Miracle of the passive voice in Hebrew: We were passed over, lamed! We were torn asunder!
The Bible (in English)-thirty-nine books in the Old Testament. Nine hundred twenty-nine chapters. Twenty-three thousand two hundred fourteen verses. Five hundred ninety thousand, four hundred thirty-nine words, two million seven hundred twenty-eight thousand one hundred letters.
In all languages the name of the deity is composed of only four letters: Latin-Deus. Greek-Zeus. Hebrew-Adon. Aramaic-Adad. ArabicAlla. The same is true of Parsi, Trtr, and the Jadga language. In Egyptian Oman or Zaut. In east Indian, Asgi or Zagl. In Japanese Jain. In Turkish — Aadi. In ancient Scandinavian-Odin. In Croatian-Duga. In Dalmatian — Ront. In Tyranian-Ahir. In Etruscan-Chur. In Swedish-Kodr. In Irish-Dich. In German-Gott. In French-Dieu. In Spanish-Dios. In Paroani-Leon.
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At a formal luncheon on the ship, the captain asked Lionel who was the boy he had adopted, and Lionel said: His name is Samuel Lipker, and Samuel said: That's a grievous error, sir, my name is Sam Lipp, and I was born in Boston. They sat on deck. Soldiers served iced tea to the returning heroes. From the Statue of Liberty, an escort rowed out to the ships that sprayed jets of water and colored balloons were flown on the piers. Samuel looked and said: A whole city is waiting for me. He said that without any emotion.
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When Mother built.
When Rebecca Schneerson built her destroyed farm in the settlement, a spark of apostasy flashed in her. Enraged by Nehemiah's death, she built a model farm. She erected a modern cow barn, built a dovecote and a chicken coop, planted citrus groves and vineyards, her vegetable patch was big and well-watered, she had fields of clover, corn, and barley, she built an incubator for chicks, the first incubator in Judea, and in the annual milk production contest, two of her cows usually won first place. One day, when Ebenezer was fifteen years old, and the Great War was in its second year and Turkish and German officers would stop in her house on their way south, Ebenezer was hit by a stone thrown at him by an Arab. Ebenezer, sitting on a piece of wood and carving it, was concentrating so hard he didn't see a thing, but Rebecca came out to hit the son of the Arab who stood near his father. The man came to defend his son. Rebecca shaded her forehead with her hand, and said to the Arab: I would curse your father if I knew which of the ninety-two lovers your mother had was really your father! And the Arab enjoyed the curse more than he was offended by it. His donkey deposited droppings next to his feet. Rebecca laid the stick on the ground and wiped the sweat off her brow. The Arab said: You're an angry woman, I'm Ahbed. She said to him: Listen, there's a good farm here, there's a garden, there's food, come with your stupid son, work here, and I'll pay you more than all the seedy dignitaries in Marar, and that's how Ahbed started working for Rebecca and living in the old cow barn Rebecca fixed up for him. After the war, when locusts and hunger destroyed the rage in the settlers, Rebecca was the first one to restore her farm. Then Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg came to the Land with the British Service, as it was called then. The captain, who edited a French periodical in Cairo, before that had been an officer in the Argentinean army, an American citizen, with a name he claimed was Swiss, and belonged to the Greek Orthodox church. Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg came to the Land to prepare, as he put it, a tombstone worthy of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, which a young officer in His Majesty's army in Jerusalem thought it fitting to erect. The young British officer was excited by the return to the land of the Bible and thought the Captain planned to erect a memorial to the prophet Jeremiah, and only later did he realize his error. The bureaucracy was still in its infancy, the Arabs sharply attacked the Balfour Declaration, the government appointed a Jew as the first commissioner in Judea, and Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg, known as an international expert on Dante Alighieri, claimed that the series of incidents described above was a sign that the desired memorial would be erected. Nobody understood the logic of the series of incidents, but since the idea was so confused, they thought something was indeed hiding behind it. Some claimed that the whole issue of the memorial was simply an optical illusion and the Captain was a spy, but nobody knew who he was spying for or why. The Arabs, who then began to fear that the Jews had come to steal the land from them, were afraid that the Jewish commissioner would divert the water of the Yarkon River to London and the water of the Jordan to the arid plains of England. That was the time when a young engineer in the military service came up with an idea about ships to bring icebergs from