Yiddish Tales/S. Libin (Israel Hurewitz)/Manasseh
MANASSEH
It was a stifling summer evening. I had just come home from work, taken off my coat, unbuttoned my waistcoat, and sat down panting by the window of my little room.
There was a knock at the door, and without waiting for my reply, in came a woman with yellow hair, and very untidy in her dress.
I judged from her appearance that she had not come from a distance. She had nothing on her head, her sleeves were tucked up, she held a ladle in her hand, and she was chewing something or other.
"I am Manasseh's wife," said she.
"Manasseh Gricklin's?" I asked.
"Yes," said my visitor, "Gricklin's, Gricklin's."
I hastily slipped on a coat, and begged her to be seated.
Manasseh was an old friend of mine, he was a capmaker, and we worked together in one shop.
And I knew that he lived somewhere in the same tenement as myself, but it was the first time I had the honor of seeing his wife.
"Look here," began the woman, "don't you work in the same shop as my husband?"
"Yes, yes," I said.
"Well, and now tell me," and the yellow-haired woman gave a bound like a hyena, "how is it I see you come home from work with all other respectable people, and my husband not? And it isn't the first time, either, MANASSEH 367
that he's gone, goodness knows where, and come home two hours after everyone else. Where's he loitering about?"
"I don't know," I replied gravely.
The woman brandished her ladle in such a way that I began to think she meant murder.
"You don't know?" she exclaimed with a sinister flash in her eyes. "What do you mean by that? Don't you two leave the shop together? How can you help seeing what becomes of him?"
Then I remembered that when Manasseh and I left the shop, he walked with me a few blocks, and then went off in another direction, and that one day, when I asked him where he was going, he had replied, "To some friends."
"He must go to some friends," I said to the woman.
"To some friends?" she repeated, and burst into strange laughter. "Who? Whose? Ours? We're greeners, we are, we have no friends. What friends should he have, poor, miserable wretch ?"
"I don't know," I said, "but that is what he told me."
"All right !" said Manasseh's wife. "I'll teach him a lesson he won't forget in a hurry."
With these words she departed.
When she had left the room, I pictured to myself poor consumptive Manasseh being taught a "lesson" by his yellow-haired wife, and I pitied him.
Manasseh was a man of about thirty. His yellowish- white face was set in a black beard; he was very thin, always ailing and coughing, had never learnt to write, 368 S. LIBIN
and he read only Yiddish a quiet, respectable man, I might almost say the only hand in the shop who never grudged a fellow-worker his livelihood. He had been only a year in the country, and the others made sport of him, but I always stood up for him, because I liked him very much.
Wherever does he go, now? I wondered to myself, and I resolved to find out.
Next morning I met Manasseh as usual, and at first I intended to tell him of his wife's visit to me the day before; but the poor operative looked so low- spirited, so thoroughly unhappy, that I felt sure his wife had already given him the promised "lesson," and I hadn't the courage to mention her to him just then.
In the evening, as we were going home from the workshop, Manasseh said to me :
"Did my wife come to see you yesterday?"
"Yes, Brother Manasseh," I answered. "She seemed something annoyed with you."
"She has a dreadful temper," observed the workman. "When she is really angry, she's fit to kill a man. But it's her bitter heart, poor thing she's had so many troubles! We're so poor, and she's far away from her family."
Manasseh gave a deep sigh.
"She asked you where I go other days after work?" he continued.
"Yes."
"Would you like to know ?"
"Why not, Mister Gricklin !"
"Come along a few blocks further," said Manasseh, "and I'll show you." MANASSEH 369
"Come along !" I agreed, and we walked on together.
A few more blocks and Manasseh led me into a narrow street, not yet entirely built in with houses.
Presently he stopped, with a contented smile. I looked round in some astonishment. We were standing alongside a piece of waste ground, with a meagre fencing of stones and burnt wire, and utilized as a garden.
"Just look," said the workman, pointing at the garden, "how delightful it is! One so seldom sees anything of the kind in New York."
Manasseh went nearer to the fence, and his eyes wandered thirstily over the green, flowering plants, just then in full beauty. I also looked at the garden. The things that grew there were unknown to me, and I was ignorant of their names. Only one thing had a familiar look a few tall, graceful "moons" were scattered here and there over the place, and stood like absent-minded dreamers, or beautiful sentinels. And the roses were in bloom, and their fragrance came in wafts over the fencing.
"You see the 'moons'?" asked Manasseh, in rapt tones, but more to himself than to me. "Look how beau- tiful they are! I can't take my eyes off them. I am capable of standing and looking at them for hours. They make me feel happy, almost as if I were at home again. There were a lot of them at home !"
The operative sighed, lost himself a moment in thought, and then said:
"When I smell the roses, I think of old days. We had quite a large garden, and I was so fond of it! 370 S. LIBIN
When the flowers began to come out, I used to sit there for hours, and could never look at it enough. The roses appeared to be dreaming with their great golden eyes wide open. The cucumbers lay along the ground like pussy-cats, and the stalks and leaves spread ever so far across the beds. The beans fought for room like street urchins, and the pumpkins and the potatoes you should have seen them! And the flow- ers were all colors pink and blue and yellow, and 1 felt as if everything were alive, as if the whole garden were alive I fancied I heard them talking together, the roses, the potatoes, the beans. I spent whole evenings in my garden. It was dear to me as my own soul. Look, look, look, don't the roses seem as if they were alive?"
But I looked at Manasseh, and thought the con- sumptive workman had grown younger and healthier. His face was less livid, and his eyes shone with happi- ness.
"Do you know," said Manasseh to me, as we walked away from the garden, "I had some cuttings of rose- trees at home, in a basket out on the fire-escape, and they had begun to bud."
There was a pause.
"Well," I inquired, "and what happened?"
"My wife laid out the mattress to air on the top of the basket, and they were all crushed."
Manasseh made on outward gesture with his hand, and I asked no more questions.
The poky, stuffy shop in which he worked came
into my mind, and my heart was sore for him. YOHRZEIT FOR MOTHER
The Ginzburgs' first child died of inflammation of the lungs when it was two years and three months old.
The-young couple were in the depths of grief and despair—they even thought seriously of committing suicide.
But people do not do everything they think of doing. Neither Ginzburg nor his wife had the courage to throw themselves into the cold and grizzly arms of death. They only despaired, until, some time after, a newborn child bound them once more to life.
It was a little girl, and they named her Dvoreh, after Ginzburg's dead mother.
The Ginzburgs were both free-thinkers in the full sense of the word, and their naming the child after the dead had no superstitious significance whatever.
It came about quite simply.
"Dobinyu," Ginzburg had asked his wife, "how shall we call our daughter?"
"I don't know," replied the young mother.
"No more do I," said Ginzburg.
"Let us call her Dvorehle," suggested Dobe, automatically, gazing at her pretty baby, and very little concerned about its name.
Had Ginzburg any objection to make? None at all, and the child's name was Dvorehle henceforward. When the first child had lived to be a year old, the parents had made a feast-day, and invited guests to celebrate their first-born's first birthday with them.