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wondering whether she had done the right thing in fleeing from Rome. The prospect of a trip across the Mediterranean in this hulk was growing uglier by the day. Still, she had clung to the thought that it would at least get her baby away from the Germans. But to start by breaking the Fascist law, and trying to outrun the coast guard’s gunboats!
    Rabinovitz said in a hard though not hostile tone as she sat silent, “Well, never mind. I’ll get it all from Rose.”
    “No, I’ll chip in,” Natalie said. “Aaron will, too, I’m sure. I just don’t like it.”
    “Neither do I, Mrs. Henry, but we can’t sit here. We have to try something.”
    On a hatch cover near Dr. Jastrow, who was writing in a notebook, two young men were arguing over an open battered Talmud volume. Rose was gone. Jastrow paused in his work to listen to their dispute about a point in
Gittin,
the treatise on divorce. In the Polish yeshiva, Jastrow had earned many a kiss from his teachers for unravelling problems in
Gittin.
The sensation of those damp hairy accolades came to mind, and he smiled. The two arguers saw this and shyly smiled back. One touched his ragged cap, and said in Yiddish,
“Der groiser shriftshteller
understands the little black points?”
    Jastrow benignly nodded.
    The other young man — gaunt, yellow-faced, with a straggling little beard and bright sunken eyes, a pure yeshiva type — spoke up excitedly. “Would you join us, and perhaps teach us?”
    “As a boy, I did once study the Talmud,” Jastrow said in cool precise Polish, “but that was long, long ago, I fear. I’m rather busy.”
    Subdued, the pair resumed their study. Soon, to Jastrow’s relief, they moved away. It might have been amusing, he thought as he resumed writing, to join the lads and astound them with memory feats. After fifty years, he remembered the very passage in dispute. The retentiveness of a boy’s mind! But a long voyage lay ahead. Keeping one’s distance in these crowded conditions, especially amid these tribally intimate Jews, was the only way.
    Jastrow was starting a new book, to pass the time and make some use of his disagreeable predicament. In a deliberate echo of his big success,
A Jew’s Jesus,
he was calling it A
Jew’s Journey.
But what he had in mind was not a travel diary. As Marcus Aurelius had written classic meditations on the battlefield by candlelight, so Jastrow proposed to coin his wartime flight into luminous thoughts on faith, war, the human condition, and his own life. He guessed the idea would charm his publisher; and that if he brought it off, it might even be another book club selection. In any case, at his age, it would be a salutary reckoning of the soul. On this notion, characteristically combining the thoughtful, the imaginative, and the catchpenny, Aaron Jastrow was well into the first notebook borrowed from Rabinovitz. He knew the book could never be a success like A
Jew’s Jesus,
which had hit the book club jackpot and the best-seller lists, with its novel portrayal of Christ in his homely reality as a Talmud prodigy and itinerant Palestinian preacher; but it would be something to do.
    After the yeshiva boys had moved off, the little scene struck him as worth writing down. He detailed the subtle point in
Gittin
which, so long ago, he had disputed in much the same terms with his clever young cousin, Berel Jastrow, in the noisy study hall of the Oswiecim yeshiva. He described that distant scene. He made gentle fun of his own gradual change into a cool Westernized agnostic. If Berel were still alive, he wrote, and if he had been invited into this dispute over page 27 A of
Gittin,
he would have picked up the thread with zest, and argued rings around the yeshiva lads. Berel had remained true to the old orthodoxy. Who could now say which of them had chosen more wisely?

But what has become of Berel? Does he yet live? In my last glimpse of him, through the eyes of my venturesome and well-travelled niece, he stands