Word Made Flesh by Jack O'Connell

Author:Jack O'Connell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road

15.

There was a young woman in our community, really a girl, but quite beautiful and very mature for her age. She was, in fact, only seventeen years old at the time of the July Sweep. She never knew her mother—the woman died of typhus when the daughter was still an infant. The child lived in the attic of Haus Levi with her widower father, who was a kind man but not the best of providers and, to be honest, he had a propensity for the drink. The creature, as he sometimes called it. Nevertheless, he loved his daughter with all of his being and he attempted to do his best by her.

The daughter was named Alicia. She learned to read at a very young age. Her father was both amazed and proud of her skill with words and he was known to bring the girl to the neighbors’ kitchens after supper and have her perform, reading from the storybooks, the cheap little fable pamphlets and tissue-paper parables that he would purchase with the meager wages he earned as a marginal performer in the Goldfaden Carnival Troupe. The child loved her fairy tales, came to memorize them, so that after a time, she did not even need the books to tell the story. The neighbors in Haus Simeon—Miss Svetla, Mr. and Mrs. Wasserman, the Brezina family—appeared to enjoy these visits and would remark that the child indeed seemed blessed with a natural gift for language and the architecture of the tale.

Alicia’s talents blossomed as she grew and her skills were noted and praised by Mrs. Gruen, the teacher at the unchartered and makeshift school that was operated, somewhat clandestinely, in the basement of Haus Zebulun. I have never seen anything like it, Mrs. Gruen would croon to the father; she has been given this blessing for a reason. And the widower would nod and smile at the honor lavished on his only child. But he could never completely understand the teacher’s point. If there were a way that Alicia’s talents could secure her escape from the poverty of the Schiller, he couldn’t imagine what it was. And if Mrs. Gruen knew of a method by which Alicia could utilize her gifts to flee the privation of her surroundings, then why not come out and announce it instead of hinting at some vague and hidden destiny?

By the time Alicia was a teenager, she was contributing as much to the household support as her father. She took in washing and mending and for a time she held a delivery route for Der Kehlkopf in the German Quarter of the city. But the papergirl job kept her out of the Schiller past dusk and with the pogroms increasing at this time, her worried father made her give up the position. Still, these were good years. They ate fairly well and, most important, there was enough money to prevent Alicia from having to take a violet passport, the term, at that time, given to the government license for sanctioned brothel whores.

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