The Death of My Aunt

We hear Yiddish from the original text of the short story, “The Death of My Aunt,” spoken aloud, which then cross-fades into

An actor reading an English translation of the short story:

In the early hours after midnight, the telephone sounds altogether different — or so it seemed to me when the metallic jangle pounced like a thief that night, putting a swift end to my dreams and driving me out of bed. I ran down the long dark corridor to the dining room and reached for the receiver.

“Yes,” I croaked, half asleep.

I couldn't catch who was on the line. “Who did you say is speaking?”

“The old age home on Howard Avenue,” the voice said.

I felt for a chair and sat down. The spiders that nest in hidden places had come out into the open, tightening the loose strands of their webs with their thin, hairy legs. I clutched the receiver with both hands.

“Are you all right, Mrs. Lempel?” The feigned politeness was infuriating. I was tempted to ask whether he'd called at two o'clock in the morning just to find out how I was. But my throat closed up.

The voice on the other side of the night spoke again. “I'm sorry to say we have some sad news for you. Your aunt — your aunt, Rokhl Halperin, is no longer among the living.”

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Host Aaron Henne: Welcome to episode three of The Dybbukast, the show in which we ask: What do novels, mythological narratives, poems, plays and lyrics from throughout history tell us about the times in which they were created and what do they reveal about the forces still at play in our contemporary societies. 

This is Aaron Henne, Artistic Director of theater dybbuk. In this episode, presented in collaboration with the Yiddish Book Center, we’ll be exploring “The Death of My Aunt,” a short story written in Yiddish by Blume Lempel, and originally published in 1975. The story moves through time and space as a woman deals with mourning the loss of her aunt, whose past came to life as her present grew dim.

You will hear me in conversation with Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, whose book Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories contains their English translations of many of Lempel’s stories, including the one featured here. During our discussion, they revealed the intricacies existing within the narrative and discussed the ways in which it touches on immigrant experiences, emotional dislocation and familial connection.

And now, episode three of The Dybbukast: “The Death of My Aunt”

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Actor 1: She took her best dress out of the closet and laid it on the bed, next to the white silk kerchief with a golden fringes that she wore to bless the candles.

My aunt had brought this kerchief with her from Poland. It was the only memento she had from her mother, and she had decided to wear it when the time came to stand before the Lord of the Universe. She had also sewn for herself a shroud with long sleeves and a high, ruffled collar, as befitted a pious woman.

Aaron: I’m so excited to be here with you, Ellen and Yermiyahu. Thank you for joining me today.

Ellen Cassedy: It’s a pleasure.

Yermiyahu Ahron Taub: Thank you so much for having us.

Aaron: Thinking about “The Death of My Aunt,” in particular, and Blume Lempel’s work in general, what would you say her writings tell us about immigrant experiences, especially those who may have come to America to escape difficulty, and the intersections between the realities of living in the present and a longing for the past, for home?

Yermiyahu: I think the story exemplifies a kind of antithesis to the rags-to-riches, American-immigrant-made-good narrative. It's kind of an antidote to that.

Actor 1: My aunt was 70 years old when she went into the old age home. She turned over everything she owned and began to save again. Every penny I gave her she put away — to support the rabbis, the scholars, long, long after her death.

Yermiyahu: To me, the story is very much about being an outsider, being alone and yet not surrendering, not collapsing.

Ellen: Lempel, as we know, was a refugee from Hitler, herself an immigrant. And you could say that her writing served the purpose for her of allowing her to move freely from the present to the past, to bring the past with all of its pain and all of its joy into her life in the New World.

Actor 1: These excursions into the past took place mostly in the evening, when she would lay aside her prayer book and sit in her room with only the walls for company. She seldom complained about her fate and even stopped envying the women who had children of their own.

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Aaron: Now let's explore “The Death of My Aunt”'s plot and literary strategies. The story opens with a telephone call in the middle of the night. The narrator answers and it's the old age home informing her that her Aunt Rokhl has died. Actually she died hours earlier.

Ellen: For some reason, the home had waited to call until two o'clock in the morning. So the narrator, the niece, has missed her opportunity to be with her aunt at the moment of death. So she's let her aunt down, which is very upsetting to her.

Actor 1: I wanted to call the home and scream: Murderers! Robbers! To save the cost of a lousy phone call you shatter the lifelong dream of a poor old woman?

