"William Tenn - My Mother Was a Witch" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tenn William)

My Mother Was a Witch
William Tenn

I spent most of my boyhood utterly convinced that my mother was a witch. No psychological trauma
was involved; instead, this belief made me feel like a thoroughly loved and protected child.
My memory begins in the ragged worst of Brooklyn's BrownsvilleтАФalso known as East New
YorkтАФwhere I was surrounded by witches. Every adult woman I knew was one. Shawled conventions
of them buzzed and glowered constantly at our games from nearby "stoops." Whenever my playmates
swirled too boisterously close, the air turned black with angry magic: immense and complicated curses
were thrown.
"May you never live to grow up," was one of the simpler, cheerier incantations. "But if you do grow
up, may it be like a radish, with your head in the ground and your feet in the air." Another went: "May
you itch from head to foot with scabs that drive you crazyтАФbut only after your fingernails have broken
off so you can't scratch."
These remarks were not directed at me; my mother's counter-magic was too widely feared, and I
myself had been schooled in every block and parry applicable to little boys. At bedtime, my mother spat
thrice, forcing the Powers with whom she was in constant familiar correspondence to reverse curses
aimed at me that day back on their authors' heads threefold, as many times as she had spit.
A witch in the family was indeed a rod and a staff of comfort.
My mother was a Yiddish witch, conducting her operations in that compote of German, Hebrew,
and Slavic. This was a serious handicap: she had been born a Jew-ish cockney and spoke little Yiddish
until she met my father, an ex-rabbinical stu-dent and fervent Socialist from Lithuania. Having bagged him
in London's East End on his way to America, she set herself with immediate, wifely devotion to unlearn
her useless English in place of what seemed to be the prevailing tongue of the New World.
While my father trained her to speak Yiddish fluently, he cannot have been of much help to her and
their first-born in that superstitious Brooklyn slum. He held science and sweet reason to be the hope of
the world; her casual, workaday necromancy horrified him. Nary a spell would he teach her: idioms,
literary phrases, and fine Yid-dish poetry, by all means, but no spells, absolutely no spells.
She needed them. A small boy, she noted, was a prime target for malice and envy, and her new
neighbors had at their disposal whole libraries of protective cantrips. Cantrips, at first, had she none. Her
rank on the block was determined by the potency of her invocations and her abilityтАФwhen invoked
uponтАФto knock aside or deftly neutralize. But she sorely lacked a cursing tradition passed for
generations from mother to daughter; she alone had brought no such village lore to the United States
wrapped in the thick bedspreads and sewn into goosedown-stuffed pillows. My mother's only weapons
were imagination and ingenuity.
Fortunately her imagination and ingenuity never failed herтАФonce she had got-ten the hang of the
thing. She was a quick study too, learning instruments of the occult as fast as she saw them used.
"Mach a feig!" she would whisper in the grocer's as a beaming housewife com-mented on my
health and good looks. Up came my fist, thumb protruding between forefinger and middle finger in the
ancient male gesture against the female evil eye. Feigs were my reserve equipment when alone: I could
make them at any cursers and continue playing in the serene confidence that all unpleasant wishes had
been safely pasteurized. If an errand took me past threatening witch faces in tenement door-ways, I shot
feigs left and right, all the way down the street.
Still, my mother's best would hardly have been worth its weight in used penta-grams if she had not
stood up worthily to Old Mrs. Mokkeh. Mokkeh was the lady's nickname (it is Yiddish for plague or
pestilence) and suggested the blood-chilling imprecations she could toss off with spectacular fluency.
 This woman made such an impression on me that I have never been able to read any of the fiercer
fairy tales without thinking of her. A tiny, square female with four daughters, each as ugly and short as
she, Mrs. Mokkeh walked as if every firmly planted step left desolated territory forever and
contemptuously behind. The hairy wart on the right side of her nose was so large that behind her