Isaac Bashevis Singer
FROM THE DIARY OF ONE NOT BORN
Where man does not walk, where cattle do not tread, Fri–
day the thirteenth ot the thirteenth month, between day
and night, behind the Black Mountains, in the wasted
woodland, at the castle ot Asmodeus, by the light ot a
charmed moon.
I, the author of these lines, was blessed by a good fortune
that comes to only one in ten thousand: I was not born. My father,
a yeshivah student, sinned as did Onan, and from his seed I was
created-half spirit, half demon, half air, half shade, horned like a
buck and winged like a bat, with the mind of a scholar and the
heart of a highwayman. I am and I am not. I whistle down chim–
neys and dance in the public bath; I overturn the pot of Sabbath
food in a poor man's kitchen; I make a woman unclean when her
husband returns from a trip. I like to play
all
kinds of pranks. Once,
when a young rabbi was preaching his first sermon in the synagogue
on the Great Sabbath before the Passover, I turned myself into a fly,
and bit the learned man on the tip of his nose. He flicked me off,
but I flew to the lobe of his ear. He stretched out his hand to drive
me away, but I danced off onto his high forehead, and paraded
around between the deep rabbinical furrows. He preached and I
stang, and I had the pleasure of hearing this newly hatched scholar,
still wet behind the ears, scramble the text and forget the profundi–
ties which he had expected to pour from
his
sleeve. Oh, yes,
his
enemies had a gay Sabbath! And oh, how his wife berated
him
that evening! Indeed, the quarrel between man and wife went so far
that, 1 blush to tell you, she would not let him into her bed Passover
night, when every Jewish husband should be a king and every Jewish
wife a queen. And if it had been destined for her to conceive Messiah
then, I nipped that in the bud!
