My Wednesdays were at the home of a widow. She lived in an apartment
below the Dorfmans, and this, in a way, transformed my Tuesdays and Wednesdays
into adjoining "days." There, too, as on my Sundays and Mondays, the apartment
was in the back of the store.
It was quite obvious, even for a boy my age totally immersed in religious learning, that the store was completely neglected. It had the bleak look of a store where business was not even expected anymore.
I could not tell what kind of store it was, what type of merchandise it offered. As I learned later, the widow had taken it over upon the recent death of her husband and had apparently let it completely run down. Everywhere in the store, on the shelves and on the floor, there were boxes upon boxes, ripped-open cartons, stray merchandise. This was not the result of rush business, leaving no time to put things away, but of plain indifference and apathy.
The apartment did not look much better. Along with a general untidiness there was gloom in every corner. Not even the fact that the donor of my "day" had a little boy, about two-and-a-half years younger than I, seemed to have helped her to muster new energies and to overcome the shock of her husband's death.
I thought very much about the little boy without a father and about the widow without a husband, and became exceedingly preoccupied again with paired comparisons, as with the various people of my Tuesdays—the little boy and me, both fatherless; the widow and my widowed Mother; and, in each case, the parallel of a mother-and-son.
After a while I came to think that, in all likelihood, the widow gave me a "day" because she simply could not refuse Esther's request, a request by a neighbor and friend who lived upstairs.
There was no regular mealtime hours, not even for her son, so here, too, I was all alone most of the time during my three meals.
I found it difficult to eat here. While I was generally a very poor eater—how well the word "poor" went with the "eating of my days"—on my Wednesdays I ate even less, barely enough to carry me through to the next "day" at the warm and affectionate home of a baker.
My days, without quotation marks, were filled with prayers and intensive studies, and I was constantly reminded in the various religious texts, as well as by admonitions from my teachers, that suffering Jewry was in exile.
At times I consoled myself that my suffering was integral to my growing up, and that my loneliness and unhappiness were basic to my religious education.
All my teachers kept reminding me of my potential great destiny in the matter of Jewish learning. The greater their anticipations and hopes, the greater became their pressures and demands. And many a day and night did I feel weighted down with the burden of the future they foresaw for me.
In such moments I often wished I had the strength to rebel against my mentors and all their teachings.
I kept comparing and contrasting myself with the widow's little boy and found myself asking, without words—for I was ashamed to bring it up even as a question—whether or not I might have been happier were I her son. He seemed to be totally without parental supervision and without any pressure for a "learned" future . . . Would not my immense load of daily learning, from dawn to dusk, and the responsibility of my future "promise," as told and demanded by my teachers, been easier, a lot more easier? . .
I also reflected a great deal upon the widow's moods. As she apparently did not care, in my childish but "learned" judgment, for either of the two worlds, neither the lower one on earth nor the upper one after death, so did I decide in periods of despair to stop caring.
While it was the duty of every Jewish man and woman, most specifically the former, to conduct himself on earth in such ways as to earn his individual share in the "future World," I started to doubt whether my suffering was worthwhile, and to question the meaning of the whole endeavor into which I had been thrust. I also became aware of persistently growing questions about the justness of my beggarly lot and—God forgive me!—about the wisdom of the "Heavenly Management."
The awareness that such heretic questions found harbor in my mind threw me into a panic, and I responded with even greater religious fervor. I tried hard, with bodily motions to and fro during learning and praying, to banish such doubts and thoughts. I prayed longer and louder in order to silence, with the fervor of my praying words, such intruding questions and doubts.
But the questions and question marks recurred, like a neon light in the night that goes on and off. I saw myself a loser of both worlds, and my soul, poor soul, an eternal wanderer, never to be redeemed, doomed to everlasting hopelessness, without a single stop, not even a day-station in the endless cycle of time . . .