I stayed away from Kraków for many years, but when I returned, I discovered what had been missing from my life. Rabbi Simeon ben Eleazar says that the Holy One, blessed is He, endowed women with more understanding than men. And my Reyzl was living proof of this. She was strong and beautiful and endowed with a natural talent for running a trade.
And I couldn’t get enough of her. I loved her very essence, and how it lingered on my lips for hours as a sign of our love, and how I would cling to her, trying to get closer to her than is physically possible in this world, as if I were trying to annihilate the distance between us. Maybe she tasted of the womb, and fed some deep, forgotten desire to return to it, floating in warmth, protected on all sides, cared for, loved. I’d make her want me, need me, and desire me completely before she took me in. All I ever wanted was to be as essential to her as she was to me, in that moment when the rest of the world disappears and one woman becomes all women for you.
But all the years of study with sharp minds in dusty rooms hadn’t taught me what to say to her. All the Torah, the prophets, and the endless pursuit of Talmudic logic couldn’t guide me to the words I needed to set things right between us. Only the mystical Zohar had offered a hint: “The ideal man has the strength of a man and the compassion of a woman.” A tricky proposition, but I was working on it. Just not fast enough for some people, apparently.
Perhaps I should mention that it’s perfectly normal among Jews for a woman like Reyzl, whose family had some standing, to marry a poor scholar and live on her parents’ charity for a few years. But then the husband is supposed to get a prestigious position as a respected rabbi, and start building a house of his own with cooks and servants and lines of students going out the door, and well-connected people seeking his advice about money and other important matters. He’s not supposed to turn and head the other way, beyond the borders of the empire to a snow-covered wasteland near the Pripet Marshes just to study with one obscure rabbi.
It didn’t occur to me to talk it over with her first.
Not that I would have listened.
And that’s why I came to Prague.
It was time for me to listen.
THE RAMPARTS OF THE CITY were eerily silent, as the town criers held their tongues while the dreadful edict was formalized, written out, and copied by municipal scribes. And so my beloved people made their last-minute preparations to welcome Pesach in blissful ignorance of the cauldron of trouble simmering outside the walls. Tablecloths and kittels blossomed in doorways and windows along the Breitgasse as house wives shook out the special white garments, and checked the dull gray clouds for signs of rain.
Servants hired by the Jewish Town Council prowled the streets collecting for the matzoh fund, hawking the World-to-Come with their steady refrain and promising us that “Charity saves from death, charity saves from death.”
“Have you given yet?” said one of them, thrusting a tin box at my chest. The box was shaped like a house with a peaked roof, with a coin slot where the chimney should be. Hebrew letters on the front panel spelled out, tseduke, charity, though the hawkers pronounced it tsedoke.
I tried to step around the little man, but he had the legs of a spider, and quickly blocked the way again with the tseduke box.
“Listen, friend, anyone who isn’t getting from the fund has to give to it. That’s how it works. Now, you look like a fellow who could spare a few kreuzers so the poor and destitute can have matzoh on Pesach. Maybe even a couple dalers.”
I reached into my pockets. A merchant of furs and pelts had leaned out of his shop to watch, and it wouldn’t look good for the new shammes to brush off the matzoh fund on Erev Pesach. I held out a pair of copper coins that seemed to get lost in my suddenly huge hands.
“I only have a couple of groshn.”
“A couple of what?” said the little man, staring at the strange Polish coins.
“I don’t have any Bohemian money yet.”
“Not even a few pfennigs? What kind of cheapskate are you, anyway?”