The Leper Princess and The Court Jew

By Barak Bassman

After centuries of wandering the small towns of Central and Eastern Europe, Zalman has finally been exposed by a great Hasidic Rebbe as a walking corpse, an affable zombie impersonating the living shtetl Jews around him. But when the rebbe insists that Zalman permit his soul to move on to the next world, Zalman scoffs that he is beyond redemption - and confesses by way of a tale about his long ago sins in a petty principality in Medieval Germany. There he had loved and was spurned by a beautiful Christian princess with long golden hair, before making a pact with a demon queen and cursing the princess to live out her days with monstrous deformities.

Drawing on medieval Jewish lore and the traditions of Hasidic storytelling, The Leper Princess and The Court Jew is a meditation on guilt and responsibility.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barak Bassman
• Release date: Jan 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9781945330964

Barak Bassman

Barak A. Bassman received a B.A. in Classics from Grinnell College and a law degree from the New York University School of Law. He practices law in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and lives in the Philadelphia suburbs with his wife and two children. He is the author of Elegy of the Minotaur and Repentance: A Tale of Demons in Old Jewish Poland.

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THE LEPER PRINCESS AND THE COURT JEW

by

BARAK BASSMAN

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

THE LEPER PRINCESS AND THE COURT JEW

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Copyright © 2018 Barak A. Bassman. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

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ISBN: 978-1-945330-96-4 (eBook)

ISBN: 978-1-945330-97-1 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-945330-98-8 (hardback)

Library of Congress Location Number: 2017962535

FICTION / Folklore

Version 2018.01.30

Table of Contents

I. A Dead Man Walks the Earth

II. A Happy Childhood in the Abundant Household

of the Court Jew

III. The Princess with the Golden Hair

IV. Between Two Worlds

V. Vengenace

VI. The Curse of Leprosy

VII. The Dybbuk

VIII. A Tale of the Hasidim from the Archives of the Institute

Other Books by Barak Bassman

About the Author

The Leper Princess and The Court Jew

I. A Dead Man Walks the Earth

It had happened during Shabbat services, on a Saturday morning, in the Great Synagogue in the shtetl of K ____ in the land of Poland, that Zalman, who had carefully pretended to still be a living Jew, was exposed to the community as a walking corpse. Earlier that morning he had agreed to read the weekly Torah portion as the scheduled reader had fallen ill and lost his voice. Although it had been some time since Zalman had received such an honor, he did not spend much time weighing the wisdom of accepting it. To the contrary, he congratulated himself—silently—on how well he had fit into the society of the living.

The reading went well at first, as Zalman’s Hebrew had always been strong, and he still recalled the basics of cantillation. Feeling emboldened, he let his fine baritone boom across the synagogue in celebration of the divine and wondrous Torah. But then four Hebrew letters cropped up in the scroll before him: yod-heh-vav-heh, the sacred name of the Holy One, Blessed be He. Zalman attempted to chant the word Adonai—Lord—but no sound came forth. Disconcerted, he moved on quickly, hoping no one had noticed. They would not have noticed, he reassured himself, all the men were gossiping amongst themselves and ignoring the words of the Torah that Shabbat morning. Yet the name of the Holy One continually recurred in that weekly Torah portion and, each time, Zalman could not utter His Name.

There was one man paying close attention to Zalman’s reading: the famed Tzaddik of K. ____, a rebbe renowned throughout Poland for his wisdom and learning. The Tzaddik famously meditated on each Hebrew letter in his prayers. And on Shabbat mornings, he blocked everything from his mind but the words Our Teacher Moses set down in the holy Torah and concentrated with all his soul on each syllable as it was chanted. His followers claimed he was able to harness the esoteric powers latent in the Hebrew letters to elevate himself into the upper realms, where he could plead his people’s case directly before the Throne of Glory.

So when the Tzaddik sat that morning in his seat of honor by the Great Synagogue’s Eastern Wall, he visibly directed his great powers of concentration upon Zalman’s chanting. The Tzaddik eventually rose from his seat and demanded silence. The beadle obediently banged his stick hard against the reader’s lectern and repeated the call for silence. The room fell quiet, the surprised men of K _____ turned their faces forward, and Zalman trailed off in his chanting. Once all eyes were on him, the Tzaddik pointed a bony forefinger at Zalman, and roared:

That man is an abomination!

That man, who is reading from our most holy Torah, is one of the dead, yet still somehow walking here in the daylight. Behold, he cannot pronounce the name of the Holy One, Blessed be He, which is the fount of all life and thus anathema to the dead.

The crowd converged around Zalman. The beadle picked up the silver yad, the pointer used by the Torah reader to track his place, found His Name in the scroll, and asked Zalman to pronounce the word. When he could not, the men gathered around him recoiled in terror, except for the Tzaddik.

There is nothing to fear, the rebbe told them, this is no demon. He is a hapless Jew who, for some reason, does not remain in his grave like a well-behaved corpse. We have to remedy this condition and free this poor soul to enter the World to Come. Come, take him to my home.

Two burly men in wrinkled, ill-fitting gabardines, whom, Zalman surmised, were looking for an excuse to leave the service anyway, escorted the dead man to the Tzaddik’s house. The saintly rabbi and his followers remained in the Great Synagogue to complete their Shabbat morning devotions.

These two burly men expressed no interest in their charge. Having carried this secret for so long—through countless decades, across so many towns and villages in Central and Eastern Europe—Zalman now felt an urge to unburden himself about what life was like when one is dead. All that was wanting was a politely awkward question to broach the subject.

But instead the two louts waddled through the main square of the shtetl, past the government building, the small church and a now empty tavern. The tavern-keeper’s wife, a squat woman sweeping outside, yelled at the two lumbering dolts that they had still not paid their full tab from the night before. They cursed back at her in their slurred, faltering speech.

Zalman resigned himself to being the town drunks’ excuse to nurse their hangovers in more hospitable places than the Great Synagogue. The things he could tell, if only they would care to hear: about how he had to pretend to eat when he did not actually need to eat at all. Or the long, boring nights when he had to pretend to need sleep like everyone else to avoid drawing suspicion.

Or how, as a dead man, it was imperative to avoid matrimonial entanglements. A by-product of death, even for the dead who managed still to be up and about, was an inability to perform basic conjugal duties. Truth be told, Zalman’s lusts, the cause of so much anguish in his living years, had swiftly petered out once he became an animated corpse.

All this and more was he ready to tell at last. But one of the two oafs had just left their little procession, to go down a narrow side alley and discreetly vomit. The other stumbling lout took a