As the sun approached the horizon, the men gathered for the afternoon prayer service, abbreviated because there were only four of them, not the ten required for the full service. They finished just before the sun touched the western horizon. As soon as the sun was down, while the light was still good enough to read, they started again with the evening service.
"Praised be to the Lord, God of the universe, who has commanded us to count the days of the Omer," Yitzach said, "on this, the thirty-third day of the Omer."
"Amen," the other three replied, ending the service. There had been thirty-three days since the start of Passover, and until the festival of Shauvos, every day was to be counted.
"So," Yitzach said. "Time for a haircut, but we'll do that tomorrow. Chava, Gitele, we need to talk. Come, everyone, back to the table."
"I have a proposition for you," Yitzach said, as they sat down at the table by the light of one candle. "My son doesn't want to take up the life of a Shutzjude. He's a scholar at the Yeshiva of Heidingsfeld. I've married off one daughter and I think it's time for me to find someone to carry this house into the next generation. I'd like to find a husband for Gitele, and that won't be in Kissingen. Your trip to Poland has me thinking that perhaps we should join you.
"So, here is my proposition. Stay through the week, and then we'll come with you. That will give me time to transfer my protected status and will give us time to pack up what we can take with us. Waiting a bit will be worth your time because Wednesday is market day. That will give you a chance to lighten your load by getting rid of all those empty bottles before we leave the best of the Franconian vineyards."
There were several replies. "Father!" Gitele said. "Can we afford a week's delay?" Yankel asked. "Is it safe?" Gitele added. "How long have you been planning this?" Moische asked.
"There are too many Jews around Kissingen," Yitzach said. "We've known that for a while. If some of us don't leave soon, the Christians will force us out. Last winter Chava and I decided we should go, so this spring we've been watching for a group to join. Poland, Hungary, Turkey, they all look better than German lands."
"Too many Jews?" Yankel asked. "Do you have a minyan?"
"No, Rav Yakov," Yitzach said, pausing to count under his breath. "There are eight over age thirteen. When I was a child, there was a minyan, but that was before the war."
"There are three of us," Yankel said. "So together, we have one extra. So long as we are here, we have enough for a Torah service."
"It's a long walk. My brother lives down by the river."
"Tell them I have a sefir Torah in my luggage," the old rabbi said. "We can do the full service Thursday and perhaps on Shabbos if the walk is not too far."
"I can't promise they'd come on Thursday," Yitzach said. "There is work to be done. If you stay through Saturday, though, they will come."
"I don't want them to come on Shabbos if they have to walk over two thousand cubits."
"The walk is longer," Yitzach said, "but we know our eruv laws. When one of us wants to visit the other on Shabbos, we arrange to eat a Shabbos meal at my cousin's place, halfway between."
"So Reb Yitz," Moische asked, once it was clear that the Rabbi was satisfied that no laws would be broken by the proposal to gather a minyan for Shabbos. "How many other groups of travelers have you spoken to?"
"There was a group of Jews out of Wertheim two weeks ago. They were traveling fast and didn't want more people. Last week another group came through. Like you, they were from Frankfurt and trying to peddle their way east. I would have been tempted to go with them if they had seemed competent. I've heard rumors of other groups but not everyone who travels up this valley stops in Kissingen to talk with me."
"Thank you for the compliment," Moische said, with a laugh.
"Don't thank me too soon," Yitzach said. "First, my wife and daughter need to be convinced that you are competent enough for us. And I suspect that we need to convince you that we are competent enough for you."
For the next hour, the travelers repeated many of the answers they had given two nights before in Hammelburg. This time, though, there were fewer evasive answers.
"My wife and I left Frankfurt Monday a week after Passover ended," Moische explained. "I'd hoped to leave the week before, the first Monday right after Passover, but that didn't work out. Instead, we left on the eighteenth day of the Omer. That seemed good enough, and eighteen is a lucky number."
