Moyshe from Modvelt

As Itsik drove down from the bungalow colony in his father-in-law’s bouncy-springed old car in the dark, he whistled to keep himself awake. He’d left Myra and Shirley up there to enjoy themselves because he could only stay up there on the weekends. He couldn’t take off so much time from work in the pharmacy. The other husbands were going to carpool back to the city at dawn on Monday morning but he hated to get up so early so had decided to drive back on Sunday evening.

After a day of swimming and sun, his body felt both refreshed and tired, and he was wary of being lulled into slumber by the monotony of the path thrown ahead on the pavement by his headlights. Almost the only other light came from the occasional mysterious glow of the eyes of rabbits from the grass verge on his right. They were like accents to the tune he was whistling, like the delicate pings of triangles in the percussion section of an orchestra.

Once, he thought, he would have been eager to write down this image and use it in a poem, in a novel, but now it was no use to him. You couldn’t put such things in a play script or a screen play. And the rabbits’ eyes glowing would be impossible to capture on film. He imagined himself mentioning this to Rafe Phillips, his backer. But no, Phillips was all business. His arranging to fly Itsik out to California to make a Yiddish film, the first...