Yermiyahu: The woman looks outside when she finds out that her aunt has died. She looks out and sees tree branches in her yard filled with wailing, keening women in mourning,

Actor 1: I went to the window and parted the curtains. I looked out at the tree swaying in the wind. The snow had turned into a heavy rain. I saw that the bare branches of my tree were filled with keening women wrapped in black shawls. They had settled on the bushes and on the barbed wire fence, and in my aunt's voice, they were speaking to me: “Remember, be sure to do what I deserve, as I asked you to. Do not disgrace my dead body. No lipstick, no powder. Examine my shroud. Make sure it's not full of mites, God forbid. Do not forget the Willett Street rabbis. I’ve made my donations so they will say Kaddish and study Mishnah in my name. Remember! Remember!”

Yermiyahu: That's something that we hear about the Holocaust itself is: Never forget. Remember, remember.

Ellen: She goes back to bed and pulls the covers over her head and begins to recall her aunt's life back in the old country.

Actor 1: Here she is as a little girl, playing with the boys who study at her father's school. And now she's a grown woman, sitting at the machine, sewing bridal garments for other women's weddings. She sews and sews, until white begins to show in her jet-black braids. Then she bows to her father's wishes and marries a widower with grown children. When her father dies, her husband takes over the school and his children leave for America. My aunt's mother moves in with her older daughter, my own mother. Just before the Second World War, my aunt and her husband arrive in New York.

Yermiyahu: As soon as she gets to America, her husband dies. She's kind of left to fend for herself, without children, without anyone to help her, really.

Actor 1: My aunt had no children of her own. No matter how much I did for her, she always felt that children of her own would have done better; a son would have said Kaddish, a daughter would have donated to charity to save her soul from disgrace in the other world. The way things were, the entire burden fell on her shoulders.

Yermiyahu: And yet she leads this incredibly rich inner life. She lives a life devoted to God, devoted to texts, devoted to traditions.

Actor 1: Every moment of every day, every day of every year, she prepared herself for the journey to the other world. Mondays and Thursdays, in accordance with the old custom, she fasted half the day.

Ellen: And then, a kind of salvation arrives in the form of the narrator, her niece, who has also managed to flee Hitler and come to America. The aunt moves in with the narrator and her family in Brooklyn. And she's not old. She’s not even 60 years old but she has become old. She already kind of lives in the world to come. She eats alone. She emerges very rarely from her room to tell stories to the children. And she observes the Sabbath with great devotion.

Actor 1: On Friday nights, with the beginning of the Sabbath, my aunt came to life. A special spirit shown from her gray eyes and her face became smooth and unwrinkled.

Ellen: Then the narrator and her family decide to leave Brooklyn and move to the suburbs and to their surprise, the aunt decides not to go with them. She moves into the old age  home and begins to sort of live in the old country in her mind again.

Actor 1: My aunt peopled the home with characters from the Old Country. The rope-maker from her town had turned up here and was overseeing the kosher kitchen. The tenant farmer's son had become the house doctor. The cantor was the same one who used to lead the prayers in the big synagogue.

Yermiyahu: The aunt remembers the shtetl kind of as if it's happening now. Her lost love —  who, you know, obviously, is no longer with her — she remembers that so vividly. She remembers telling the sibling, “Don’t tell our father."

Actor 1: “Listen to this,” she said. “Motele Shoyber has turned up again. How he figured out where I live, I have no idea. Please, Pesenyu, don't breathe a word to Papa."

Ellen: By the end of this story, she has retreated even further into her own mind and become a little girl again.

Actor 1: Around Hanukkah, she became a little girl, running around barefoot, washing her mother's noodle-board in the river, setting down the noodle-board in the water and swimming away with the current.

Ellen: And there the recap of the aunt's life ends, and we're back in the present day with the narrator, when the aunt has died and the narrator makes her way to the old age home. She’s full of grief, full of regret, and her reason for going is to dress her aunt tenderly in her shroud and usher her soul into the world to come.

Actor 1: If only they had called me in time, I could have been standing at her death bed, perhaps wearing the white wings of the Angel Gabriel. I would have opened the gates to the Garden of Eden for her. With all due ceremony, I would have shown her to the seat she so richly deserved, where the patriarchs and matriarchs and all righteous men and women sing the Song of Praise before the Throne of God. At daybreak I arose, ironed the garment she'd sewn for herself, wrapped it in tissue paper, and set off for the funeral.

