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

toward the ghetto wallsтАФ"even there the bride's family suppliesтАж"
"Myself!" she cried. "I am to make each myself. And embroider them with my
own hands. And I cannot sew!" She proceeded to weep again into her apron, this
time so prodigiously, the gillyflowers would surely have grown from the watering
had the Lord G-d been paying attention as in the days of old.
"A-ha!" Shmuel said, reaching into his pockets and jangling several coins
together. "I understand. But my dear, I have the means to help you, onlyтАж"
"Only?" She looked up from the soggy apron.
"Only this time, as you have prospects of a rich marriageтАж "тАФfor gossip travels
through stone walls where people themselves cannot pass. It is one of the nine
metaphysical wonders of the worldтАФ number three actually.
"Only?" To say the girl was two platters and a bottle short of a banquet is to do
her honor.
 "Only this time you must pay interest on the loan," Shmuel said. He was a
businessman after all, not just a Samaritan. And SamariaтАФlike Burgundy, was a long
way from there.
Tana agreed at once and put her X to a paper she could not read, then gratefully
pocketed three gold pieces. It would buy the services of many fine seamstresses
withтАФshe reckoned quicklyтАФenough left over for a chain for her neck and a net for
her hair. She could not read but, like most of the girls of Ykaterinislav, she could
count.


"I do not like such dealings," Shana remarked that evening. "The men at least are
honorable in their own way. But the women of the goyimтАж"
"I am a respected moneylender," Shmuel said, his voice sharp. Then afraid he
might have been too sharp, he added, "Their women are nothing like ours; and you
are a queen of the ghetto."
If she was appeased, she did not show it, but that night her prayers were even
longer over the candles, as if she were having a stern talking to with the Lord G-d.


AhтАФyou think you know the tale now. And perhaps you are right. But, as Shmuel
noted, some do not know story from history. Perhaps you are one of those. Story
tells us that the little devil, the child stealer, the black imp was thwarted. Of such
blood libels good rousing pogroms are made.
Still, history has two sides, not one. Here is the other.
Tana and her Leon were married, of course. Even without the cloth it was a good
match. The milker's business was a thriving one; the mayor was rich on graft. It was
a merger as well as a marriage. Properties were exchanged along with the wedding
pledges. Within the first month Tana was with child. So she was cloistered there, in
the lord mayor's fine house, while her own new house was being built, so she did not
see Shmuel again.
And then the interest on the loan came due.
A week after Tana's child was delivered, she had a visitor.
It was not Shmuel, of course. He would never have been allowed into the
woman's section of a Christian house, never allowed near the new infant.
It was Shana.
"Who are you?" asked Tana, afraid that in her long and difficult pregnancy her
husband had taken a Jewish concubine, for such was not unheard of. The woman