the north to the Mediterranean, and the Arabs also saw that idea as a Zionist plot to steal the desert from its eternal inhabitants. They heard that there was a Jewish river in Asia, where Jewish kings and princes lived, headed by a queen as tall as a two-story house, and the river stopped flowing on the Sabbath. They were afraid the Yarkon and the Jordan would also stop on the Sabbath and then the black goats would cross the Jordan also on winter days too. They demanded that if the Jordan really was stopped it should also be stopped on Friday, their day of rest. The river (the Sambatyon) was invented by Jewish liars who Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg thought were his ancestors back when they lived in the eleventh century, of whom, he said, not even one trace remained of the survivors. So the Captain was able to invent a family tree for himself going back to the eleventh century, dream of memorials, and come to the Land of Israel disguised as whatever he wanted, and after the Arabs finished worrying about the fate of the water, they started getting anxious about the idea of the memorial. And all that happened before the Captain would come to the settlement. First, they claimed, they never heard of the poet. Second, the editor of the Jaffa newspaper, Nasser, wrote Dante was a fanatical anti-Muslim, while it is a Jew disguised as an Orthodox Greek who wants to build the memorial, and we've got enough of our own imposters and spies, and dignitaries hastened to hold ceremonies of reconciliation in proper houses overflowing with charred meat and steaming coffee but nothing helped. Nasser wrote in his newspaper that no tombstone would be erected to Dante in the land that was holy to Muslims because Mohammed's legendary horse rose from there to heaven. The Captain, who came to the settlement at the height of the struggle for the memorial, sat in the community center erected by Nehemiah and read a Hebrew newspaper from Jaffa, and saw Rebecca and her son in the distance, walking in the street. Ebenezer was now a lad of nineteen and held in his hands a sawed-down tree trunk. The Captain got to his feet, pressed his sword to his thigh, and followed Rebecca from a distance, which he privately called a distance of decency. The young staff officer who was reprimanded for confusing Jeremiah with Dante was seeking an outstanding Arab poet to pacify the Arabs, and the Captain who moved between the monasteries and the churches in the Land in an attempt to bribe the abbots of the monasteries and the priests of the religion to support the idea of a memorial to Dante encountered a firm and hostile refusal. The Captain had instructive theories, which nobody he met was interested in, like the theory about the site of Moses's grave, and without knowing about the melody of the Psalms that Rebecca later taught herself (maybe she knew it from her childhood) he taught himself the book of Psalms, so he could recite it by heart from beginning to end and from end to beginning. The Captain really didn't get excited when he heard the idea that he was a triple spy and that he had also been a spy in the war, he didn't even get excited that under the aegis of the British government he continued, according to the slanderers, to write sharp and satanic articles against Great Britain in his French newspaper in Cairo where he hadn't been for months. When the Captain saw Rebecca walking with her son, as he put it later, he was filled with that longing that a self-respecting South American (or Mexican, according to Rebecca) captain feels one moment before he's executed. He followed Rebecca, and Ebenezer, who turned around, saw him, and said to his mother: A man in a uniform is following us, and she said: A fool with a sword, like Joseph with his songs. Rebecca had plans for the new government and, as she told Ebenezer, she somehow counted on the certain folly of the Mexican buffoon who would follow her home, knock on her door, and stand at attention, and when he did indeed do that she opened the door to him, and his sword struck the post and the Captain saluted chivalrously, or as she put it, like every dumb Turk when a beautiful Jewish woman passes by, and she brought him into her house, let him sit alone for a long time, sent Ahbed to him with a glass of cold water and then with a tray where a carafe of coffee and small cups wobbled and only then did she come in, dressed in an elegant gown, and they chatted about the weather, government upheavals, locusts, typhus, the banishments the Turks had enforced, and she told how she had fostered irrigation when people were tortured and killed and the Arabs then raised their heads and said: The Jews under our feet, but me, she said, they didn't touch, they'd come and look at me and a poor German in an officer's uniform played melancholy tunes for me and would moon after me. All the time, Rebecca was devising her plans and now and then she peeped at the face of the Captain staring at her with a savage intensity so shrouded with respect that he couldn't see her.