Ellen: And then it ends on this very sweet and tender note, even though there is a flash of anger near the end, where the narrator tells the attendants at the old age home, get out of this room, leave me alone with my aunt's body, you don't belong here, I do.

Actor 1: I looked at my escort. “Get out,” I said in a voice that allowed no opposition. He stared at me startled, but said nothing.

Yermiyahu: There’s also a moment of anger of the women at the funeral who descend upon the narrator.

Actor 1: In the lobby, the women fell upon me: “How could you have been so cold hearted?

Her wailing could have moved a stone, but you chose not to respond. They said in the office that they called you — the poor woman was waiting for you until the moment her soul departed.”

Yermiyahu: You know, and you're not really sure who to feel most empathy for. I mean, you feel empathy for everyone, but in some ways you feel so much empathy for the narrator who wasn't there when her aunt dies. One could read that she feels like she perpetuated a kind of injustice against her aunt by not being there, and perhaps furthered, you know, her isolation at the moment of entrée into the next world.

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Aaron: Let’s go for a moment to this topic of isolation and the experience of what it is to exist in a dominant society, being both contained within it and separate from it at the same time.

Yermiyahu: So many of the protagonists in Blume Lempel’s stories wrestle with questions of aloneness, togetherness, apartness. Some of the more crucial sort of insights, visions, phantasms happen when characters are alone. Sometimes they're in hiding in nature — which is a whole other theme, is sort of closeness of nature to the quotidian, to the everyday world.

Actor 1: Then, a brown bear came running, not from the forest, but from far away, from the great cities of the civilized world.

Ellen: Blume Lempel is an interesting example of someone who is both deeply connected and very much apart. She was very involved in the post-war world of Yiddish letters. She corresponded with Yiddish writers all over the world. She was published all over the world. And yet, she lived on Long Island, in New York, in a place where her neighbors had no idea that she was a world-published writer.

Actor 1: Dear Chava, as for my so-called anonymity, it is not a condition I have sought out exactly, but, in fact, in a certain sense, maybe I am a recluse. For me, it's enough to write a story and have it appear in a journal. Beyond that, being in public scares me.

Yermiyahu: Just to reiterate what Ellen had said, she did, in the correspondence with Chava Rosenfarb — she kind of talks about herself in these very sort of surreal terms. I mean, she — they had a rich epistolary friendship; Chava Rosenfarb, a distinguished Yiddish writer, arguably, in the school of psychological realism, whereas Lampel’s work was so much more experimental. They sustain each other over many years. And in that correspondence, Lempel talked about the diminishing Yiddish readership. Who are we writing for? Who's going to be reading our stories?

Actor 2: Dear Blume, of course you're right that there is almost no readership. But in fact, you have no right to say that because you are read. Those who still read the Yiddish journals do read your stories. As for books, here too you stand out. You get reviews. Take heart from the fact that you're appreciated and praised.

Yermiyahu: Lempel says even among the Yiddish-speaking world, people only talk about Mendele Mokher Seforim, Sholem Aleichem, Peretz. They don't talk about contemporary writers. So she did feel that isolation keenly in a lot of different terrains.

•••

Aaron: Blume Lempel’s journey is an interesting one, covering much ground geographically and emotionally. Please tell us more about her background and story.

Ellen: Blume Lempel was born in 1907, in a tiny little town called Khorostkov. At that point, it was Galicia, then it was Poland, and now it's in Ukraine. She described her birthplace as “a whitewashed room by the banks of a river that had no name.” But somehow she emerged from this tiny town to write with great feeling and many exact details about an extraordinarily wide range of characters in settings that ranged from the Old World, to cosmopolitan Paris between the wars, to New York and California. And when we first came upon her work, we were just astounded. We'd never read anyone like her in any language. We found her to be a dazzling stylist and a bold explorer of new terrain.

To solve the mystery of how this woman emerged from such a tiny town to become a writer on the world stage, we went searching for her story. We learned that her schooling was sporadic. She later recalled:

Actor 1: My father believed that all a girl needed to know was how to cook a pot of food, sew a patch and milk a cow.

Ellen: She remembered that in Poland, she didn't write at all. She only dreamed about writing. But as she dreamed, she was storing up observations that would later appear in her work. And all her life her childhood self remained accessible to her. The way she put it was:

Actor 1: The girl who was the girl whose tides ebb and flow on my sandy shores to this day.

