Mr. Monday and other tales of Jewish Amsterdam

16 Adr. Monday and Other Tales of Jewish Amsterdam

If you saw Mr. Monday sitting in the front room of his basement shop, you wouldn't suspect what a really strange person he was. His head was always covered with a dark cap, the symbol of his religion. On the table in front of him stood an oil lamp that burned all day. Between him and that light was a large glass bowl filled with water. An object like that was called an ordinal and it served as a lens and light amplifier.

He had quite a number of customers and from his earnings he could have lived quite comfortably if he had been an ordinary man. In reality he was a barrel full of contradictions and inner doubts, a restless seeker and at the same time a musing dreamer. The complexity of his psyche you would begin to suspect only when, in his dark basement room against the wall you inspected his two small cupboards filled with books. One cupboard contained Judaica. Some prayer books and commentaries written by pious men were very rare. In particular, one dusty book filled Mr. Monday with uncommon pride, so rare was that volume.

"I would rather lose an arm than lose that book," he confided to me. "Even in the famous Straschun Library in Vilno, no copy of that volume is to be found."

The other cupboard contained books about the physical sciences but the titles seemed to have been picked by a medieval alchemist. Only centuries-old books were arranged on those warped shelves. The Laws of Nature by the Abbe Nolet and About the Behaviour of Mercury in the Full Moon or The Magnet Stone and the Scorpion, a Treatise on Machines that do not Require an External Moving Power.

Since there were no books of more recent date, Mr. Monday's interest in natural science was rather out of date,