Moshe Isaac was born in Bukovina. In Poland he married Sarah, daughter of Rabbi Where-the-Wind-Goes-Down. After he moved to Galicia and begat five sons, his last son Jacob was born, and then he died and didn't move the rod even in the wind. Jacob who moved mountains with his eyes that went blind from thirst for salvation begat Joachim the Dane, who went to seek the traces of the Dane who saw the Sambatyon River circumventing the realms of Sabbath, found a wife in Russia, and became enslaved to her compassion for him. His son Sambatyon the Dane begat Nehazia the Dane, who was also called the Genius of Tarnopol, who returned his forefathers to the soil and annulled the observation of the sky not through books. Nehazia married his cousin Miriam, daughter of Elijah, and begat Avrum the tavern owner who taught children, and hid creatures who saw sights they shouldn't have seen and showed them the straight path. From many torments, he died while walking and was buried in a small cemetery where a two-headed cow was later seen. Avrum begat Moshe Isaac who learned a little math, wrote three books, and in his dreams would see a city named Berlin and knew the names of its streets by heart even though he had never been there. He married a wise and modest woman named Leah. Leah raised two daughters who died of typhus and a young son named Nehemiah. Moshe Isaac died young and had time to hear his son Nehemiah learn Talmud. Nehemiah left the faith, taught and studied the Torah of the Land of Israel, married Rebecca the daughter of the great-granddaughter of Secret Charity, husband and father of Rebecca Secret Charity. Nehemiah begat… The ship emitted a long siren and then a short one. The birds circled above the church that looked like cardboard from here. The light was blinding. Ebenezer stabbed the womb of his mother who was looking at the sands of the Land and didn't come to it.
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Rebecca followed Mr. Abravanel's Arabs, who led the coffin on the back of a donkey. Behind her, the sea ended and now she was walking in dark moldy alleys. Niches that may have been shops swarmed with dusky human beings with burning eyes, beyond there the honking of a train was heard whose locomotive tried in vain to bestow an importance on the city but the palm trees had beautiful shapes and thin trunks. Rebecca calculated precisely the delusion in which she followed her man's coffin, and if there was any beauty in the shabby outposts of the ancient east that hysterical women sometimes used to exaggerate and glorify, she knew how to protest that misleading vision with smiling rage. The tears that would later flow from her eyes for eight years in a row were already waiting for her through her eyelashes. The new and ugly hotel was teeming with noisy Jews. Outside vegetables and flowers were sold and the smell of charred meat stood in the air. The fragrance of lemons and the sea only intensified the smell of charred meat revolving on spits as if human beings were being roasted. The coffin was put in her room. After the door closed behind them and the Jew in the white suit arranged everything and even hinted to the Turk who had followed them all the way to wait for him, only then did she calm down. When she decided not to weep yet, her eyelids almost swelled with tears. She went to the coffin and looked outside. She saw houses closing in on her from all sides. She looked here and there, lowered the filthy shade, opened the top of the coffin and Nehemiah got up, stretched, and hugged his wife. He said he would never again lie ten days in a coffin, even if he had to die for it. His face beamed with joy that didn't fade because of what he could see through the window or from the cracks of the coffin. When they looked outside through the transparent and filthy shade, Rebecca and Nehemiah saw two completely different landscapes.
The hotel was in turmoil. Jews who wanted to board the ship honking in the harbor sought buyers for their miserable belongings. Arabs haggled cunningly and the dignitaries among them would spit at every Jew heading for the ship, and Nehemiah, who was watching his wife's face, didn't see the Jewish lords wearing suits and smelling of perfume who came to take care of the new immigrants, to arrange their papers, if they had any, and talked with the Pioneers as if they were recalcitrant children who came to embitter their lives. Nehemiah said to Rebecca: I swear to you, Rebecca, I've come home and I won't leave here. And she, who longed with all her soul to leave here, was too stunned by the solemnity of his words to respond. She thought: I've got his son in my belly, he'll learn. From the window, on the other side of the room, a little square was seen with a carousel spun by a donkey and a camel. An Egyptian dancer in red and bright scarves danced there to the cheers of mustached men who cheered and applauded and thrust money between her breasts. Her eyes were painted, and even from the window they looked bold. The donkey spinning the carousel with the camel stopped, and a man in the uniform of a retired emperor whipped him and cursed in Italian. At night, they put into Nehemiah's coffin the body of the man who died of typhus, Rebecca took from her trunk a black silk dress and a black silk scarf, and the next day she went to the funeral with a sweet expression of modesty steeped with charm on her face.
The tears she had wanted to weep the day before now flowed, cultivated, proper, and foreign to her. They were meant for a man she didn't even know, and another man she didn't even know praised Nehemiah, a cantor recited the prayer for the dead and somebody volunteered to say kaddish. The Turk who stood there all the time and stared at Rebecca wanted them to put up a tombstone immediately. And the tombstone was ready that very day with the engraving: Nehemiah ben Moshe Isaac Schneerson, born in Ukraine in 1880, buried in the Land of Israel in the month of Teveth 5660 (1900). The Love of Zion Burns in his Heart. The Turk asked the translator to translate for him. The translator read: "Nehemiah Schneerson born in Russia in the year eighteen eighty, buried in Palestine in the month of January nineteen hundred. The love of his wife will accompany him." Rebecca whispered to the Jew in the white suit: What is he saying, and he translated for her. She said, Why did he say Russia, and the Jew said: For him, Ashkenazi Jews are born only in Russia, for the Turk it's all the same, anyway he doesn't know where that is. The Turk smiled, received what was coming to him, and left. Later on, what was written would be corrected and the document signed by two rabbis along with the photo of the grave against the background of the Mount of Olives would be sent to the family of the dead man in Aleppo, Syria.
Nehemiah wasn't thrilled by the sight of Mr. Abravanel, who came to talk with him in the locked hotel room about the wretched settlements. An empty suit, he said to Rebecca who made tea and served them. A pleasant wind blew from the sea. Nehemiah wanted to go immediately. Rebecca wasn't thrilled, but the hotel wasn't her heart's delight either and so it was decided to leave the next night. Mr. Abravanel, whose son would rule Israel after those ragamuffins, arranged everything and the next day a cart waited for them at the door of the hotel. Nobody peeped out the windows. The streets were dark. The Turks were already beating one another in their dark rooms. The cold of the night before vanished in a dry chill. A wind blew from the Libyan deserts. A precarious smell of cardamom, raisins, and droppings rose in Rebecca's nose. Nehemiah smelled lemons and honey. The road was deserted and the sky was strewn with stars.