Harry Gersh’s widely remembered portrait of the kochalein as an institution appeared in these pages four years ago. We return to the scene for this story, in quite a different vein, by the fiction-writer Jack Luria.
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Summers blazed hot and endless when I was a boy on the East Side of New York during the early 20’s. Day and night the clamor of the steaming streets reached in through the wide open windows until there was no place to go, no place to hide. My widowed mother, who vowed every year that she would never go to the country again, would break down the last week in July. She would thumb through her Hebrew calendar and sigh, “Blessed be the Name, the month of Tammuz we’ve dragged ourselves through alive, but for the weeks left yet until Rosh Hashonah I have no strength.”
She would start packing, groaning all the while, “Who knows how it’s better to die—by going to the country or choking in the city?” A dozen times, as the bulging sacks and cartons piled up, she changed her mind. My two sisters and I, to whom going to the kochalein meant a new life, hardly dared to breathe. Not until we were on board the Hudson Day Line boat bound for Kingston Point could we be sure that God had once more been good to us.
These were our happiest moments: all around us were the beauty of the rolling hills and the magnificence of the boat. We spread ourselves over camp stools on the very top deck (the windiest), ate hard-boiled eggs and rolls, and kissed Mama in gratitude. We tiptoed into the carpeted salon where on a sunken bandstand four elderly Germans with Hindenburg mustaches were playing Strauss waltzes. How grandly the dignified white-haired ladies sat in their wicker chairs and listened! Here if Mama opened her mouth to speak a Yiddish word, we shushed her scornfully into silence. We felt luckier than a human being had the right to be.
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There was always a moment of uneasiness when Schaine’s husband, Yankel, met us at the railroad station with his horse and buggy. “And where do you think we’ll find enough room for another cockroach?” he asked my mother. But soon Mama and Yankel were hard at work over the problem of getting both us and our supply column onto his buggy, and we children fell to kissing the horse.
Yankel was a small, thin old man who seemed to belong to his horse, Yushke. Always Yankel had a rich horsey smell about him and fascinated us by calmly rolling cigarettes with one hand while with the other he guided the horse’s reins. He scorned American mothers for ruining their children by withholding the strap. Hence his ruddy face scowled easily at children, except when he sat behind Yushke. Then nothing disturbed his calm but a fit of independence in the horse, who had a habit at times of going where he, not Yankel, wished to go. The old man was naturally somewhat hard of hearing. But when he finally got us all onto the buggy and started giddyapping the horse home, it was wonderful to see how he sank into a web of blissful, absolute deafness.
On that first buggy ride from the village we used to point out all the landmarks—the bee farm, the plum tree orchard, the general store where we went for ice cream, the cornfield from which we were chased by dogs, the path to the cattail swamp. But we would always say to one another, “I don’t remember what Schaine’s farm looks like. Do you?” And then the horse turned into the dilapidated yard and we jumped gleefully from the buggy and took in the familiar things again—the crumbling weather-beaten barn, the rambling gray house with the green shingles, the old pump with the littlest children dredging the mud from the “river” which flooded over from the wooden trough. Just like last year and the year before that!
But here came Schaine Shamroyevsky, mistress of our country haven. She was a mountain of a woman, as big as Yankel was small. Her embraces were bear hugs, and her kisses overflowed with warm affection. Since we had come in the middle of the season into a full house, Schaine and Yankel would have to sleep in the hayloft in the barn; we would have their own tiny room next to the kitchen. But to make my mother, whom she loved with a true mother’s love, welcome, Schaine would have given up her share in the world to come.
Schaine’s farm was a kochalein, which means literally “cook for yourself.” Vacationing at Schaine’s was inexpensive, but one needed strength to survive the bargain. For about sixty dollars for the season, which could last from Memorial Day to Chanukah if one wished, each family had a sleeping room, cooking and food storage privileges in a communal kitchen with half a dozen wood stoves, and daily delivery of groceries from the village. Milk Schaine supplied from her tiny herd of cows; tomatoes, cucumbers, and string beans came from her garden. Into a house with ten rooms came close to fifteen families; doubling was permitted and some rooms had four beds.
The roomers came from dingy tenement houses on the East Side and Williamsburg, and Schaine’s resort made them summer equals of millionaires with country homes. The trees, the sun, the air were the same. And if sometimes life became bitter with quarrels over children or which half-empty bottle of milk in the icebox belonged to whom, we could always escape to the sweet quiet of the meadows and the piney fragrance of the woods. When we returned finally, as we perforce had to, usually the storm had passed—who could make peace between angry pullers of hair like Schaine?
