Satan in Goray

was torn, his skull cap fell off. Two long, tousled earlocks dangled from his shaven scalp. He tried to defend himself, but the charity students were quick to hold his head, punching him with their weak hands as they helped carry him, as though they were kneading dough. Mordecai Joseph himself proudly helped carry Chanina by the legs, spitting into his face and pinching him viciously. Soon Chanina was lying on the table. They lifted his coat tail. Mordecai Joseph was the first to do the honors.
    "Let this be in place of me!" he cried, in the words of the Yom Kippur scapegoat ritual. He rolled up his sleeves, and gave Chanina so hard a blow that the unlucky youth burst all at once into tears, like a school boy, and whimpered.
    "Let this be instead of me!" Mordecai Joseph ex-claimed with a sigh and again struck Chanina.
    "Let this fowl go to his death!" someone cried responsively, and a hail of blows fell on the idle scholar. Chanina gave a hoarse cry and began to gasp.
    When they took him from the table, his face was blue and his mouth clenched. A boy immediately fetched a vessel of water and poured it over Chanina, drenching him from head to foot. The young man jerked spasmodically and remained full length on the ground. There was a terrified silence in the study house. The one woman who happened to be in the women's gallery pulled at the grate and sobbed. Mordecai Joseph limped back, beating the floor with his crutch, and his face behind the thicket of his beard was chalk-white.
    "Thus rotteth the name of the wicked!" he said. "Now he shall know that there is a God who rules the world!"

    7

    Reb Eleazar Babad and His Daughter, Rechele Reb Eleazar Babad was seldom at home. It was his practice to move about from village to village. He would put on his heavy coat, stuff straw in his shoes, and, with a sack in one hand, a stick in the other, take to the paths and byways. Like a beggar he would drive off the hounds with his stick and sleep nights in the haylofts of peasant barns. Some said that Reb Eleazar went to collect old debts due him from before 1648; others were certain that he wandered this way as a penance for the sins that were wearying his spirit. Rechele, his only daughter, remained at home all alone. For days on end she sat on a foot bench facing the hearth, reading the volumes she had brought from distant cities, and it was rumored that she was versed in the holy tongue. Some even went so far as to declare that she had learned Latin from a physician in Lublin. Goray housewives had sought to be friendly with Rechele and had paid her courtesy visits, but her response had not been the usual "God bid ye welcome." She had not urged them to be seated but had hid something from them in the bosom of her dress. Young matrons in silk bonnets, usually with aprons bulging over their pregnant bellies, came to amuse Rechele, to play at bones with her, and to chat about prospective matches, as young women will. Some of them brought their jewels along in caskets in order to preen themselves; others had balls of wool and knitting needles, to show how capable they were. But Rechele sat at the hearth, never rising to greet them, not even wiping the benches dry for them to sit upon. She confused their names, acted so haughtily that the women began to laugh and mock her. Before leaving, the last of the visitors called to Rechele from the other side of the door: "Don't be so high and mighty, Rechele! Your father isn't rich any longer; you're a pauper now!"
    Rechele (God save us!) was sickly, and much had to be forgiven her. The woman who went from house to house Thursdays to knead the troughs of dough for the Sabbath reported that Rechele ate less than a fly; she had her period every three months. She slept late in the morning and barricaded her door at night with wooden crossbars. A neighbor that lived behind Reb Eleazar's brick house in a dwelling that had half settled in the earth whispered that Rechele never went into the yard to relieve herself....
    Rechele had been born in Goray in 1648, a few weeks before the massacre. When the haidamaks had besieged Zamosc, her mother had fled with the infant in her arms, and, after many trials, had arrived in Lublin. The little one had been five at her mother's death, and Reb Eleazar had been in Vlodave with the rest of the household at the time. Rechele alone had remained in Lublin at the home of an uncle, Reb Zeydel Ber, who was a ritual slaughterer. He was a tall man with thick