"It took a day to pack up Reb Yankel, Yossie and Basya in Hanau, and then we spent the Sabbath of Parshos Emor with the Jews of Aschaffenburg. Last Monday, we set off into the Spessart. In a week, we made it to Hammelburg, buying and selling as we went.
Yitzach interrupted. "You know, Reb Moische, yesterday I asked how you could manage, buying and selling across the countryside, and we got off into matters of commercial law and legal fictions and Talmud. You never answered my question."
Moische Frankfurter answered, "A merchant can't afford to disclose the secrets of his trade."
Yossie chuckled. "He never lets us suggest a price, ever. Before we buy or sell, he always looks in his book and then tells us what offer to make, and he tells us what the final price should be. Sometimes, he's wrong, but mostly, his advice is good."
"When I'm wrong," Moische said, "It's because of the war. I've been this way twice before, to the Hannover fair and back, by way of Meiningen and Erfurt. My father did it many times. The first rule for any merchant is to constantly watch the prices of everything."
"I know that well enough," Yitzach said. "But I only need to know the prices of goods in and around Kissingen. You need to know the prices everywhere."
"We only know the prices where my father or I have been before. Of course, you have to correct for the season." He paused. "So, Reb Yitzach, if you come with us, what will you bring as trade goods?"
The answer to that question emerged after morning prayers and breakfast Tuesday, while Moische's wife and Chava set to work cutting the men's hair. Between Passover and Shavuos, the thirty-third day of the Omer was the only day on which it was auspicious to have a haircut, so all of the men took their turn.
"So," Yitzach said, while his wife worked around his head with comb and shears. "What I propose to do is slaughter a cow and make sausage. I'll sell the meat I can't preserve and buy trade goods with the profit. There aren't more than a handful of Jews east of here. The Protestants did a good job of driving us out of Saxony back before my lifetime, so you'll want kosher meat that will keep. My sausage should keep all summer if it stays dry and out of the sun. I'll need help, though, because we'll have to keep the fire smoking, and we'll need to shave an awful lot of beef very thin.
"You're a shochet?" Moische asked.
"The best in Kissingen, if you discount my brother's son Ari. He's the one I want to take over this place. I also have a cousin who is competent. We take turns buying cattle at the Neustadt market. Most of the meat we sell to Hammelburg."
"Where did you study?" Yankel asked.
"Heidingsfeld, where my son is now. When my father died, I left the yeshivah and came home to take over his business."
The cow was slaughtered that morning, and everyone was put to work, under the able direction of Yitzach and his wife. The larger butchering job, of course, was left to the shochet himself, but then the meat had to be salted and rinsed to get the blood out, and every bit of meat had to be stripped from the carcass excepting the hindquarters. That part would go, at a discount, to the Christian butchers in town because kosher preparation of the loins would have been too much work.
By evening, the big chimney in Yitzach's kitchen was festooned with thinly sliced beef hung from freshly cut willow twigs. Larger cuts of meat hung awaiting sale or additional work the next day. They'd stripped the derma from the intestines for use as sausage casing, and the smell of grilling liver filled the house.
Yossie was the strongest of the travelers, with years of experience doing hard physical labor at the printing press. Because of his str
ength, he spent a good part of the day chopping firewood from Yitzach's woodpile for the kitchen fire. The wood had to burn to charcoal on one side of the kitchen hearth, then the hot coals were swept over to the other side to provide dry heat under the meat. When the wood supply was adequate and the fire burning properly, he was put to work at the cutting block, shaving thin curls of beef. For a break in that job, he was sent to the salt works for a sack of salt. By nightfall, Yossie's arms ached as much as they had ever ached after a long press run.
Wednesday morning, Yossie was spared from more physical labor. The evening before, Moische and Yitzach had asked him to come with them into town to help in the marketplace. The three of them woke up before sunrise, said their morning prayers quickly and ate a cold crust for breakfast before setting out.
