The Frozen Rabbi

by Steve Stern

Genres: Jewish Fiction

Synopsis

Award-winning novelist Steve Stern’s exhilarating epic recounts the story of how a nineteenth-century rabbi from a small Polish town ends up in a basement freezer in a suburban Memphis home at the end of the twentieth century. What happens when an impressionable teenage boy inadvertently thaws out the ancient man and brings him back to life is nothing short of miraculous.

Release date: June 14, 2011

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 384

Sample

Praise for The Frozen Rabbi

“[An] extraordinary story . . . recounted by Stern with manic virtuosity . . . The voracious pace lets Stern spill a hundred years of vivid Jewish history onto the page . . . He writes with piercing zeal.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“[A] wonderfully entertaining, inventive new novel that evokes Amy Bloom, Michael Chabon and Isaac Bashevis Singer . . . Laugh-out-loud funny, the sort of humor that takes you by surprise.”

—Heller McAlpin, NPR.org

“A funny, profound and virtuosic work . . . This fast-paced romp through history allows Stern to show off his great gift for plotting and dialogue. He manages to be funny in at least a half dozen dialects . . . For those willing to enter this unfamiliar space, to be tossed between centuries and realities, between this world and the Other Side, what awaits is a rare enchantment.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“Among the wonders awaiting the reader of Steve Stern’s exuberant new novel, The Frozen Rabbi, is one of sheer logistics: How did he get all of this in here? The book’s 370 pages are packed to bursting with epic adventure and hysterical comedy, with grim poignancy and pointed satire, as Stern repeatedly shifts time and tone to craft a wildly entertaining tale of the 20th-century Jewish experience and the paradox of tradition . . . Page after page, Stern embraces every outrageous possibility, in lush, cartwheeling sentences that layer deep mystery atop page-turning action atop Borscht Belt humor.”

—The Washington Post Book World

“Stern's sentences, as infectious as they are pyrotechnical, move the reader relentlessly forward. I am hardly the first critic to marvel at the sheer dazzle Stern can produce, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, page after page.”

—Sanford Pinsker for ZEEK

“In this gripping fantasy, a hasidic rabbi is frozen in the 19th century and becomes a New Age guru after being thawed out in modern times . . . Steve Stern has put together an imaginative story that breaks free from reality as it roams across the years from 1889 to 2002 . . . moving back and forth skillfully between actuality and illusion.”

—The Jerusalem Post

“Stern is actually quite famous for being unknown. In the 25 years since he published his first book (Isaac and the Undertaker's Daughter), younger Jewish writers have run with a similar shtick, and have, for some reason, reaped bigger returns. In Jonathan Safran Foer, you see Stern's fanciful English, in Nicole Krauss his magic realism, in Michael Chabon his updated golems and gun-toting shtarkers. But Stern was there first, and with The Frozen Rabbi it feels like he may be last too: This is a novel so rich, full, funny, dense and exhausting, it feels like there may be no more Steve Stern books left to write—by him, or anyone else . . . It's perhaps unusual that a comic writer should also be such an astute historian, but Steve Stern—for all his doppelgangers in the literary world—is truly one of a kind.”

—The Toronto Globe and Mail

“[A] master of Jewish magical realism . . . This comic novel takes us on a rollicking ride while offering some astute observations on the preservation and transmission of tradition along the way.”

—Reform Judaism magazine

“I found this multigenerational fantasy infectious . . . Stern manages to playfully capture Yiddish syntax with such precision that you might think the author had just been unfrozen from the 18th century himself . . . The Coen Brothers, fresh off another suburbia-meets-shtetl concoction in A Serious Man, might want to option this book.”

—Art Silverman, NPR's All Things Considered

“Told with a sharp linguistic wit . . . Stern's smart, gritty tale also feels like a magical coming-of-age story.”

—The Oxford American

“[Stern] successfully weaves Old World mysticism and New World capitalism into a witty, yet poignant story, which is highly recommended for all Jewish libraries.”

—The Association of Jewish Libraries Newsletter

“Novelist Steve Stern's entrancingly zany fable interlaces the mystery and mysticism of Old World Yiddish folklore with the New Age spiritual yearnings of today, and all through the magic of a story well told . . . Laugh-out-loud funny . . . Stern writes with the light agile touch of a master raconteur, and his characters spring from an imagination that seems as steeped in Sholom Aleichem, I. B. Singer and the Marx Brothers as in Gabriel García Márquez and Franz Kafka.”

