Free Burning Twilight by Kenneth Wishnia

struggled to be heard over the noise, until finally I had to shout, “Kapitan!”
    The captain turned to face me, the curse on his lips evaporating when he noted the authority of my manner and decided that I might have powerful connections. He had steely gray eyes, a square Teutonic face, and blond hair that hung nearly to his shoulders, brushing the carved eagle claw ornaments on his dress plate armor, while the foot soldiers’ armor was made of plain tanned leather. I appealed to him in the name of King Sigismund, and when that didn’t work I tried to reason, cajole, and even beg them to set Kassy free, insisting that Rabbi Loew would vouch for her good name.
    “Then I suggest that you send for him,” said the captain, and they carted her off to the stockade.
    And here I was thinking that Kassy might be safe from persecution in the somewhat more tolerant Kingdom of Poland. Now I felt like a man wearing his best Shabbes clothes who suddenly needs to sift through a pile of manure in search of a lost penny. But it finally gave me somewhere to start.
    I gave the houseboy my last German kreuzer and told him to seek out Rabbi Loew as fast as he could and alert him to Kassy the Bohemian’s arrest. It was nearly ten groschen in Polish currency, and I wasn’t on the public payroll yet. But who thinks about money at a time like this?
    Then I cornered Mrs. Gromatsky as she was sweeping up the broken dishes.
    “Where can I find some thieves in this town?”
    “Try the City Hall.”
    “I mean some real ganefs —cutpurses, whoremongers, coin-clippers—”
    “Those paskudnyaks ? All I can tell you is that the big crooks used to gather down by the Water Gate, but now most of them work on Wall Street.”
    I grabbed my soft hat and set off for the ulica Muma , or Wall Street, so named because its back end lay in the shadows of the fortifications that formed a ring around the old city.
    “Be careful,” Mrs. Gromatsky warned. “If one of those varlets kisses you, you better count your teeth.”
    T he man who went by the name of Reb Schildsberg had lived in a large town house near the corner of Zydowska and Kramarska Streets, the informal borderline between the Jewish and Christian quarters, only a few steps from the main square. But the sun was low in the sky and the fog was already rolling in, and the thought of what they might do to Kassy after nightfall made me quicken my pace toward the southwestern part of the old city.
    And nobody tried to stop me and ask what I was doing.
    Despite the urgency of my mission, it was still a relief to leave Germany behind and be able to move about freely without having to wear that cursed Jew badge on my chest like a bright yellow target. I had almost forgotten what it felt like to breathe the air of freedom.
    Or at least partial freedom. Because life in Poznan was no paradise for the dark-eyed People of the Book. For the past seven decades the city fathers had issued one anti-Jewish decree after another, imposing strict limits on commercial and residential expansion in order to control the size of the city’s Jewish population. And while there was no wall around the ghetto, as there was in other places, that just made it easier for the Christian mobs to attack us, prompting a number of royal proclamations that made the city council directly responsible for our safety, which did help a bit, God save King Sigismund III.
    But a couple of years ago a suspicious fire had torn through Jew Street, killing more than a dozen people and reducing an untold number of sacred Torah scrolls to ashes. The wealthiest merchant in Prague, Mordecai Meisel, had lent the Jews of Poznan ten thousand gildn to help them recover from the disaster, but the facades of many fine houses still showed the scars, like black claw marks left by some ravening creature emerging from the depths, its talons coated with pitch.
    The tenements gave way to the vast Market Square, dominated by the enormous Ratusz, the town hall