Ellen: So at the age of 22, in 1929, Blume left Khorostkov. She intended to become a pioneer in Palestine, but on the way, she stopped off in Paris and she fell in love with that city. She met her husband, they started a family and she began to write and meet other Yiddish writers. She was hoping to make Paris her permanent home, but then came Hitler. And in 1939, just before World War II, she and her family were very fortunate to be able to flee to New York, where she remained for the rest of her life. She died in 1999.

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Aaron: Lempel began to write short stories not long after arriving in the U.S., with some works published in the 1940s and 1950s. There is then a long gap in her publication history. Please share with us about this gap and what occurred that made it so.

Ellen: After she arrived in America, Blume Lempel reached out to the New York Yiddish literary scene, and she started publishing. She had a serialized novel published in a newspaper, and she published short stories. But then the news from Europe began to trickle in, and she learned that back in her hometown, her family had been murdered, and that on the day before the liberation of France, her beloved brother, who had joined the resistance, had been arrested and shot. And, as she later said, she was catapulted into a deep despair. She wrote:

Actor 1: The past was a graveyard, the future without meaning. I sat paralyzed within a self-imposed prison. The years went by, many desolate, fruitless years.

Ellen: She began to burn her work. But then came a turning point, when two friends who were Yiddish writers suggested that she dedicate herself to writing about the terrible destruction that was consuming her. Write about the Holocaust. Write about how it was affecting her.

Yermiyahu: Those key alliances, I think, really nurtured and saved her, anchored her and propelled and inspired her.

Ellen: And this opened a psychological door. She wrote:

Actor 1: I felt I must speak for those who could no longer speak, feel for those who could no longer feel, immerse myself in their unlived lives, their sorrows, their joys, their struggle, and their death.

Ellen: So she really found her calling. And her subject, as she developed it, was not the annihilation itself, but the aftermath; mostly not people who had experienced the ghettos and the camps but, as she put it:

Actor 1: The survivors, the broken people who attempt after the war to establish a new link to life, and who through it all remain broken.

Ellen: So she took upon herself the task of expressing the experience of people like herself;  an experience of displacement and flight and adaptation and the special grief and guilt that come with that. So in her work, the Holocaust is never far from the surface, often just hovering out of sight. I think we can see how in the story, “The Death of My Aunt,” the narrator's grief over not being there at the moment of death might be a reflection of a larger grief that Blume Lempel felt about her separation from her people who were being annihilated in Europe. She wasn't there for the moment of their death, and that has haunted her ever since.

Actor 1: Again and again, I imagined her despair. She'd been counting on my last visit. She'd had so much to say, so much she wanted to hear, I imagined how she wrestled with death, mounted her resistance, waited and hoped that at any moment, the door would open and I would arrive.

Yermiyahu: This is something that I've uncovered or seen anew in other translation projects of Yiddish writers: the sort of imperative to memorialize, given the ruptures that characterize 20th century Jewish life; never returning to the place that you were born in, that you spent your formative years in. And maybe if you did return, there's not gonna be anything left at all. And maybe if you do return, there's going to be hostility or enmity when you get back. So all these, you know, sort of profound dislocations that are the 20th century Jewish condition, they're there in the text, they’re there both in content and form. It's all like one big yahrzeit in a way.

Actor 1: Until five in the evening, she held off the Angel of Death. When night fell, her thoughts became muddled as usual, her wits distracted. Then, only then, was she defeated.

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Aaron: Blume’s work emerges once again in the early 1970s, published in Yiddish periodicals both in the U.S. and in Europe. What allows this to occur and what has shifted? And, related to this, how did this work achieve wide publication, and were there any barriers to achieving its greatest reach?

Ellen: Maybe the most important factor in Lempel’s career was that around 1970, she won the support of Abraham Sutzkever, who is considered the greatest Yiddish poet of the 20th century. He was renowned as a cultural hero who had rescued treasured Jewish texts in the Vilna ghetto, and as the editor of the leading Yiddish literary journal Di Goldene Keyt, “The Golden Chain,” which was published for decades in Tel Aviv. And another editor might've tried to reign Lempel in, to smooth out her rough edges and tame her bold choices but Sutzkever never did

Actor 3: Dear Blume, you have your own words, your own observations, your own madness, which you scoop out from within yourself like shovelfuls of hot coals. Your talent is not an ordinary one. Of that, I am sure.

