"Jane Yolen - Granny Rumple" - читать интересную книгу автора (Yolen Jane)

Granny Rumple
Jane Yolen
SHE WAS KNOWN AS GRANNY RUMPLE BECAUSE HER dress and face
were masses of wrinkles, or at least that's what my father's father's mother used to
say. Of course, the Yolens being notorious liars, it might not have been so. It might
simply have been a bad translation from the Yiddish. Or jealousy, Granny Rumple
having been a great beauty in her day.
Like my great-grandmother, Granny Rumple was a moneylender, one of the few
jobs a Jew could have in the Ukraine that brought them into daily contact with the
goyim. She could have had one of the many traditional women's rolesтАФa
matchmaker, perhaps, or an opshprekherin giving advice and remedies, or an herb
vendor. But she was a moneylender because her husband had been one, and they
had no children to take over his business. My great-grandmother, on the other hand,
had learned her trade from her father and when he died and she was a widow with a
single son to raise, she followed in her father's footsteps. A sakh melokhes un veynik
brokhes: Many trades and little profit. It was a good choice for both of them.
If Granny Rumple's story sounds a bit like another you have heard, I am not
surprised. My father's father used to entertain customers at his wife's inn with a
rendition of Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish, passing it off as a story of his own
invention. And what is folklore, after all, but the recounting of old tales? We Yolens
have always borrowed from the best.
Great-grandmother's story of Granny Rumple was always told in an odd mixture
of English and Yiddish, but I am of the generation of Jew who never learned the old
tongue. Our parents were ashamed of it, the language of the ghetto. They used it
sparingly, for punchlines of off-color jokes or to commiserate with one another at
funerals. So my telling of Granny Rumple's odd history is necessarily my own. If I
have left anything out, it is due neither to the censorship of commerce nor art, but
the inability to get the whole thing straight from my aging relatives. As a Yolen ages,
he or she remembers less and invents more. It is lucky none of us is an historian.


As a girl, Granny Rumple's name was Shana and she had been pursued by all the
local boys. Even a Cossack or two had knocked loudly at her door of an evening.
Such was her beauty, she managed to turn even them away with a smile. When she
was finally led under the wedding canopy, the entire village was surprised, for she
married neither the chief rabbi's son, a dark-eyed scholar named Lev, nor the local
butcher, who was a fat, ribald widower, nor the half dozen others who had asked
her. Instead she chose Shmuel Zvi Bar Michael, the moneychanger. No one was
more surprised than he, for he was small, skinny, and extremely ugly, with his
father's large nose spread liberally across his face. Like many ugly people, though,
he was also gentle, kind, and intensely interested in the happiness of others.
 "Why did you marry him?" my great-grandmother had wondered.
"Because he proposed to me without stuttering," Shana had replied, stuttering
being the one common thread in the other suits. It was all the answer she was ever to
give.
By all accounts, it was a love match and the expected children would have
followed apaceтАФwith Shana's looks, her mother had prayedтАФbut Shmuel was
murdered within a year of the wedding.
It is the telling of that murder, ornamented by time, that my great-grandmother
liked to tell. Distance lends a fascination to blood tales. It runs in our family. I read