Free The Book of Aron by Jim Shepard Page A

again and the children set up the stage for the play.
“I liked when he said that loneliness was the port from which he always sets out,” Zofia said.
“I liked when he asked, ‘Do you steer the course or are you just carried along?’ ” my mother said.
“I’m not just carried along,” Adina said.
“You sound like Boris,” Zofia said.
The play was called The Three Journeys of Hershkele . The hero, who wore a headdress he could barely keep on his head and that was never explained, hid on a plane bound for England, where he talked the English king into allowing all the Jews to emigrate to Palestine. Then he hid on a plane to Egypt, where he found a whole roomful of the pharoah’s gold to pay for everyone’s trip. Then he hid on a plane to Germany, where he met with Hitler. The boy who played Hitler was very good. When he saw all the gold Hitler was sorry for what he’d done and invited the Jews back, and the hero told him no thanks but said he’d use the leftover gold to buy milk and butter for the starvingGerman children. At the end just the hero and Hitler remained onstage and Hitler thanked him and asked if there was anything he could do in return for the milk and butter and the hero said yes, that Hitler could make a law that all adults who pass children on the street must bend their heads in shame, and Hitler said that he would. Then the hero sang a song about the Ten Commandments and the whole cast did a dance and the thing was over.
My mother applauded even after everyone else had stopped. She was weeping again. “You liked it too,” she said to me. Korczak came back out to thank the cast of the play and everyone applauded again. He thanked everyone for coming, and congratulated them all on being twice orphaned themselves, since they were stateless and Jewish. He told the adults to remember to approach children with affection for what they already were and with respect for what they could become. He told the children to remember that we couldn’t leave the world the way we found it. And to remember to wash our hands. And to drink boiled water. And to open the windows to get fresh air. He looked out the window closest to him and finished by saying that we should wait until it was warmer, though.
E VEN ADINA THOUGHT THE OLD DOCTOR HAD BEEN worthwhile, even if part of the reason for that had been the cookies afterwards. Later she said she hadn’t seen cookies in she didn’t know how long and Boris got angry that we hadn’t swiped some for him and Lutek. When Zofia told him they weren’t really cookies, Adina said maybe they weren’t cookies but they’d been close enough.
We were all hungry all the time. “I remember Mama fed us vegetables because she thought they were healthy,” Adina told us one morning, like she’d had a dream. We were in front of a shop for hernia belts and someone was shouting at their kids from the building’s roof. Someone behind us on the first floor kept telling his wife to add water to the carbide lamp. Someone else poured dirty oil from a windowsill higher up and it spattered on the sidewalk near our feet.
Boris got us started trading the ration cards of people who’d died or left the ghetto, and he thought the best place was around the distribution shops when the mothers came by with their small children, and he was right. He and Lutek did the haggling because the rest of us couldn’t stand to see the kids’ faces while it went on. Lutek had gotten one boy’s wooden shoes by holding the ration cards under his mother’s nose andsaying he was only asking her to throw in one extra item, and that if she wanted to trade she had to be able to imagine herself in another guy’s shoes. She’d taken the cards and used them for rutabagas and her son had gone home barefoot. But it was getting warmer. Zofia said it was already late in May though Boris thought it was still April. Lutek tried on the wooden shoes and said that just as he thought, they fit perfectly.
“What is