the crooked stairs to the kitchen, I could hear Perl the rabbi’s wife issuing orders to the servants to scour the house for khumets, the last traces of leavened bread. So there were no oats or porridge or kasha to keep my stomach from growling, only a mugful of chicken broth and some stringy dried prunes. Hanneh the cook shouldn’t waste a piece of good meat on the new assistant shammes.
I warmed my fingers on the tin mug, while pots clattered and doors slammed all around me. Despite the noise, I overheard Avrom Khayim the old shammes telling the cook, “What do we need a fifth shulklaper for? Like a wagon needs a fifth wheel.”
But—wonder of wonders—Hanneh actually stood up for me and told the old man that the great Rabbi Judah Loew knew what he was doing. She had heard that the new man from Poland was a scholar and a scribe who had only been in Prague a few days, without a right of residency, when the great Rabbi Loew had seen a spark of promise in him and made him the unter-shammes at the Klaus Shul, the smallest of the four shuls that served the ghetto’s faithful.
Maybe Hanneh was thinking of her own husband, dead these many years, because she ended up stirring the ladle around the big pot and giving me a boiled chicken neck. I thanked her for this, one of the first signs of kindness anyone in this strange new place had shown me.
I sucked the bones dry, then went to the mirror to clean the shmaltz off my beard, and noticed with some resignation a few prematurely gray hairs curling around my temples. But I thought of the disembodied screams that had roused me from my bed, and suddenly a few gray hairs didn’t seem like such a bad thing.
I found the master putting on his short tallis.
“What should we do, Rabbi? Should we prepare for an assault?”
“Just attend to your duties, Benyamin Ben-Akiva,” he answered. “God will show us the way in due time.”
So I grabbed the big wooden club and went to chase the spirits out of the shul.
THE KLAUS SHUL STOOD in the elbow of a disreputable side street between the Embankment Street and the cemetery. I listened for the sound of spirits rustling about, then I raised the club and pounded three times on the narrow double doors and told the spirits worshipping inside to return to their eternal rest. I dug out the big iron keys, which jingled coldly in my fingers, found the right one, and opened the shul for shakhres services.
I traded my thick wool hat for a linen yarmulke, and stood on the platform in the empty shul and chanted a Psalm that was supposed to keep the restless spirits at bay. The melody wavered in the chilly air. I never claimed to be a cantor.
Back outside, I listened to the silence and prayed that it wouldn’t be shattered by the sound of boots and breaking glass. Then I doubled back and headed east along the Schwarzengasse to the far-flung Jewish houses outside the ghetto on Geist and Würfel Streets in the Christian part of Prague.
When the limits of the ghetto were established after the Papal decree of 1555, several Jewish house holds fell outside the line of demarcation, including what was left of the original Old Shul, and the rebellious Bohemians were content to ignore the shrill voices demanding that every single Jew in the city be relocated within the gates. But none of the Jews were more than a minute’s dash from the main gate, just in case they had to retreat inside the ghetto to seek shelter from the gathering storm.
Maybe it was fine for the Jews of Prague, but I wasn’t used to being cooped up like this, behind a wall.
The watchmen were still changing shifts. The night men looked beaten and tired, but their tightly drawn faces betrayed their agitation. And yet somehow I was still hoping to finish up early and go see Reyzl before she got too busy helping her family prepare for Pesach, which fell on Shabbes eve this year, when all work had to stop a half-hour before sunset.
Women carry ing heavy tubs for spring cleaning sloshed soapy water on the steps of their homes and onto the newly laid cobblestones. I had to dodge a butcher’s apprentice holding a big basket of meat on his head and step around the masons chiseling away at the