415
PARTISAN REVIEW
-You want to be able to recognize her?-he smiles, reas–
sured-all right! Here is a sign: she has a mole on the left side of
her nose.
* * *
The man climbed down from the mail coach and did
not say goodbye until he reached the bottom step, from a dis–
tance, and coldly. Apparently he suspected me of being ac–
quainted with his wife and perhaps even of belonging to her
"unkosher" family in Warsaw!
I was left alone in the coach, but sleep was out of the question
now. The early morning air enveloped me; my literary coat was
padded with wind and the cool morning crept into every limb. I
moved to the back and huddled in a corner. Outside, the sun be–
gan to shine. It is possible that I rode through a breathtakingly
scenic area; the first rays of the sun may have kissed the upmost
peaks of the tree-lined hills and danced across a blue , crystal
clear river. ..but I did not have the courage to open the little win–
dow...a Jewish writer has respect for the cold. I sat and began to
plot out a story...but other thoughts intervened.
Two separate worlds, a man's world and a woman's
world...a world of the talmudic "Four Categories of Damages,"
and a world of story books, which one buys by the carton .
When he reads, she falls asleep; when she reads, he falls
asleep ...not enough to have different sects...not enough that we
classify people according to French noses, English canes,
German hunters, Lithuanian pigs, Polish beggars, Eretz Yisrael
wanderers...not enough that every part of the body lies in another
area and has a different ring to its name...not enough that every
one of these parts separates further into different sections:
Chassidim, Misnagdim, Yekkes...but we are also split into males
and females .. .so that in each and every narrow, damp, squalid
Jewish home there are two distinct worlds...
When he reads, she falls asleep, when she reads, he falls
asleep.
At the least, I think, we ought to unite the two worlds...It is
every Yiddish writer's duty... but Yiddish writers have too many
