Mr. Monday and other tales of Jewish Amsterdam

18 Adr. Monday and Other Tales of Jewish Amsterdam

He could scarcely talk. When he was thirteen years old, he behaved like a toddler of three.

Medicines for his sick wife and imbecile son cost Mr. Monday a lot of money and in order to get a little extra income he started a new profession—on the side, you must understand. He made up poems to order. People came to him in the evening after the shop was closed and gave him orders to write poems to be recited at wedding parties and other special occasions. They ladled out information about the bride and bridegroom and how their engagement was arranged and more of those kinds of details. Then Mr. Monday put it all into rhyme and rhythm.

Sometimes his customers would ask him to insert political hints in those doggerels, for example a sly word or two, that the bridegroom lent his ear to political orations instead of attending synagogue and listening to the rabbi. Mr. Monday never objected to putting them in. He considered himself responsible only for the form of the poems, nobody could blame him for the contents and subtle hints. By setting that rule for himself, he eliminated the possibility of any conflict of conscience in his own political being, because he himself had certain strong views on politics. He was a socialist, but of a strange sort, he was a supporter of the Polish Bund, a political organisation of the Polish ghetto ideologically close to Marxism. Mr. Monday sympathised with the faction of the Bund which was opposed to Zionism. Every week he received a small periodical, Yiddish text in Hebrew letters, the organ of the Bund. The paper came from Lodz, in Poland.

Although he had lived in Holland for so long, our cobbler's political attention was drawn tightly to the problems