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Quarrels in Schaine’s kitchen were as inevitable as gefilte fish on Friday night. The kitchen was the nerve center. Here the fifteen women converged and battled for survival three times a day. “If you have cooked a summer in Schaine’s kitchen,” my mother used to say, “you need not fear the tortures of Gehennom in the world to come.”
“There must be a system,” Mamie Yarmolow used to say about the kitchen. Schaine herself believed in God, good will, and laissez-faire. Yet she was willing to try Mamie’s systems although no system ever worked longer than a day or two. There were just too many women for the number of stoves.
Mamie’s favorite was the three-shift plan—early cookers, middle cookers, and late cookers, and everyone rotating from week to week. All this was fine in theory, but what could you do if the children’s stomachs didn’t know of systems and clamored for food? And what if an early cooker didn’t come on time—you were to let the stove go idle? Or go even up the score between a slow pot-roaster and a quick broiler of steaks. Mamie tried picking numbers, pulling straws, tossing coins. She tried queue formations with special priorities for women with infants under a year, or visiting husbands. In the end the law of the subway ruled—rush and grab. If you were polite, you stood and waited.
To us children the kitchen was strictly off limits. “We don’t have trouble enough—we need children under our feet yet!” cried the women. And because it was a place forbidden, it had an almost exotic appeal. Always the fragrance of burning pine and hemlock hung about it and mingled with a hundred other smells that lay over the harassed women like comforting balm. Even on weekdays the prosaic odors of borsht and meatballs rolled in sweet and sour cabbage drew me. But on Fridays what cheer there was in the music of a bevy of women chopping their gefilte fish all at once! What a wonderful mishmash of smells: there were cinnamon and butter buns and huckleberry and raspberry pies baking—and apple sauce and stuffed derma and tsimmes (shredded carrots cooked in fat and sugar). But thrusting aside these paler odors there would come forth the compelling aroma of the Shabbos tcholent—meat and potatoes and fat simmering on a slow fire for hours and hours and gathering strength and grace with each passing moment! Blessed those who only even smelled—thrice blessed the tasters!
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Schaine, the impartial umpire, the dispenser of even-handed justice, was never far away when the cooking was at its height. She hovered anxiously about—a mother hen watching over her chicks. Without her the place would have exploded through the sheer inflammability of so many people thrown so close together. If a quarrel arose, she would repeat the Yiddish proverb, “If two quarrel, both are at fault.” She sought to convince both opponents that they were innocent of ill will, that the angels were weeping to see such saintly women guilty of the terrible sin of anger. “Because Moses became angry at a rock—a rock, not a human being, God forbid—he lost the privilege of entering the Promised Land.” In the end both saintly women were ready to kiss Schaine, if not each other. Peace of a fashion had been restored.
A broad smile would crinkle Schaine’s leathery brown cheeks and her eyes would shine like ripe blackberries. With her funny snub nose and round sheitel, from beneath which her own gray hair strayed mouselike, I would imagine her a giantess—a good giantess who lived deep in the forest and helped save lost children from the witches.
Despite her size, Schaine had something elfin in her. If a child took sick and the doctor’s medicine didn’t seem to help, she would talk away the evil eye. And the child would be out playing in a few days—as well as ever! She had all kinds of dried herbs in little cotton sacks, some of which she had brought from the old country. She never recommended her herbs unless the doctor’s prescription had been tried and the illness lingered. There was one little boy who had the summer complaint for weeks. Schaine gave him a brew of dried thistles and saffron—and the summer complaint fled.
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But if Schaine had magic at her command, it seemed to fail her when it came to her own family. This woman, who healed rifts not only among her roomers but between husbands and wives, who was ever on the alert for the mitzvah of bringing two people together in marriage, had little peace in her own family. It grieved her to see how her children were set one against the other—the successful merchant son against his poor brother, who was a leather worker, and the cynical daughter mocking them all. The two sons had even torn the family name in two: the rich one bore the name of “Shamroy” while the poor one, from spite, called himself “Royevsky.”
