Mendele: Yiddish literature and language --------------------------------------------------- Contents of Vol. 1 no. 12 June 4, 1991 1) "Old Age" by I.B.Singer (Golda Werman) 1)------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 4 Jun 91 12:25 +0300 From: RWERMAN@HUJIVMS.HUJI.AC.IL Subject: Isaac Bashevis' story This is Bashevis' first published piece, winning a competition and prize. It was published in the Litteratishe Bletter, in 1925. We hope you like it. Old Age (Growing Old) ^^^ ^^^ I.B.Singer [Litteratishe Bletter, 1925] Translated by Golda Werman copyright 1991 USA. All rights reserved. While his wife was alive Gimpel Bedner was still something of a "mentsch". True, it was years since he had worked as a water carrier and they lived only on what Sheindel was able to earn selling milk. But Sheindel managed; she bought milk for everyone from the peasants and kept it in large earthen crocks in the store-room of their house, she made her own butter, and from time to time she even carried back a sack of corn on her shoulders. Gimpel always lay on the iron bed with his pants on and barefoot. He was half paralyzed and had a broken arm, so he couldn't work any more. He hardly ever left the house except for the high holidays when he dragged himself to the synagogue on crutches. Meanwhile Gimpel's daughters, children of his old age, grew up and left home to work as servants in the big city, returning for a week each summer: they were tall, good-looking girls, who wore low-cut dresses and flesh-colored stockings. In town they all talked about them and exchanged ugly stories, but Gimpel knew nothing of this. When he saw them coming through the door his iron-black, unkempt face would light up and, struggling to close his perpetually unbuttoned pants, he would draw a deep sigh and blurt out breathlessly: "Oy--ay--a good year to you!" Every year they brought new clothes and clean linens for their father; then the windows, which were always shut, would be opened, and the house would smell of perfume, and the rags which were always scattered over the floor would disappear as if the earth swallowed them, and the ceiling would light up, and the little house would become bright and festive. Gimpel never stopped sighing with pleasure. Once, in a fatherly way, he spoke to his wife about them. "I can't understand where they got their good looks," he said to her. "I don't remember that you were as pretty as they are--eh? Oy." His leg suddenly began to throb with pain. In those days he was still the head of the family, he had a little house, an inheritance from his grandfather, he had a wife, and he had children. When a housewife came to buy milk and butter and Sheindel was not at home, Gimpel used to haggle with her: "I can't reduce the price, believe me it costs me as much...I should live so".... The real problems began when Sheindel fell in a peasant woman's house, and died. By the next day there wasn't even a piece of bread in the house, and no one to buy any for him. Good friends completely forgot about him, and the peasants didn't honor the deposits which Sheindel had left for milk. Elke, the neighbor with the long, yellow teeth, did come in for the first few days to cook some unpeeled potatoes and to let out a loud, heartbreaking "Oy" from time to time. The groan was a sign that she wanted to give one of her first-hand reports about the latest tragedy in town. She would moan quietly and bend from side to side until someone finally asked her why she was groaning so, and what happened. This time Gimpel heard some bad news. "They say that your daughters are doing shameful things in Lublin...yes, they know it for a fact...they even say that they are about to come back".... This is how Gimpel learned that not only had he lost a wife, but that he no longer had children, either. He fastened his eyes on the dark floor and as he peeled the potatoes with his long, black nails, his emaciated, stiff hands shook so uncontrollably that he couldn't bring the food to his mouth. "Nu, if that's how it is," he bellowed and doggedly scratched his moist, tangled beard, "let it be so." ****************************** His daughters returned, rented a little house outside of town, put flowerpots in the windows, wore red dresses and green hats, and walked through the streets perfumed, with silk kerchiefs on their heads. Fat housewives wagged their fingers and pointed at Gimpel's daughters, cursing and mocking them at the same time. Tradesmen, Jews who knew Gimpel, would accost the daughters while staring at their sinful faces: "You should be ashamed of yourselves for bringing such disgrace on your father in his old age." Gimpel, for his part, became a bes-medresh Jew. Days on end he would sit near the stove in the synagogue study-house mumbling passages from the Psalms, smoking leaves taken from the bath-house brooms, and always keeping his stiff, twisted hand open. Since the arrival of his daughters his body had become even stiffer than before. Nonetheless his appetite remained good, just like a peasant's. If anyone brought carrots, he ate them, if someone passed around handfuls of cooked beans, he ate them, too. Since Gimpel's daughters came to town the young men in the study-house, full of sinful thoughts, made it a practice to take their texts to the window where they sat with glazed eyes and smiling lips, finding it difficult to concentrate. They would turn to Gimpel and say: "Greetings from your daughters, Reb Gimpel. They want to catch a student from the study-house on their fishing pole. Would you know why? I mean, haven't they told you?" Then everyone would choke with laughter and pinch each