Read Inventing Memory for Free Online Page B

his life of luxury: the shafts of light that fell on the silk cushions in the drawing room at Fontana di Luna, the Gothic windows and Renaissance fountains plundered from a different Europe than mine, the gardens made in imitation of eighteenth-century France or sixteenth-century England. But I could not possibly know then that he was even more stimulated by the strong smells of my downtown streets—the sweat of the peddler women with their heaving bosoms, the aroma of pickles and smoked fish, of knishes and blintzes, of beer and ale and strong cigars. Pushcarts overflowing with tumbling tomatoes and staring fish, large barrels filled with pickles, foamy brewed drink tapped from kegs, the wildly bearded men in their bowler hats, haggling and arguing, the women in their kerchiefs, the half-naked children playing in the Rutgers Square Park and scrambling for their piled-up clothes when the lookout boy whispered, "Cheese it—duh cops!"—these were sights and sounds that filled Sim with an excitement he could not find in the purer precincts of his uptown world.
    Sometimes he would become so bewitched by the ghetto that he was in danger of being knocked down by a careening horsecar. He went into a trance on Hester or Ludlow or Orchard Street or East Broadway, and he would say to himself that he could never properly write a book about the "Hebrews" (as he called us) unless he rented a flat down here and lived among the tenements and pushcarts day and night. Sim was particularly fascinated by the way whole families came to sleep under the stars on sweltering summer nights, leaving the airless caves of the railroad flats to the roaches, rats, and bedbugs. The roofs came alive with humanity on such a night. And sometimes Sim would wander from roof to roof, gazing down at the sleeping immigrant women, looking everywhere for his "Sophia."
    But the goddess from the boat was nowhere to be found.
    Oh, he saw women who were as juicily attractive, as full-breasted and full of life, yet their eyes (he later said) lacked the same mischief.
    "Mister!" came a call of a peddler with a tower of derbies on his head. He advanced to grab Sim by the lapels and drag him into the darkness of his little hole-in-the-wall: "You need a zoot? A coit? A new pair of shoes?" The man rummaged furiously among an amazing array of goods, then leaped forward, tore Sim's topcoat off his back, and substituted a heavy tweed much too dense for this hot weather.
    " Nu? " said the man. "Nu, nu, nu?" He raised a cracked fragment of mirror. Apparently Sim was so overwhelmed to be interrupted in the midst of his reverie that without even bargaining, he bought the lumpy thing the man had pressed on him.
    The peddler was astonished, perhaps even disappointed. He kept throwing in extra goods "at no extra charge" for the sake of sweetening the deal.
    "I'm looking for a woman," Sim Coppley said, and the snaggletoothed peddler, as if to show that nothing was beyond his capacities as a procurer of human needs, excused himself, ran up a flight of narrow stairs at the back of his dusty lair, and brought down a dirty young girl with feverish black eyes, a smudged apron, and a nimbus of frizzy hair. She began to whimper pathetically, revealing yellow teeth.
    Horrified that even this disgusting peddler knew his predilections (or so he imagined in his guilt), Sim turned and, leaving both his dollars and the heap of clothes, ran down the street, darting and weaving amid the pushcarts. Secure in his escape, he suddenly realized he was wearing the peddler's heavy tweed and had left his own bespoke London topcoat behind.

    A few days later, Sim wrote a letter to the column called "A Bintel Brief" in the Yiddish newspaper:

    Esteemed Editor:

    I hope you will give me advice even though I am a "goy" who has learned Yiddish from books and dictionaries rather than at the knee of my mother.
    Returning to America from Europe on a ship called Der Goldener Stern some months ago, I met a Hebrew