His full name, it should be mentioned, was Shlomo Efraim Neuman, in So-and-so’s and So-and-so’s memory. They’d have liked to give him a hundred names. Grandma Henny did it all the time. She would call him Mordechai Leibeleh, and Shepseleh and Mendel and Anshel and Shulam and Chumak, and Shlomo Haim, and that’s how Momik got to know who they all were, Mendel who ran off to Russia to be a Communist nebuch, and disappeared, and Shulam the Yiddishist who sailed for America and the ship sank, and Isser who played the violinand died with the Nazis, may-their-name-be-blotted-out, and tiny Lei-belch and Shepseleh there was no more room for at the table, the family was so big by then, and Grandma Henny’s father told them to eat like the gentry, and they believed him and ate on the floor under the table, and Shlomo Haim grew up to be a sports champion and Anshel Efraim wrote the saddest, loveliest poems and then he went to live in Warsaw and became a Hebrew writer nebuch, and they all met their end with the Nazis, may-their-name-be-blotted-out, one fine day they closed in on the shtetl and gathered everyone together by the river—aiii, little Leibeleh and Shepseleh, forever laughing under the table, and Shlomo Haim who was half paralyzed and recovered by a miracle and became a Samson the Hero, forever flexing his muscles at the Jewish Olympics with the Prut River in the background, and little Anshel, the delicate one, they wondered how he would ever get through the winter, and they put hot bricks under his bed at night so he wouldn’t freeze, there he sits in his sailor suit with his hair parted in the middle looking so serious with his big eyeglasses; Goodness me, Grandma clapped her hands, you look just like him. She told him all about them long long ago, in the days when she could still remember, and they thought he was too young to understand, but once when Mama saw that his eyes weren’t staring blankly anymore, she told Grandma Henny to stop right away, and she also hid the book with the amazing pictures (she probably sent it to Aunt Idka). And now Momik is trying as hard as he can to remember what was in the pictures and the stories. He writes down every new thing he remembers, even the little things that don’t seem important, because this is war, and in war we use everything we have. That’s what the State of Israel does when it fights against the Arabs, pshakrev.
Bella helps him sometimes too, of course, but not so willingly, and the main part he has to do for himself. He isn’t angry with her or anything, no, of course not, obviously anyone from Over There can’t give him real clues, and they also can’t ask him to help in a simple, straightforward way. It seems they have all these laws of secrecy in the kingdom. But hardships like these don’t worry Momik, who has no choice, because he’s got to take charge once and for all. And over the past few weeks an awful lot of crooked lines have gone into his spy notebook which he now writes in under the covers where he can’t see. He isn’t always exactly sure how you’re supposed to write those wordsin Hebrew that Papa screams out in his sleep every night. Anyway, Papa seemed to have calmed down a little and he’d stopped with the nightmares for a while till Grandfather arrived and then everything started up again. The screaming is certainly weird, but what do we have logic and brains and Bella for? When we examine the screaming in the light of day, it turns out to be quite simple. It was like this, there was a war in that kingdom, and Papa was the Emperor and also the chief warrior, a commando fighter. One of his friends (his lieutenant?) was called Sondar. This strange name may have been his name in the underground, like in the days of the Etzel and Lehi. They all lived in a big camp with a complicated name. There they were trained to go on daring missions, which were so secret even today you have to keep mum about them. Also there were some trains around, but that part isn’t so clear. Maybe those trains are like the ones his secret brother Bill tells him about, the trains attacked by savage Indians. Everything is so mixed up. And there were also these big campaigns in Papa’s kingdom called Aktions, and sometimes (probably to make the people feel proud) they would have really incredible parades, like we have on Independence Day. Left, right, left, right, Papa screams in his sleep, Links recht, he screams in the German language Bella will positively not translate for Momik, till he practically shouts at her and she gets angry and tells him it means left, right, to the left, to the right. Is that it, Momik wonders, then why didn’t she want to translate it? Mama wakes up at night from Papa’s screaming and she pokes him and shakes him, and cries, Nu, Tuvia, sha, be still, the child can hear you, Over There is gone, it’s the middle of the night, a klag zal im trefin, you’ll wake the boy, Tuvia! And then Papa wakes up scared and starts with the big krechtzes that sound like a frying pan sizzling under the faucet, and Momik in his room meanwhile has shut the notebook under the covers, but he still hears Papa sort of sighing into his hands, and now he thinks carefully, the way Amos Chacham does before answering
