man, a brilliant man, a doctor, a lawyer, a dentist, who will wait on her hand and foot and give her everything her heart desires.”
There was a stir of tremendous interest as the kind of curse my mother was kneading became recognizable. It is one of the most difficult forms in the entire Yiddish thaumaturgical repertoire, building the subject up and up and up and ending with an annihilating crash. A well-known buildup curse goes, “May you have a bank account in every bank, and a fortune in each bank account, and may you spend every penny of it going from doctor to doctor, and no doctor should know what’s the matter with you.” Or: “May you own a hundred mansions, and in each mansion a hundred richly furnished bedrooms, and may you spend your life tossing from bed to bed, unable to get a single night’s sleep on one of them.”
To reach a peak and then explode it into an avalanche—that is the buildup curse. It requires perfect detail and even more perfect timing.
“May you give your daughter Pearlie a wedding to this wonderful husband of hers, such a wedding that the whole world will talk about it for years.” Pearlie’s head began a slow submergence into the collar of her dress. Her mother grunted like a boxer who has been jabbed lightly and is now dancing away.
“This wedding, may it be in all the papers, may they write about it even in books, and may you enjoy yourself at it like never before in your whole life. And one year later, may Pearlie, Pearlie and her wonderful, her rich, her considerate husband—may they present you with your first grandchild. And, masel tov, may it be a boy.”
Old Mrs. Mokkeh shook unbelievingly and came down a step, her nose wart twitching and sensitive as an insect’s antenna.
“And this baby boy,” my mother sang, pausing to kiss her fingers before extending them to Mrs. Mokkeh, “what a glorious child may he be! Glorious? No. Magnificent! Such a wonderful baby boy no one will ever have seen before. The greatest rabbis coming from all over the world only to look upon him at the bris, so they’ll be able to say in later years they were among those present at his circumcision ceremony eight days after birth. So beautiful and clever he’ll be that people will expect him to say the prayers at his own bris. And this magnificent first grandson of yours, just one day afterward, when you are gathering happiness on every side, may he suddenly, in the middle of the night—”
“Hold!” Mrs. Mokkeh screamed, raising both her hands. “Stop!”
My mother took a deep breath. “And why should I stop?”
“Because I take it back! What I wished on the boy, let it be on my own head, everything I wished on him. Does that satisfy you?”
“That satisfies me,” my mother said. Then she pulled my left arm up and began dragging me down the street. She walked proudly, no longer a junior among seniors, but a full and accredited sorceress.
Afterword
When, in the late nineteen sixties, Ballantine Books decided to do a five-volume simultaneous publication of my work (four short-story collections and one new novel) my then agent, Henry Morrison, told me that the head of the firm was troubled by something and wanted to hear from me.
I telephoned Ian Ballantine, who pointed out that we might be facing some length problems in the collections. “Could you give me another group of your short stories,” he asked, “stories of different lengths so that, if needed, I could pop this one or that one into a given collection to make certain that they were all of pretty uniform length?”
I told him I could, and forwarded such a group to him in a few days. The stories in that group—all, in my eyes, second-rate pieces—were chosen on the basis of only one characteristic: widely varying lengths. Well, to my horror, Ian called me shortly after he received them and told me he liked the whole bunch very much and wanted to publish them as a fifth collection.
“But, Ian,” I wailed, “those are some of my worst stories!”
“Fine!” he replied. “Then how about calling the collection The Worst of William Tenn?”
I regret to this very day not having had the guts to go along with his suggestion. I came up with another title, and Ian liked it. But to take what I regarded as the curse off the book, I insisted on inserting a couple of other stories of which I was rather fond.
One of them was “My Mother Was a Witch.”
Before I am condemned for wandering outside the genre with criminal malice and utterly vicious premeditation, let me say this:
I admit freely that this story is definitely not science fiction; it is certainly not fantasy; and it is hardly even good red herring. But. It does demonstrate to the reader how much the simple fantastic was a part of my rearing and childhood.
How could I not have turned out as I have?
Written 1964 / Published 1966