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grandmaw kicks off,” Duddy said, “she’s going to roll her eyes and gurgle. That’s what they call the death-rattle.”
    “Aw, you know everything.
Putz.”
    “I read it, you jerk,” Duddy said, whacking me one, “in Perry Mason.”
    Home again I would usually find my mother sour and spent. Sometimes she wept.
    “She’s dying by inches,” she said to my father one stifling night, “and none of them ever come to see her. Oh, such children,” she added, going on to curse them vehemently in Yiddish.
    “They’re not behaving right. It’s certainly not according to Hoyle,” my father said.
    Dr. Katzman continued to be astonished. “It must be willpower alone that keeps her going,” he said. “That, and your excellent care.”
    “It’s not my mother any more in the back room, Doctor. It’s an animal. I want her to die.”
    “Hush. You don’t mean it. You’re tired.” Dr. Katzman dug into his black bag and produced pills for her to take. “Your wife’s a remarkable woman,” he told my father.
    “You don’t so say,” my father replied, embarrassed.
    “A born nurse.”
    My sister and I used to lie awake talking about our grandmother. “After she dies,” I said, “her hair will go on growing for another twenty-four hours.”
    “Says who?”
    “Duddy Kravitz. Do you think Uncle Lou will come from New York for the funeral?”
    “I suppose so.”
    “Boy, that means another fiver for me. Even more for you.”
    “You shouldn’t say things like that or her ghost will come back to haunt you.”
    “Well, I’ll be able to go to her funeral anyway. I’m not too young any more.”
    I was only six years old when my grandfather died, and so I wasn’t allowed to go to his funeral.
    I have one imperishable memory of my grandfather. Once he called me into his study, set me down on his lap, and made a drawing of a horse for me. On the horse he drew a rider. While I watched and giggled he gave the rider a beard and the fur-trimmed round hat of a rabbi, a
straimel
, just like he wore.
    My grandfather had been a Zaddik, one of the Righteous, and I’ve been assured that to study Talmud with him had been an illuminating experience. I wasn’t allowed to go to his funeral, but years later I was shown the telegrams of condolence that had come from Eire and Poland and even Japan. My grandfather had written many books: a translation of the Book of Splendour (the Zohar) into modern Hebrew, some twenty years work, and lots of slender volumes of sermons, hasidic tales, and rabbinical commentaries. His books had been published in Warsaw and later in New York.
    “At the funeral,” my mother said, “they had to have six motorcycle policemen to control the crowds. It was such a heat that twelve women fainted – and I’m
not
counting Mrs. Waxman from upstairs. With her, you know,
anything
to fall into a man’s arms. Even Pinsky’s. And did I tell you that there was even a French Canadian priest there?”
    “Aw, you’re kidding me.”
    “The priest was some
knacker
. A bishop maybe. He used to study with the
zeyda
. The
zeyda
was a real personality, you know. Spiritual and worldly-wise at the same time. Such personalities they don’t make any more. Today rabbis and peanuts come in the same size.”
    But, according to my father, the
zeyda
(his father-in-law) hadn’t been as celebrated as all that. “There are things I could say,” he told me. “There was another side to him.”
    My grandfather had sprung from generations and generations of rabbis, his youngest son was a rabbi, but none of his grandchildren would be one. My Cousin Jerry was already a militant socialist. I once heard him say, “When the men at the kosher bakeries went out on strike the
zeyda
spoke up against them on the streets and in the
shuls
. It was of no consequence to him that the men were grossly underpaid. His superstitious followers had to have bread. Grandpappy,” Jerry said, “was a prize reactionary.”
    A week after my