East of Time by Jacob Rosenberg

Author:Jacob Rosenberg
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Brandl & Schlesinger
Published: 2014-02-18T22:00:00+00:00

To Immortalize a Beggar

Our neighbourhood was a fascinating gallery of characters, but if asked on whom I would bestow my first prize for sheer originality, I would choose the learned and pious beggar whom we called Shulem the Prince. Shulem was a rich man who became a pauper overnight. If you enquired how, he would respond, with an almost hidden grain of bitterness, that it was Satan’s doing. ‘And yet I am much better off than Job,’ he would continue. ‘I still have six hungry children at home, and a little wife standing next to her frozen stove, awaiting a miracle.’

Since he had no profession, Shulem took it upon himself to become a beggar. He quickly turned into the most respected beggar in our city. For one thing, he never begged on Mondays and Thursdays; on those two days, like most pious Jews, he fasted — because Monday was the day when Moses had ascended Sinai, and Thursday the day when he had come back down.

Since he was a particularly methodical man, Shulem’s professional itineraries were well mapped out. He never visited the same home twice in the one week, and he knew exactly how much to expect from each household — so planning his expenditure was a breeze. The first twenty groshen he received he always put aside for tzedakah (charity), in aid of a school for disadvantaged boys. To Shulem, charity was of paramount importance in life. Without charity, he declared, the whole world would, God forbid, come to an end.

Well, it did. And as our homely thugs, on the orders of the ghetto authorities, and in the company of hundreds of other Jews, escorted his thirty-year-old wife and their six children (the oldest only nine) towards eternity, Shulem ran out from the crowd. ‘God!’ he screamed into the rooftops. ‘Why?... Tell me why!’

Shulem immediately suffered a fit, collapsed, and died on the spot. Early next morning, a man who claimed to be a seer swore that he had heard, in the middle of the night, the voice of an embodied Tzedakah wailing, ‘I am a widow, a widow, a widow!’ Of course nobody believed him. But as the day showed itself, and the growing light revealed bizarre footprints on the otherwise untouched blanket of snow, our whole backyard fell under the spell of a deep and awesome foreboding.

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