Sunrise West by Jacob G.Rosenberg

hope are interchangeable.’
    Esther looked up from her work. ‘Tell us, Emil,’ she ventured, ‘how did you get the glass eye, and that scar on your cheek?’
    Emil’s voice dropped. ‘ Kristallnacht ,’ he sighed, and began to tell us his story. ‘We had a modest haberdashery shop, on a side street in the centre of Berlin, an inheritance from my father. The year of our Olympic Games, 1936, was a good year for business — everybody wanted to look their best. One day an apprentice of a tailor called Joachim Haber flew into our shop, bought a set of buttons and vanished. Later, as we were about to close, Herr Haber himself, who had often expressed his desire to own a shop just like ours, came through the door. “Emil,” he said arrogantly, “why did you increase the price of your buttons?” “We didn’t,” my wife Sylvia answered at once, “we’ve been charging the same price for two years.” Joachim ignored her. “You Shylock!” he thundered. “I’ll make sure you pay for that.”
    â€˜Two years later, on the morning of 9 November 1938, Haber — dressed in a high-booted Nazi uniform adorned with shiny tin regalia, and accompanied by a gang of thugs — again crossed the threshold of our business. “I’m back, Jude Shylock,” he announced. I tried to respond calmly: “I am honoured, Herr Haber, to be addressed by that name.” But this answer merely enraged him and he raised his fist to strike me. My poor Sylvia jumped between us to protect me. One of the thugs thrust her aside roughly and drovehis knuckleduster into my eye, while another plunged a knife into my cheek. A fountain of blood spurted all over the shop. Sylvia fainted, they trampled on her beautiful body, then arrested her for obstructing the authorities in their duty. I never saw her again.’
    â€˜Emil,’ murmured Esther, ‘I can picture very well what took place in your shop, because I also had a taste of German brutality.’
    â€˜ Nazi brutality,’ he corrected her.
    â€˜I was locked up at sixteen,’ she went on, ‘and spent my entire youth in concentration camps. But tell me, why did you feel so privileged to be equated with that despicable character, Shylock?’
    Esther’s question ignited a black flame in Emil’s good eye; but maybe to gain time and gather his thoughts he appeared to disregard what she had said. Clapping me on the back, he declared: ‘I hear you’ve been writing verses of lamentation. I’m glad. Aristotle argued that poetry is more universal, and hence more worthy of our serious attention, than history. Poetry is concerned with universal truths whereas history treats only particular facts.’
    Then he turned back to Esther. ‘The renowned actor Henry Irving, reputedly the greatest Shylock of all time, explained, after many performances, that he looked upon Shylock as virtually the only gentleman in the play, and the most ill-used. Like that pack of greedy dogs who attacked us in the shop, the Venetians encircled a helpless Jew and destroyed him.
    â€˜You see,’ Emil continued, looking straight at Esther, ‘the great literature of every culture is universal, and yetparticular too. The heroes that appear in nineteenth-century Russian novels would be at home in any of the books written at that time. Dostoevsky’s Karamazovs could quite comfortably inhabit Gogol’s pages, as Tolstoy’s Pierre Bezukhov could inhabit Turgenev’s. And couldn’t Balzac have chiselled out a Jean Valjean?... But now tell me, friends,’ and he spread out his arms expansively, ‘in which other English book of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, aside from Shakespeare, could you find a Hamlet, a Lear, or a Shylock?’
    I was struggling to follow his logic. ‘Are you implying,’ I asked, ‘that Shakespeare doesn’t fit into the