The Loves of Judith Read Free Page A

wasn’t anything left.”
    Once I heard the Village Papish scolding Globerman for the same thing. The word “robber” I understood,
“Hashbez”
I guessed, and
“Akhen”
I didn’t get.
    “You stole! You plundered!” he rebuked him.
    “Me steal? I didn’t steal.” Globerman chuckled. “I obtained.”
    “You ‘obtained’? What does that mean, you ‘obtained’?”
    “Some of it I obtained by pulling and some of it I obtained by dragging. But steal? Not me. I didn’t steal nothing,” roared the dealer, with a laugh I can still recall clearly to this day, many years after his death.
    “I’ll tell you what’s the difference between just a gift and a gift of cash,” he said now in a loud voice so everyone would hear. “To think up what gift to buy somebody
iz a lokh in kop
, a hole in the head. But to give somebody cash
iz a lokh in hartz
, a hole in the heart. Period.”
    And he closed my fingers around the money and declared: “That’s how my father taught me and that’s how I’m teaching you. It’ll be just like you yourself was born on the
Klots
, the butcher block.”
    Then he pulled out the flat bottle he always carried in his coat pocket and I recognized the smell of the grappa Mother loved to drink. He poured a lot of liquor down his throat and a little bit of liquor on the fire, roasted the ribs he brought, and sang aloud:
    Zaydele went walking down the street
    Went with a penny to buy himself a treat
    Oh, Zaydele, it’s only a deceit
    The cent went off and there’s no treat
    Daddy, Daddy, he is bold
    Mommy, Mommy, she will scold
    They’ll beat poor Zaydele till he’s out cold
.
    And Moshe Rabinovitch, the strongest and oldest of my three fathers, caught me and tossed me up in the air over and over again, threw and caught my body with his thick, short hands. And when Naomi yelled, “And one to grow on,” and I soared for the thirteenth time, I saw a swarming cloud of wings threatening to cover the village.
    “Look,” I shouted. “Starlings in summer!”
    And at first glance, the raging nimbus did indeed look like a flock of starlings that had lost its sense of time. But it soon turned out that, thanks to the swings of Moshe Rabinovitch’s strong hands, I saw the locusts rising on the Valley that year, 1952.
    Moshe’s face became melancholy. Naomi panicked. And Globerman said for the
n
th time: “
A mensh trakht un Gott lakht
—man makes plans and God laughs.”
    Within five minutes the dull drumming of the Arab peasants was heard beyond the hills, coming out of their houses to the fields, armed with screaming women, long sticks, and noisy, empty gasoline cans to rout the enemy.
    Globerman sipped more and more grappa from his bottle and served Moshe more and more meat, and in the evening, when all the children went to the fields with torches and bags, spades and brooms to kill the locusts, my third father, Jacob Sheinfeld, came, laid his hand on my shoulder, and invited me to dinner.
    “All the gifts ain’t nothing. Money gets used up. Clothes you rip up. Toys get broke up. But a good meal, that stays in your memory. From there it don’t get lost like other gifts. The body it leaves real fast, but the memory real slow.”
    That’s what Jacob said, and his voice, too, like the voice of the dealer, was loud enough to reach everyone’s ears.

5
    A STRANGE BIRD ,” that’s what they called Jacob Sheinfeld in the village.
    He lived all by himself, he had a little house, a garden which was once well-tended, and a few empty canary cages, relics of an enormous flock that was now dispersed.
    His field, which had once boasted a citrus grove and a vineyard, vegetables and fodder, was now leased to the village for common cultivation. His incubator he had already closed. His wife who had left he had already forgotten.
    Jacob’s wife was named Rebecca. I knew she had left him because of my mother. Never did I see her, but everybody said she was the most beautiful of all the women in the