As if poverty weren’t enough, the poor son’s wife had given birth to a feeble-minded son. All summer long the big, handsome boy with the mind of an infant wallowed in the dirt while Schaine’s eyes teared every time she looked at him. Crowded beyond endurance as the place was, she still found room for him. “If God has looked unkindly at him,” she used to say, “let me at least be merciful to him.”
With her husband Schaine was far from gentle: all the turbulence of kochalein living and family grief which the woman absorbed in her great body she turned into bitter words for Yankel. She complained eternally about his laziness—to her he was always Yankel der Foyler (the lazy one). A man of normal strength would have had trouble keeping up with Schaine, but Yankel was not only small and thin but asthmatic. In the heat of the afternoon Schaine had to separate the milk from the cream, churn the butter, weed the garden, and clean the chicken coops. And where was Yankel? Usually snoring in the hayloft, dreaming of horses or, perhaps, his boyhood days when he sat at the table of a famous Hasidic rebbe in the Ukraine. Schaine never went to look for Yankel—I suspect her kind heart hated to separate the old man from his Hasidic rapture. She relieved her feelings by calling on all the powers of light and darkness to deal justly with her husband. At last, at the end of her power of speech, she summed up everything with one last blessing, a pun: “Foyler [lazy one] du, ausfoylen [rot away] zolst du takeh!”
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In the late evening, after the cows had been milked (how I loved to go to the barn with a glass to be filled directly from the udder!) and the many wants of the roomers taken care of, Schaine and Yankel would finally sit down to supper. She would put one plate of soup on the table. Yankel would wash, say a blessing, and plead, “Nu?”
“For eating he’s here—der Foyler!” Schaine would say with all the sarcasm she could command. She would take a spoonful, look at him once or twice, hesitate, then push the plate towards him, and they would both start eating from it at once.
“Why doesn’t Schaine give Yankel his own plate to eat from?” I once asked my mother. “Is it because she’s angry with him?”
“No, child,” my mother answered. “It is because she really loves Yankel. It’s from the old country yet. A man and his wife ate from one plate so everyone could see how happy they were with each other.”
After he had eaten, Yankel would sit on the porch steps, roll a cigarette, and tell stories. Tired after the day’s turmoil, the women huddled close together to hear. The old man peopled the night air with creatures from his childhood memories. He told of goldsmiths enslaved by she-devils, of holy men, of the secret Thirty-six who covered seven miles in one step, of the prophet Elijah disguised as a hunter wandering through the world in search of those who needed him. He told stories from the Midrash that made Moses and David and Solomon so alive they might have been kochalein husbands visiting on the weekend.
Schaine would come out finally and sit in the shadows to listen. I watched the old man’s beard bobbing under the flickering light of the kerosene lamp until he himself looked like one of the spirits he told of. Caught in the storyteller’s spell and fearful of the darkness and sounds outside the magic circle, I would lull myself asleep, until my mother shook me and cried, “To bed!” But the next morning there would be Schaine, scolding the old man as always.
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The stresses of life at Schaine’s being what they were, we all needed a scapegoat. Schaine punished her scholar husband for the burdens which a strong man might have lifted from her shoulders. The roomers found a scapegoat, one summer, in Zelda Kammerman.
Zelda was an ugly duckling—except that she was the opposite of ugly. Among the work-worn, poverty-scarred women, her comeliness set her apart. Although a bit on the heavy side, she was tall and shapely and called attention to herself by rouging her cheeks and wearing beauty spots. While the other women wore full-sleeved, long-skirted dresses, her skirts were almost knee-length and her rounded arms bare. She wore her thick black hair conservatively in a pompadour, but the way her dark eyes sparkled and her laughter bubbled on weekends, when the menfolk came, set the women’s teeth on edge.
By contrast with her, her two children were the most neglected and unkempt in the kochalein. Zelig, a boy of five, ran around so forlorn and hungry that the women were always wiping his nose and feeding him crusts of buttered rye bread which he devoured in comic haste, as if in fear that his benefactors would regret their kindness. The other child, Miriam, a thumb-sucking little girl of two, waddled about in a little shift but no pants. We children amused ourselves by following her around, stroking one forefinger with the other and crying “Shame!”
Zelda’s troubles began the very first weekend. She borrowed a cigarette from a visiting husband and proceeded in most sophisticated style to smoke it. It was the worst thing she could have done: the Orthodox were shocked that Zelda had smoked on the Sabbath, while the non-religious saw it as the gesture of a loose woman. Thereafter when she came near, conversation stopped and eyes grew stony.