—The Jewish Week

“National Jewish Book Award winner Stern deftly explores the Jewish immigrant journey from 1890 to the present, ranging from pogroms to the transatlantic crossing to life on Manhattan's bustling Lower East Side.”

—Library Journal

“An ethnic novel with universal implications.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Stern elevates his virtuoso storytelling and whirling magical satire to cosmic heights in this lovingly irreverent and revelatory novel of the timeless conflict between the sacred and the profane, and the perpetual search for home and meaning.”

—Booklist, starred review

Sometime during his restless fifteenth year, Bernie Karp discovered in his parents' food freezer—a white-enameled Kelvinator humming in its corner of the basement rumpus room—an old man frozen in a block of ice. He had been searching for a slab of meat, albeit not for the purpose of eating. Having recently sneaked his parents' copy of a famously scandalous novel of the sixties in which the adolescent hero has relations with a piece of liver, Bernie was moved to duplicate the feat. No stranger to touching himself, he hardly dared to dream of touching another, so inaccessible seemed the flesh of young girls. His only physical intimacy so far had been with his mother's Hoover, innumerable pairs of socks, and his big sister's orchid pink underpants retrieved from the dirty clothes hamper in the bathroom. Then he had come upon the novel he'd once heard his parents sheepishly refer to as the required reading of their youth. Not a reader, nor much of an active participant in his own uninquisitive life, Bernie had nevertheless browsed the more explicit passages of the book and so conceived the idea of defrosting a piece of liver.

Shoving aside rump roasts, Butterballs, and pork tenderloins in his quest, Bernie delved deeper among the frozen foods than he'd ever had occasion to search. That was when, having emptied and removed the wire trays, the boy encountered toward the bottom of the bin a greenish block of ice that stretched the entire length of the freezer. Scattering individually wrapped filets, tossing packages of French fries, niblets, and peas, Bernie was able to discern beneath the rippled surface of the ice the unmistakable shape of a man. It was an old man with a narrow, hawkish face, gouged cheeks, and a stringy yellow beard, his head wreathed in a hat like a lady's muff. His gaunt body was enveloped in a papery black garment that extended to the knees, below which his sticklike calves, crossed at the ankles, were sheathed in white stockings. His feet were shod in buckled bluchers that curled at the toes, his arms folded behind his head as if he were taking a luxurious nap.

Bernie's initial reaction was panic: He'd stumbled upon something he shouldn't have, and thought he ought abruptly to cover his tracks. He rolled the boulders of meat back onto the ice, slammed shut the lid of the deep freeze, and tromped upstairs to his room, where he crawled into bed and tried to still his galloping heart. A solitary, petulant kid, his chubby cheeks in their first flush of cystic acne, Bernie was unaccustomed to any kind of galloping. But the next day he returned to the basement to determine if he'd seen what he'd seen, and that night at dinner, ordinarily a somber affair during which his father related his business woes to an indifferent wife, Bernie muttered, “There's an old man in the meat freezer.” He hadn't meant to say anything; if his parents were keeping some dirty secret in the basement, it was none of his business. So what had compelled him to blurt it out?

“Did you say something?” asked his father, unused to his son's breaking his sullen silence during meals. Bernie repeated his assertion, still barely audible.

Mr. Karp pushed his bottle-thick glasses back onto the hump of his nose and looked to his wife, who sat feathering her spoon in her consommé. “What's he trying to say?”

It took a moment for the fog to lift from her puffy face. “Maybe he found the thing.”

“The thing.” Mr. Karp's voice was level.

“You know, the white elephant.”

“The wha—?” Mr. Karp grew quiet, his hands beginning to worry the loosened knot of his tie. “Oh, that.”

“It's not an elephant,” mumbled Bernie fretfully.

Mr. Karp cleared his throat. “That's an expression, white elephant, like a heirloom. Some people got taxidermied pets in the attic, we got a frozen rabbi in the basement. It's a family tradition.”

Bernie retreated once again into silence, having been unaware that his family had any traditions. Then it was his sister Madeline's turn to be heard from. A voluptuous girl, exceedingly vain of her supernormal development, she condescended to inquire, “Like, um, what are you people talking about?”

