I’ll admit to you, dear reader, that I don’t care much for dogs. The truth is, I don’t like them at all. To be perfectly honest, I hate them. As far as I’m concerned—and both my grandfathers held the same view—a dog is a mangy cur, a sycophant, a howler, a biter, a bootlicker. What is there to like in a dog?
And even if I did have positive feelings for dogs, they would have vanished after that lawsuit.
The door to Father’s courtroom opened and a tall, heavy-set man entered. He wore a gray jacket, gray trousers, and a gray hat. His clothes were flour-dusted. Zanvel was his name, and he was a baker on our street. In the courtyard where the bakery was located, he was often seen walking about wearing only his long underwear, a pair of crumpled slippers, and a conical paper cap instead of a hat.
Journeymen bakers earned good money, but Zanvel worked in his father’s bakery and was paid better than the others. He had pale skin, blue eyes, and the thick neck and shoulders of a
boxer. He kneaded huge chunks of dough, the sort of work that can easily break someone who isn’t strong enough.
He approached Father’s desk, pounded it with his fist, and said, “Rabbi, I want to start a lawsuit.”
“Against whom?”
“My wife.”
“Sit down. What is it?”
“Rabbi, it’s either me or the dog,” Zanvel shouted. “There’s no room in the house for both of us.”
“Who is this dog?”
“It’s not a person but a real dog,” Zanvel yelled. “She wanted to have a dog in the house—a fire in her kishkes! Ever since she got that dog, she’s forgotten she has a husband. My line of work is hard and backbreaking. I’m a baker, Rabbi. I bake bread so people can eat. All night long I work nonstop in the bakery, but when I come home in the morning, instead of being greeted by my wife, a dog comes bounding toward me. He barks and jumps on me. They say it’s out of love, but I don’t need his love. It wouldn’t be so bad if it were a little puppy. But this dog is like a bear. A wild beast. I don’t want a wild beast in my house. He opens his mouth like a lion. He can crunch a hard bone. When he barks, I have to cover my ears. He makes such a fuss, I’m lucky that he doesn’t bite my nose off. What do I need that for? My father didn’t have a dog.
“People say that a dog is useful if you live in a village, out in the country—but why do I need a dog in Warsaw? No one’s going to rob me here—I have an excellent lock on my door. Poor people used to come to my house and I would give them what I
could: one or two groschen, a piece of bread, a piece of sugar. But this dog drove all the poor people away. I have a charity box hanging on a wall and a Hasid used to come to collect the money, but he stopped coming, too. If we don’t chase the dog away, he’ll end up tearing the hem of someone’s coat. These Hasidim are scared of dogs.”
“Why does she need a dog?” Father said.
“Rabbi, you know like I know. No one in my family owns a dog. She began complaining that she’s lonely. You see, we don’t have children and she wants to have a living creature in the house. So I tell her, get a cat or a parrot. At least a bird sings. A parrot speaks. But what does a dog do? Rabbi, I’m ashamed to say it, but she kisses him. She’s always kissing him. I’m not, like they say, jealous. But when I see her kissing him, it wounds me to the core. Rabbi, I work long, hard hours for her—and it’s the dog she kisses. She never stops kissing him, petting him, worrying over his health. He doesn’t eat enough; he doesn’t sleep enough.
“Rabbi, I told her I’m going to take a piece of iron and split his skull open. So she screams she’ll leave the house. Rabbi, I want to have a rabbinic judgment! I want you to decide which of us is more important—a man or a dog.”
“What kind of comparison is that, God forbid. Comparing a dog to a man!”
His wife was summoned. A sturdy woman came in; she had a high bosom, strong arms, thick calves. Her shoes were tattered. She didn’t walk but dragged the soles of her shoes along the floor. She was sucking on a hard candy and one red cheek was pulsating. Boredom radiated from her face.
“Why do you need a dog?” Father asked her. “The Talmud teaches that a Jew is forbidden to keep a savage dog in his house.”
“He’s not savage, Rabbi. He’s better than this one,” she said, pointing a short, stubby finger at her husband.
The argument lasted a long while, and from their wrangling I, a little boy, clearly understood that the woman loved her dog and hated her husband.
Father finally succeeded in reconciling husband and wife. He apparently convinced the woman to either sell the dog or give him away. But hardly a month had passed and the man returned.
“Rabbi, I want a divorce.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m the baker who was here once. My wife still has the dog. The rabbi decided then that—”
“Yes, I remember.”
“Rabbi, it’s the same as before. Even worse. She sleeps in bed with him. If I’m lying, may I drop dead right here.”
Father sent for the woman once more and—wonder of wonders—she came with the dog. It was a huge pug, fat and thick-legged. From his wideset eyes and flaring nostrils gleamed a rage, a hatred, a contempt for every living creature. The dog barked at my mother. The woman wanted to take the dog into the courtroom, but Mother declared, “There’s a Torah in there.”
