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falls. Now David associates the blunt heaviness of the barge with a whole house of bricks as “a cloud sheared the sunlight from the wharf.” His back feels cooler in the sharpening wind, smokestacks on the other bank darken slowly, “fluting filmy distance with iron-grey shadow.”
    The Polish boy Leo, whom David admires beyond words for his defiant show of independence, shows him a rosary. The black beads become “lucky beads” to David. In his Jewish innocence the links of the rosary drive him wild with envy. He is the perpetual outsider. The sight of a boy on the block grabbing a girl makes him feel all the more isolated in his cruelly won sexual “knowledge.” “I know … I know … I know,” he repeats to himself. In one of Roth’s most telling images, David in sluggish thought resembles “a heavy stone pried half out of its clinging socket of earth.” Leo’s rosary must belong to him, because the beads give out a light like the marbles which other boys roll along the curb.
    As a Jew, David is transgressing, and there may be no safe place at home in which to hide a rosary. In marvelous counterpoint to Leo playing “bad” with David’s own cousin Esther, David watches Esther, who is afraid of being detected, hears her squeals at being handled by Leo. Leo insists that David “lay chickee” for him and Esther (be a lookout). Leo pays him off with the rosary David so much desires. The crucifix attached to the rosary quite frightens David; he recognizes something that may be hostile to him as a Jew. The cellar where all this is happening is dark; the gold figure on the crucifix swings slowly. David lets the glistening beads fall, one by one, in order to see how they light up the murk. Suddenly Esther’s sister Polly appears and accuses Esther: “Yuh wuz wit’ him in dere!” David slinks away. In the now violent dispute between Polly and Leo, the Catholic cries: “Yuh stinkin’ sheeny!” and the Jew is outraged that her sister not only has been petting, but petting with a Christian! “Her voice trailed off into horrified comprehension. “Oooh, w’en I tell – He’s a goy too! Yuh doity Crischin, ged oud f’om my cella’ – faw I call my modder. Ged oud!”
    David flees the cellar, flees the frightening transposition of sexual taboo into religious taboo. In the streets he just wants to get back to his own familiar world. He reaches the cheder, performs brilliantly in his Hebrew reading for the visiting rabbi, then in an excited leap of fantasy, based on his fascination with the rosary, tells Yidel Pankower that his mother is dead and that he is really half Christian, the son of a European organist who played in church. The rabbi, all alarmed and curious, intrusively carries the strange story to David’s home. There is a violent altercation with his father, who is all too willing to believe that David is someone else’s son, and beats him. The scene is mixed with violent humor because it is the same moment Genya’s sister Bertha and her husband have chosen to come in to ask for a loan. To cap everything, David, as he is shaken by his father, drops the rosary. Totally beyond himself now, Albert hysterically takes this as proof of David’s supposed Gentile parentage. “God’s own hand! A sign! A witness! A proof of my word!… Another’s! A goy’s! A cross! A sign of filth!”
    David runs away in earnest this time, ends up at the car barns, where at the foot of Tenth Street “a quaking splendor dissolved the cobbles, the grimy structures, bleary stables, the dump-heap, river and sky into a single cymbal-clash of light.” David has inserted the metal dipper of a milk can “between the livid jaws of the rail, the dipper twisted and bounced, consumed in roaring radiance, candescent.” As a long burst of flame spurts from