taken technology to the very threshold of manned flight. Shmerl envisioned a wholesale exodus of the Jews, enabled through innovative engineering to make aliyah to the Upper Yeshiva without having to die. His own mistake, however, was to fix his propeller—fashioned from the windmill stocks whose shredded sails were replaced with taut muslin—to the interior rafters rather than the roof of the family’s hovel. He’d feared that instead of waking up in Paradise, his parents would open their eyes to a house with its roof torn asunder and midnight pouring in. As it was, the unholy racket roused Todrus and Chana Bindl from their rude mattress, whence they staggered forth in rumpled gowns to gaze blearily upon the thrashing blades. But even as the junkmonger sputtered and fumed, his wrath was checked by the breeze that cooled the room and fanned the brow of his agitated wife, who went directly into labor.
Shmerl, however, was disconsolate. He vowed to build another engine powerful enough to raise the roof of the entire planet and stir the stars into wheeling spirals, but his faith in his own abilities was severely impaired.
He returned to the mill to find that the combined weight of the various machinery parts had finally collapsed the rotting floor of the loft. A shambles, the place was the outward expression of Shmerl’s internal despair, the perfect analogue—he judged—to his arrogance and grand designs. Bereft of illusion, he concluded that all his efforts were suspect, all merely in the interest of distracting himself from another kind of yearning; though despite his intrepid investigations, he was shy of the maidens, who were put off for their part by his reputation and the bell-shaped curve of his spine. No self-respecting marriage broker would ever approach him. Consumed by remorse for his own vanity, Shmerl languished in the millwright’s wrecked quarters beyond the Shabbos boundary and the reach of a father who sought to turn a profit from his blunders.
“Every day is Yom Kippur,” he declared to his little brothers, who’d grown bored with his misery and were happy to leave him alone.
The summer wore on with a soupy heat that set the lice seething, which in turn bred an epidemic of typhus that swept through the shtetl of Shpinsk, sparing neither goyim nor Jews. There were so many funerals that the processions trotted back and forth in relay fashion from cemetery to shul. The wailing of women along the route could be heard all the way to the ruined mill, where a passing installment peddler left word that one of Shmerl’s brothers—Pinya, was it, or Melchizedek?—had fallen prey to the plague. Said Shmerl, ripping the lapel of his jerkin, “It should have been me.” The younger brother had been taken in retribution for the sins of the elder (this was his logic) and though other siblings had from time to time perished in the starveling Karpinski household, this death harrowed the conscience of the inventor as no other; the pain was acute and ineffable. While it was too late to sacrifice himself in his brother’s stead, there was still another course of action that lay open to him; yet for what he considered, Shmerl was sick with apprehension. Though the ancient texts strongly decried necromancy, he located an obscure passage in The Book of Bosmath bat Shlomo that included the prayer: “Baruch mechayei hameitim, blessed is he who raises the dead.” But however often he repeated it, Shmerl could never quite believe it was true.
Still, there was no time left to tarry; tonight was the watch night and tomorrow the dead boy’s body would be committed to the earth. Working full throttle according to certain principles of Faraday and Clerk Maxwell detailed in the journals his brothers had pilfered from Avigdor, Shmerl electrically magnetized a horseshoe. He surrounded the shoe with a halo of wooden spools bundled in soft-iron wires and insulated copper coils, further equipping the device with a notched lead gadget called a commutator, like a viper with a rubber boot heel in its jaws. Then he lowered his completed dynamo into the case of a mahogany coffee grinder and hung it around his neck by a barber’s strop. As he crept into the house in the small hours of the morning, Shmerl discerned among the usual odors—petroleum, onions—another smell, tart as citrus, which he determined as death. It was not an unfamiliar odor; death was practically a member of their family, but tonight, as he stood watching his father and