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

murder mysteries; my daughter is a detective.
There was, you see, a walled Jewish ghetto in the town of Ykaterinislav and
beyond it, past the trenches where the soldiers practiced every spring, the larger
Christian settlement. The separate Jewish quarters are no longer there, of course. It is
a family joke: What the Cossacks and Hitler only began, Chernobyl finished.
Every day Shmuel Zvi Bar Michael would say his prayers in his little stone house,
donning tefillin and giving thanks he was not a womanтАФbut secretly giving thanks
as well that he had a woman like Shana in his bed each night. He was not a man
unmindful of his blessings and he only stuttered when addressing the Lord G-d.
Then he would make his way past the gates of the ghetto, past the trenches, and
onto the twisting cobbled streets of Ykaterinislav proper. He secreted gold in various
pockets of his black coat, and sewed extra coins and jewels into the linings of his
vest. But of course everyone knew he had such monies on him. He was a changer,
after all.
Now one Friday he was going along the High Street where the shops of the
merchants leaned despondently on one another. Even in Christian Ykaterinislav
recessions could not be ignored and the czar's coinage did not flow as freely there
as it did in the great cities. As he turned one particular corner, he heard rather loud
weeping coming from beside the mill house. When he stopped inтАФhis profession
and his extreme ugliness allowing him entree other Jews did not haveтАФhe saw the
miller's daughter sobbing messily into her apron. It was a white apron embroidered
with gillyflowers on the hem; of such details legends are made real. Shmuel knew the
girl, having met her once or twice when doing business with her father, for the miller
was always buying on margin and needing extra gold. As a miller's wares are always
in demand, Shmuel had no fear that he would not be repaid. Gelt halt zikh nor in a
grobn zak: Money stays only in a thick sack. The miller's sack, Shmuel knew, was
the thickest.
The girl's name was TashaтАФTana to her familyтАФ and as pretty as her blond head
was, it was empty. If she thought something, she said it, true or not. And she agreed
with her father in everything. She would have been beaten otherwise. She was not
smartтАФbut she was not that stupid.
"NaтАФna, Tana," Shmuel said, using her familiar name to comfort her. "What
goes?"
 In between the loud snuffles and rather muffled sobs, she offered up the
explanation. Her father had boasted to the mayor of Ykaterinislav that Tana could
spin miracles of flax and weave cloth as beautiful as the gold coats of the
Burgundian seamstresses.
"And where is Burgundian anyway?" Tana asked, sniffling.
"A long way from here," replied Shmuel. It was little comfort.
"I am a poor spinner at best," Tana confessed. She whispered it for it was
nothing to boast of. "And I cannot weave at all. But I can cook."
"NaтАФna, Tana," Shmuel said, "but what is the real problem?"
"The real problem?"
"Why are you really crying?"
"Oh!" She took a deep breath. "Unless I can spin and sew such a cloth, my
father's boast will lose us both our heads."
"This sounds like a fairy tale to me," said Shmuel, though of course he did not
use the word fairy, that being a French invention. He said "It sounds like a story of
the leshy." But if I had said that, you would not have understood. And indeed, I did
not either, until it was explained to me by an aunt.