With an Unopened Umbrella in the Pouring Rain

Iapa is a village in Maramureș a few kilometres from Sighet with a few hundred chimneyed houses that stretch from down below, from the place called Boundary Valley, or Ciarda, or Cheblițe, from the bank of the River Tisza, which here flows broad and slow, making it a good place for barges to moor. Then the houses stretch along the edge of a road that climbs the hills to the places named Grui and Sihei and Meia, before scattering along the edge of the fir and oak forests.

It may well be precisely the village’s position that made its inhabitants’ occupations so various. There were ploughmen and carters, shepherds and traders, woodcutters and day labourers, and all kinds of other occupations arising from the village’s proximity to the town, to the River Tisza, and also to the forest.

On Friday evening, for example, the Jewish bargemen’s rafts used to moor here on their way downstream from logging in Poienile de sub Munte, Ruscova, Petrova, and Leordina; with thick hawsers they tethered their rafts to knotty willow stumps at the water’s edge and went to spend the Sabbath with a family whose house served as a makeshift inn, where they found lodging that was cheap and sometimes even free of charge. On Friday evening and Saturday morning, they joined the congregation in the tradesmen’s synagogue, softly murmuring their prayers, and as evening fell, they seated themselves at the end of a long table in the same synagogue, munching dried herring tails with a crust ofkoyletch. Often, they cracked walnuts, sipped strong slivovitz, and hummed old, wordless songs at thatshaloshudes meal, the third of the Sabbath, provided by one of the synagogue’s trustees. And in the evening, after a hurriedmaariv andhavdalah prayer and the song of parting from Queen Sabbath, recited when they could see at least three stars clearly in the deep blue sky, the Jewish bargemen returned to the riverbank and shook hands with the Romanian bargemen. For they too had come down from Leordina, Petrova, and Poienile de sub Munte to moor their rafts, tethering them to the same knotty willow stumps before going to spend their Sunday in the village. After which they unmoored their rafts and went on their way, down the Tisza…

In the place named Ciarda, or Cheblițe, in the valley between the river Tisza and the hill, all along the main road, there lived a hundred and twenty Jewish families, who earned their bread, which was not always daily bread, from many different occupations: there were numerous woodcutters, one carter, and five porters, who early each morning hung a thick sack across their chests and one over their backs and set off to the loading ramp of Sighet station, where they filled them with flour or firewood or whatever need to be loaded and unloaded from the freight cars; there were seekers of work or simply seekers of bread, vagrants who set out on Sunday with an empty bag and returned on Friday having filled it with dry crusts and a greater or lesser quantity of those small grey coins with a hole in the middle; there were also five or six cattle traders, who sweated and grew hoarse on market days; and then there were four grocers, three butchers, two cobblers, two poor tailors, two carpenters, and a blacksmith.

Well, it is of that blacksmith that I wish to tell you a tale: Schmiel the Blacksmith, as he was called, since nobody in the village could remember his surname. And I also wish to tell you the tale of Rifka, his wife, and of their children, whose number nobody knew for sure, since they came into the world and grew up like the grass, like the weeds, like the flowers…

The house of Schmiel the Blacksmith was at the meeting of the ways, where the country road that led to Sighet met the path that led up into the forest. It was a small cottage, painted dark blue, with a porch and two rooms. Behind the house was a field with a shed for a cow, and behind the shed there was a vegetable patch. The smithy was an extension on one side of the house: two log walls adjoining the firewall, roofed with shingles, with an opening that rested on two slender poles of fir. Between these poles was a post for tethering the