The Book of Mischief by Steve Stern

Author:Steve Stern
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55597-059-8
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2012-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Romance

I.

The tale is told in my family of my mother’s father, Eli Goldfogle, who was engaged at birth to his future wife, Esther, in the Old Country, what the immigrants called “the other side.” Nobody believes the story; the married couple themselves could not have known the whole of it, which is to say they were in no position to pass it along to their children, who passed it on to me. But ours is a family of disappointed dreamers, many of whom, like myself, live alone, and it’s our penance to carry such tales. This one begins at the end of the last century in the Byelorussian village of Utsk, when arranged marriages were à la mode. It was a mitzvah, a good deed, and an act of faith that families should pledge to each other, over honey cakes and brandy, infants born at approximately the same time.

Since the Goldfogles and Esther’s parents—call them the Bluesteins, though nobody used surnames in those days; since the Goldfogles and the Bluesteins inhabited separate villages several rolling versts apart, Eli and his pledged one, his mash-kin, managed to grow up without ever meeting. There had of course been occasions when they might have, market days and celebrations when the communities converged. But while they were aware of a mutual fate, which they accepted the way the young accept their mortality, never really believing they will die, neither child was especially curious about the other. Each had more pressing interests, and as the marriage contract was an accomplished fact, what after all did it have to do with either of them?

Young Eli was in any case engaged in his studies. While he wasn’t counted among the prodigies—he couldn’t perform, like some, those dazzling feats of memory whose fame in the Pale of Settlement were equal to virtuosity on the violin—he was nonetheless a fervent scholar. From his tenderest years it had been the boy’s ambition to become a Talmud khochem, “an uprooter of mountains,” like the wise men who sat in their bearded serenity by the synagogue’s eastern wall. Like them he would devote himself to the Five Books and their commentaries, and to a total adherence to the precepts ordained therein. “Torah min hashamayim, the Torah is from heaven; hashamayim min Torah, heaven is from the Torah.” This was Eli’s watchword, which he intoned with an earnestness that caused his unlettered father, Moishe the Pit (so called for his work in a quarry or his bottomless appetite, take your pick), to scratch his head.

What he lacked in breadth of intellect, Eli made up for with his zeal and fidelity to the letter of the Law. And if it didn’t appear that, by such application, he would ascend to the ranks of the saints, so be it; Eli had small patience with saints, who seemed to him in their mystical transports a largely irresponsible lot. Under the benevolent eye of the sage Rabbi Ben Bag Bag in the dilapidated study house, he had

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