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Meylekh Magnus
- Northwestern University Press
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✦ 3 ✦ Meylekh Magnus (Pages of a Biography) 1 “What? When was that?!” It was approximately the sixth or seventh year* when Meylekh Magnus (as people still called him then) became a regular at Feygele’s. Even though her cheeks had a sickly red to them (because her lungs weren’t right, she often joked), Feygele had many suitors, many followers, many admirers. . . . She would ask: “Well, what do you think? How long do I still have to gad about? How many more brides will I rob of their fiancés?” Even though they always found her in her special, girlish room, perched on the soft ottoman with her feet drawn up beneath her, her dress pulled over her knees, and always wrapped in a soft shawl, because she was chilly—despite all that, the gentlemen callers were much, much more numerous at her place than at those of other ladies. Why was that? Because something looked out at them from the black, cleverly arranged locks over her short-haired, boyish forehead—something that gave her the appeal of both sexes at once. And when she nimbly , in a catlike manner, cast one of her glamours—even just a *That is, 1906 or 1907. 4 ✦ der nister glance—at her admirers, a cooling and cooking in their hearts would start. Moreover, she had a smooth little tongue, which extracted one pearl of wisdom after another, one joke after the next, so that she was never outshone by anyone. . . . “Oh, oh,” her admirers quietly thought in great amazement. With enamored sighs, they sought to be close to her. That’s what it was like to desire someone. . . . And now, today , who should show up other than the same lucky soul who, until now, had never once crossed her doorway? The one who, as might be thought, also had had no reason to come: he was a bookworm who kept far away from women, out of bashfulness; all the comrades in the Karlikow party, to which he belonged, made jokes about him. They did so as one jokes about an old maid, even though, for all that, he wasn’t old at all yet. On the contrary, he was young and in the prime of youth: he was always modestly dressed, he always had his hair precisely parted, and he was always so smooth-shaven that one might have even thought he had nothing to shave. Yes, he was a little odd—an eccentric who stuck to the periphery in all the company he kept, except for the group in which he was a party member. He performed editorial work for them, correcting and improving items in the daily press— and more serious print matters, too, for they had enlisted him as someone with great knowledge in many different fields. Except for those duties, he kept away even from those nearest to him—to the extent that nobody even knew where he lived, how he lived, or with whom he was friends. They only knew that he was very musical, and that he could, without a sound, sing entire operas, as if he had the score lying before his eyes. Moreover, it was known that he performed concerts for himself alone—for nobody—as he stood at the window or, at other times, facing the wall. Strange! And even stranger: as decently and as courteously as he acted toward those who were in his camp, he did just the oppo- [3.147.62.92] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 21:54 GMT) meylekh magnus ✦ 5 site with people on another side. He did so even with people he had only just met, who had made the slightest turn in a direction other than his—by belonging, let us say, to another Karlikow party (when, fundamentally, there wasn’t such a big difference between his group and theirs at all). For example, people talked about how, once, in the fifth year,* one night he had had to provide shelter to a comrade involved in a conspiracy—a man who, only a little while back, had drifted over from his party to another. When that individual stayed with him in his little room—the one with a single, tiny table, a little bench, and a bed—and the time came to go to sleep, he let the man, his former comrade, have the bed. He sat awake the whole night, not wishing to argue or be his neighbor even in sleep—and he also didn...