Wary of his sister, who may have suspected him of stealing her underwear, Bernie slumped in his chair, avoiding her eyes. His father seemed to do likewise, for Madeline's looks could be oppressive in the matte gray Karp household; while Bernie's mother, still playing with her food, offered acerbically, “He's from your father's side of the family; they were always superstitious.”

“He's a keepsake”—Mr. Karp's tone was defensive—“that they handed down from generation to generation.” He squared his weak shoulders as he tried to summon some pride for an object whose existence he had clearly forgotten till now.

Annoyed, Madeline pushed her chair from the table, blew at a wisp of primrose hair that fell instantly back into her eyes, and flounced resolutely out of the dining room. Moments later a shriek was heard from downstairs, and Mr. Karp cringed. “He came with a book, the rabbi,” he said, as if the literature conferred some official distinction. “Yetta, where's the book?”

“There was a book?”

Heaving a sigh, Mr. Karp readjusted his glasses and got purposefully to his feet, departing the room just as Madeleine emerged from the basement, her robust complexion gone deathly pale. “I, um, no longer want anything to do with this family?” she declared interrogatively.

“Here it is,” announced Mr. Karp, squeezing past his busty daughter to reenter the dining room. “It was in the bottom drawer of the dresser, under my Masonic apron.” Proprietor of a prosperous home-appliance showroom, Mr. Karp was a joiner, an affiliate of local chapters of the Masons, the Lions, and the Elks, his enrollment dating from a time when Jews were not always welcome in such organizations. His prominence and civic-mindedness, however, had earned him the status of an honorary gentile. He had even managed to secure his family a membership in an exclusive Memphis country club, which (with the exception of Madeline, whose endowments gave her entrée everywhere) the family seldom used.

Mr. Karp handed a limp ledger book of the type in which accounts are kept to his son, who began indifferently thumbing the pages. Instead of figures, the pages were covered in an indecipherable script that resembled clef signs and fishhooks.

“The book explains where the rabbi came from,” continued Mr. Karp with authority. “My papa wrote it all down himself. Problem is, he wrote it in Yiddish.” He may as well have said Martian. Then he added somewhat apologetically, “He's supposed to bring luck.”

What kind of luck? Bernie wondered as he carried the ledger to his bedroom, a boneyard of aborted hobbies—the unpainted husks of model cars, the broken clear plastic trunk of a Visible Man, a PlayStation gathering dust. Though his only real enthusiasms to date had been a fondness for overeating and his late penchant for erotic fantasy, he idly perused the ledger's scribbled pages. When they refused to give up one jot of their meaning, he stuffed the book under his mattress alongside Madeline's panties and fell promptly into a dreamless sleep.

When the holy man Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr, the Boibiczer Prodigy, wished to get closer to God, he would sit, or rather lie, by a certain pond in the woods outside his village. There, using techniques described in Gedaliah Ibn Yahya's Girdle of Abimelech, he would meditate on the letters of the Tetragrammaton until he entered a trance. In his youth he had been acclaimed for his public demonstrations of memory, his ability to recite passages of Talmud both forward and backward, and his feats of what the uninitiated called magic. But now in his twilight years he was far beyond such exhibitions, and preferred to exercise his powers in solitude. He would lie upon his back on the mossy bank of the pond, his clasped hands cradling his head as the Girdle prescribed, while his neshomah, his soul, ascended to the Upper Eden. There his soul sat in bliss among the archons studying Torah. Once, however, during one of his more intensive meditations—this was in the blustery month of Sivan, just after Shavuot—there came a mighty storm. With his soul aloft, his body, frail as it was, remained insensible to the moods of the terrestrial world; and so, while the storm raged and the torrents battered his meager frame, Rabbi Eliezer continued his meditations in peace. The drenched earth on which he lay turned to mud and the water of the shallow pond began to rise, inundating his legs to the waist, creeping over his chest and chin and ultimately submerging his hoary head.

Previously the sage had depended on the shulklapper summoning the faithful to prayer to signal the reunification of his body and soul, but the deluge had muted any noises from above the surface of what was quickly becoming a lake.

