And Moshe could not help but notice that Webb, like his lovely Chona, had a physical disability. Though he was a hunchback of some kind, he moved with a certain feeling of joy, a lightness, as if every moment were precious. Cripples, Moshe thought, have brought me fortune: Moses, Chona, and Chick.

moping around the back storeroom of the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, the sole Jewish grocery in Chicken Hill.

They frolicked and laughed, dancing as if they were birds enjoying flight for the first time. Webb’s band played like wizards, four sets of gorgeous, stomping, low-down, rip-roaring, heart-racing jazz. The result was an outrageously joyous event, matched in intensity only by the great Mickey Katz affairs.

Standing at her stove, Chona said in Yiddish, “Me ken dem yam mit a kendel nit ois’ shepen.” (You can’t ride in all directions at once.)

Moshe listened in rapturous silence, and when she was done, he found himself bathed in the light of love only heaven can deliver. He returned to the storeroom for several days, filling himself with words of the Midrash Rabbah, about which he had been previously ambivalent, and the young flower who led him to words of holy purpose.

But Moshe had badly overestimated the organizational power of country Jewish rabbis, and most of the notices were lost in the ongoing rush of death notices, bar mitzvah commitments, once-in-a-lifetime sales, kosher cow-slaughtering requests, tallit-making services, business-dispute refereeing, mohel (circumcision) mix-ups, and marriage-arrangement

He frolicked through every dance step that Moshe had ever seen, and Moshe, who had spent his childhood as a fusgeyer—a wandering Jew—in Romania, had seen a few: horas, bulgars, khosidls, freylekhs, Russian marches, Cossack high-steps.

“You can forever remember the wrongs done to you as long as you live,” she said. “But if you forget ’em and go on living, it’s almost as good as forgiving. I don’t care who you was, or what you done, or even what you calls yourself. I know your heart. You look so tired.”

weapons that were sold cheaply enough so that the poor could purchase them and kill one another. Any man could buy one and walk into schools and bring death to dozens of children and teachers and anyone else stupid enough to believe in all that American mythology of hope, freedom, equality, and justice.