Free Stempenyu: A Jewish Romance by Sholem Aleichem, Hannah Berman Page A

frequent intercourse with his comrades, and spent many an amusing hour with them.In a word, he managed to keep himself alive somehow.
    But, Rochalle did not live at all. She ate, and drank, and tasted her mother-in-law’s preserves a dozen times a day. She never dipped her finger in cold water, and never came in contact with a single soul. It was not seemly that the daughter-in-law of Isaac-Naphtali should hobnob with everybody and anybody. Whilst, on the other hand, anybody who was a somebody would have nothing at all to do with Isaac-Naphtali’s daughter-in-law, because the “somebody” would be sure to hold him, or her, self far above Isaac-Naphtali, both in station as in wealth, just as Isaac-Naphtali himself considered himself far above the other householders of Tasapevka.
    And, so it came about that Rochalle’s days and months dragged on, as if she were a prisoner. It was again eat, and again sleep, again the cup of coffee, and again Dvoska-Malka with her preserves, from week end to weekend.

XII      ROCHALLE SINGS HER LITTLE SONGS
    That was how Rochalle lived her life at the period when she first came upon Stempenyu, at the wedding of Chayam-Benzion’s daughter.
    We left her standing at the door, on the morning after the wedding, gazing dreamily at the scene before her—the market square of Tasapevka—the shops, the booths, and the wagon drawn by oxen, and the peasant boy in the large hat.
    That was the life she was leading when, for the first time, she heard the wonderful sounds that came forth from Stempenyu’s fiddle.
    She was passionately fond of music, and she had always wanted to hear a good musician, and to know him personally, if possible. When she heard anyone playing or singing, she tried to repeat the melody afterwards in her low, sweet voice. Her parents used to say of her that itwas a great pity she was born a woman. She had a man’s talents in a woman’s body. If she were a man she would have set the world on fire.
    It seemed that her parents did not understand that Rochalle had within her a certain power—a certain something which we, in our day, call by the name of Talent. But to them, her parents, it seemed that Rochalle’s power of picking up a melody, and afterwards repeating it accurately—this power, they thought, lay in her brain, and not in her quick ear. They thought she could do this remarkable thing because she had the cleverness which had, from time immemorial, been the special prerogative of the male sex.
    Amongst us Jews, brains play the most important parting the regulation of our lives—much more so than the rest of our capacities, and our limbs and bones and muscles combined—the two hundred forty parts, as well call them.
    A good head! A good little head! That is the finest thing among us.
    To return to our story:
    Rochalle sand until she was about fifteen or sixteen years old, as if she were a little bird to whom the whole universe was as free as the air itself. No matter what she heard, whether it was the Cantor singing in the synagogue, or a simple ballad sung by a wandering minstrel—a beggar, or a song which the people around her were in the habit of singing, or a melody that no one else could play but the orchestras which came into the village when there was a wedding—no matter what it was, Rochalle was sure to sing it soon after, in her low, clear and sweet voice. It was worth while listening to her, and the villagelooked upon her as a source of amusement. But, the moment she was the affianced wife of Moshe-Mendel, her mother said to her:
    “Phew! It is enough, my daughter! You will have to give up singing now. When you are living with your parents in law, how will it look if you suddenly start squealing like a bird? What would the people say to that?”
    Rochalle recognized that it was considered unseemly to sing. She took her mother’s advice, and never sang any more. Not that she never sang at all. Quite unconsciously, she used to break into song now