Sublime

Throughout the civilized world, from Battery Park to Fulton Street, he was known as a dependable man for a fast tax write-off.

some customer-services departments,

conspicuous.

He wrote Forrest Ashby that he was thinking of moving to Canada to be a high school teacher.

He would then proceed to startle and goad the earnest and morose, briskly crushing their fashionable and half-baked preconceptions.

some far-off court in Ethiopia or Yemen, a sloe-eyed rabbi in a gaudy kaftan. That impossible black rabbi with his outlandish Torah, the realm of women:

Could it be that today’s society has made Jewish identity superfluous?

squalid, savage, and attritional – rather well suited, in fact, to modern tastes.

It was that strategy for preserving Jewish memory that explains how, when Bialik published “To the Bird” in 1892, it fell on such receptive ears.