The Family Moskat by Isaac Bashevis Singer Read Free Book Online Page A

Spinoza, Leibnitz, Kant, and Hegel. Jekuthiel gave Asa Heshel the key to his house and the youth spent entire days there, reading and studying.
    He only
    -27-half understood
    the German. He struggled over the problems in mathematics and drew geometrical figures with a piece of chalk on a board. When his grandfather learned that the boy had thrown himself into the study of worldly books he disowned him. His mother's eyes were swollen with weeping. But Asa Heshel stuck to his new path. Often he would stay for the evening meal at Jekuthiel's. While the older man prepared the food, he discussed philosophy with Asa Heshel.
    "All right, let's assume that the earth was torn away from the sun"--
    Jekuthiel spoke with the traditional prayerhouse chant--"does that settle the matter? There still has to be a First Cause."
    Asa Heshel swallowed all the books at a gulp. He managed to plow his way through the Russian and Polish with the help of a dictionary, the Latin from a Vulgate that Jekuthiel had borrowed from the priest. The "emancipated" Jews near by in Zamosc heard of him and began to send him books from their own library. Jekuthiel even wrote out for him a list of works that might help him go on to higher education without the help of a university. But years passed and little came of his undisciplined efforts. He began courses of study but never completed them. He was reading without system, browsing here and there. The eternal questions never gave him rest: Was there a God or was everything, the world and its works, mechanical and blind? Did man have responsibilities or was he accountable to no higher power? Was the soul immortal or would time bring everything to oblivion? In the long summer days he would take a crust of bread, a pencil, and paper and go off into the forest, or he would climb up to the attic of his grandfather's house, sit himself down on an upturned water barrel, and daydream. Each day he would make up his mind anew to leave the town, and each day he stayed. He had neither money for travel nor any idea how he might earn his keep out in the great world. Ever since he had departed from the accepted ways, his mother had begun to ail.
    She had taken off her matron's wig and went about with a shawl over her head, in the manner of a mourner. She lay in bed for days at a time, reading her prayerbook. His sister, Dinah, complained that because of him she could not find a husband.
    Reb Dan Katzenellenbogen's enemies began to discuss bringing a new rabbi to the town.
    His grandmother Tamar was no longer alive. His father had disappeared. Some people said that he was somewhere in Galicia -28-and had
    taken another wife; others said that he had died. Whenever Asa Heshel talked about going away, his mother would tremble and red spots would flare up on her cheeks.
    "You, too, will leave me," she wept. "Dear Father in heaven."
    During this time it happened that Reb Paltiel, one of the synagogue elders, lost his wife. After the prescribed thirty-day mourning period he sent a matchmaker to Finkel. Asa Heshel's grandmother seized on the idea and his uncles hastened to talk his mother into it. Reb Paltiel promised to sign over to Finkel a house he owned and put aside a dowry for Dinah. But he stip-ulated that Asa Heshel leave the town.
    "He's too smart for me," Reb Paltiel declared. "I don't like his goings on."
    These things Asa Heshel brought with him to Warsaw--his grandfather's maledictions and predictions that he would come to no good; his mother's prayer that Elijah the prophet, the friend of the friendless, would intercede to save him in his trials; a nickel-plated watch from Jekuthiel. Todros Lemel, head of the modern Jewish school in Zamosc, gave him a letter of recommendation to the learned Dr. Shmaryahu Jacobi, secretary of the Warsaw synagogue, written in Hebrew, in a flowery and ornate script.
    The letter read:
    To my illustrious teacher and guide, world-renowned sage in Law and Enlightenment, Reb Shmaryahu Jacobi, long