Breaking Home Ties

In the frost-bitten dusk of a shtetl that seems to exhale ghosts, David Bergman—molten-eyed, violin-bowed—believes his envy has murdered his bosom twin, Paul Zeidman, during a drunken mazurka of recrimination; the snow drinks the blood he only imagines, and he bolts, a remorseful Cain clutching nothing but dissonance. Years ossify into decades: the Pale dissolves behind him, Ellis Island re-names him, Broadway neon baptizes him, law books armor him, and Manhattan’s skyscrapers become his new kaddish. Meanwhile, the mother who once sang lullabies over Sabbath candles is reduced to peddling matches on Hester Street; the father who debated Talmud now folds newspapers for a penny a bundle; sisters in threadbare coats dream of David’scoattails. A wedding is brokered—Rose, a silk-stockinged philanthropist whose charity is a mausoleum for the aged, agrees to marry the lawyer whose checks keep the boilers running. On the day violins are tuned in the home’s linoleum hall, the past sidles in wearing a faded fiddler’s vest: Paul, scar intact but pulse steady, strikes the opening chord of “Eili, Eili,” and memory detonates like shrapnel. In that suspended tremolo, David’s gilt identity fractures; the Bergmans—wrinkled, penniless, radiant—rush toward the prodigal as though toward a Sabbath that never again will set.