One shining autumn afternoon, Zilber was taking his retiree’s daily stroll through the Berkeley neighborhood where he lived, the streets crunchy with leaves. Another goddamn beautiful day in California, Zilber mused to himself.
His daughter Glynda always teased Zilber that he couldn’t pass a Little Free Library without looking through the giveaway books. Well, she’s right! he admitted. Zilber spotted an unusual box mounted on two wooden poles across the street. He thought he knew all the book offerings in walking distance from his home, but this one seemed to have sprouted out of nowhere. Coulda sworn I passed this corner three days ago, and that giveaway box wasn’t there. Unlike most of the free libraries, this one was built in the shape of a little train boxcar. Zilber crossed the street to get a closer look. The red boxcar had a clear plastic door, and Zilber lifted the latch.
Most of the time when he browsed one of these mini-libraries, Zilber leafed quickly through the contents and then continued his midday walk, more concerned with piling up steps on his cell phone health app. This time he took a closer look. The box was packed with literary debris—glitzy bestsellers from decades past, manuals for software programs that no one remembered, and a very dated guide to the first year of a baby’s life. What is this meshuggeneh crap? They should just recycle it.
Then his eye was caught by a short paperback with a binding that had grayed like an old man’s beard. The title didn’t ring a bell: Tales of a Disappearing Man. The book was so old that the price was in cents: 75¢, to be exact. You’d pay twenty times that today for a paperback. Zilber had never heard of the author. He read the back cover blurb:
Chaim Allemenschen’s 1924 novel, Tales of a Disappearing Man, considered his greatest work, won the Kruening Medal for international literature, often compared to the Nobel Prize. Allemenschen wrote his entire oeuvre exclusively in Yiddish. Two years after receiving his award, Allemenschen mysteriously abandoned his writing career, left his native Poland, and then dropped out of sight, possibly spending the rest of his days in Peru. Two witnesses reported seeing him at work on a chocolate plantation there. This is the first English translation of a neglected Yiddish classic.
Yiddish classic. That phrase suddenly brought back Grandma Gittele dandling Zilber on her knee seventy-five years ago when he was a baby on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn. The “G” at the beginning of Zilber’s daughter’s name, Glynda—that was in Gittele’s honor. Grandma Gittele not only knew Yiddish, the mammeloshen, the Ashkenazi mother tongue, she spoke seven other languages. That was because she had to hawk pickled green tomatoes in the market of Bialystok in the Old Country. Bialystok was a crossroads in Europe. As Grandma Gittele joked, “We were part of Poland on Mondays, Russia on Tuesdays, and Lithuania on Wednesdays.” Gittele was one of the lucky ones—she left Bialystok before the Holocaust, when the entire remaining Jewish population of the city took refuge in a synagogue, and the Nazis set it on fire. And those flames also burned the last of the Yiddish language in that region of Poland.
Zilber could not resist putting the copy of Tales of a Disappearing Man in the pocket of his heavy coat. Eh! I’ll probably just toss it after one chapter.
A warm spell hit Berkeley the next day, and Zilber did not wear his heavy coat again for a week. He forgot about Tales of a Disappearing Man. On a chilly day, Zilber’s stomach was bothering him, as it often did in recent years. Now the food I eat is eating me.
Zilber decided to drive to downtown Berkeley to visit a Chinese restaurant where he liked to order fish congee, a soothing rice gruel with soft chunks of cod that his stomach could handle even in its bumpiest moods. A full meal, and it costs less than a fancy-schmancy burger! While he was waiting for the restaurant staff to prepare his takeout dish, he fished around in his pockets. What’s this? Zilber came across the paperback he had found in the Little Free Library. With nothing else to do, Zilber started reading. There were several underlined passages and scribblings in the book, including, “Tell Seymour about this,” and “Don’t tell Seymour about this,” as well as the word schlemazel underlined with the note, “Look up meaning.” Normally he couldn’t stand when someone desecrated a book in this way, but he overlooked it this time and started reading. The first chapter began the story of a widower rabbi whose grief caused him to begin drinking heavily, not just clear vodka, but also plum brandy.
