And the Rat Laughed - By Nava Semel Page 0,3

The old woman would try her best to keep the venom from splattering onto the recipient of her story. The old woman hadn’t chosen her, and there was no doubt in her mind that her granddaughter was hardly the ideal addressee. Had she been allowed to choose, she would have preferred someone indifferent, unemotional, far-removed from her and from the threat of her hereditary deficiency. But at her age, it would be foolish to expect a perfect listener.

When they come to judge her story’s tortuous emergence from its darkness, they will dissect the storyteller too. Maybe it could have gone differently. Maybe it would have been enough to tell just the beginning, and to limit the continuation to an innocuous minimum.

Without hearing all of it, her granddaughter’s mother too would question its validity, because to her mind, some stories have to be confined to those who have already crossed the twilight zone separating childhood from whatever follows.

Ever so laboriously, the story moves forward, only to retreat again.

***

In the case of the old woman and others like her, the hereditary deficiency has reached its quintessence. Her daughter had complained, first behind her back and then to her face. And that too is part of the story, though it is probably part of a different one.

The old woman would also have liked her unbridled story with its warped and twisted spikes to be replaced with something more tame. Had the granddaughter’s mother been witness to this conversation as it unfolded on a sunny afternoon in Tel Aviv, she would have been more relentless in her judgment on the art of storytelling than any outside expert.

Don’t lay this on us, Mom, she would have screamed. Spare us. So much for this story. Cut it out once and for all.

***

What is a Jew?

If it’s such a terrible thing to be a Jew, why did you make me one?

Papa and Mama, it’s your fault. You’re to blame that I am what I am. You’re the worst father and mother in the world. I wish I had known. I would have chosen to be born to someone else.

Maybe she’d heard the word Jew before, but five-year-olds don’t give much thought to the words hovering around unless a particular one is repeated over and over again, and begins to hurtle at a frightening pace.

There were other insults. Once she even spat at her father. He wiped off the wet spot and, much to her surprise, did not scold her. She tried to strike a bargain. She promised to be the very best. She’d never ask for anything again. She swore she’d eat cabbage for breakfast, lunch and dinner. They knew how much she hated cabbage.

They rinsed her hair with peroxide. She thrashed about wildly. The servant threatened to tie her hands together, and eventually managed to hold them tight.

It’s so you don’t look too Jewish.

If there’s such a thing as too Jewish, there’s such a thing as not Jewish enough too. She’d already made up her mind: as soon as she could, she would stop being Jewish at all.

If being Jewish was such a terrible thing, then being a Jewish little girl was the worst thing in the world.

***

There was another word she heard for the first time. They spat out War like you spit out a broken tooth. Then they started whispering, as if they’d lost their voices. And even though her lungs were still full of screams at that point, she was already starting to sound like them. First masking her voice, then whispering, and finally utter silence.

If you were going to hand me over to strangers, why did you bring me into the world?

Where is “there”?

Who’s going to help me with my homework “there”?

Whose bed will I go to “there”?

And who will be with me “there”?

Who else will be “there”?

Why isn’t “there” here?

The old woman rattled off the questions one after the other, the way children do to control what comes next. Now she realizes that this had been her way of reducing her fear, though she can hardly bear to admit that the effort was doomed to fail. Would her granddaughter be able to see through the old-woman shell, and perceive the five-year-old child she once was? Her childish voice reaches out through the cracks in the story. Once she’d been forced into the next stage, the child had trained herself never to speak in anything but a grown-up’s voice.

***

When her strength ran out – how much strength can a five-year-old have? –she