Mr. Monday and other tales of Jewish Amsterdam

YESTERDAY NEVER RETURNS

1 had two aunts named Kate, so our family called one of them Kate and the other one Duplikate.

Duplikate was a good soul, but when she was born, they had forgotten to sharpen her wits. In fact, she was as dumb as a doornail. Her absolute inability to understand even the simplest things was miraculous. For example, when we played Bingo and it was her turn to call the numbers, she inevitably made mistakes in their call-names. So when she had the number 31 in her hand she called out "Upstairs and Downstairs", while even a child knows that this is not the name for 31 but for 69. Then the whole game went wrong and she would run out of the room.

She and her husband Levi were not really our Aunt and Uncle, but it was because they lived in the same house as we did for so many years that we considered them as real family. We lived on the third floor and they were down below us. When they came to our building, Duplikate already had six children, and she never missed a chance to beget another one. All together she brought twelve children into this world, or maybe it was fourteen or fifteen. Anyway, the registrar could not keep up with her. Her married life was an endless struggle against lack of money and an endless love-making with Levi. Those two cooed like