140
PARTISAN REVIEW
Since my life span is eternal, and since I don't have to worry
about making a living, bringing up children, or accounting for my
deeds, I do just as I please. Evenings, I watch the women at the
ritual baths, or make my way into the bedrooms of pious folk and
listen to the forbidden talk between man and wife. I enjoy reading
other people's letters and counting up the amounts in women's nest–
eggs. So sharp are my eaI"i that I can hear thoughts behind the skull,
and although I have no mouth and am dumb as a fish, I can, when
the occasion arises, make a cutting remark. I have no need for money,
but I like to commit petty thieveries. I steal pins from women's
dresses and loosen their bows and knots. I hide important papers and
wiIls--what malicious deeds do I not do! For instance-
A Jewish landowner, Reb Paltiel, a learned man of a distin–
guished family and a charitable nature, became impoverished. His
cows stopped giving milk, his land became barren, his bees made no
more honey. Things went from bad to worse. Reb Paltiel could see
that
his
luck was turning, and he said to himself: "Well-I'll die
a poor man." He had a few volumes of the Talmud and a Psalter,
so he sat down to study and pray, thinking: "The Lord giveth and
the Lord taketh away.
As
long as I have bread I will eat, and when
that, too, is gone, the time will have come to take a sack and a stick
and go begging."
The man had a wife, Grene Peshe, and she had a wealthy
brother, Reb Getz, in W.arsaw. So she began to nag her husband:
"What's the sense of sitting here and waiting until the last loaf is
eaten? Go to Warsaw and tell my brother what has happened." Her
husband was a proud man, however, and he replied: "I don't want
any favors from anyone.
If
it is God's will that I be provided for,
he will give me from his full hand, and if it is my fate to be a pauper,
this trip wiIl be a needless self-abasement."
But, as women have been given nine measures of garrulousness
and only half a measure of faith, she pleaded and insisted until he
capitulated. He put on his shabby fur coat with the moth eaten fox–
tails,
took a covered wagon to Reivitz, from thence to Lublin, and
then he was bounced and jounced for days between Lublin and
Warsaw.
The trip was long and arduous, the covered wagon jogging
along for nearly a week. Nights, Reb Paltiel slept at wayside
inns.
It
was right after the Feast of Tabernacles, when the skies are heavy
