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repairing the sack lifted his needle high in the air and stared at Asa Heshel with perplexed eyes. A woman with a triangular face broke into a laugh, showing a mouthful of gold teeth.
    "Look who wants to pick and choose!" she said in a sharp Lithuanian accent. "Count Pototski!"
    The other women giggled. The glasses on the landlord's nose seemed to gleam with triumph.
    "Where did you say you come from, your highness?" he asked, his mouth close to Asa Heshel's ear, as though the newcomer were deaf. "Show me your pass."
    He looked long and carefully at the passbook with its black covers and wrinkled his forehead.
    "Ahal From over there," he said. "From one of those one-horse villages."
    He raised his voice. "All right, put down your basket. Warsaw'll put you in your place."
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    2
    Asa Heshel came of distinguished stock on both sides of his family. His maternal grandfather, Reb Dan Katzenellenbogen, had a genealogical chart of his own, inscribed on parchment with gold ink in the form of a many-branched linden tree. The root was King David, and the branches bore the names of other illustrious forebears. Reb Dan himself had on his forehead a scar that, it was said, was the mark only of those descended from kingly stock and privileged to wear the crown when Messiah came.
    Asa Heshel's grandmother on his father's side, Tamar, had worn a ritual fringed garment, like a man, and had made the New Year pilgrimages to the Chassidic court of the rabbi of Belz. His paternal grandfather, Tamar's husband, Reb Jerachmiel Bannet, was a man of fervent and inordinate piety, who never touched food before sunset, mortified his flesh with cold baths, and in the winter rolled his body in the snow. He paid no attention to household or business affairs, but day and night sat locked in his attic room, studying a volume of the Cabala. Sometimes he would disappear for days on end. It was said that on these journeys he would meet in some humble place the six-and-thirty hidden saints, by whose virtue and humility the entire earth is enabled to exist. Since Reb Jerachmiel refused to take part in any civic affairs, it was Tamar who participated in the community council's deliberations. She sat at the end of the table, alongside the propertied men of the town, her brass-rimmed spectacles perched on the end of her nose. She took snuff from a horn snuffbox, gnawed at sticks of licorice, and talked in determined accents. It was said that the rabbi of Belz himself stood up and put a chair in place for her when she came in.
    She had brought eight children into the world, but only one of them had survived to adulthood. Some were stillborn, others had died in their cradles. She had not permitted the little bodies to be carried away until she had herself prepared them for burial. As a charm the last-born had been given five names, Alter, Chaim, Benzion, Kadish, and Jonathan, and to fool the Angel of Death they dressed the child in trousers of white linen and a white cap, like a shroud. Around his neck he wore a little bag containing an inscribed amulet and a wolf's tooth to ward off the evil eye. At twelve he was pledged to Finkel, the daugh--25-ter of the rabbi of Tereshpol Minor. At fourteen he was married.
    Nine months after the wedding the young wife was delivered of a daughter, Dinah, and two years later of a son, who was named Asa Heshel, after one of his great-grandfathers. At the circumcision ceremony both grandmothers lifted the hems of their skirts and hopped and bobbed to each other as though they were at a wedding.
    But there was little peace in the house of the young pair. Every couple of weeks Jonathan--they called him by the last of his five names--would climb into a coach and ride off to his mother in Yanov. Tamar stuffed him with pancakes, eggnogs, roast chicken, egg noodles, and preserves. In the spring she made him take a tonic against worms, as though he were still a schoolboy. The delicately reared Jonathan could not stand his father-in-law, who