Isaac Bashevis Singer, born in Poland in 1904, emigrated to New York in 1935, when he began writing in Yiddish for the Jewish Daily Forward. He is the author of many novels and stories and winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize for literature. Translated by the author and Dorothea Straus.
6
Sam Palka winked and laughed. He puffed once on his extinguished cigar and threw it in the ashtray. He lit another and said, ‘You may call me a charlatan, but I have never been to tell her the truth. She loved David Vishkover, the poor man, the victim of a false wife, not Sam Palka, the landlord, the millionaire, the woman chaser, the gambler. Everything had to stay the same. I still visit on Blake Avenue. It has become almost completely black. It makes no difference to Channah Basha. ‘Here I have lived,’ she says, ‘and here I want to die.’ I come to her in the morning, spend the day with her—we take a walk and go to bed right after supper. I’m known there. The blacks and the Puerto Ricans say, ‘Hi Mr Vishkower.’ We still eat burned-flour grits, noodles with beans, kasha with milk, and we talk about the old country as though we had stepped off the ship just yesterday. It’s no longer a game. To her, Bessie is still alive, making me miserable. She thinks that I sustain myself on a small annuity from the insurance company and my Social Security. The buttons keep falling off the jacket and pants I wear, and Channah Basha continues to sew on others. She begs me to bring my shirts; she wants to wash them. She begs me bring her my shirts; she wants to wash them. She darns my socks. A pair of my pajamas that are twenty years old hang in her bathroom. Every time I come, I have to report about Bessie. Is she still so wicked? Haven’t the years softened her? I tell her that age doesn’t change character—once bad, always bad. Channah Basha asked me to buy a plot in the cemetery of the Wysoka landsleit so that when we die we can lie side by side. I did so, even though another plot awaits for me next to Bessie’s grave. I will have to die twice. When I die Channah Basha is going to be surprised by my legacy to her. I have made her the beneficiary of an insurance policy for fifty thousand dollars. The house on Blake Avenue will also be hers. But what will she do with it? There comes a day when money is useless. We are both on diets. She now cooks with vegetable oil instead of butter. I am afraid to eat a piece of babka—cholesterol.
One day I was sitting with Channah Basha and we were talking about olden days—how they used to bake matzo, send gifts on Purim, decorate the windowpanes for Shevuot—and suddenly she asked, ‘What is the matter with your wife? Will her end never come? I answered, ‘Weeds are hardy.’ Channah Basha said, ‘I would still like to be your wife before God and the people, even if only for one year.’
‘When I heard these words I was beside myself. I wanted to cry out,’ Channah Basha, my darling, no one stands in our way any more. Come with me to City Hall and we will get the license’. But this meant killing David Vishkower. Don’t laugh—he is a real person to me. I have lived with him so long that he is closer to me than Sam Palka. Who is Sam Palka? An old lecher who has made a fortune and doesn’t know what to do with it. David Vishkover is a man like my father, peace be with him. Well—and what would happen to Channah Basha if she should hear the truth? Instead of becoming Sam Palka’s wife, she would become David Vishkover’s widow.’
I love this story. This hilarious portrait of everyday Main Street characters rings as true today as it did when it was first published back then. The basics are the same and how little things change.
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