413
PARTISAN REVIEW
in the study house, or he sleeps...if he has an extra minute, he
smokes a pipe...but bored?
-Don't forget-I tell him-a woman doesn't study Talmud,
she takes no part in public affairs, she isn't even responsible for
carrying out the six hundred and thirteen precepts...
-That's the point, exactly! I soon understood that being bored
meant having nothing to do, a kind of idleness that can drive a
person mad. Our rabbis long ago understood this in a spiritual
sense...do you read the more abstruse commentaries?? "Idleness
leads to boredom!" According to Jewish law a woman is not
permitted to be idle. So I said to her: do something! She wants to
"read" she told me. Reading was also a strange concept to me, even
though there were alreadyJews among us, especially those who had
learned to write in the profane tongue, who "read" books and
newspapers instead of "studying" sacred texts. At that time I did
~
not yet know how educated she was...she spoke to me even less
l
than I spoke to her! She is quite a tall woman, but she used to hold
her head down and her lips pressed together as if she couldn't
count to two...a quiet person, a sheep. And her face always looked
strained and worried, as if a ship full of her dairy products had
sunk... "I want," she says, "to read." Read what? Polish,
German...even the Yiddish translation of the Bible, so long as she
reads...And here, in Konskivala, there is not even the shadow of a
book! I felt so sorry for her that I couldn't deny her this...so I
promised her that when I went to the uncle in Lublin I would pick
up some books for her...
-Don't you have any?-she asks.
-I? God forbid!
-Then what do you do all day in the study house?
-I study!
-I, too, want to study-she declares.
-I make it clear to her that Talmud is not a story book, that it
is not meant for women, that the Gemora even teaches that
women may not study Talmud, that it is holy... but nothing
helped. If the people of Konskivalia had known, they would have
stoned me. And they would have been right! I won't go into all
the details...l'll be brief. She begged me, she cried, she swooned,
she carried on for so long that I finally gave in. I used to translate
a page of Gemora for her each evening...but I knew from the
be–
ginning how it would end...
