The Flood
Published in Issue #27 Translated from Yiddish by Daniel Kennedy subscribe to unlock the full storyOld Zadok the tallis-dealer awoke around three in the morning when in Tiberias the rains were still pouring down. He opened the narrow window of his cabin, just as Noah on the Ark had done, in order to see if the flooding had subsided.
Zadok did not recognize his surroundings: Tiberias was drowning—streams of water poured down from the hills. The streets, the houses were sluiced in surging currents, as though they were being washed away. Here a torn off shutter, here a dismantled roof, was battered by torrents of water. Even the wooden synagogue across the way floated like an untethered boat. For fear that God was punishing the Earth with a second Great Flood, the old man hastily shut the window.
In the dark he stepped into his slippers, tied his caftan, and lit the kerosene lamp.
His first act was to open up his two large trunks of merchandise. He removed the folded tallisim, stood up on the twisted bench and placed them, one by one, on the uppermost shelf—the further from the ground his merchandise was, the safer it would be. On top of the tallisim he placed mezuzahs in wooden frames, brass frames, along with bundles of tsitsis. When his work was done he strode into the other room to where his son Zorekh was sleeping.
Perhaps out of fear for his old age, or perhaps fear of the dangers of the flood, Zadok did not wish to be alone. He roused his son who’d been snoring like a...
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