other. Once, tired of reading the Psalms, Gimpel responded to the young students with a prank: "The story is right, believe me...eh? Quick, a radish, give me a radish. Without a radish my throat is dry." The older members of the congregation were not around, so the students indulged him with radishes which they peeled and cut into slices; Gimpel bit into them with strong, bovine teeth and shaking his head like an animal chewing its cud, rewarded the group with some vulgar patter. He even talked about his own daughters. "Never mind," he said, "they earn their money honestly." And he accompanied this with a smile from his twisted lips, aware, even while doing it, that he had lost control of his senses. Gimpel shut one eye, waited for the smile to disappear and remained speechless, wearing the expression of someone who had made a public spectacle of himself. Then he returned to his Psalm Book with the tobacco stained pages and mumbled something from it while moistening his dry fingers to turn the page. He mixed up the words and confused the order of the verses, reading the last line before the first; all the while the young students pinched each other until their arms turned black and blue. "It's a pity that you didn't learn the bakery trade, Reb Gimpel," they said. "You already know how to knead and mix, just like a genuine baker. ****************************** In the winter the roof of Gimpel's little house suddenly collapsed, and he began to spend his nights in the bes-medresh. At first no one said anything, but after a while the older congregants became annoyed and holding their hairy noses up high they sniffed the air for bad odors, while they complained bitterly to each other in whispers: "What a disgusting stench," they said, pointing towards the stove, "it's suffocating." They took out their snuff boxes and offered them around to see whether the smell of the tobacco would cancel out the bad odor. But after long consideration they reverted to their first estimate of the situation. "It's a profanation of God's name," they said. "One simply may not even mention a holy word under these circumstances." Chanina, a young porter with a full head of hair, a fleshy face, and a little blonde beard, said that he had seen with his own eyes how the old man had made the wash basin impure. What a commotion broke out in the study-house; they ordered the water in the wash-basin to be thrown out, everyone removed his phylacteries and Mordecai Joseph, the trustee of the ritual bath, a cripple and very influential, who is always seated near a book-stand studying Midrash, pressed his twisted body forward on his heavy cane, and shouted at the top of his lungs: "Gimpel and his daughters have sullied the whole town," he screamed. "We've put up with enough from him, enough! Get a horse and wagon and take him away! Take him there to the, you know, his whores--the apple doesn't fall far from the tree." His green, moist eyes glared with anger under their thick eyebrows and he inhaled deeply through his long red nose, breathing in and spitting out, breathing in and spitting out. He assailed the beadle for permitting it and accused the wardens of being ignoramuses, noting that according to the law they are not fit to be officers in the synagogue; the children were told to bring him various books and with his long, deathly-white finger he pointed to the specific place in the Shulchan Aruch where it said so. "'Distance yourself the space of four arm lengths from excrement and urine and if a nightpot filled with feces and urine is left in the room, it is not permitted to pray there.' Do you understand or not? It couldn't be more clearly stated, and it comes straight out of the Gemora; here, see for yourselves!" He took out one holy book after another, sneezed from too much tobacco, talked about the piggish mouths and the fact that today's prayers are called an abomination'." The wardens were frightened at the rules he cited. "That's it, take him away now," they ordered. "Tell Hirsh Malcha to come with his horse right away so that we can get this business over with!" ***************************** An hour later Gimpel was lying in a bed with a pillow under his head, covered with a red quilt. An unkosher odor permeated the little room, there were pictures of naked women on the walls, and something was cooking in the kitchen. Both of Gimpel's daughters were dressed in nothing but their bodices and red, scandalously short slips, and they sullenly hummed a tune while ironing clothes. They had discussed sending him away to the hospital in Lublin that very night, they had argued about money, and they had heaped abuse on Hirsh Malcha, the coachman. Gimpel lay with his eyes closed, half asleep, from time to time heaving a deep and bitter sigh. "Oy--ayyaiyai!" The younger daughter was overcome by pity for her father and approached his bed to talk to him: "You will want for nothing in the hospital, Tatte. We will work and pay just like everyone else." Suddenly a very tall, pockmarked soldier with a white sword hanging at his side, came to the door where he stood motionless, looking at Gimpel with a stupid, mocking, drunken gaze. The older daughter shot an angry sideward glance towards her father, and not knowing what to do with him she picked at her ear while trying to think up a solution. For a few moments she stood this way; then she quietly stepped over to his bed. "Move a little closer to the wall, Tatte," she whispered in a firm and businesslike tone, as if she were discussing an illegal transaction with an accomplice. "Do you hear me or not? Lie just like that until I tell you that you can move. That's the way...that's it."