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PARTISAN REVIEW
Eight, fun di trilogiye") on gray emergency-issue rag paper that he
bought in rolls and cut up, with a bookbinder's precision, into a sort
of galley sheet . When they became drafts, he cut them again , length–
wise. Then he hung them up, facing the wall . One day, by accident,
I turned one of the sheets around .
From then on I used to tear paper off the hook, connect the
halves and try to decode , infuriatingly slowly at first, later with the
ease of a skilled cryptologist, those pages of flowing , elegant , almost
medieval script. He wrote in Yiddish, the daily language of Euro–
peanJewry. But it was not the gut-churning , plebeian tongue I heard
spoken around me . I didn't know then tha t there were giants ofYid–
dish literature living- or in the process of dying at the hands of the
Nazis and their collaborators . Not for them the green pastures of the
land of Israel. The zeal of negation of the diaspora negated them
too, they who first broke down the walls of the ghetto .
My grandfather never broke out of the ghetto. He brought it
with him to the promised land. He was one of the founders of the
first preserved shtetl in the Middle East, the religious city of Bnai
Brak (Boiberik, the satirists called it) . An orthodox Jew of the
modernist Mizrahi wing, a consummate bourgeois of slight build, he
used to promenade through the streets of the settlement winter and
summer in a brushed three-piece suit , worn over his ritual fringes,
with a Dickensian slouch hat atop his skullcap . A watch chain
stretched across his unfashionably gaunt midsection . His beard and
moustache, which he trimmed himself, were the color of rust , and
his earlocks were tucked behind his ears. Thus he would sit , in his
place of honor near the eastern wall of the great synagogue on Rabbi
Akiva Street .
Every afternoon at four, in the tiny apartment crammed with
half the furniture of Lodz along with assorted daughters and grand–
children, the flotsam of failed marriages and foreign wars who in–
vaded the hallways and kitchen on folding cots , he would dismiss his
heirs with a cantankerous wave from the parlor. "Turning into a kib–
butz," he said.
Afterwards he would sit upright at his glass-topped desk , amid
his sharpened pencils, his fountain pens , the glue he made to his own
recipe, and his cigarettes neatly cut into thirds . I watched through
the blinds as he twirled his moustache, picked up his tweezers and
wiped off his fountain pen on his black skullcap - either to remove
the old ink or to prime his creativity . From then on he proceeded
ceaselessly, like a man mesmerized , to fill his stacks of galley paper
with that medieval script.
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