Isaac Nedinsky began to help his father on the family’s little mud-farm in Poland when he was fifteen years old. For many years he worked hard in the fields, but at times he would sneak off and stay away from work for hours. When he caught him, his father would slap him mercilessly; in fact, his father was kind of a brute, all right.

Nevertheless, Isaac was deeply dejected one morning at the end of the first great war when his father was shot in the head by the fuddled sweetheart of a revolutionary mail-clerk. That day the place swarmed with staggering people, wild and foolish from the effects of drink, and that’s why Isaac didn’t dare to pick up his father and bury him. Neither did Isaac dare to leave the woods where he was hiding.

Coward that he was, he waited five full days before he ventured to return to what was left of his father’s house. His mother and his two sisters were gone. The sweetheart of the revolutionary mail-clerk, now sobered up, with Isaac’s mother’s brooch pinned on her blouse, advised him to go away quickly before something could happen.

Isaac went away. He turned toward Germany. It was no easy journey. For days he cowered in ditches hiding from roving bands. There were times when he ate grass and plain earth; there were times when he was desperate enough to gnaw on his socks.

After two months in Germany, Isaac landed a job as an office janitor. He was not disliked, being rather conscientious in the pursuance of his humble work. After two years he married Rachel, who was not pretty, not very smart; as a matter of fact, Rachel was a downright dumb and bad woman indeed. The son from the marriage, however, was exceptionally handsome and bright.

Yes, David was his father’s joy. Thus, Isaac one day was greatly angered at seeing Erna, the tall German secretary, kicking David. What had happened? David, playfully, had grasped Erna’s leg, causing a run in her stocking. That was all. Well, Isaac was quite exasperated and raised his voice and his hand. That he shouldn’t have done. Erna shouted for help. Two young fellows appeared and bounced at Isaac. Isaac, this time, bounced back energetically and, surprised at his own strength, walloped the two fellows good and hard.

Next evening, however, he walloped nobody when he was suddenly attacked by four men in the street and beaten unconscious.

When he left the hospital four months later he could not find his bad wife Rachel and there was no trace of David, his son. Isaac looked for them long and in vain. Then there was a change of government in the country and Isaac, not a very courageous man, left in a hurry.

In Austria, surprisingly enough, Isaac found work quickly as a watchman in a great freight-yard. There he worked somehow listlessly, day in, day out. There he was not liked at all and his colleagues got pretty tired of listening to his endless mournful tales about Rachel and David. His colleagues, furthermore, neither relished nor believed his tall story about the fuddled sweetheart of the revolutionary mail-clerk who had shot his father. And, in fact, Isaac told that story much too often.

His meager savings were invested in futile searches for his wife and child. He was fired one Thursday around five o’clock in the afternoon, but that didn’t matter much as the government in this particular country changed two hours later anyway. So Isaac, no hero as ever, fled northward this time, to Czechoslovakia.

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In Czechoslovakia he found work immediately. Again he had the care of a small office building, but this was a much friendlier place—he was better paid, it was nicer all around, and the people even seemed to mind less when he told what they thought to be “triste little fibs.”

All the time Isaac longed bitterly for his son. He visualized him growing up—handsome, virile, happy. And new visions stubbornly appeared before his mind: the brooch of his poor mother, the pale face of his little sister who had had the measles three times in a row. . . . Where, great God, were they all? His mother? His sisters? David, his son? Rachel, his wife?

One day his modest popularity sank swiftly. He was called to help at an extra big mailing and, for hours, he wetted the gummed parts of sharp envelopes with his lips. All office workers pitched in folding letters, stuffing them into envelopes. Yes, Isaac tried to combat his notion at first, but the longer he looked at the girl standing in front of him across the table, the more he seemed to recognize how similar she looked to Erna, the tall German secretary who had so cruelly kicked his son. Isaac stared at her. He couldn’t help it. He became more and more absent-minded. He gave insolent answers to people who wanted to know what had got into him.

His declining popularity—little did it matter. There came a change in the government of this country and this time it was not a more or less quiet, smooth change at all. Isaac fled faster than ever—to Poland. The escape was not easy, though. Wherever he went, he encountered German soldiers. Again he hid for days. He tore turnips out of the soil, he ate a dead sparrow raw.

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In Poland no janitor job nor any other job waited for him. He never told his stories any more. He got sick. Isaac contracted what appeared a very silly sickness—a hiccough, a ridiculous hiccough that began as a succession of little spasmodic gulps and soon changed into sustained attacks of a rasping cough that lasted for hours. People in the municipal kitchen were greatly annoyed at all that noise.