Ellen: And with Sutzkever's encouragement to write exactly the way she wanted to, Lempel’s stories didn't move smoothly from point A to point B. Instead, often within a single sentence, you'll find her imagination moving back and forth between dream and reality, and past and present. And we think that this jaggedness is a carefully considered literary choice that embodies the disruptions in her own life and the lives of her characters. So it's an ingenious way to convey the restless existence that she knew so well.

Actor 1: I pulled the covers over my head, but the wailing women in the March wind kept up their lament. They commanded me to read and understand the wind-blown pages of my aunt's life. Eyes shut, I gazed upon the narrow lane where she was born and grew up.

Ellen: Lempel published two collections of short stories, and she also published individual stories all over the world in journals in the United States and Australia and France and South Africa. And when these stories were published, the praise came pouring in. The celebrated Yiddish writer Chaim Grade wrote to her how sad it was that her talent had flowered so late, at a moment in history when so few people could read her words in the original. But he said maybe this was inevitable because she belonged to her time and no other time. He wrote:

Actor 4: Dear Blume, it is enough to make one weep that you appeared in our literature at a time when so few good readers remained. But, perhaps it could not have been otherwise. Perhaps your magical, sweet, lyrical tone could not have come into being any earlier than our autumn years. You are a modern writer in the most beautiful sense.

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Aaron: Let’s investigate Lempel’s choice to write in Yiddish. Given where she lived and her circumstances, I'm curious about the reasons for this choice.

Actor 1: Yiddish is in my bones. When I hear my mother’s “Oy” in my head, I lift my eyes to heaven and hear God answering me in Yiddish. The birds, real and imagined, speak Yiddish, and the wind at my windows speaks Yiddish because I speak Yiddish, think in Yiddish.

Ellen: Yiddish was a portable homeland for Lempel. It was a way of remaining true to a world that was no more while she made her way to new places, confronting new circumstances in new languages. Yiddish is also a way to honor the 6 million who perished in the Holocaust.

Actor 1: My older brother tells me to write in Yiddish, directing my stories from beyond the grave: “This is how it was. This is what happened so it must be recorded.” “You did not survive simply to eat blintzes with sour cream. You survived to bring back those who were annihilated.” “You must speak in their tongue, point with their fingers.”

Ellen: Yiddish was also a way for Lempel to hide. Writing in Yiddish could feel isolating. But maybe that very isolation freed Lempel to pursue her own vision, because even as she was being published in Yiddish periodicals, and receiving literary prizes, and corresponding in Yiddish with readers and writers all over the world, her children could not read what she wrote. So maybe writing in Yiddish in an English speaking world helped to liberate Lempel to be the taboo-defined writer she was meant to be.

Actor 1: I lay in bed thinking about our limited understanding. The March wind had blustered away somewhere, taking with it the keening women who spoke to me in my aunt's voice.

I also thought about the philosopher who said that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Indeed, I knew a little.

Yermiyahu: I do feel that, for Lempel, Yiddish was her primal umbilical cord to the world that she lost, and it was a language of great heights. When people hear Yiddish, they immediately think the comic register or somehow the register is always like immediately lowered; not in a good way, like, not like in a sort of organic, folk way, but just in a sort of trite or corny or this-is-the-punchline moment. She could have written in English. It wasn't fluid. I mean, it wasn't exquisite in that way, but she did master English and she could have, you know, insisted upon English, but she chose not to, and that decision was very deliberate. It was very strategic. It was very essential to maintain that connection to the world that she lost, to the loved ones that she lost, also to the traditions that she lost.

Actor 1: As evening fell, when her room began to grow dark and the shadows pressed in from every corner, after she had finished eating and recited the blessing after the meal, made up her bed and placed a bowl of water on the night table for the next morning's ritual hand washing — then my aunt would emerge from her room to tell the children a story. She'd recount the tale of the little old lady who had lots and lots of children — dark, charming little girls and boys — Jewish children who spoke Yiddish, studied Torah and feared God.

Ellen: Her life work as a writer was to evoke the experience of transition and survival and displacement and disruption. And through her writing, she held on to the past while making a new home in a new place.

