Free A Book of Great Worth by Dave Margoshes

saying where’s the money from the tickets? So what do we say?”
    “Tomorrow?” my father offered.
    Shmelke peered at him with skeptical admiration. “Sure, tomorrow, that’s context. But what happens after tomorrow?”
    “Gilbert and Sullivan is sold?”
    “Morgenstern, no offensive, but you and my infermal partner Goldblatt would be sweethearts, regular darlings, newlyweds you could be.”
    “You couldn’t sell Gilbert and Sullivan?”
    Shmelke’s watery eyes rolled up and almost disappeared into his eyelids. “Morgenstern, you can always sell Gilbert and Sullivan. In Cleveland, Gilbert could be elected mayor, Sullivan the governor of Ohio, maybe.”
    “So what’s the problem?”
    “Problem? Who said anything about a problem? Morgenstern, you surprise me. Problem? What a cryptic. No problem, believe me. The Gilbert and Sullivan money goes to the opera and that accounting is closed, the book is finished, kaput. A little inconsideration, maybe, when the Gilbert and Sullivan cancels and there’s the refunds to make, but a problem? Noooo.”
    Shmelke glared at my father, challenging him, and, though he was tempted to say he didn’t understand, my father held his tongue. After that, the two men saw each other often, in the hallway outside the toilet, rather than at the dinner table, as my father was then working nights, and often they would share a glass of whisky in my father’s room, occasionally in Shmelke’s. The man did not bathe often and there was an odour in his room that my father found worth the price of his whisky to avoid.
    It was spring when my father moved into the room in Harlem, and the city was opening itself up for him the way leaves and blossoms open themselves up to the insects that float on the warm breezes of April and May. The Jewish life of New York was rich and exciting in those days, its theatre vigorous, its literature strong and searching, its artists bold and sensitive with a free dom growing out of a new sense of purpose after a hundred years or more of lying low. There were half a dozen Yiddish dailies in the city then – his father was editor of one of them, The Morning Journal , and his older brother Sam worked for another, The Day – and the competi tion between them was fierce, their pages filled with essays on the arts and philosophy, criticism, Talmudic debate, humour, advice on everything from self-improvement to affairs of the heart and body, along with news of the far-flung community and the world at large that owed as much, in its style and presentation, to Hearst and Pulitzer as it did to Spinoza and the learned rabbis of Poland and Russia. My father was a news writer, not an essayist, toiling, like his brother, for The Day , but he loved the company of the great men he drank coffee with in the cafeteria at the corner of East Broadway and Rutgers Street and at the Café Royale on Second Avenue, in the heart of the Yiddish theatre district known as the Jewish Rialto, where the lights burned all through the night like beacons.
    Sometimes, he would encounter Shmelke there. The tall, skinny man with the pennant ears had secured a position as press agent to a rabbinical council and was also doing publicity work for a hospital in the Bronx. But his heart and soul belonged to the arts and he often could be found in the evenings at the Café Royale and other warm, bright rooms that sparkled through the grey streets of the Lower East Side like fireflies. There were often actors still in makeup and costume, sometimes outlandish costume, at the café, and Shmelke, with his ill-fitting suits and clownish face, could easily have been one of them, my father thought.
    “Morgenstern, Morgenstern, join us. Sit down, my friend. Combine with me a drink. You know Rubenstein and Pashka?”
    “Of course.” My father sat, smiling. Despite the invitation, he knew he would pay for the whisky he ordered.
    “Rubenstein, the steamed violinist, and Pashka, the clammed dramatist. Morgenstern,