The Family Moskat by Isaac Bashevis Singer Read Free Book Online

was always engaged in some dispute or other with half the town; or his mother-in-law, who kept the food pantry locked against her daughters-in-law; or his brothers-in-law, Zad-dok and Levi, who, for all their learning and education, sat around playing chess or exchanging witticisms. When his father died--it happened in an almshouse during one of his trips away from home--
    Jonathan went to his mother and stayed there, dispatching a divorce to his wife by a messenger. Finkel was barely nineteen years old at the time.
    Asa Heshel went through all the diseases of infancy; Gimpel, the Tereshpol Minor barber-surgeon, gave up all hope for him time and again. He had measles and whooping cough, diphtheria and diarrhea, scarlet fever and ear abscesses. He would weep all night long, get fits of coughing, and turn blue, as though he were dying.
    Finkel had to carry him around in her arms all night. Very early he began to suffer from fright; anything might frighten him--the blowing of the ram's horn, a mirror, a chimney-sweep, a hen. He had dreams of gypsies stowing children in a sack and spiriting them away, of corpses that walked about the cemeteries, of ghosts that danced about behind the ritual bathhouse. He was always asking questions: How high is the sky? How deep is the earth?
    What's at the other side of the end of the world? Who made God?
    His grandmother would put her hands to her ears. "He drives me crazy," she wailed. "He's a dybbuk, not a child!"
    He attended cheder for only half a day. He quickly got the reputation of a prodigy. At five he was studying Talmud, at six -26-he began the
    Talmudic commentators, at eight the teacher had no more to give him. At the age of nine he delivered a discourse in the synagogue, and at twelve he was writing learned letters to rabbis in other towns. The rabbis would send him back long epistles, addressing him as "The Keen and Eagle-eyed" and "Uprooter of Mountains."
    Matchmakers flooded the family with matrimonial offers; the townsfolk predicted that he was sure, in God's good time, to inherit his grandfather's rabbinical chair, for what were his uncles Zaddok and Levi but empty heads and dawdlers. And then what does the promising youth do but abandon the roads of righteousness and join the ranks of the "moderns"? He would start endless disputes with the others in the study house and criticize the rabbis. He prayed without putting on the customary prayer sash, scribbled on the margins of the sacred books, made mock of the pious. Instead of studying the Commentaries he delved into Maimonides's Guide for the Perplexed and Jehuda Halevi's Khuzari. Somewhere he got hold of the writings of the heretic Salomon Maimon. He went about with his coat unbuttoned, his earlocks unkempt, his hat pushed to one side, his eyes looking into the distance beyond the rooftops. His Uncle Levi would chide him: "Don't think so much. The sky won't fall."
    The town agreed that it was Jekuthiel the watchmaker, follower of the heretic Jacob Reifman, who had brought the youth to grief.
    Jekuthiel Watchmaker had once studied under Reb Dan Katzenellenbogen, but later had gone in for worldly learning. He lived in a small house at the end of an alley, kept away from the religious folk, and fraternized mostly with the town musicians. He had a thin beard, a wide and lofty forehead, and big black eyes.
    All day he sat in his tiny workroom over his work bench, a jeweler's glass in his eye. In the evening he read, and sometimes to pass the time he played on the zither. His wife had died during an epidemic, and the children had been taken by her mother. Asa Heshel became a familiar at jekuthiel's place. The watchmaker had in his library old copies of the modern Hebrew journal Hameasef and the Pentateuch in Moses Mendelssohn's German translation, besides a collection of the German poets, Klopstock, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, as well as some old textbooks of algebra, geometry, physics, and geography. There were also the works of