A Book of Great Worth by Dave Margoshes

Rebeccah’s hard-headed, bristly bearded grandfather, had adopted in one of those Ellis Island subterfuges that had smoothed the wrinkles from so many Russian and Polish names. The old man, long dead now, had begun as a peddler but had worked his horse and wagon into a stand, then a small shop, then Williams Brothers, one of Cleveland’s better furniture stores, proving his abilities as a merchant and his sagacity, he always claimed, as a name-picker. That side of the family – the store was now run by Rebeccah’s un cles Meyer and Robert – seemed to have much in common with the Greenspuns of Akron and their one Cleveland offshoot, all of them prosperous, right-thinking family people who erected big brick houses near the lakefront and gave work to coloured maids who, as Uncle Meyer once explained to Rebeccah, would be job less and go hungry otherwise, “which you, I suppose, Miss High And Mighty, would rather see?”
    Rebeccah herself was considerably different. She had had the good fortune, she liked to tell her friends, of “marrying smart,” referring not to herself but to her mother. Jacob Kristol was a working man and union or ganizer with rough hands and an intelligence striving to free itself of an inadequate education, not a trader, by any means, but a man who would smile when he saw children stealing apples from a street vendor. He had had three years of school in Russia, then another two in New York’s Brownsville, enough to give him sufficient English to go to work, at a factory manufacturing umbrella handles, but the bulk of what he knew of the world came from night school, correspondence courses, workshops put on by the union and a voracious appetite for reading that had made him, in his old age, a favourite of the librarians at the stately Carnegie branch in downtown Cleveland, where he would spend most of his afternoons from the time of his retirement until his death, in the reading room, crumpled over Crime and Punishment , which he was reading for the fourth time. He’d come to Cleveland as a young man, on a freight train with a trio of anarchists, to work and help organize the foundry. Then he’d stayed, marrying, as the Williamses always put it, “above his position,” and fa thering two children, a son who took after his mother’s side of the family but died in the war, and a daughter – Rebeccah – who took after him.
    Rebeccah’s devotion to him was, in some respects, her undoing. Jacob Kristol had married late, so he was already an old man through most of the time his daughter knew him, retired before she was through with school and dead before she had barely reached twenty. But his impact on her was powerful, making her different from most of the girls she went to school with, leaving her bored and dissatisfied with the few boys who were willing to penetrate the veil of sarcasm and feigned intellectualism with which she clothed herself, and she would have liked to have fled from the small city provincialism of Cleveland when she graduated, but her father’s failing health kept her at home. Then, when he died, a pledge to him that she would look after her mother, who was also ailing, continued to keep her bound. By this time, she had a job, an apartment and a life of her own, and had discovered the small café society of artists and poets, actors and anarchists who frequented the cluster of cafés and delicatessens along River Avenue on either side of the Rialto Theatre, where touring companies from New York would stage the latest in Yiddish productions.
    “You’re too good for this narrow stage,” one of the actors – a handsome man with a cleft in his chin who went on to have a career in Hollywood under a new name – told her after they’d made love on the mattress of straw-filled ticking in her small, darkly lit loft. “Why don’t you come with me?”
    “And you’ll make me a star?” Rebeccah asked, batting the long, artificially thickened lashes of her large, luminous