As their rebbe's retreats were fairly routine, Eliezer's small band of disciples had grown accustomed to the old man's frequent absences, but that he should stay away for so long in the wake of such a terrible storm seemed to them a distinct cause for worry. After several days, a party of Rabbi Eliezer's Chasidim, their earlocks streaming, gabardines flapping like crows' wings, began combing the pastures and thickets known to be the tzaddik's special haunts. Deracinated trees with roots like hydra heads, the bloated carcasses of drowned hogs, and roofless peasant huts were what they found, but no Rabbi Eliezer. Some of his followers even passed in the vicinity of the pond that had overnight turned into a considerable body of water, underneath which lay the Prodigy in his mystical transports. When weeks had passed without a rumor of their leader's whereabouts, the Chasids reluctantly called off the search; they tore their garments, beat their pigeon breasts, and sprinkled ashes over their heads but refused to say Kaddish, contending one and all that their rebbe would one day return.

The seasons changed, the russet and gold autumn supplanted by an alabaster winter, while Rabbi Eliezer continued his submarine meditations. The ground was blanketed, the trees stooped like peddlers under haversacks of heavy snow, and still the rebbe's body remained impervious to decomposition. It was the time of year when the industrious widower Yosl King of Cholera, accompanied by his feckless son, Salo, dragged his sledge across the snowfields to the banks of the Lower Bug to harvest ice. (He'd been an orphan, Yosl, whom the town had married off to another orphan during a plague in the hope of assuaging God's wrath—hence his name.) This year, however, Yosl had heard from the cheder boys, who skated the horse pond on Baron Jagiello's estate, that summer storms had increased the pond to the size of an inland sea. After investigating, Yosl went hat in hand to the baron and begged permission to carve ice from his lake in exchange for replenishing the estate's own supply free of charge. An agreeable man when it served his interests, the baron gave Yosl the go-ahead, and the ice mensch set out across the fields, trailed by his son.

When they arrived at the swollen pond, a few truant Talmud Torah boys were already there, their wooden skates describing wobbly spirals and arabesques on the jade green surface of the ice. Abandoning his sledge, Yosl trod the ice in his hobnailed boots to test its thickness and then, satisfied, began to cut a trench with his axe. He called to his son to bring him the double-handled ice saw, but Salo, as timid as he was lazy, ventured only to the edge of the lake to hand his father the tool.

“Amoretz!” Yosl complained to the iron gray sky. “He puts his shoes on backwards and gets from walking into himself a bloody nose.” But that was the extent of his indictment, since Yosl had long since abandoned any real expectations of his son's usefulness. The boy's fear of almost everything in existence seemed to exempt him from life itself, let alone work, and sometimes his father wondered if Salo, whose mother had died in childbirth, had ever been entirely born.

While his father labored, Salo dawdled at the margin of the lake, ashamed as always to be hanging back but convinced that the ice would not support his lumpish weight. Occasionally, however, he might dare himself to rest the ball of a foot on the crusted surface, rubbing a circle as smooth as glass with the sole of his shoe. But rather than steal a glance through the polished porthole, lest it reveal something unpleasant, Salo usually turned away without even looking. At one point he did catch sight of a fish like a monarch's wing suspended in a sunless world where time stood still. And again, unable to resist a peek after rubbing another circle, he saw the face of an old man with a yellow beard.

“Papa!” cried Salo in terror.

In no particular hurry, Yosl trudged over to find out what his son was squawking about this time. “Gevalt,” he exclaimed upon seeing the thing the boy had accidentally discovered, “it's the rebbe!” Shaken to the core, Yosl slapped his own face to collect himself, then rounded up the other boys (his own was too slow) and dispatched them to the Chasids' study house with the news. The rebbe's disciples came running, arriving breathless to find that Yosl Cholera had already set about excavating their longlost leader. The ice mensch, his jaw working like a whiskered feedbag as he labored, was dragging a large block of ice containing the rebbe onto the shore of the lake with his rope and grappling hook.

Then the Prodigy lay before them on a mound of snow, and his gathered disciples, puffing like steam engines, were at a total loss as to what to do next. It was surely a blessing to have their tzaddik back in their midst again, apparently intact even if frozen stiff, but what now? In former days it was the rebbe himself to whom they would have applied for advice, but he was unavailable for comment. There were the texts of holy writ to consult, though even the most sedulous scholars among them—those who prescribed what portions of Torah one should consider during intercourse, or whether it was permitted to pee in the snow on Shabbos (which was tantamount to plowing, which was work, and so forbidden)—even they knew of no passages pertaining to the current quandary. Then one of their number, Fishel Ostrov, the shovel-bearded yeast vendor, proposed that they light torches to thaw the holy man on the spot. His theory was that Rabbi Eliezer, during his raptures, was proof against the depredations of time and the elements, and that once the ice was melted, he would be restored to them in all his prior vitality. There was a thoughtful buzzing among them until a wiser head prevailed.