As soon as I entered the kitchen and saw the dog, a mixture of dread and joy overcame me, somewhat akin to the feeling I had when a policeman came to our apartment. I took a piece of bread and threw it to the dog. As he sniffed, it, the brown eyes
in his wrinkled forehead seemed to say, I don’t consider dry bread a treat!
I wanted to pet the dog, but his growl frightened me. This was no dog but a four-legged anti-Semite. Each limb breathed fierce aggression. When Father heard the barking in the courtroom, he too became frightened. He closed the holy book he was studying and began fanning himself with his yarmulke.
“What’s that?” he said.
“That’s her husband,” replied Zanvel the baker.
Usually Father attempted to make peace between litigants, but this time he did so merely for appearance’s sake. As bizarre as it sounds, the woman agreed to a divorce. She sacrificed her husband for a dog.
I don’t remember if the divorce was performed in our house, but the marriage was dissolved. The woman remained in the apartment with the furniture. The street seethed with the news: a dog had driven a man away from his home. The women said awful things about the wife, whispering secrets into one another’s ears.
One woman who heard the news turned red, exclaiming, “No!”
“Yes!” the other woman replied, and whispered another secret into her ear.
“Foo! How’s that possible?”
“Everything is possible, my dear woman. May she burn in hell!”
“And I once heard a woman tell a story about a noblewoman who lived with a stallion, a male horse, and they had a baby that was half human and half colt.”
“What did they do with it?”
“It died right away.”
“All of this stems from excessive luxury. Having it too good drives them crazy—a fire in their kishkes!”
After his divorce, Zanvel went downhill. He started drinking. At night, while kneading huge chunks of dough, he’d sing plaintive tunes, and his voice could be heard throughout the courtyard. The neighbors complained that he woke them up. People wanted to arrange a match for him. All kinds of women flattered him, but he didn’t want any of them.
“If a dog can drive me out of my house, then I’m really afraid.”
And he was seen frequenting the tavern on our street.
The woman with the dog found another man, a fruit dealer, and it was rumored that he would soon marry her. He happened to like dogs. When he visited the divorcee, he brought her chocolates and jellybeans, and a piece of meat or a bone for the dog. If the woman was busy, the fruit merchant would take the dog out for a walk, leading him on a leash. Sometimes he would unleash him and the dog would follow him warily, dragging the leash on the sidewalk.
An awful thing happened on one of these walks. Zanvel the baker was approaching the dog. He was barefoot, wearing only a pair of white long johns and balancing a cheesecake on his head. Zanvel had ceased kneading the huge chunks of dough at his father’s bakery because he had developed a hernia. Now he was working for a pastry baker, who had sent him to deliver the cheesecake to a café.
When the dog saw his onetime master and rival, he attacked him with savage fury. The cheesecake fell off Zanvel’s head.
The dog bit Zanvel’s foot and Zanvel grabbed hold of the dog’s neck and strangled him. The fruit merchant pulled out a knife and stabbed Zanvel …
All of this took place within a few minutes. The policeman blew his whistle. Someone telephoned the first-aid squad. On the ground lay the dead dog with bloodshot eyes, a smashed cheesecake, and a bloody human being. The dog’s tongue was black and hung out of his mouth like a rag.
Soon Zanvel the baker was placed on a stretcher in the first-aid wagon. A medic bandaged his foot and the shoulder the fruit merchant had stabbed. The policeman handcuffed the fruit merchant and brought him to the police station. A janitor took the dead dog away. Barefoot boys and girls and even a few older fellows picked up pieces of the cheesecake and nibbled at them. When the woman, the owner of the dog, heard what had happened, she ran out into the street to bemoan her dog, and perhaps her lover, too. But the women on the street immediately pounced on her, beat her, and pulled fistfuls of hair from her head. There was a wild free-for-all on the street with tempers flaring everywhere.
You probably want to know, dear reader, how the story ended, and I’ll oblige. The end was that the fruit merchant, after spending a couple of weeks in jail, disappeared. Zanvel the baker lay in the hospital two days and then returned home. He went to console his former wife—and once again a match ensued. Before the wedding the wife swore that she would never again keep a dog in the house.
Instead of a dog she bought a cage with two yellow canaries and a green parrot to boot. Zanvel the baker resumed working
for his father. He no longer kneaded the huge chunks of dough but slid the loaves of bread into and out of the oven. Zanvel’s canaries chirped and sang all day long. The parrot spoke Yiddish. Everything was fine and dandy once again. In my view, heaven and earth had sworn that a dog must not be victorious. And as proof we have the story of “Chad Gadya,” the last song sung at the Passover Seder, where the dog is on the side of justice but the Master of the Universe is on the side of the stick that beats the dog. Because whether just or unjust, a dog should not interfere with our affairs.
That’s the interpretation attributed to the rebbe, Reb Heschel, who supposedly first told it. And even if he did not, he could have told it.