Yermiyahu: I do read the story as a fleshing-out, a filling-out of the American immigration narrative beyond the acculturation narrative, beyond the assimilation narrative, beyond the questions of obvious familial passing-on, into looking at the individual, into honoring the individual, into honoring this soul who insists upon her place, even as she cleans houses, even as she's totally marginalized, totally totally marginalized.

Actor 1: To ward off the humiliation of the outside world, my aunt took refuge in the secret passages of her own being. There, she found the strength that guided her and motivated her to go on with her life. With every punishment in this world of lies and falsehood, she attained a higher moral standing in the world of truth, beyond the grave.

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Aaron: Something the story touches on and that has come up in our conversation is the sense of being both at home and also oriented towards another place — this idea that I'm living in a space that has given me refuge and that I have in some ways made my own but, at the same time, I have a desire for the place I left behind and what, even with its challenges, it gave me. I am both here and I am elsewhere simultaneously. And I think that holds true for a lot of people who are both immigrants and not, even people who have a kind of nostalgic longing for a place that maybe never quite was but they seek it out. So, I'm just curious your reflection on that.

Yermiyahu: I think it's a part of immigrant tradition, immigrant culture, the culture you came from, the culture you're in now, trying to navigate between the two, trying to make sense of the two. I think it's a product of Judaism. Olam ha-zeh, olam ha-ba — “the world here, the world to come.” We're always looking to the next world. We're always looking to the next moment even as we're doing everything we can to make this world as rich as possible. I think it's also embedded in the landscape that Blume Lempel originated from. First, it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then Poland, then the Ukraine after World War II, Poland between the wars. Even the landscape itself, you know, is constantly shifting. For anyone doing genealogical research in families knows this — you know, the spellings of names is constantly changing. So all of those things are sort of embedded kind of primally, emotionally, psychically in the DNA of people on the move, people with a portable homeland. We've talked earlier about Yiddish, you know, being a portable homeland. Well, the Torah is the ultimate portable Jewish homeland. As Jews have moved across and around the globe, the Torah is like their foundational text. So perhaps, yeah, perhaps there is a line from the Torah to Blume Lempel, who knows.

Actor 1: Dear Chava, you ask if I have a large garden. No, it is not large, but it does require work. I grab my shovel and run outside, and the garden rewards me for my efforts. Red and yellow roses lift their faces to me, and the grass is green. Everything wants to live and to thrive. It's a Jewish garden with a little of this and a little of that. Everything comes together harmoniously.

•••

Aaron: Thank you for listening to this episode of The Dybbukast. Selections from “The Death of My Aunt” by Blume Lempel from the English translation by Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, were read by Diana Tanaka. Additional readings were performed by Julie Lockhart, Clay Steakley and Mark McClain Wilson. Yiddish taken from the original text was read by Miri Koral of the California Institute for Yiddish Culture and Language. Scholarship was provided by Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub. Our theme music is composed by Michael Skloff and produced by Sam KS. The series is edited by Mark McClain Wilson.

“The Death of My Aunt” is included in the book Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories, published by Mandel Vilar Press and Dryad Press. The book is available with free shipping to anywhere in the United States from either of these publishers. More information can be found at dryadpress.com or mvpublishers.org.

Thank you to the Covenant Foundation for supporting the launch of The Dybbukast and our development of related resources. Speaking of which, please visit us at theatredybbuk.org/podcast, where you will find links to a wide variety of materials which expand upon the episode’s explorations. And if you want to know more about theatre dybbuk’s work in general, please sign up for our mailing list on that same website on the contact page.

New episodes of The Dybbukast will be available every second Friday of the month. This episode was presented in collaboration with the Yiddish Book Center and was produced by theatre dybbuk.

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Actor 1: I unwrapped the shroud with its ruffled collar and frilly sleeves. I pulled it over her thin frame, all the way from her feet to her blue lips. I covered her head with the special burial cap, and over the cap I placed her mother's white silk kerchief edged with golden fringe. I pulled the kerchief over her closed eyes. Only her long, pointy nose poked out at me. Bracing myself against fear, against death, against my own feelings, I touched my lips to the silk kerchief, and it seemed to me that with this gesture I freed the imprisoned soul, which then rose, fluttering softly, and wafted away to the exalted place for which it was destined, leaving behind the body as a gift from Mother Earth.

We hear Yiddish from the conclusion of the original short story.