On her part Zelda seemed determined to have a good time if only to spite the rest. We could hear her singing ‘The Sheik of Araby” up in her room hour after hour. She had a strong Russian accent, but her voice was vibrant and melodious. Soon she began to frequent the neighboring hotels, often without her children. When she returned, the women were always ready with remarks which, while they were made behind her back, were loud enough for her to hear: “Look—Pola Negri is back. Already Valentino is tired of her. . . . Hang around at hotels she can. For washing out a pair of underpants for her child she has no hands . . . .” Usually, that would start her off on “The Sheik of Araby.” Sometimes she would fall to kissing and hugging Zelig and Miriam in unwonted excess. Once in a while she would turn angry, defiant eyes towards her tormentors and stop their remarks in mid-air.
Yet Zelda was not entirely without friends. I was one of them. To my young mind it seemed the height of unfairness for so many to be banded against one. Then I worshipped her comeliness. To me she was as beautiful as a princess in a fairy tale, and I could hardly keep my eyes from her when she was around. She must have intuitively felt both my sympathy and my adoration, for she often smiled at me. Once she sighed coquettishly and said, “Why aren’t you twenty years older, kiddo?” I remember how my cheeks burned. I ran away, wondering whether she was making fun of me yet hoping with all my might that she meant what she had said.
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Zelda’s other friend was, unexpectedly, Yankel, who usually took an interest only in the affairs of Yushke. Patriarch though he was, there was a gleam in Yankel’s eye when Zelda went by that seemed to say, “Oh, if I were only twenty years younger!” Once she exclaimed, “A handsome Jew like you goes around with a ragged beard? Let me fix it!” He sat obediently on a pile of feed sacks while she trimmed his beard with comb and scissors and his face glistened like the hackles of a full-blooded rooster cocking an eye at his hens.
Schaine came by and scowled, “Look at my Talmud sage! A thousand ways he finds to fritter away the time of day!”
“Whenever you no longer want a fine man like Yankel, I’ll take him off your hands and thank you,” laughed Zelda. Schaine went on her way, looking cross. But thereafter Yankel allowed no evil word to be spoken against the young woman in his presence.
The roomers respected the old man, and they grew less harsh toward Zelda. Then something happened which made them seethe again. One evening during the supper rush, a crimson Ford drove up. Immediately we children gathered round. A man in a cream-colored flannel suit and a stiff straw hat stepped out, opened the other door of the car, and into it stepped Zelda! Our eyes popped as they drove off in a cloud of gasoline fumes.
No one had any relish for supper that night: the women were too full of self-righteousness which now came flooding out so fiercely that neither Schaine nor Yankel could dam it up.
“It’s a sin even to be under the same roof with her,” said one woman.
“The children,” chimed a second.
“Women, because of such as her we must all the time watch our husbands!” darkly croaked a third, a skinny, hatchet-faced hag whom we had ironically nicknamed “Sarah Bernhardt.”
Before the kochalein Zelda now stood condemned. When she slipped out and left her children underfoot to fall into washtubs and track muck over people’s rooms, there was no longer any question what she was up to. Zelda had told Schaine that her visitor in the Ford car was her distant cousin and had come to take her to a vaudeville show in a nearby hotel. “Who are we to set ourselves up in the place of God to judge her?” Schaine said. But feelings of outrage mounted, even though Zelda was no longer proud and defiant, but slunk about almost animal-like, avoiding everyone’s eyes.
One morning all the festering ill feeling toward Zelda burst forth like a torrent. Some milk which Zelda was heating on the stove boiled over and bespattered the pot of one Mrs. Bezdin, who happened to be stewing lamb. Mrs. Bezdin’s face flamed with fury and her tight-fitting wig, the mark of her extreme Orthodoxy, pushed up to the top of her head.
“You God-accursed apikores! You filth!” she shouted. “You spend your nights in adultery and your days destroying our ancient ways! How long will God let you foul the earth you walk on?”
“I’ll make up for the damage! I’ll pay for the pot, I’ll pay for the meat! Only spare me your spiteful tongue!” Zelda pleaded, shamefaced and trembling with fear of the aroused zealot.
“Pay for the pot and the meat!” cried Mrs. Bezdin. “How can you pay for the corruption which you visit on us and our children?”
“It’s the evil within you, not what I do that inflames you,” Zelda retorted and ran from the kitchen.
