Having fled the great house of the Comte de Villars and his bizarre offer of employment, I had returned gratefully to the routine of my days: my mother woke me tenderly at five o’clock each morning, bringing a basin of water to my bed. I performed my ablutions, washing my hands of the unclean spirits that might have settled on my body during the night, and said my morning prayer of thanks. I put on my tzitzit, a fringed protective garment, like a prayer shawl with a slit cut in the middle for the head to go through. Over this I wore what I hoped was a French-looking chemise, a red vest with silver buttons, and a black coat. I hid my yarmulke beneath a black felt three-cornered hat.
I scurried to morning prayer with my brother and my father at one of several places of worship set up in various houses in our section of Paris—we did not have a synagogue—then my father and I yoked up our peddler’s boxes and set off to make a little money, calling out hoarsely, “Watch fobs! Knives! Snuffboxes!” etc. The streets of Paris were cacophonous with the cries of peddlers selling everything from baked apples to firewood to water pumped from the Seine. Each peddler had his or her own cry, and we milled through the streets, across the bridges, baskets and boxes strapped to us, crying out our wares. My brother Shlomo was exempt from this work; the treasured scholar of the family, he stayed back to study all day. I didn’t envy him. In the afternoons I played skittles with other boys in the courtyard, or ran wild through the neighborhood with my gang of friends. I had no inclination to study the holy texts in my free time as I was meant to—nor did I have any great interest in business. I just wanted to enjoy myself as much as possible. My father, a serious, even doleful man, thought I was a ruffian in the making. His selling was punctuated by prayer morning, afternoon, and night: Shacharis, Mincha, and Ma’ariv. He was also one of a group of stalwart men who volunteered to prepare the dead of our community in the traditional manner. His attitude toward me, his blithe eldest son, was one of resigned disappointment, occasionally peppered with disgust. I avoided him as much as I could.
In addition to selling, I loaned small sums to the gentiles in the area—trifling amounts, really; I was no banker. People often needed a little something to tide them over to the next month, and usury was forbidden to Catholics. My father, brother, and I lent money at reasonable interest, collecting the pledges when they were due. Within our own community, we lent to one another without charging interest. That was our custom.
Our world of German and North European Jews took up about four cramped and winding streets of Paris, branching off the rue Saint-Martin, on the Right Bank of the Seine. The Portuguese Jews lived on the Left Bank, near the rue des Grands Augustins. They traded in silks and chocolate, and received passports for twice the time we did.
There had once been a much larger Jewish community in Paris. But in 1306, Philippe IV, in need of income for the bankrupt French state, had a brilliant idea: he simply arrested all the Jews in France, confiscated our money and property, and deported us. This initiated a series of expulsions that were revoked and reinstated several times during the coming centuries. We were let in or kicked out, depending on how important for business we were seen to be. Luckily for me, Louis XV was a tolerant king; in the past fifty years or so, we Jews had been allowed to slink into Paris in dribs and drabs, like rats trickling back into a house once the catcher has left the premises.
My young life pattered on in its usual way for several months until I got the jolting news that I was to be married. I was seventeen. My betrothed had been selected for me out of the meager handful of Jewish girls in Paris by the local matchmaker in collusion with my parents; the marriage contract was hammered out through a marriage broker. Hodel Mendel was just fourteen. As my parents saw it, Hodel was a catch: her father, Mayer Mendel, was the only ritual slaughterer on the Right Bank. The ritual slaughterer was an important man in our community. On top of that, the Mendels offered a substantial dowry, plus room and board for three years. Who could resist? As for me, I was dying to sleep with a woman, and Hodel was not a bad-looking girl.
I thought of marriage as a sort of Eden where you could pluck sensual—and sanctified—delight from every fruitier in the garden. I couldn’t wait. The day before my wedding, my scholarly uncle Yitzak sat with me, breathing thickly through the dense hairs in his nose, and explained that what I was about to do had been done by Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and there was nothing to be nervous about. He gave me a brief layout of the geography of my future wife, and myself in relation to her, causing me to nearly faint with embarrassment, but teaching me nothing I didn’t already know from having once witnessed two stray dogs humping, and my habit of idling inside bookshops where livres philosophiques, with their carefully illustrated descriptions of persons in flagrante delicto, were clandestinely sold. Having fulfilled his duty, Uncle Yitzak stood up stiffly, kissed my head, and walked out of the room. My mother, to my surprise, stormed in the minute he left, weeping, and clasped me violently against her breast.
When I saw little Hodel on the evening of our wedding, she was hanging by her elbows between her tall mother and her squat father, being guided through the courtyard of her family building like a blind person. Her face was entirely whited out by an opaque veil that fell to her waist, giving me the curious impression that her head was on backward. I stood with my parents beneath the wedding canopy, trembling in my white coat, waistcoat, and britches, over which I wore a kittel—a white linen robe, white for mourning, to remind me of my own death. Yet in truth my kittel could have been my own burial shroud, given what my marriage would turn out to be.
Hodel looked very small and rigid beside her pantherlike, black-browed mother, who was maneuvering her toward me with a firm grip. Her little badger of a father had to raise the girl’s elbow in order to keep her level. It looked as if they were heaving a draped statue across the courtyard. Hodel seemed to be making no effort to walk; in fact, she was quite stiff. I wondered if her feet were being dragged along the ground beneath her wedding gown. The four candle-bearing matrons walking before this coercive procession lent the ceremony an eerie air of sacrifice. At last Hodel was beside me, perfectly hidden behind the thick white silk. After my father pronounced the seven blessings, when Hodel’s veil was raised, a corner lifted by each parent, I saw that her eyes were inflamed and swollen from weeping. Her round cheeks had tear tracks on them. Her breath shuddered and caught like that of a tiny child who has been bawling. I crushed the glass beneath my heel with a sudden rush of anger.