Onju

What he said was often difficult to understand. He jumped from one topic to another and lost the thread of his discourses, so that he ended on a different subject than he had intended at the beginning of the conversation.

Still, everyone loved him. Despite all his faults, he exuded humanity and goodness, so that everyone liked to approach him with their problems and only very rarely left him without feeling a sense of relief. As much as he lacked the ability to captivate larger audiences, so much more was it possible for him to provide comfort in private conversation, to help or cheer up a desperate man so that his almost insoluble problem seemed small, insignificant and no longer unmanageable.

He had his office hours every morning between ten and twelve o’clock. He waited for his visitors in a small room on the second floor of an office building that was right next to the synagogue. It was rare that the rabbi received visitors at other times, but it was possible. One could telephone him at home and get an appointment before or after a wedding, a funeral or a circumcision. Even if he only had a few minutes, it was more important to the rabbi to listen to the concerns of the petitioners than to dismiss them.

One day the rabbi got a call that was different than the many daily others he received. It was a male voice that was familiar to him, but he couldn’t recall the face that it belonged to. It...