Worse yet, try to be fair and take turns, once him and once her, and you’ll get it from them both. “What’s the matter, mister,” she’ll say, “don’t you like my dress today?” Or else he says to you, “Mister! Just last week you bought from me. Do you mean to tell me my goods poisoned you?”
If you harbor humanitarian sentiments, moreover, and start preaching to them that each is a human being who has to eat — in a word, that they should live and let live, as the English like to say — they’ll answer you right back, and not in English either, but in a simple Yiddish that may sound a wee bit cryptic though it’s really quite understandable: “Brother! You can’t ride one ass to two fairs!”
You see how it is, my dear friends. There’s no pleasing everyone. It’s hopeless even to try, and the more you play the peacemaker, the less peaceful things become. That’s something I know from experience. In fact, I could tell you a good one about how once I was foolish enough to butt in on a married couple in order to make up between them — the outcome of which was that I took it on the chin from my own wife! I don’t want to digress, though. True, it happens even in business that you sometimes put aside one thing to talk about all kinds of others, in fact, about everything under the sun; but we had better get back to our story.
One rainy day in autumn when the sky was weeping buckets and a black pall hung over everything, the station was crawling with people. Passengers kept piling in and out, all of them hurrying, all of them jostling, and most of all, of course, our Jews. Everyone was climbing over everyone with suitcases and packages and bundles made of bedclothes. And the noise, the sheer commotion — what a racket! Just then, in the midst of all this bedlam, there they were: him and her, both loaded down with edibles as usual. As usual, too, both hurled themselves through the same door of the train at once. Only then … goodness me, what had happened? Suddenly both baskets were on the ground and all the rolls and eggs and oranges and seltzer bottles were rolling about in the mud to an uproar of shouts, shrieks, tears, and curses mingled with the laughter of the conductors and the din of the passengers. A bell rang, the train whistled, and in another minute we were off.
There was a babble of voices in the car. Our fellow Israelites were giving their tongues an airing, everyone gabbling together like women in a synagogue or geese in the marketplace. So many different conversations were going on all at once that one could only make out snatches of each.
“What a massacre of rolls!”
“What a pogrom of eggs!”
“What did he have against those oranges?”
“Why ask? A goy is a goy!”
“How much would you say all that food was worth?”
“It serves them right! It’s time they stopped getting on everyone’s nerves.”
“But what do you want from them? A Jew has to make a living.”
“Ha ha, that’s a good one!” said a thick bass voice. “What Jews don’t call making a living!”
“What’s wrong with how Jews make a living?” piped a squeaky voice. “Do you have any better ways to make one? Why don’t you tell us about them!”
“I wasn’t talking to you, young fellow!” the bass voice thundered.
“You weren’t? But I’m talking to you. Do you have any better ways to make a living?… Well, why don’t you say something? Speak up!”
“Will somebody please tell me what this young man wants from me?”
“What do I want from you? You don’t like how Jews make a living, so I’m asking you to tell us a better way. Let’s hear it!”
“Just look how he’s leeched on to me!”
“Shhh, all of you! Stop talking about it. Here she comes.”
“Who?”
“The basket woman.”
“Where? Where is our beauty queen?”
“Right over there!”
Pockmarked and redheaded, her eyes puffy with tears, she struggled through the passengers looking for a place until she finally sat down on her overturned basket, hid her face in her tattered shawl, and resumed crying silently into it.
An odd hush came over the car. Everyone stopped talking. No one let out a peep. Except, that is, for one person, who called out in a heavy bass voice:
“Jews! Why so quiet?”
“What’s there to shout about?” someone asked.
“Let’s pass the hat around!”
So help me! And do you know who the kind heart was? None other than the same character who had laughed at how Jews make a living, a queer-looking fellow with a queer-looking flat, glossy-brimmed cap and blue-tinted glasses that hid his eyes completely: there simply were none to be seen above his fat, fleshy bulb of a nose. Without further ado he took the cap from his head, threw a few silver coins into it, and went from one passenger to another, booming in his bass voice:
“Give what you can, children! All donations are welcome. Darovanomu konyu vzuby nye smotryat—that means, according to Rashi, that we won’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”
Folks began rummaging through their pockets and purses, and all sorts of coins, both silver and copper, were soon clinking in the cap. There was even a Christian there, a Russian with high boots and a silver chain around his neck, who yawned, crossed himself, and gave something too. In the whole car one passenger alone refused to part with a kopeck — and that, of all people, was the very same individual who had taken up the cudgel for Jewish livings, an intellectual-looking young man with pasty cheeks, a pointy yellow beard, and gold pince-nez on his nose. You could see he was one of those types with rich parents and in-laws who travel third class to economize.
“Young fellow,” said the Jew with the blue glasses and big nose, “let’s have something for the hat.”
“I’m not giving,” said our intellectual.
“Why not?”
“Because. It’s a matter of principle with me.”
“You didn’t have to tell me that.”
“Why not?”
“Because vedno pana po kholavakh—that means, according to Rashi, that you can tell a rotten apple by its peel.”
The young man flared up so that he almost lost his pince-nez. “You’re an ignoramus!” he squeaked furiously at the man with the blue glasses. “You’re a cheeky, insolent, impudent, impertinent illiterate!”
“Thank God I’m all of that and not a two-legged animal that oinks,” answered the man with the big nose in a surprisingly good-natured tone of voice before turning to the puffy-eyed woman and saying, “There, there, Auntie, don’t you think you’ve cried enough? You’ll ruin your pretty eyes if you don’t stop. Here, hold out your hands and I’ll fill them with a bit of spare change.”
A strange woman if ever there was one! You might have thought that, seeing all the cash, she would have thanked him from the bottom of her heart. In fact she did nothing of the sort. Instead of thanks, a volley of oaths spewed forth from her. She was a veritable fountain of them.
“It’s all his fault. I hope he breaks his neck! I pray to God he breaks every bone in his body! He’s to blame for everything — I only wish, dear Father in heaven, that everything happens to him! He shouldn’t live to cross his own threshold! He should die a hundred times from a fire, from a fever, from an earthquake, from a plague, from an ill wind that carries him away! He should croak! He should burst! He should dry up like a puddle! He should swell like a dead fish!”
Good Lord, where did one person get so many curses from? It was a lucky thing that the man with the blue glasses interrupted her and said: