A Strand of Hair
Published in Issue #22 Translated from Hebrew by Herbert J. Levine and Reena Spicehandler subscribe to unlock the full storyTranslators’ Introduction:
We sometimes forget that the current generations of Jews are not the first to worry that our descendants may not be Jewish. More than a hundred years ago, while living in Odessa in the last period of his life, Mendele Mocher Seforim (named after his character, the itinerant book seller) began a series of Hebrew stories on the Jewish holidays, of which he completed five. (This is the third to appear in Jewish Fiction .net). These are unlike anything else in his oeuvre in Yiddish or Hebrew, as they are not satires. They are attempts at constructing a viable world of Jewish belief and commitment, rather than deconstructing the existing social structures through irony and ridicule. We offer you this story that revolves around Passover as a poignant example of how tradition and modernity collided a hundred years ago, even as they continue to collide around our Seder tables.
As spring arrives, work increases in the world of the Holy Blessed One! Every living thing — from crawling animals to four-legged ones, from birds to human beings — comes out for its tasks, builds and repairs, cleans and sets up nests and homes in caves and in holes, in fields and in forests, in hamlets and in villages. At such a time, the female rules the home. By her order, windows are opened which had been closed during the rainy season; by her word, the household furnishings are moved about. She changes the places of the tables and chairs, the benches, beds and wardrobes, and rearranges them at her will. And woe to the person who resists and angers her, for she can burn him with the exhalation of her breath. At such times, a wise husband sits apart and is quiet.
Gabriel Karpas, who is both a wise man and a wise husband, sat alone in his room on the fourteenth day of the month that marks the Spring, close to his writing desk, with bent head and furrowed brow, glancing up at intervals toward a battered, much-diminished bookcase in the corner. He seemed in great distress and sunk in difficult thoughts. Many movables this case had held from the time it had been brought to the Karpas home until it wound up in this room, where it had been standing for several years, like a poor person, behind other finer cases, and...
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