Isaac’s malady lasted for long months. He grew very weak. He held countless odd jobs but his hiccough always got him fired before he could serve a single week. Even while he slept, his lungs and his throat jerked convulsively and continuously; his comrades in the poorhouse barracks were greatly annoyed.

Isaac’s hiccough abated a little at a time when the official government decided to leave Poland in a hurry. Isaac himself managed to escape to Hungary. Naturally, this time he had not the ghost of a chance to find a janitor’s job; in fact, he had hardly been in the country for two days when he was shipped to Austria.

In Austria the hiccoughs returned and all his haunting visions. He had no time to look for work because again he was sent back to Hungary, thrown into a Danube barge, and left on the river with about seventy fellowmen. On the barge Isaac ate wood splinters and moss scraped from the logs that held the barge together. He hardly noticed that two men went crazy and that an elderly couple went overboard. His hiccoughs subsided. In the pocket of the girl who quietly died at his side he found a small chocolate bar.

Isaac stayed in Rumania for six weeks only. A policeman who questioned him one day had but little understanding for relapsing hiccoughs and was convinced that this Isaac here was trying to poke fun at him. So the policeman smashed into Isaac’s nose until he felt bone and cartilage give way.

Isaac looked rough now with his battered face. On his way to Italy, he occasionally thought of suicide but he knew that he did not have the courage to end his life. Isaac felt old, very old and worn. Once arrived, he found a strange government in the land with strange new ways, and it didn’t take him long to realize that this government just wasn’t cut out to lose any love on him. It could happen now that Isaac at night wept silently like a beaten child.

And on his way to France, this unmanly business of crying became quite a habit with him indeed. This man hardly over fifty, so many of his companions felt, should have strength enough to pull himself together. Well, Isaac quite often lacked that strength.

When the government was so painfully changed in France, Isaac had no chance to vanish as he had so often done before whenever a government changed. But the Germans who rounded him up did not treat him too badly. Somehow, and strangely enough, they never suspected that this decrepit-looking individual was a Jew. Some weird character, some small-time boxer taken to drink, they thought. Yet he was sent to Poland anyway. There, in a sawmill, for more than three years, Isaac stacked boards that—he was smilingly told—were destined for a special camp. His fellow workers whispered incredible stories about that special camp. To his German guard he told endless yarns about his mother’s brooch stolen by a Bolshevik harlot, and he became quite liked as he always stressed the Bolshevik association of his father’s murderer. Why, even when he insanely assured his German guard that he, Isaac, was a Jew, his revelation was received as a splendid joke and he became even more popular. When at last, late in 1945, the German guard found out that Isaac actually was a Jew, he heavily pummeled his face, in which this time nose and cartilage presented no more obstacles.

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Isaac survived the second great war. He came back to Czechoslovakia where the government had changed again, and he came to Austria that now had no particular government of her own. Isaac came back to a Germany defeated, suspicious, cold—the government extinct.

In Bremen, Isaac, agelessly old, agelessly worn, stepped on a boat and crossed the ocean. Not once during the entire voyage did he mention his mother’s brooch or Rachel or David, his son.

At Staten Island, he learned to spell and to pronounce correctly the name of the friendly rabbi who had made possible his transfer from the old, very old world to the new, or at least newer, one.

Arriving at his destination, a Midwestern town, Isaac, miraculously, was still energetic enough every day to tie his shoelaces, to put on his shirt and coat, to walk, to move his jaws in order to eat. Miraculously, he was able to study the new language at a night school for recent refugees, not doing badly. One evening, the teacher, a young wholesome woman, enthusiastic but a bit inexperienced, decidedly overrated the capacities of her pupils. Tired of the routine of spelling and pronouncing exercises, she began to introduce a new progressive teaching method by reading and explaining chosen excerpts from good books. This evening, she told her pupils about a book called The Grapes of Wrath, the sad story of Oklahoma farmers who lose their land, wander, suffer, and endure. The pupils could not follow her too well except when she came to the following simple passage:

“This here is William James Joad, dyed
of a stroke, old, old man. His folks buried
him becaws they got no money to pay for
the funerls. Nobody kilt him. Just a stroke
and he dyed.“

Isaac at this point couldn’t help thinking of his father. The room was stuffy. He coughed and, suddenly, his hiccoughs returned. As Isaac seemed unable to check the rapid contractions of his poor windpipe, some diverted pupils grinned, some laughed. The teacher was visibly irritated, thinking the disturbance intentional. She looked hard at Isaac and said coldly: “Why, Mr. Nedinsky … I must say . . . really!”

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