To his surprise, Zilber found the book engaging, the characters sympathetic. The server brought his fish congee in an opaque plastic container. The fish, the porridge, and the container were all a similar, whitish color. A cloud within a cloud within a cloud. When Zilber got the rice gruel home and started to eat the warm congee, he read farther into the novel. There were no distractions, because Zilber’s wife had died years earlier of breast cancer, and Zilber’s daughter Glynda and her partner Carmen had long ago moved to North Carolina because their tech jobs allowed them to work from anywhere. Home prices were too high near Zilber.
Whenever Zilber started a new book, he felt he would finish it if he was able to read at least one-tenth of the pages during the first sitting. He found himself taking in quite a bit of the novel that night, not putting it down until he’d read two full chapters, about ten percent of the paperback. I’m gonna have to start developing a taste for Yiddish classics, he quipped to himself as he washed the bowl he’d used to consume the fish congee.
On subsequent nights, Zilber read deeper into Tales of a Disappearing Man. Each chapter was exquisite, almost a poem, describing the world of Poland at the time when Zilber’s great-grandparents had lived there in a Jewish shtetl, the gnarled streets alive with beggars, tailors, haggling housewives, and visionaries gazing toward the imminent arrival of the messiah. The novel had tiny type crowded onto the page like the knots in his grandmother’s finely crocheted shawl. As he got farther and farther into the book, Zilber savored all the quirky characters from that world, and the aromas of the markets that smelled of pickled herring and fresh dill.
The book itself, however, had seen better days. The binding was coming apart, and as Zilber turned each page, it separated from the spine. Gevalt! Not again! Before long, half the book had come apart into separate pages. The loose sheets were held in place only by the front cover, which had a strange portrait of the rabbi being pulled on one side by little devils, and on the other by miniature angels. The next day, the cover, too, wiggled its way loose from the binding, and only a fragment of the full text was still glued to the spine.
Zilber attempted to keep the free pages together with the section that was still attached to the binding, but the little sheets of paper kept falling onto the floor when he picked up the book to start reading. He was afraid that pages were getting lost under the large wooden coffee table in front of the old sofa where he liked to read. Zilber shrugged off the loss of those pages, though. He had already read them, and no one would ever again make use of this very badly damaged copy of Tales of a Disappearing Man.
One evening after dinner, Zilber was deeply absorbed in the novel when his cell phone rang. It was in the pocket of the fleece jacket he was wearing, and he swiped to answer.
“Dad?”
“Oh, hi, Glynda.”
“Are you OK? You sound funny,” Glynda said.
“No, distracted. I was just reading,” Zilber explained.
“Good book?”
“Extremely absorbing,” Zilber allowed.
“Well, sorry to interrupt. Just called to see how you’re doing.”
“Fine. My digestion’s always a bit of a question mark,” Zilber said.
“Not too many onions, I hope?”
“I’m very fond of onions, but they don’t feel the same about me,” Zilber answered. “I’m not eating as much as I used to.”
“Well, don’t lose too much weight, Dad. I don’t want you to disappear.”
“Very funny. And how are you and Carmen?”
“We’re great. She and I started a yoga class this week. Pretty low-key.”
“Well, if there’s nothing special, you mind if I go back to reading?”
“So soon? OK, sorry I bothered you. Bye, Dad.”
Zilber read on that night and the following evenings. Despite the book’s condition, Zilber continued to work his way through the novel. As the plot evolved, the rabbi lost his congregation because of his drinking and seized an opportunity to become a fur trader in the north of Finland. Zilber was now more than halfway through the book. At the end of the chapter he was reading, the former rabbi got lost in a white-out blizzard, and it was not clear if he would ever reappear. This reminded Zilber of the adventurous life he thought he would live when he was young, before he became an auditor of balance sheets and a family man. I wasn’t a bad father and provider. But what’s left for me? Older, and more older. Maybe it’s time for me to disappear. Zilber shook his head, shut the novel, and went to bed.
The next day Zilber noticed that the book seemed longer than he had thought. He realized for the first time that there was an Epilogue at the end, which the author had added, probably to comment on the novel’s roots in history. Could this actually be based on a true story?
After reading a full chapter the following day, Zilber flipped to the end of the book again to see how many pages he had left. Not only was there the Epilogue, there was also a Translator’s Note he hadn’t noticed before, and Zilber glanced at a sentence or two of that section. Oy! He’s talking about the ending. Zilber shut the book in order not to ruin the suspense.
