Yente had six older brothers who went to yeshiva and, at home, quoted passages from the Scriptures under their breath while she hung around the table at which they sat, too little to be assigned real women’s work. She also had four older sisters, one of whom was already married; significant efforts were being made to match up another.
Her father, detecting her interest and zeal, showed her the letters of the alphabet, thinking they would be like little pictures for her, like jewels and stars—lovely alef, like the reflection of a cat’s paw, shin like a little boat with a mast made out of bark and let out onto the water. But—who knew how or when—Yente learned the letters in a different way, in such a way as to be able to make words of them soon. Her mother slapped her hands for this with an unexpected ferocity, as if Yente was reaching for too much. Her mother didn’t know how to read. She would listen happily, however, as Yente’s father, on rare occasions, or more often as their old relation, Abramek the Cripple, told the women and children stories from the books in Yiddish. Abramek always did this in a plaintive voice, as if the written words were by nature akin to a lament. He would start at dusk, by the dim light of the candles, and so, along with reading, there would appear in the house in the evenings the unbearable sadness of the village Kabbalists, of whom there were many in those days. You could develop a taste for this sorrow in the same way that some grow fond of vodka. They would all be overcome by such melancholy that someone would begin to cry and keen. Then they would want to touch with their hands everything of which Abramek had told, and they would reach out for something tangible—but there was nothing there. That lack was terrible. There began true despair. All around them darkness, cold, and damp. In the summer dust, dry grass, and stones. Where is all that, that world, that life? Where’s paradise, and how can we get there?
To little Yente it seemed that every such evening of stories would grow dense, darker, impenetrable, especially when Abramek the Cripple would say:
“And it is known that the space of the world is filled with ghosts and evil spirits, born of human sin. These float in that space, as is written clearly in the Zohar. We have to guard against them attaching to us on the way to the synagogue, and this is why we must know what is written in the Zohar, namely that the damagedoer lies in wait for you on the left side, for the mezuzah may be placed only on the right side, and on the mezuzah is written God’s name: Shaddai, which will defeat the damagedoer, which explains the mezuzah’s inscription: ‘And Shaddai will be on your doorframe.’”
They nodded their heads in agreement. This we know. The left side.
Yente knew this. “The air is full of eyes,” her mother would whisper to her, jerking her around like a rag doll every time she got her dressed. “They are watching you. Just put out a question before you, and the spirits will instantly answer. You just have to be able to ask. And to find those answers you receive: in the milk that has spilled into the shape of the letter samech, in the imprint of a horse’s hoof in the shape of the letter shin. Gather, gather these signs, and soon you will read a whole sentence. What is the art of reading from books written by man when the whole world is a book written by God, even the clay path that leads up to the river. Look at it. The goose feathers, too, the dried rings of the wood of the fence boards, the cracks in the clay of the houses’ walls—that is exactly like the letter shin. You know how to read, so read, Yente.”
She feared her mother, and how. The tiny little girl stands before the thin, small woman, who is perpetually muttering something, always with spite. Shrew, that’s what everyone in the village called her. Her moods changed so frequently that Yente never knew whether her mother, setting her down on her lap, would kiss her and hug her or squeeze her shoulders painfully and shake her like a rag doll. So she preferred to just keep out of her way. She would watch her mother’s skinny hands putting the last of her dowry back in the chest—she had come from wealthy Silesian Jews, but little of that wealth remained. Yente heard her parents moaning in bed, and she knew that this was her father chasing the dybbuk out of her mother, something he kept secret from the rest of the family. Her mother would at first try faintly to escape him, but then she would take a deep breath, like someone submerging herself in cold water, in the icy water of the mikvah, where she could hide out from evil.
Once, in a time of great poverty, Yente watched in secret as her mother ate the rations intended for everyone—her back hunched, her face lanky, her eyes empty. They were so black you couldn’t see her pupils in them.
When Yente was seven years old, her mother died in childbirth along with the child who didn’t have the strength to make its way out from inside her. To Yente’s mind, it had obviously been a dybbuk, which she had eaten when she stole the provisions intended for everyone, and which her father had not managed to banish during those nocturnal struggles. That dybbuk had set up shop in her mother’s stomach and not wanted to leave. Death—that was the punishment. A few days before the fatal childbirth, fat and swollen, with pale eyes, she’d woken her sleeping daughter at dawn, pulling her by the braids, and said:
“Get up. The Messiah has come. He is already in Sambor.”
After the death of his wife, Mayer, guided by some hazy sense of guilt, took over the care of his little daughter himself. He didn’t really know what to do with her while he was studying, so she just sat with him and looked at what he was reading.
“So what will salvation look like?” she asked him once.
Mayer, brought back to reality, stood up and leaned back against the stove.
“It’s simple,” he said. “When the last little spark of divine light returns to its source, the Messiah will appear to us. All laws will be invalidated. The division between kosher and non-kosher will disappear, like the division between holy and cursed. Night will cease to be distinguishable from day, and the differences between men and women will disappear. The letters in the Torah will rearrange themselves so that a new Torah will come to be, and everything in it will be opposite. Human bodies will be light as spirits, and new souls will come down into them, straight from the throne of the good God Himself. Then the need to eat and drink will vanish, sleep will become superfluous, and every desire will dissipate like smoke. Corporeal reproduction will give way to the union of holy names. The Talmud will become covered in dust, completely forgotten and unnecessary. Everywhere will be bright from the glow of the Shekhinah.”