When the Night is New by Marvin Rabinovitch (best large ebook reader TXT) 📖

an old maid.” She tittered at her own boldness.

“A very young old maid,” he amended. “An old maideleh.”

That’s what he would call their daughter when she reached thirty, affection leavened by impatience. The girl loved it on certain occasions, though it drove her almost mad on others.

“Well, I’ve told you everything,” she said. “Would you like me to read to you?”

“About old Mr. Chips?” he snorted. “No thanks!”

“Well, it’s too early to go to bed. We can play the radio. There’s ‘Treasure Trail’ on CJAD.”

“I’m not in the mood.” He seemed very restless, pacing up and down the confined space, picking up objects at random and putting them back down. She watched him beneath lowered lids, a little afraid of angering him.

“So what do you suggest?” she murmured at last.

“I’m going for a walk,” he said, almost with a groan of frustration.

“Yes, a breath of fresh air will do us both good,” she said.

They tiptoed down the stairs, afraid of attracting the attention of neighbors. The street lamps went on, casting a pearly radiance, as they emerged. A quarter moon shone mistily over the mountain whose summit and glowing cross were visible just over the low rooftops of her street. They trod on the heels of their shadows, ghostly elongated shapes that wheeled around them as they proceeded down the sidewalk. The smell of lilac hung heavy on the air. She felt a vague longing for the feel of his palm against hers, but she knew better than to suggest it or wordlessly take the initiative. After all, he belonged to Mitzi Posner.

Without consciously intending to, they headed toward the park, crossing at the lights from the built-up section to the green flat land. Scores of promenaders crisscrossed the gently sloping lawn. In the softball diamonds, pickup teams moved cautiously among the bases, taunting each other with low, hoarse cries.

A crowd had gathered around a shallow depression near the sidewalk just across the street from the Jewish old people’s home, Maimonides. A scarecrow figure in an outfit of tan with a red brassard around one arm was haranguing them, pumping the air with one fist while the other hand hooked a thumb through his belt.

“It’s a Nazi demonstration,” Adele whispered tremulously, frightened. “Let’s not go there.”

“Don’t be silly,” he admonished her. “We don’t run away from such things.”

She was starting to tremble. “They’re violent people. Things can happen. It’s dangerous.”

He laughed with contempt. “Yeah, for the speaker. He’s a poor dumb fish swimming in a Jewish sea around here. I want to see what happens.”

Reluctantly she followed as he edged closer to the outer fringes of the onlookers. They could hear the ranting voice of the Nazi now as it rose and fell in waves of staccato oratory. Using a pair of folding metal chairs opened edge to edge as a makeshift platform, the man was speaking in broken English, interspersed with foreign phrases. Adele recognized the accent. He was a French Canadian of the lowest class, those people who broke store windows after disappointing hockey games. She shuddered with fear.

“…Dem Juifs, dey got to be taught un lecon, hodderwise dey drain hus dry….”

A murmur of anger ran through the crowd, but against whom it was hard to tell. In any event, it seemed to encourage the speaker, who warmed to his theme.

“Bientot it is time for deir Passover. Den dey cut de t’roats, les gorges, of good enfants chretiens for deir blood, cook deir Passover bread with deir blood.”

“That’s what makes it taste so good,” Yashe yelled, cupping his hands around his mouth. People turned around and gave him dubious looks but were careful to keep silent.

“Yes, our blood, de blood of our saviour, le sangue sacre, taste good in Jewish mouths. Les vampires is de Jewish race, eaters of blood.”

“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,” Yashe called back. He was shaking with demonic laughter. Adele pulled desperately at his arm.

“Don’t, don’t, please stop.”

“Can’t. Having too much fun.” He shook her off.

“You like blood?” the Nazi jeered. “I give you bloody nose.” He made as if to descend from his perch on the chairs, then thought better of it.

“You dumb Pepsi!” Yashe shouted, struggling to shoulder his way through the press, “You give Hitler a bad name.”

A large man with thick, hairy forearms and an overpowering effluvium of stale sweat stood directly in his path and tried to calm him down.

“Take it easy, boychik,” he rumbled, the wide barrel of his chest impeding the younger man’s progress, “What if he’s carrying a knife or an ice pick? There’ll be enough blood to swim in then, all of it yours.”

“I don’t care,” Yashe raved, “I’ll choke the shit out of him.”

The stranger stepped aside and favored Adele with a mordant smile. “He’s hot stuff, ain’t he? Okay, ya wanna get it outta your system, go ahead. Just don’t say you weren’t warned.”

Given free rein, Yashe hesitated. In the mean time, the Nazi folded his chairs and beat a hasty retreat.

“Thank God!” Adele whispered fervently, noting the sudden departure. It was a nightmare that had unraveled just in time.

Yashe slumped beside her, as if deflated. “Lucky for him, he knew when to take a powder,” he growled with a show of ferocity. “They’re all fucking cowards when it comes to a fight.”

“Thank your lucky stars and bench goymel,” the big man said with a scornful laugh, referring to the Hebrew blessing for escape from death. “The next time you play the fire-eater, you may get burned.”

