“Anyway, we had a party to which all our friends came, and the boy was decked out in a fancy uniform with silver buttons and a cap with a dingus on the top. I tell you, he could have passed for the chief of staff! But it really was a lifesaver for the poor little fellow, he looked like a different person. Why, his face was bright as sunshine! We all drank to his health and someone said to me:
“ ‘He should only finish high school, and nail that sheepskin to the wall, and go right on for the next one!’
“ ‘Well, now,’ I said, ‘that’s very kind of you, but don’t think his future depends on it. Let him stick it out for a couple of years, and then, with God’s help, we’ll marry him off and the rest will take care of itself …’
“The wife just gave me a pitying smile when she heard that. ‘Would someone please tell him,’ she said to the guests, ‘that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s way behind the times.’
“ ’Would someone tell her,” I answered, ‘that the times aren’t worth catching up with.’
“ ‘Would someone tell him,’ she said, ‘that he’s nothing but an old f—!’
“That brought the house down. ‘Me oh my, Reb Aharon,’ they said, ‘you’ve got a Cossack there, not a wife!’ Meanwhile the wine kept flowing and we all got so mellow that we started to dance. But I mean dance! The wife, my boy, and I were put in the middle of a circle and everyone cut the rug up around us until, before we knew it, it was dawn …
“That same morning we brought him to the school. We arrived so early that the doors were still locked and there wasn’t a stray dog in sight. At last, thank God, the doors opened and we came in from the cold and revived. Pretty soon the place was full of youngsters, all with their schoolbags on their backs. There was enough talking and laughing and shouting and hallooing for a country fair. In the middle of it all I’m approached by a man with gold buttons — a teacher, it turns out, with a sheet of paper in his hand. Can he help me? Well, I pointed to my boy and said I had come to enroll him in the rabbi’s schoo — I mean in junior high school. ‘What year is he in?’ he asks me. ‘The third,’ I say. ‘He’s just been accepted.’ ‘And what’s his name?’ ‘It’s Katz,’ I say. ‘Moshe Katz, though we all call him Moshke.’ ‘Moshke Katz?’ says the teacher. ‘There’s no Moshke Katz in the Third Form. There is a Katz on the list, but his first name is Mordukh, not Moshke …’
“ ‘Well, it’s a mistake,’ I say. ‘It’s Moshke, not Mordukh.’
“ ‘It’s Mordukh,’ he says to me, waving the list in my face.
“ ‘It’s Moshke!’
“ ‘It’s Mordukh!’
“Well, we Moshked and Mordukhed each other back and forth until the sad truth finally dawned on me; there had been a little error. Do you get the picture? The goy had mixed up the names; he had taken a Katz, all right, it just didn’t happen to be mine. There were, it appeared, more ways to skin a Katz than one …
“What can I tell you? It would have broken your heart to see my boy’s face when he was told to take that dingus off his cap. No stood-up bride ever cried half so hard. He couldn’t stop for the life of him. ‘I hope you see what you’ve done now,’ I said to the wife. ‘Didn’t I tell you they’d crucify the boy? I pray to God he gets over it soon, because if not he’ll get an ulcer for sure.’
“ ‘You can save the ulcers for your enemies,’ she says. ‘That child is going to high school! If he doesn’t get in this year, he’ll get in next; if he’s not accepted here, he will be somewhere else. We’ll stop trying over my dead body!’
“How’s that for a quick comeback? And who do you think had his way in the end, me or her? Let’s not kid ourselves: when she wants it, she gets it …
“Anyway, why drag it out? I went to the ends of the earth with that boy — there wasn’t a town with a high school that we didn’t try. And there wasn’t a town with a high school where he didn’t take the exams, and where he didn’t pass the exams, and where he didn’t pass them with flying colors — and where he wasn’t rejected. How come? Because of those crazy quotas. Believe me, I started to wonder if I wasn’t crazy too. What are you running from town to town for like an idiot? I asked myself. Who the Devil needs it? Supposing he does get in somewhere in the end — so what? Say what you will, though, no one likes to throw in the sponge. And I had become so mule-headed about it that it was an act of sheer mercy on God’s part to find me a commercial high school in Poland where they took a Jew for every Christian — that is, where the quota was fifty percent. There was just one little catch: the Jew had to bring his own Christian with him — and only if your Christian passed the exams and you were ready to treat him to tuition did you stand a fighting chance … In other words, instead of one millstone around my neck, there were two. Do you follow me? As if it weren’t enough to knock my brains out for my own boy, I now had someone else’s to worry about, because if Ivan doesn’t pass, Yankl can pack his bags too. In fact, that’s practically what happened. By the time I found the right Christian, a tailor’s boy named Kholyava, I was green in the gills — and when the chips were down, wouldn’t you know that he went and flunked flat on his face! And in ‘Christian Religion,’ of all things! Don’t think my own son didn’t have to take him in hand and coach him for the makeup. What, you ask, does my son know about Christianity? But with a head you won’t find in all of Russia, what’s there to wonder at?…
“Well, with God’s help we made it to the great day: both of them were accepted. Home free at last, eh? Except that when I come to pay the registration fee, my goy doesn’t show! What seems to be the problem? The damn Russian would rather croak than see his son with so many Jews. What does he need my commercial high school for, he says, when a Christian boy like his own can get in anywhere he pleases? Go tell him he’s mistaken! ‘How can I help change your mind for you, Pani Kholyava?’ I ask him. ‘You can’t,’ he says. So I sat him down and had a little talk with him about all men being brothers, etcetera — I even took him to a tavern for a drink or two, which turned out to be nine or ten — I tell you, I managed to get a few gray hairs before I finally heard from the school that young Kholyava was enrolled there. Thank God, I thought, at last it’s over and done with!
“Well, I came home that day to get a new shock. What was it this time? The wife had thought it over and decided that she couldn’t leave our precious one-and-only all by his lonesome in Poland. How could she ever look herself in the mirror if she did? ‘But what else can you do?’ I asked her. ‘What else can I do?’ she says. ‘Do I have to spell it out for you? I’m going with him.’ ‘But who’ll look after the house?’ I ask. ‘The house,’ she says, ‘is only a house …’ Just what was I supposed to say to that? And don’t think she didn’t pick up and go with him, leaving me all by myself! Imagine, a whole house with no one in it but me — it shouldn’t happen to my worst enemies. My life went to pieces; the business went to the dogs; everything went to hell around me while we sat and wrote each other letters: ‘my dear wife,’ ‘my dear husband’—oh, it was a first-rate correspondence! ‘For God’s sake,’ I wrote her, ‘how long can I go on like this? I’m only human. A house without a woman is no house …’ It did as much good as last winter’s snow, of course. In the end it was she who had her way again. When she wants it, she damn well gets it …