When the Angels Left the Old Country: Chapters 1–4

They showed up to study and sometimes could be seen davening in the back of the shul at minyan, too, but never when there were fewer than ten men in the room.

The demon king enjoyed an over-generous measure of self-regard and had named a great number of his children after himself. Perhaps he intended to stymie the Angel of Death.

In any case, our Ashmedai was a very minor prince of demons, belonging to that class of creatures another people might call fairies, and we Jews know as sheydim: mischievous spirits of the earth who enjoy leading people astray.

Most of those who knew him did not call him by his full name, but shrank it to fit his stature, and called him Little Ash.

He had made trouble in the demons’ yeshiva, where they learn their magic, and without completing his studies he had been sent to Poland, where he found he liked it better than at home, as in his father’s palace other demons were always treating him like a child and telling him what to do.

The angel had been sent to Shtetl for a purpose it had now forgotten, and had stayed in Shtetl to hinder the mischievous whims of Little Ash.

The angel had been sent to Shtetl for a purpose it had now forgotten, and had stayed in Shtetl to hinder the mischievous whims of Little Ash.

“We’re not talking about the evil inclination.”

The noise was loud enough to startle the doe goat who was ruminating in the doorway, but not loud enough to startle the old men who were the only others in the shul at the moment.

Little Ash was finding it harder to go about his business and was afraid that people would start to notice his presence, and then he would be banished, or else eaten up by one of the gentile demons from the towns around them, who were always throwing rocks at him and telling him to keep to his own territory.

The pogroms in the east had everyone unsettled, always looking over their shoulders.

“I was already listening to whatever you were going to say,” said the angel in reproach, taking Little Ash’s hand and moving it farther from the sacred pages.

Little Ash, ears keen for gossip, turned around at once, and jabbed the angel with a sharp elbow when it kept its eyes on its page of Talmud.

For centuries it had only worn the same white caftan with which it first arrived in Shtetl, but for the occasion of their departure, Little Ash presented it with a vest, a shirt, and trousers, so that it would blend better with the population in the larger towns and cities, where its angelic appearance might draw unwanted attention from Jews and Christians alike.

These, Little Ash stole from a station attendant, and they would have made it to Warsaw for free had the angel, feeling Guilty, not compelled him to buy overpriced kosher sandwiches on the train to make up for it.

The angel had changed its tallis for a plain, undyed woolen shawl that was less conspicuous among the gentiles, but it felt, once they arrived, that it need not have made the effort, and perhaps could have kept its caftan as well.

Ashmedai had feet like a bird, which made his shoes uncomfortable, and the angel had cloven hooves, which did not bother it, because angels are too single-minded to pay attention to their own shapes.

As our sages tell us, cherubim have faces like children, and perhaps this angel was one of those, because its features were soft and rounded, its face beardless.

The most important thing to note about their appearance, however, is that they were both unmistakably Jewish. This is why when a young man detached himself from the crowd, intending to fleece these newcomers, it was a young Jewish man.

Yossel had a number of reasons for having changed his name, but in doing so he had proven to himself and the rest of the underworld that he could forge unimpeachable documents for identities that had no history behind them at all.

“Look, he’s guilty of more crimes than Jews have obligations!”

Little Ash insinuated himself between the crook and the angel, grinning up into Yossel’s face.

“In Krumer Street!” said Yossel, drawing himself up indignantly. “In Krumer Street they know nothing! It’s nothing but rogues and cheats in Krumer Street!”

Demons, backward creatures that they are, love nothing more than dealing with rogues and cheats.

He had also been blessed by nature with delicate bones and long eyelashes, which made him look younger than even other demons considered him to be.

Rose’s father would have been better suited to the work of a melamed, teaching Hebrew to small children, as his favorite way to pass the time was to chant Torah verses in his hoarse, not unpleasant voice to the goats as he milked them. Mendel Cohen, as he was called, had had the terrible misfortune, as a child, to be born into a secular family and, as a young man, to inherit a dry-goods store.

And then she and Dinah went back to the shop, where Dinah sat quietly behind the counter and mended tiny pairs of trousers while Rose checked sums and made a list of delinquent payments and waited for her brother Motl to get back from cheder, so she could hire him as a messenger.

He considered his daughter a genius, particularly since her efforts in the shop had allowed him to buy, once in a while, some rabbinic text for himself, for the edification of the goats while he repaired his fences.

She tried not to bring him up too frequently in conversation, because Rose, perhaps out of some unconscious resentment toward her irresponsible father, had a habit of dismissing at once the merit of any young man who seemed likely to become a Torah scholar.

Unlike angels, demons are quite gifted with languages, although Little Ash, for reasons known only to himself, had adopted a Yiddish accent in all languages, around the time of the false messiah, in the reign of Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich.

Nevertheless, it also considered itself too generous to be annoyed by Little Ash’s accent or by the demon’s insistence on speaking in modern jargon while in public.

“Oh, America, Canada, Cuba,” said Yossel, waving a hand with a worldly air. “I know all the Americas.”

“Is it true what they say, that all the young people forget the Commandments in America?” Little Ash’s eyes were shining. The angel, had it been paying the least bit of attention, might have chided him for sounding so hopeful.

“My friend speaks only the holy language; you can be honest.”
“Only!” Yossel was impressed, despite himself. “Now that's what they call a pious Jew.”

Although he considered himself something of a radical, he liked to read the Orthodox papers, because he found they detailed a great deal more misbehavior than the others. Socialists, and so forth, seemed to find more good in the hearts of humankind than did the pious writers, and so it was to the conservatives that Little Ash turned when he wanted to feel a dose of optimism.

The angel was oblivious to this. Its name was now Maariv, as its thoughts turned without conscious effort to the evening prayers. It could see only holiness in a synagogue and was quite unaware that to many of the men surrounding it, God was a distant and untrustworthy ruler, hardly more beloved than the tsar himself.

Little Ash, meanwhile, glanced around and surreptitiously removed his shoes, which after a day of travel were beginning to hurt him terribly.

While the angel’s inaudible singing made even the motes of dust which fell from the ceiling seem as precious as jewels in the crown of the tsarina, may her name be erased, Little Ash’s hungry eyes counted a minyan of hypocrites, another of scoundrels, and several minyans’ worth of broken promises.

The person Little Ash was looking at, a veritable well of wickedness, was quite tall for a Jew, and well muscled, with a rather attractive, healthy face.

The Sixth Commandment, as you know, once broken, cannot be unbroken or forgiven. Little Ash was aware that the man he was looking at knew this, and had, all the same, contrived to disobey this Commandment on more than one occasion.