“Know-it-all,” accused Berel Hogshead, the teamster, insisting that the risk was too great, since, once thawed, the rebbe might begin to putrefy and his bones become—God forbid—food for the worms. Better they should put him somewhere for safekeeping, so that at least he would remain in one piece until he chose to burst forth from his repose of his own accord. More buzzing in the affirmative as Yosl King of Cholera, neither Chasid nor mitnagid but simple opportunist, stepped forward in his capacity as proprietor of the Boibicz icehouse: “Your honors, for a nominal fee . . .”

THE BOIBICZ ICEHOUSE was a windowless granite grotto dug into the northern slope of a hill at the edge of the village by giants or fallen angels in some antediluvian age. That was the legend, anyhow. All Yosl Cholera knew was that he'd inherited the icehouse after the death of Mendel Sfarb, its former owner, whose family claimed to have had it in their possession since the Babylonian Exile. The business was Mendel's guilty gift to the orphan who had been his ward and virtual slave from the age of six. From outside, the sunken structure with its domelike stone protrusion resembled an age-encrusted tomb, which made it a most suitable repository for the Boibiczer Prodigy; it was a place where his body could lie in state, so to speak, resistant to decay until such time as he saw fit to come forth again—or so his followers maintained. Much to Yosl's annoyance the Boibicz Chasidim insisted on honoring their rebbe's resting place as they would a sacred sepulcher: They warbled their prayers (excepting the prayer for the dead) at its entrance, placed messages in the cracks between its stones, and took turns inside cleaning the sawdust and flax that collected around the holy man's transparent berth. Though they cautioned one another not to diminish its mass, they discreetly shaved slivers from the block of ice, which they sweetened with dollops of honey and devoutly sucked. Since they refused to acknowledge the Prodigy as officially deceased, the Chasids were unable to elect a successor and thus came to be known for their veneration of the refrigerated rebbe as the Frozen Chasidim.

Diverting as were the antics of credulous fanatics, however, the inhabitants of Boibicz had other concerns to reckon with. Edicts and ukases were being issued by the imperial government in such dizzying succession that what was permitted in the morning was often forbidden by afternoon. The most recent stated that, for their own good, the Jews would be barred from leasing inns, taverns, and shops in the villages outside the Pale of Settlement. In addition, no new Jewish settlers would be allowed in the villages and hamlets within the Pale, a decree that often stranded merchants returning from business trips or families from High Holiday worship in nearby towns. The Byzantine logic of these laws defied the understanding of even the most learned Talmudists, but as a consequence, many longtime citizens of Boibicz had begun to find themselves homeless, and for those still in residence the writing was on the wall. Eventually the Jews came to anticipate a wholesale exodus from a place that had been a home to their families for generations, though at that prospect they continued to drag their heels. In the end it took a delegation of their neighbors, chaperoned by a regiment of Cossacks dispatched by the government and operating under the blind eyes of the local police, to expedite their departure.

For all the chaos that erupted on that winter morning just after the Festival of Lights, the perpetrators went about their business almost mechanically, though the violence was no less savage for being deliberate. Without fanfare they entered the dingy Jewish quarter and smashed the shop windows, hauling out bolts of cloth, pedal-driven sewing machines, spirit lamps, unplucked chickens, anything that fell to hand. They defecated in the synagogue vestibule and wiped their goosefleshed behinds with the torn vellum scrolls of the Torah. Feivush Good Value, melammed and tradesman, they hanged from his own shop sign by his patriarch beard; they swung Shayke Tam, the idiot, by his heels, squealing because he thought it was a game, until his feeble brains were splattered across the shtibl wall. Those who fled to the woods were hunted down and beaten to splinters, though most who stayed put survived, among them Yosl Cholera's son Salo, who'd taken refuge in the icehouse.