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It was too hot in the barn that afternoon and Yankel slouched on a bench under an apple tree and studied aloud from a large brown leather volume of the Talmud. Though I understood none of the strange Aramaic words, I lay on the grass nearby and listened lazily to the pleasant singsong.
I was surprised to see Zelda, pale and red-eyed, come and sit beside Yankel. “You are a learned and pious man,” she said to him. “Tell me, does our religion teach us to be cruel to people? Is it just that they abuse me?”
Yankel looked at her over his spectacles. “I am no rabbi,” he said gravely. “But it is written that the sin of hatefulness is worse than profaning the Sabbath or—God forbid—eating forbidden food. If we repent on Yom Kippur, sins against God are forgiven. But to atone for sins against our fellow men, we must make good the harm we have done.”
“Then they are wrong?” asked Zelda.
“Without question. Our religion teaches the duty of pity above all.”
“Oh, you speak exactly like my sainted father!” exclaimed Zelda, breaking into sobs. Then impulsively she threw her arms around the old man and kissed him on the cheek. Red-faced, Yankel replaced his skullcap, which had fallen to the ground. Moving away a space on the bench, he patted her shoulder as a father would.
For the rest of the afternoon there was new excitement. The way the roomers buzzed about Zelda’s gesture towards the frail old man, one would have thought him a dashing young lover. Zelda embodied lust and wantonness to them, and if she had knelt reverently to wash the feet of a saint they would have seen evil there.
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That evening Yankel told us a story by Sholom Aleichem called “The Song of Songs.” It was about a boy who tenderly loved a beautiful girl, but could not bring himself to tell her of his love. Until the very last we all hoped desperately that all would turn out well, but the boy came to woo his beloved too late. Broken-hearted, he repeated “Amen” to the marriage blessing as she became the wife of another man.
As the story ended, some of the women wept. But Schaine, usually an appreciative listener, now broke the gloom strangely. “To tell a foolish story like that! What a waste of time!” she cried. “You couldn’t tell us a story from the Talmud? That would have lifted us up.”
It was hard for me to fall asleep that night, for the boxlike room still held on to the heat of the day. As I lay tossing on the sagging old bed, light suddenly poured through the spaces around the ill-fitting door which led from our room to the kitchen. I heard Schaine dictating a letter for my mother to write. I grew tense, for I realized that the letter was about Zelda. Although I half understood what was going on, in my eyes she had not fallen. Even now I would have taken sides with her against the world.
I caught fragments of the letter: “Tour wife and children miss you so much. . . . Your duty as a husband and father . . . as soon as possible . . . .” I tossed on the bed until the light went out and I managed to escape from the lonely dark into sleep.
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Zelda’s husband came on Saturday. Dark and silent, he carried a weariness about him which seemed strange for a man still in his twenties. Schaine explained that he was worked out by his job in a kosher sausage factory. The other women said that Zelda had worked him out. All that day he followed his two children about with an expression that said, “You were lonely, so here I am.” In the evening he drew Schaine into a corner of the kitchen.
“My wife and I haven’t talked to each other for many months,” he said. He sat hunched on a bench, his eyes searching the floor. “And yet in your letter you said she was missing me. Is this the truth?”
“Is there something I could gain by a lie?” answered Schaine slyly.
“Then why doesn’t she appreciate all I do for her?” he asked. “Always I work overtime. Never am I home before nine o’clock.”
“For whom do you work so hard?” Schaine asked softly.
“For her—for the children. To save enough to buy a house in Brownsville, so they will have some comfort. Not be shut up like in a prison cell where you freeze in winter and choke in summer.”
“Good!” said Schaine. “But how will it be if you buy your house and find that you have lost your wife? Will you have a home?”
“But I want life should be pleasant for her. It is for her I am slaving. What shall I do?” he said.
“Zelda is a beautiful woman and a good woman,” said Schaine. “But in your eagerness to earn an extra dollar you have left her starved and lonely. Believe me, she needs your love more than a house in Brownsville. Or even Flatbush.”
And all at once, Schaine told my mother, he left the table, his shoulders erect and new fire in his eyes.
Early the next morning I saw Zelda and her husband walking with their arms about each other under the maple trees while their children dragged along behind them. I told myself that I was happy for Zelda, and yet a strange feeling of loss stayed with me all that day.
