591.
JACK LUDWIG
THE DISPOSSESSED
THE TENANTS. By Bernard Malamud. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
$1..95.
HARRY LESSER TAKES THE TWENTY-THIRD
God
is
my landlord,
I mainly want.
He leads me to lie down in grim postures,
For the most part alone.
So I walk through these alleys
In the shadow of debt
And fear the good even more than the evil.
My rod comforts a little,
Though not really that much.
Once in a purim somebody prepares me a meal
I myself wouldn't serve a worst enemy.
Surly noodniks sans mercy
Follow me all the days of my life,
Yet God forbid I should maybe move.
Probably I'll hang on in this lousy house
For ever.
Once before a time, goes a pre-Malamud story, Prometheus
stole fire from heaven for men , which mightily angered the gods, fire's
sole owners up to that point. They grabbed Prometheus, chained him
to a rock, and set birds to eating at his renewable liver for ever. Mean–
while, of course, man had the fire.
In time, as everyone knows, the gods themselves stole out of heaven,
and left in their \\'ake nothing but end less, undifferentiated, boring
space. Einstein, however, saw it another way.
He
IO:Jked up into those
vacant heavens and saw
light.
]\;ow light might have served anyone not
familiar with what the heavens were like when they where full of real
fire. Light wouldn 't do for one follower of the old departed gods, a
palish priest, Eli Ot.
"Einstein, Shmeinstein," Eli Ot is reported to have said, "he's
nothing but a skyintist and what skyintist can ha\'e disinterested opinions
about the sky?" "Right," agreed Ez Ra, a pale godsman of dubious
Chinese and Egyptian derivation. "Light is not fire," said Ez Ra, and
with this nix Eli Ot energetically agreed. "Neither light nor fire is such
a hot idea," Eli Ot added. "Any young man with a swan song in his
heart should hide out from
both
fire and light. The best place for hiding
is a bank, or perhaps some other vaulted institution."
