“There won’t be as much for you, let me remind you. I get the feeling there’s going to be a whole lot more for me.”
“It’s a good farm.”
“It’s how they bought your manhood, yekl,” said Sharon. Murray didn’t answer. “Wonderful, what a match that shadchen machine stuck me with,” she muttered.
“Look,” called Murray. “This is one of the animals that live around here.” He held up a small jellyball. “You get a couple of them and they sort of mush together. They make gray things that you can eat.”
“Feh!” said Sharon.
“You carry it,” said Murray. “You have to get over your fear.”
“It isn’t fear,” she said shrilly. “It’s disgust.”
The first few days were unpleasant. Sharon refused to have anything to do with the animals. Even the vegetables from the fields made her run from the table at mealtime. Soon her hunger grew to the point where she had to compromise. She ate a few vegetables, and some of the boiled gray lumps. She admitted that they were reasonably pleasant in taste; but her intellect betrayed her, and after she thought about the source of the food she hurried to the bathroom again. It wasn’t as bad the next day, and then it wasn’t long before she was eating well again. From then on she helped Murray in all the day’s chores, although forever after she had a particular distaste for the jellyanimals.
Murray had come back to the house for a quick lunch one day. It was now near the end of summer, and the day’s routines had none of the urgency of the spring planting or the fall harvest. Sharon had fixed a special meal for him, hamburgers made from ground stupe meat.
“You’re incredible,” said Murray.
“I figured you’d like it,” said Sharon. “How long has it been since you had a good old greasy hamburger?”
“Too long. One of the things I was hoping to do when I went back to get married was fill up on things like that. You know, pizzas and cheap French fries.”
“I know how you feel already. I’d give anything for some honest drive-in trayf. It wouldn’t be so bad, except that this isn’t our choice. If you never had the chance to decide, you never had the chance to make your own mistake. The Representatives have cheated you out of your own humanity. They’ve just forgotten about free will.”
Murray sighed. “Don’t start that again, Sharon, okay? This is my little Garden of Eden. You keep forgetting if you’re Eve or the serpent. You’re forever trying to make the Representatives sound like corruption personified. How many other people do you know who have a whole, clean, beautiful world all to themselves? You just can’t make a gift like that out of evil intentions.”
“For thousands of years we’ve swallowed that einredenish. They say, ‘Go on. Make money. Gather possessions. But just don’t get pushy.’ And the nuchshleppers go right along with them. Every time we seem to be pulling our people together, somebody throws cold water on our smoldering desire, scatters the flame of our spirit. Being driven out of our own land into exile wasn’t bad enough. But then for centuries, wherever small communities of Jews gathered, the machers in power devoted themselves to splitting up even those tiny groups.”
“That’s the racial paranoia my father yelled about all the time,” said Murray. “It’s stupid. What’s the matter, you need to be persecuted? You can’t have someone hand you a gift horse without looking it in the mouth?”
“Bubkes! I know some Trojans that would’ve been a lot better off if they had. Anyway, now the Representatives have found the real answer. This is a neat thing they’ve done. Nobody can accuse them of genocide. Even you can’t see what they’re doing.”
“What are they doing?”
“You know what the Diaspora means?”
“No,” said Murray.
“It used to mean the community of Jews living outside Israel. There used to be great numbers of Jews throughout the world. Now there isn’t. Mostly, there are a couple of million Jews in Israel, living in sort of an amusement park for the Representatives. And some more scattered neighborhoods in the rest of the world. Now they’re taking the best of our people and spreading them even further. A dispersion of the Dispersion. It’s much more effective than killing them would be. No one is angered, no one is vengeful. I mean, you certainly looked happy enough when you visited your parents, nu?”
“All right,” said Murray, rubbing his eyes with his rough fingers, “suppose you tell me why they bother?”
“Go to that damn machine of yours,” said Sharon. Murray frowned, not understanding, but he went to the tect. “Now ask it a question,” she said. “Ask it what a Jew is.”
Murray did so. The answer was immediate:
**ROSE, Murray S.:
A Jew is a kind of person**
“That’s why they bother,” said Sharon. “It’s all the reason they need.”
Her ideas were as foreign to Murray as Grandpa Zalman’s had been; but, after he had thought about them, he discovered that he couldn’t find an easy reply. When he had made that admission, Murray decided that Sharon at least deserved the attention he had given to his grandfather’s odd ways. The summer ended. Several weeks later, he went to the tect and asked a few more questions. “How many other individuals have been given their own planet?” he said.
**ROSE, Murray S.:
Seven thousand, four hundred and twelve**
“What percentage of those people are Jewish or of Jewish extraction?”
**ROSE, Murray S.:
Thirty-nine percent**
“And what percentage of the population of the Earth is Jewish or of Jewish extraction?”
**ROSE, Murray S.:
Less than one-half of one percent**
Those figures seemed to substantiate Sharon’s angry charges. But, still, Murray didn’t agree that giving virgin worlds away was a scheme to destroy the Jewish people. It may just be the result of a natural superiority among Jewish students, at least as far as what the Twelfth-year Test measured. But then Murray had a sudden thought. “How many known, habitable worlds are there in the universe, besides Earth?” he asked.
**ROSE, Murray S.:
Six hundred and thirty-six**
There! “How many other people are living on the world known as Zalman, other than Murray and Sharon Rose?”
**ROSE, Murray S.:
Twenty-two**
Murray took the information to Sharon. “I have to apologize,” he said. “It looks like your view of things may be a little more accurate than mine. I’m either naïve or just stupid. If the Representatives will lie about meaningless things like this, who knows what else they’ve been lying about?”
Sharon smiled at him sadly. “Twenty-two other people, scattered around the face of a world. A regular little shtetl, if we could all get together. That’s what Jews have been saying since Genesis.”
“I guess it’s too late, now.”
“It may be too late for you and me,” said Sharon. “We’ve sold the birthright. We’ve betrayed our ancestors. And for what? Some gray lumps.”
Murray was still upset by his discoveries, and Sharon’s words only irritated him. He grew defensive. “So what should I be doing?” he said loudly. “Fighting them by myself?”
“We should be conserving what little remains of our heritage,” said Sharon softly. “You never cared much for that, did you?”
“You can’t blame me for my environment,” said Murray.
“I can, if you keep making its mistakes.”
Murray slammed his hand down on the table. “You want me to go back to Earth? Lead an uprising? Murray Maccabeus, for pity’s sake?”