paving stones. Then I nodded to another shammes, who was out collecting “wheat money” so the poor visitors would have matzoh to night. Two Jews were handing sacks of flour to a couple of Christians to store the forbidden khumets for the next eight days.
The big eastern gate rose up in front of me. Penned-in with no place to go, the Jews had built one house on top of another along the narrow streets of the Jewish Town. After a few years away from city life, I’d gotten used to the grassy paths and open pastures outside Slonim, which calmed my spirit and helped me talk to God. How could a man talk to God on a street like this? I mean, besides a cry for help.
“Stop right there!”
The gatekeeper laid a hand on my chest.
“Where’s your Jew badge?”
“My what?”
“Listen, stranger, you’ve got to wear the Jew badge whenever you leave the ghetto. You got that?”
“Yes, sir.”
I hurried back to the house with the stone Lion of Judah over the doorway and persuaded one of the Christian servant girls to take a moment out of her busy morning to sew a bright yellow ring on my cloak.
We don’t have such things in Slonim.
I rushed back to the gatekeeper, who let me through this time, now that I was wearing the gelber flek, the yellow stain required by an imperial decree—the Reichspolizeiordnung.
The street outside the ghetto was quiet compared to the Schwarzengasse, with only a few whores and drunken soldiers refusing to call it a night, crossing paths with clear-eyed kitchen maids and shop keepers with pink cheeks as round as apple dumplings. They all looked harmless enough, but I knew very well how the sunniest Christian faces could turn mean in an instant once an accusation is made.
I avoided eye contact as I walked down the Geistgasse, crunching over a thin layer of frost that had settled on the old stones. And I almost jumped out of my boots when a couple of rats scurried around my ankles, joining a slithering mass of rodents swarming over a piece of fallen meat. I’ve seen plenty of field mice in my time, but these city rats were huge.
Hoofbeats rang off the pavement, and suddenly the rats scattered as a horse-drawn cart clattered over them and came barreling right toward me. I jumped to the side and the cart thundered past, nearly crushing me beneath its wheels, the driver violently whipping his horses while his big-boned helper held on for dear life. They just missed flattening a tiny Christian servant girl as the heavy cart swung east onto Stockhausgasse and rattled away.
My heart was pounding, and I hoped that no one had seen the panic in my eyes.
Bohemia was relatively safe for the Jews these days, certainly safer than the other parts of the German Empire, where Protestants and Catholics had been furiously fighting for control of the soul of Europe ever since the reformists broke from the Roman Church a few de cades back. And for a while it seemed like a good plan to just step back and let them fight each other, but we have a saying in Yiddish: A cat and a mouse will make peace over a carcass.
And spring is open season on Jews. Holy Week and Eastertide were especially risky, and a gambling man would say that we were long overdue for some old-fashioned Jew-hatred. Every year the Jews got thrown out of somewhere. The lucky ones merely got beaten up, had their property stolen, and escaped with their books and the clothes they happened to be wearing at the time. But one Easter a while back, a mob of enraged Christians had practically burned down the entire Jewish Town, leaving only the blackened stone shul and a few crummy houses that refused to fall over. Three thousand people murdered in one weekend, all because some idiot said that a Jewish boy had thrown a handful of mud at a passing priest.
Some say it was worse than just mud, but I don’t believe that for a minute. What Jew in his right mind, outnumbered by hostile and well-armed outsiders, would invite such trouble?
When my ancestors first set foot in the land of Babylonia, they didn’t rush around smashing the idols, they made the place their home and wrote the monumental Babylonian Talmud there.
The Bohemian capital was as alien as pagan Babylon in many ways, but I knew enough to move closer to the wall and yield to