The fact was, he had scarcely strayed beyond the shadow of the icehouse since the day he'd stumbled upon Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr suspended beneath the surface of the lake. Though the frozen rebbe was scrupulously looked after by his followers, Salo, having taken a surprising interest in his discovery, had conceived the idea that the holy man was his own personal charge. He kept his ears alert to the stories the disciples told one another of the Boibiczer Prodigy's wondrous feats of piety, and when no one else was about, the artless boy (in age already a young man) took his turn sitting vigil beside the block of ice. He admired the old man's tranquility while expecting, like his disciples, that at any moment the ice might yawn and crack open and the rebbe irrupt from his slumber. It was an event he had no desire to hasten, however, so easeful was the waiting. To show cause for his hanging about the ice grotto, the boy made gestures toward helping his father, but when the King of Cholera realized it was the frozen rabbi rather than the entrepreneurial impulse that enlivened his son, he dismissed the boy once again as a lost cause. Moreover, Salo's chronic attachment to the icehouse had been noted by his waggish peers, who gave him the nickname of Salo Frostbite, which stuck.

So it was that, on the morning of the pogrom, Salo was seated on a cabbage crate, gazing at Rabbi Eliezer's slightly distorted features, their beatific peacefulness having invaded his timorous heart. All about him the stacked slabs of ice were carved into shelves and niches, which contained fish, fowl, and barrels of kvass. In one recess Leybl the hatmaker's pokerstiff dog Ashmodai awaited the spring thaw for its burial. Rime coated each jar and jeroboam until it resembled a vessel made of spun sugar; ice stalactites hung from the vault of the ceiling like fangs. But the warmth Salo felt in the rebbe's presence (enhanced by his sheepskin parka, whose collar he pulled over his ears) practically deposed the arctic chill of the grotto in its subaqueous light, a light that seemed to emanate from the ice itself. “The Chasids sit shivah while you sit and shiver,” Salo's father had complained, but in the rebbe's presence all the fearful chimeras of the boy's imagination were dispelled, and the world seemed almost an idyll, a winter pastorale. As a consequence, Salo never heard the cries of the tortured and defiled, the keening women and the breaking glass, nor did he smell the smoke from the burning synagogue. It was only when the sexton, Itche Beilah Peyse's, who'd lost his mind, began to howl like a hyena in the street that Salo's own peace was finally disturbed.

Bestirring his broad behind to go and see what was happening, he crawled up the slippery ramp and wriggled out of the hatch through which the large rectangular ice cakes were slid into the grotto. He stumbled down the hill into the village, past the Shabbos boundary markers where the snow was stained in patches with what appeared to be plum preserves. Outside the door of the smoldering timber synagogue a mother tried to revive her fallen son by pumping air into his lungs with a pair of bellows; a violated daughter begged her father on her knees in the ruts of the market platz not to disown her. The procession of wagons hauling bodies, already becoming rigid, to the cemetery vied with the jauntier parade of peasants carrying off samovars, chamber pots, a trumpet-speakered phonograph, a cuckoo clock. Plodding forward in his klunky topboots, Salo accidentally toppled the cantor Shikl Bendover, who had died of fright still standing, like Lot's wife. He paused to reerect the dead man, then realized what he was doing, and understood that the scene he had entered eclipsed any active fancies his mind might entertain. It put to rest forever his habit of ghoulish invention, for which Salo, who began then and there to grow up, was grateful.

He stepped into the smoky, slat-shingled dwelling that he and his father called home, where he discovered to his head-swimming sorrow that he'd been made an orphan like his father before him. Yosl King of Cholera lay on the raked clay floor in the stiff leather apron he'd donned for work, his head pincered by his own ice tongs. The handles of the iron tongs branched above his crimped skull like a giant wishbone, the blood streaming in crimson ribbons from his ears. Salo retched down his front and fell to his knees, leaning forward to touch those of his father's features that were still recognizable: a blue knuckle swollen from arthritis, a pooched lower lip like a water leech. For an indefinite time he lay prostrate without the least inclination ever to rise again, until he remembered that he now had a higher calling. Wiping his mouth and dabbing at his eyes, Salo crawled forward to wrench apart the ice tongs. He got to his feet and began to rummage in the debris of the ransacked hovel, eventually locating a pair of candles which he lit with a sulfur-tipped match and placed at either end of the murdered man's outstretched form. All the while murmuring Kaddish, he threw a cloth over the ancient mirror, its surface clouded with floes of mercury; then he squeezed himself behind the tile stove, scalding his tush in the process, and pried loose a wallboard in back of which Yosl had hidden his meager treasures—a handful of groschen and some duc