The Tin Horse A Novel - By Janice Steinberg Page 0,3

a quick-change artist of affection who adored you one day and, worse than anger or hatred, forgot you existed the next.

And she could leave havoc in her wake, a talent I witnessed for the first time when she caused the stock market crash of 1929. Of course, I was old enough at that time—eight and a half—to understand that cataclysms in my family didn’t affect the entire world. Yet I always associated Black Tuesday with the storm that hit our house the same day because of what Barbara did to Zayde.

Zayde Dov, Papa’s father, lived with us. In fact, our house was the same one Zayde had moved into when Papa was seventeen. But Zayde wasn’t from Los Angeles. He had crossed the ocean to come to America. And before that, he’d had to cross a river. A trifling distance, to be sure, compared to the Atlantic that churned beneath him for two weeks, an ordeal that made him refuse to set foot in a boat ever again, not even the little rowboats in Hollenbeck Park. But crossing the river was harder. The first wrenching away from everything he knew and that knew him, a seventeen-year-old boy with his mama’s kugel still warm in his belly and the fresh damp of her tears wetting the scarf she’d knotted around his neck.

And Zayde’s river was no country trickle, but the mighty Dniester, which swept from the Carpathian Mountains past his village in the Ukraine to the Black Sea. Then there was the fact that he had to swim across the river on a March night—the water icy, the current at a gallop from melting Carpathian snow—so the dogs wouldn’t pick up his scent. The dogs and the men with them, men who carried cudgels and guns.

Zayde always paused at this point. And Barbara and I always demanded, breathless as if the dogs were after us, “Why were they chasing you?”

“Ah,” he’d say, taking a sip from his cup of tea, laced with whiskey. “A great crime I committed, girls.”

No matter how many times I heard the story, I could never erase the picture that jumped into my mind, of Zayde Dov in his house slippers vaulting onto a horse with the loot from a bank robbery, like the Wild West bandits I saw in the movies.

Until he continued, “I fell in love.”

The girl’s name was Agneta. She was the daughter of one of the farmers who came into town on market day, an event that over time, between Zayde’s storytelling and my imagination, became so real I almost felt as if I’d been there, as if I’d witnessed the scene that sealed Zayde’s fate. Market day in Zayde’s village was busy and noisy, what with the jostle of peasants selling what their farms produced and the Jewish villagers offering goods such as tea, salt, and lamp oil. The villagers also provided the services of craftsmen such as Berel the tinsmith, who was Zayde Dov’s father.

Berel, an enterprising man, had recently bought a grinding machine and branched into sharpening. And scissors, appropriately, proved the instrument of Dov’s estrangement—such a rich word, signifying both that you become a stranger to others and that everything around you, everything you see and hear, even what you smell, is alien. No more do your nostrils suck in the precise odors that emanate from this soil and vegetation, this method of cooking and of handling trash, the perfume, however foul, of home. If only Dov could have foreseen what he was about to lose, would he have acted differently the day Agneta came into the tinsmith’s shop wanting her scissors sharpened fine enough to cut the challis she’d just bought for a best dress?

It was nearly dusk, and Dov was tending the shop alone. He pumped the foot pedal to start the grinding wheel and held the blades of Agneta’s scissors against the stone. He was more aware at first of the work than of the pretty peasant customer.

“I liked using the grinder,” he told us. “It’s the one thing I was good at. My father said he’d never seen such a schlemiel at working tin.”

He tested the scissor blades with his finger, then ground them a bit more and buffed them with a clean rag until they gleamed in the thin light of a late January afternoon. “Perfect, see?” he said, and demonstrated by snipping a piece of paper and displaying the crisp edges. Agneta, who was shortsighted, leaned close to look, close enough that he