Mr. Monday and other tales of Jewish Amsterdam

8 Adr. Monday and Other Tales of Jewish Amsterdam

out of bricks and mortar. But people marry and are happy within its walls—a piece of their happiness remains in the house. A child is born—another thread of happiness is added. Someone dies and a bedroom suddenly becomes a holy place. Then the house has a soul. In those derelict ruins that remain of the old Jewish neighbourhood, a thousand threads together form the remembrance of its past.

"Write down your memories before you forget..."

I wander along the alley, between the houses, aimlessly. Spirits speak to me, but I cannot hear their voices.

I walk like a Golem.

I cross the threshold between being and non-being. Days become hours, and hours seconds.

I am lying again in the warm bed on the third floor of our house in Marken Alley. When I close my eyes, I see on the inside of my eyelids the neighbourhood as I knew it during the forty years before the Great Sorrow.

The streets, the houses, the little front-rooms and backrooms. A thousand cubes, a bewildering honeycomb.

In all these cubby-holes people live. The walls are too narrow to constrain their exuberant bustle. It bursts out through the open doors. It presses through the open windows. It spills through the streets. The living river eddies between the high banks of the houses. Pushcarts with their trade stick out like islands in the stream.

People, people, people.

I know all their faces. Names drift on the slow waves of memory. Every face is a novel, each life is different.

As long as I keep my eyes closed the neighbourhood is still there. The houses have not fallen in decay, the people live. I see this image very sharply, as though I hold an aerial photo in my hand.