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“Can you not see the color of revenge? I am clothed in scarlet, as the prophet Isaiah says: It is for me the day of vengeance; the year for me to redeem has come.”
the sight of the Messiah’s naked breasts remained in Mayer’s memory
as happens with remembered images—got divided up into words and then reconstituted from these words inside the minds of his children.
With the end times drawing near, would anyone be able to grasp with reason what was going on?
At first, their homes were taken over by sobbing, and disbelief reigned. Then a silence fell. For a day, or two, or three, no one really wanted to talk. What was there to say? That once more we were the weakest, having been deceived—that God had abandoned us? Our Messiah, crushed? How could that be, when we expected him to dethrone the sultan, take power over the whole world, and exalt the humiliated?
From these shaky, broken reports and tales it was necessary to assemble a whole, reach for the books, consult with the wisest of men.
Her mother watched her all the time. Like a wolf, like a dog getting ready to sink its teeth into your shin.
Yente’s mother died with the secret clenched in her fist. She died in a kind of convulsion, in a fury. She’ll no doubt come back as a wild animal.
she hung around the table at which they sat, too little to be assigned real women’s work.
as if the written words were by nature akin to a lament.
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.
Where’s paradise, and how can we get there?
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.
“So what will salvation look like?” she asked him once. Mayer, brought back to reality, stood up and leaned back against the stove.
“Between the heart and the tongue lies an abyss,” he said. “Remember that. Thoughts must be concealed, particularly since you were born, to your great misfortune, a woman. Think so that they think you are not thinking. Behave in such a way that you mislead others. We all must do this, but women more so. Talmudists know about the strength of women, but they fear it,
We don’t do that because we ourselves are like women. We survive by hiding. We play the fools, pretend to be people we are not. We come home, and then we take off our masks.
Nahman, not understanding, responds in Hebrew. Neither of them feels right chatting in the street in the holy language, so they break off, and Nahman switches to Yiddish.
words are not nobility that want their genealogical trees retraced. Words are merchants, swift and useful, now here, now there.
there are four types of readers. There is the reading sponge, the reading funnel, the reading colander, and the reading sieve. The sponge absorbs everything it comes into contact with; and it is evident he remembers much of it later, too. But he is not able to filter out what is most important. The funnel takes in what he reads at one end, while at the other, everything he’s read pours out of him. The strainer lets through the wine and keeps the sediment; he ought not to read at all—it would be infinitely better if he simply dedicated himself to some manual trade. The sieve, on the other hand,
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“Where are you from?” he asked without ceremony, which moved me to my core, as no nobleman had ever treated me with such sincerity before.
He spoke as if he did not fully believe himself, as if he had in his possession several other versions, equally true.
He quickly demonstrated knowledge that far surpassed the horizons of any ordinary goy.
Those of us who think God addresses us by means of external events are wrong, as naive as children. For he whispers directly into our innermost souls.
Isohar pronounced the word “trinity” more quietly, so as not to rile those who believed that such a weak Messiah would be too Christian. But does not every religion have some truth to it? All of them, even the most barbaric, have been permeated by the holy sparks.
The Torah seems the same, and nothing in it has literally changed, no one has transformed the letters, but it can no longer be read in the old way. In those old words, a completely new meaning appears, and we see and understand it. Whoever in this redeemed world keeps to the old Torah simply honors the dead world and the dead law.
An unwed Jew is no one, and he will be taken seriously by no one.
suddenly saw it in its totality, and it struck me as absolutely perfect. As if I had understood at last what all of this had been for—my
It is said in the tractate Hagigah 12: “Woe to them, the creations, who see and know not what they see.”
We were putting him to a trial by the spirit, trying to determine whether he could endure such an onslaught. And we weren’t asking for any ordinary sign, as before, for the comfort of our hearts. We were asking for action, for an arrival in our world, our filth, our gloom.
I have never seen anything so real that might testify to how foreign we are to the spirit in our earthly, corporeal, material forms.
Holy fools, exiles, and eccentrics who have already survived so much that nothing fazes them, including murderers’ forced tributes.
The relationship was consummated on the very first night, or so the groom boasts—and consummated several times, at that. No one asked the bride.
Surprised by the intrusion of her husband—sixteen years older than she—into the drowsy flower beds of her body, she gazed inquisitively into the eyes of her mother and her sisters on the following day. So this is how things are?
watching Hana poking at the house with a stick, trying to get at a wasps’ nest. She’ll be sorry shortly, and they’ll all have to run away.
He doesn’t know whether she’s intelligent or stupid, cheerful or melancholic, whether she’s short-tempered or the opposite, good-natured. He doesn’t understand how this girl with the round face and the greenish eyes can be a wife. They don’t cut married women’s hair in Nikopol, so he can see how wild and beautiful hers is, dark brown, like coffee. She has lovely hands with long, thin fingers and fecund hips.
Pretty and curvy—that’s how she should be described. That’s enough. And to think that a few days ago he regarded her as he would a child.
Daughters are destined to be given away, and everyone knows from the start they’ll leave the nest, like money neatly put away that must later be paid back to the world.
closely examining every moment of the world under the watchful gaze of all the letters of the alphabet.
Nahman knows that Jacob is Jacob because when he looks at him as he is doing now, from afar, without Jacob being aware, Nahman feels a pressure in the vicinity of his heart, as though some invisible hand were holding him by it, hot and wet. This sense of being squeezed makes him feel good, calm. His eyes fill up with tears. He could just look and look and look in this way. What further proof could he want? It’s the heart that knows such things.
being foreign is a quality of those who have frequently changed their place of residence. He’s told Nahman that he feels best in new places, because it is as if the world begins afresh every time. To be foreign is to be free. To have a great expanse stretch out before you—the desert, the steppe.
To have your own history, not for everyone, just your own history written in the tracks you leave behind.
Not to understand the language, and therefore to register gestures and faces better, the expressions in people’s eyes, the emotions that appear on faces like the shadows of clouds.
This state of foreignness must be carefully guarded, for it gives enormous power.
Jacob being Jacob, as if for laughs, an unclear thing that instantly made a permanent home in Nahman’s memory, for it was Jacob’s first teaching, though perhaps he did not know that yet. The thing was that you have to practice saying no, every single day.
He says wise and stupid things.
Jacob seems at first glance like someone familiar, a peer, but soon, after a little conversation, people realize that there is nothing familiar about him—that he is peerless.
As everyone knows, it isn’t easy to go home.
Jacob, gaze blurry, stroking Nahman’s face, or Nahman, drunk, resting his head on Jacob’s chest.
This world is terrible, it is true, but perhaps it can be spruced up a little here and there. For on this worst and darkest of days, light is born. Sadness would be nothing without some knowledge of joy.
And how exactly would a saved world differ from an unsaved world?
