Айзек Азимов - Wandering Stars - An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction

Jechidah closed her eyes and leaned back against the upholstery. The horse trotted slowly. In the dark all the corpses, men and beasts, lamented their death—howling, laughing, buzzing, chirping, sighing. Some of the corpses staggered, having drunk to forget for a while the tortures of hell. Jechidah had retreated into herself. She dozed off, then awoke again with a start. When the dead sleep they once more connect themselves with the source of life. The illusion of time and space, cause and effect, number and relation ceases. In her dream Jechidah had ascended again into the world of her origin. There she saw her real mother, her friends, her teachers. Jachid was there, too. The two greeted each other, embraced, laughed and wept with joy. At that moment, they both recognized the truth, that death on Earth is temporary and illusory, a trial and a means of purification. They traveled together past heavenly mansions, gardens, oases for convalescent souls, forests for divine beasts, islands for heavenly birds. No, our meeting was not an accident, Jechidah murmured to herself. There is a God. There is a purpose in creation. Copulation, free will, fate—all are part of His plan. Jachid and Jechidah passed by a prison and gazed into its window. They saw a soul condemned to sink down to Earth. Jechidah knew that this soul would become her daughter. Just before she woke up, Jechidah heard a voice:

“The grave and the grave digger have met. The burial will take place tonight.”

Can the heroic figure be, at the same time, a Ulysses, a mensch , a meshugge , and a comedian with a heart of gold? Perhaps only if he’s Jewish. So here is a tall tale, a myth about a Jewish Ulysses with caterpillar feet and blue skin. It’s a tummel , a joyful shouting in the face of sorrow, an uplifting. It’s a fairy tale with Jewish words—and that presents a problem.

To quote Harlan Ellison, “There are three ways to write a story using words in a foreign tongue. The first is to explain every single word as it is used, by restating its meaning in English, or by hoping its use in context will clarify for the reader. The second is to attempt by syntactical manipulation an approximation of the dialect and tongue, eschewing the use of any foreign words. The third is to provide a glossary.”

Therefore, “Ellison’s Grammatical Guide and Glossary for Goyim” has been appended to the end of the story to aid the reader and provide a few belly-laughs. And since a fairy tale should have a picture, award-winning artist Tim Kirk has drawn the hero, Evsise, the Zsouchmoid.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an original story written expressly for this volume.

YOU’LL PARDON ME but my name is Evsise and I’m standing here in the middle of sand, talking to a butterfly, and if I sound like I’m talking to myself, again you’ll pardon but what can I tell you? A grown person standing talking to a butterfly. In sand.

So nu? What else can you expect? There are times you got to make adjustments, you got to let be a little. Just to get along. I’m not all that happy about this, if you want the specific truth. I’ve learned, God knows I’ve learned. I’m a Jew, and if there is a thing Jews have learned in over six thousand years, it’s that you got to compromise if you want to make it to seven thousand. So, let be. I’ll talk to this butterfly, hey you butterfly, and I’ll pray for the best.

You don’t understand. You got that look.

Listen: I read once in a book that they found a tribe of Jewish Indians, somewhere deep in the heart of South America. That was on the Earth. The Earth, shtumie! It’s been in all the papers.

So. Jewish Indians. What a thing! And everyone wondered and yelled and made such a mishegoss that they had to send historians and sociologists and anthropologists and all manner of very learned types to establish if this was a true thing or maybe somebody was just lying.

And what they found was that maybe what had happened was that some galus from Spain, fleeing the Inquisition, got on board with Cortez and came to The New World, kayn-ahora , and when no one was looking, he ran away. So then he got farblondjet and wound up in some little place full of very suggestible native types, and being something of a tummeler he started teaching them about being Jewish—just to keep busy, you know what I mean? because Jews have never been missionaries, none of that “converting” crap; other , I shouldn’t name names, religions need to keep going, unlike Judaism which does very cute thank you on its own—and by the time all the smart-alecks found the tribe, they were keeping kosher, and having brises when the sons were born, and observing the High Holy Days, and not doing any fishing on the Shabbes , and it was a very nice thing altogether.

So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that there are Jews here on Zsouchmuhn. Zoochhhhhh-moooohn. With a chhhhh , not a kuh. You got a no-accent like a Litvak.

It shouldn’t even surprise that I’m a Jew and I’m blue and I have eleven arms thereby defying the Law of Bilateral Symmetry and I am squat and round and move very close to the ground by a series of caterpillar feet set around the rim of ball joints and sockets on either side of my tuchis which obeys the Law of Bilateral Symmetry and when I’ve wound the feet tight I have to jump off the ground so they can unwind and then I move forward again which makes my movement very peculiar I’m told by tourists without very much class.

In the Universal Ephemeris I am referred to as a native of Theta 996:VI, Cluster Messier 3 in Canes Venatici. The VI is Zsouchmuhn. A baedeker from some publisher in the Crab came here a few turns ago and wrote a travel pamphlet on Zsouchmuhn; he kept calling me a Zsouchmoid; he should grow in the ground, headfirst like a turnip. I am a Jew.

I don’t know what a turnip is.

Now I’m raving. What it’ll do to you, talking to a butterfly. I have a mission, and it’s making me crazy, giving me shpilkess , you could die from a mission like this. I’m looking for Kadak.

Hey you butterfly! A blink, a flutter, a movement it wouldn’t hurt, you should make an indication you can hear me, I shouldn’t stand like a schlemiel telling you all this.

Nothing. You wouldn’t give me a break.

Listen: if it wasn’t for that oysvorf that bum, Snodle, I wouldn’t be here. I would be with my family and my lust-nest concubines on Theta 996:III, what the Ephemeris calls Bromios, what we Jews call Kasrilevka. There is historical precedent for our naming Bromios another name, Kasrilevka. You’ll read Sholom Aleichem, you’ll understand. A planet for schlimazels. I don’t want to discuss it. That’s where they’re moving us. Everyone went. A few crazy ones stayed, there are always a few. But mostly, everyone went: who would want to stay? They’re moving Zsouchmuhn. God knows where. Every time you look around they’re dragging a place off and putting it somewhere else. I don’t want to go into that. Terrible people, they got no hearts in them.

So we were sitting in the yeshiva , the last ten of us, a proper minyan , getting ready to sit shivah for the whole planet, for the last days we would be here, when that oysvorf Snodle had a seizure and up and died. Oh, a look: a question, maybe? Why were we sitting shivah in the rabbinical college when everybody else was running like a thief to get off the planet before those gonifs from the Relocation Center came with their skyhooks, a glitch if ever I saw one, shady, disreputable, to give a yank and drag a place out of orbit and give a shove and jam in big meshiginah magnets to float around where a nice, cute world was, just to keep the Cluster running smooth, when they pull out a world everything shouldn’t go bump together… ? Why, you ask me. So, I’ll tell you why.