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The Kammerman family packed to go home on the following day. When morning came, Yankel piled their luggage on the back of the buggy, pocketed a fistful of the roomers’ orders, and made ready to harness Yushke the horse. But for some reason buried within his silent self, Yushke refused to submit to the harness. Dispirited and bedraggled, he remained plopped down on his knees, and neither with sugar nor the whip would he be stirred. Without Yushke we were cut off from the civilized world—by almost two interminable miles.
I remember how the scene unfolded: in none of the books Yankel had ever read was there advice on such a matter, and so he starts scratching his beard. “Nu, Foyler,” says Schaine. “You’re a Talmud sage. Work a miracle and bring the horse to life.”
“So how are we to get to the train?” asks Zelda’s husband.
Meanwhile come the roomers shouting for their orders: “My poor sick child must have a piece of meat! . . . In a prison even they give you bread. . . . For this I had to leave Stanton Street. There I have a grocery downstairs . . . .”
“Maybe you can talk to the horse,” Schaine says to the roomers. Her snub nose wrinkles in thought and she looks at Zelda. Suddenly she spits on her hands, grabs hold of the buggy shafts and tugs at them as if she were testing her strength. She looks crestfallen and starts to walk away. She glances at the young woman again, and it is hard to read her expression. But in a moment she has turned back, taken a mighty hold on the shafts again, and with a heave worthy of Samson rolled the buggy out of the yard and into the road.
“Stop worrying! You’ll make your train and you’ll have your groceries!” she cries triumphantly. Zelda turns her head to look at the roomers who stand gawking behind the picket fence. Her gaze is stony. Then, with little Miriam in her arms and her husband and son at her side, she follows the buggy.
Just past the yard, there is a huge rocky bump on the road and we can hear from the grinding of the buggy wheels that Schaine is having trouble getting the buggy over the rock. Suddenly all the children in the yard shout hooray and start after Schaine. Some of us push and others hang on, so how helpful can we be? But we wrestle the buggy over the bump and onto flat road. At one spot there is a hill where the buggy starts to run away and we pull all our weight to help Schaine hold it back. As we follow Schaine through the village we chant at the top of our voices:
Hip! Hip! The Kaiser’s got the grippe!
Why? Why? Because he’s gonna die!
When? When? Half past ten!
Where? Where? On the “lectric chair!
We wait with Zelda at the station. As the train puffs in, she embraces Schaine and cries. She looks from the train window and I move closer, hoping that she will smile at me. Alas, she seems already to have forgotten me. Choked with the smell of coal gas and the fine spray of cinders, we wave the train off and get on with our other job.
A dozen dirty little hands help load the buggy with bread and meat and sacks of oranges and bushels of bananas. We start our victory march back home to the tune of (fine irony!) “Yes, We Have No Bananas.” Summer people and farmers alike run out to the roadway to look, and a car stops and the driver honks his horn to encourage us. Schaine is breathing in gasps and her dress is soaked with sweat, but we are so proud we could burst.
Schaine was as good as her word: the sick child had his lamb chop, everyone enjoyed fresh pumpernickel and rye, and the woman who lived over the grocery store said, “If we had Schaine on Stanton Street, what would we do with so many groceries?”
When all the roomers had been pacified, Schaine looked around. “Now where is Yushke?” she cried. He had disappeared. When she found him at last, he was frisking like a colt on the other side of the road. He seemed the image of healthy horseflesh.
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With Zelda gone, the kochalein soon returned to a kind of exhausted normalcy. The passions she had aroused spent themselves and left the roomers sorry and ashamed. Schaine, everyone remarked, began speaking to Yankel with new-found respect, even though we still stumbled over his shoes in the barn in the afternoon. In fact, she treated him almost as kindly as a roomer.
That year was the last we ever passed a summer at the kochalein. My sisters were already grown and my mother began sending me to a settlement camp. From time to time she wrote to the old couple, but then came a time when no answers came to the letters. We heard that Schaine and Yankel had become enfeebled and given up the kochalein, and at last that both of them had died within a few months of each other.
Yankel, with his scholar’s sense that all was vanity, may have gone peacefully, but Schaine must have given the Angel of Death a battle. She was not one to accept, even from The Unconquerable.
Gathered though she has been to her fathers, I can’t believe she is resting. There is always work to be done. Likely she is hovering anxiously about, mending rifts among angels with frayed tempers. And when the Celestial Horses are indisposed, she puts her arms to a chariot and pulls.
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