“Fuck you, asshole!” Yashe rasped, flexing his deltoids to swell his torso to intimidating proportions. “Maybe you’d like to teach me manners.”

The fellow gave him a light-hearted shove with one meaty hand. Yashe staggered back a few feet and almost lost his balance. Several bystanders snickered at the dumbshow.

“I don’t give private lessons,” his interlocutor said with a snaggle-toothed grin. “If you can gather up a minyan of likeminded boys, come see me again. Ten is my minimum class in your weight division. Just ask for Albert the butcher. Everybody around here knows me.”

Hands in pockets, he lumbered off downhill toward the Black Watch armory where a kilted color guard was lowering the flag. Yashe watched him go with a wrathful gaze.

“Nazi-lover!” he shouted after him from a safe distance, “Hitlerite!”

Albert the butcher turned but did not retrace his steps. “Ya wanna fight Hitler?” he yelled back and pointed toward the parade ground of the armory where the bare-kneed troops stood saluting, “There’s the gang you should join. Let me know when you sign up and I’ll buy you a beer.”

“Bigshot!” Yashe muttered and lit a cigarette, his response to every crisis. He shook his head and searched the sky, as if for inspiration, then turned to Adele. “It’s times like this I regret leaving Russia,” he said. “The Soviets don’t take shit from anyone.”

The Chekists he’d befriended as a boy had taught him to shoot the old Enfields with which British largesse had endowed the Czarist forces prior to Brest-Litovsk. The organs of the state could have used a strongly motivated, stalwart young fellow like himself. How smart he would have looked in uniform, with a pistol strapped to his hip. No Albert the butcher would have dared to raise his eyes, much less his voice, to such a figure of authority. Then stinking old Jeroboam had followed the spoor of money to the new world and dragged his wife and children along with him.

Adele encircled his arm with her own and tried to ease him away from this accursed circle of confrontation, but he resisted her pull. He had a score to settle with someone, somewhere. There was a sour taste in his throat. He lit another cigarette.

“I think there’s a bonfire near the soccer field,” she said. “The Zionists are probably organizing a koomzitz. Let’s go have a look. I love it when they dance the hora.”

It was strictly against municipal law to light fires on public grounds, but the YMHA had pull with the city council so that the authorities winked at breaches of these ordinances when a responsible agency guaranteed them as harmless. Muttering under his breath, Yashe permitted himself to be herded in the direction of the flickering flames.

A band of young people in white shirts and the blue, brimless headgear of the Jewish pioneers in Palestine, known as “dunce caps” and as distinctive of devotion to the Hebrew renaissance in the land of redemption as the Phrygian cap was of the Jacobin cause, were feeding a healthy young blaze with dry brush. The crackle of burning wood added an insectile stridulation to the human sounds of merriment and a shower of orange sparks swooped upward like the hot breath of a volcano. Yashe and Adele had to shield their eyes from the incandescent glare and shrank a little from the infernal heat of the fire.

A young woman somewhat older than the adolescents frolicking around the flames approached them with a smile. In one hand, she bore a pair of kovaei tembel, the kibbutznik dunce caps that everyone in attendance was wearing as a badge of allegiance to the Jewish homeland.

“Welcome, chaverim,” she said, offering them to the newcomers.

“We’re not Zionists,” Yashe told her pugnaciously. “I’m not even sure I’m Jewish.”

The woman was not put off by his tone, but quirked her lips mischievously. “There’s one sure way of finding out,” she said.

Yashe glowered at her. “The royal family of England has their kids circumcised. Maybe I’m a prince in disguise.”

“In that case, let me crown you.” Without a by-your leave, she set the dunce caps on their heads. Yashe recoiled from her, but too late. The hat sat rakishly over one eye. “Very becoming,” the woman said, “Pity you’re not a Zionist.”

“Fuckin’ bitch!” he cursed her. He opened his mouth wider to permit the emergence of more creative imprecations, but only a combination of the first two epithets followed. He looked wild enough to strike her, but with an effort restrained himself. Instead, he snatched the hat off his head and flung it, like a sacrifice to Moloch, into the flames.

A charged silence fell over the group. A burly, redheaded bruiser in shorts and sandals materialized beside the woman, radiating hostility and a certain aptitude for violence.

“Now why did you have to go and do that?” he asked softly. His raw-knuckled hands curled, not exactly into fists but more than halfway there. He spoke with a strong accent that Adele could not place but recognized, many years later, as Israeli.

“I hate your fuckin’ Zionism,” Yashe hissed. “My homeland is Biro Bidjan.” He referred to the autonomous region in the Caucuses assigned by Stalin to the Jews.

“Those hats cost a dollar ninety-nine apiece,” the woman said sadly.

“I don’t carry money on Mondays,” Yashe snarled.

“Then I’ll just have to take it out of your Biro Bidjan,” the redhead said, almost with a good-natured smile, and advanced threateningly.

“No, wait,” Adele cried. She dug desperately in her purse. “Here’s a dollar fifty. That’s all I have. Plus two streetcar fares. That makes almost a dollar sixty-five.”

She offered the money with trepidation. The redhead held out a fleshy palm, and she dropped the small change and tickets into it. He also relieved her of the dunce