As he strolled, daydreaming, across the square in the market town of Zyldzce, Menke chanced to brush against the tunic of the Obersturmführer von Graf und Trach. “Swine!” roared the Obersturmführer. “Menke Klepfish,” replied the young man, bowing and clicking his heels. And he got away with it. In fact, the chief officer of the occupying Wehrmacht task force was so amused that he designated Menke his pet Jew. But that was later on, after the barbarians, whose forewarned arrival the locals had refused to believe in, had come.
Before that, Menke had been merely the shtetl scapegrace, whom pious and not-so-pious citizens alike enjoyed disdaining for his waggish antics. This was even before he’d run off with—so it was rumored—a traveling circus, not that he seemed to have acquired any special talents during his time away from Zyldzce. He had laid claim upon his return to an ability to ropewalk, but once he’d strung a rope across the River Bug and collected five kopecks from each of the spectators, he announced from his perch, “Ladies and gentlemen, I confess I’m a fraud. Should I attempt to do what I promised, I will certainly fall into the river, and since I can’t swim, I will drown. Now if you think it’s right that a man who’s the sole support of his poor ailing mother should drown on account of your five measly kopecks, then I’m ready to commence my performance…”
It’s true that he cared for his aged mother; he may even have come back...
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