Meanwhile, more and more loose pages were misplaced, and each day that Zilber progressed through the novel, the book seemed to be missing a previous section. He looked under the sofa, the coffee table, and even beneath the rug in the living room, but he couldn’t find the stray parts of the book. Gradually the missing pages started to outnumber the remaining ones, until the book shrank in size each day. By the time Zilber reached the conclusion of the plot, only a few sheets of paper still clung to the book’s binding. The following day, when he finally read the Epilogue, all of the previous chapters had vanished. By the time he got to the Translator’s Note the next day, the pages were disappearing almost faster than he could read them, and when Zilber reached the last page, it fell out of the binding, and it was the only leaf of paper left in his hands.
On that last page, the translator noted that Yiddish was a difficult language to translate because, among other features, it had multiple ways to form diminutives for each noun. A cat, ket in Yiddish, could be not just a cat, but a ketsl, or a ketsele, each form of the word more affectionate and more of a loving endearment than the last.
After finishing the book, Zilber went into the kitchen to get some salty pretzels, which he washed down with seltzer. When he came back, the last page of the book had also disappeared, leaving only the binding. Zilber took the remains of the book in his hand and brought it right up to his nose. He thought it would have an odor like dust or smoke or ashes, but the spine was like his own body—he couldn’t smell it at all. He thought he would put the binding somewhere he wouldn’t lose it. Zilber went looking for a good place and he found just the spot in the top drawer of the chest in his bedroom.
When Zilber returned to the living room to look for the binding, it was nowhere in sight. He felt in the cracks of the sofa between the cushions, and he looked under the sofa. Nothing.
Zilber sat back down on the sofa and suddenly thought he might cry. He placed his head in his hands, and then looked up and saw a sketch of Glynda that an artist had done when his daughter was only nine years old, with her thick, dark curls. Zilber realized he’d been brusque with Glynda when they’d last talked. He went searching for his cell phone to apologize. Had that, too, gone missing? But it was on the kitchen counter, next to the bag of pretzels. He speed-dialed his daughter.
“Glynda?” he said.
“Dad? You sound worried.”
“No, just a bit tired,” said Zilber. “I’m OK.”
“You sure?”
Zilber walked into the living room and took his usual comfortable seat on the sofa. “I’m sure.”
“I’ve been meaning to call you again, but I didn’t know if it was too soon.”
“Too soon? For what?” Zilber asked.
“Too soon to break the news,” Glynda continued.
“News?”
“Good news. Carmen and I are pregnant.”
“Both of you?” Zilber asked.
Glynda laughed. “No, sorry, that came out wrong. Just one of us.”
“That’s wonderful!” Zilber said. “Would it be politically correct to ask which one of you?”
“No, that’s fine. It’s Carmen who’s carrying our child.”
“I’m so happy for both of you!” Zilber said.
“I’m still getting used to the idea. It was really Carmen who wanted a kid. But I’m starting to get excited.”
“Do you know if the baby will be a boy or a girl? Mazel tov either way, of course,” Zilber added.
“We didn’t plan to find out, but we had to have some genetic tests, and we know now it’s a boy.”
“A boy? Lovely. Well, that is great news.”
“You’re going to be on grandparent duty, you realize,” Glynda continued. “You’re the only one of our four parents still alive.”
“A duty I will gladly perform,” said Zilber.
They talked for a while longer, and then Glynda got off the phone. Hmm, a baby boy, Zilber thought. I wasn’t expecting that they were expecting.
The next morning, on his constitutional walk, Zilber went by the same intersection that had the Little Free Library where he’d found the Yiddish classic. Out of curiosity, Zilber crossed the street and opened the latch of the little train. To his surprise, there was another copy of Tales of a Disappearing Man. The same edition. Zilber took the book out and flipped through the pages. The identical passages seemed to have been underlined. The price was also the same: 75¢. Zilber was tempted to take the novel home again, but he realized he was done with that book. He carefully tucked the novel back between two outdated software manuals, refastened the latch, and continued on his morning stroll, his step quite a bit lighter than yesterday. You go, Grandpa, he thought, you go.
Zack Rogow is the author, editor, or translator of more than twenty books or plays. His memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost, was released in 2024 by Spuyten Duyvil Publishing. His play Colette Uncensored had its first staged reading at the Kennedy Center and ran in London, Indonesia, Catalonia, San Francisco, and Portland. www.zackrogow.com