Market day in Kissingen was busy. At the town gates, farm carts vied in friendly competition with merchants. The Jews knew their place and held back, waiting their turn. Once the crowd around the gates had thinned, they paid their Jew tax to the guard at the gates, as required by law, and then entered the town. In Kissingen, Jews were permitted to buy and sell in the marketplace, but the protocol at the town gates guaranteed that they would always get the least desirable spaces.
Once the three of them had staked out their spot, Isaac took his cart to the Christian butchers so he could sell the non-kosher cuts of meat while Yossie and Moische arranged what they had to sell. They had straw-packed baskets of the flat bottles used for Franconian wines, window-glass, ironwork, books and paper.
"Today," Moische said, "make all sales in silver. Here's the price list, what you should open the haggling with, what they should offer, and where you should go for the final price. I want to spy out the market to see if I am right on the prices, so for now, you run things."
Yossie felt a bit abandoned. Then he straightened his shoulders. He'd been the buyer at other markets, after all. Not just for himself, either. He'd done it for Master Hene's print shop and he knew how things worked. Buying and selling door-to-door the last two weeks helped, but he'd never been in charge of a market stall before. It certainly didn't help that he was a complete stranger in Kissingen.
His first few sales were small; bottles by the twos and threes, a shovel blade, a pruning hook, and two sheets of paper. Then, to Yossie's surprise, a man came to buy four full baskets of bottles.
"So, Jew, where are they from?" the man asked, pulling one of the flat green bottles from its straw packing and looking at it with care.
"Paul Fleckenstein's glassworks in Heigenbrucken, on the Lohrbach," Yossie answered. He remembered being fascinated as he watched the glassblower manipulating the red hot glass. That such green glass could be made by melting the red Spessart sandstone was almost magical.
Only after inspecting several more bottles with equal care did the man begin to dicker seriously. The man knew what he was doing, but with Moische's price recommendations in mind, Yossie was prepared.
Moische came back shortly after that to amend the price list. "You need to read the sales," Moische said, after Yossie described what he'd sold. "If you're buying wine from the vineyard next door, or if you make it for your own use, you reuse bottles. Break a barrel of wine into bottles, drink them up, and then refill the bottles when you break open the next barrel. If you sell just one or two bottles, you're probably just replacing broken glass.
"But think. If you're selling wine for shipment to far away places, you buy enough empty bottles to hold a whole barrel of wine and the empties never come back. Your last sale means that someone in town is still shipping wine to someplace far away. The local wine is good enough to grace a noble's table, which is why we are buying as much as we can with our profits."
"You've been tasting Christian wine?" Yossie asked, mildly taken aback.
"Of course. How else would I know its value in trade?" Moische said. "We're forbidden to drink the wine of idolaters, but I don't drink, just taste. It is very good wine, but then, Reb Yitzach's wine is no worse, and he has promised to bring a bit of that along with us."
Soon after Moische left for another round of spying on the marketplace, Yossie found himself facing a Catholic priest. Christian clergymen had always made him uncomfortable.
"My son," the priest said, with an alarming smile that might have been intended to be friendly. "I hear you have books for sale."
"A few, Father," Yossie said, in his best German. He knew that for a Jew to show insufficient respect could lead to trouble. He was more alarmed to be addressed as "my son" than to be addressed merely as "Jew."
Yossie went around the back of the cart to show the books. Moische had shifted their goods around carefully so that the Jewish and Protestant books were all on the cart they had left behind at Yitzach's house.
"Have you read this?" the priest asked, holding up a book.
Yossie leaned over to look. It was a volume of St. Thomas Aquinas. "My Latin is poor, Father, but I like what I know of the Saint's logic."
"If your Latin were better," the priest said, "you would find that the logic of Aquinas is compelling. The only way to salvation is through our Lord and savior, Jesus Christ."
Yossie groaned inwardly, fearing that the conversation was becoming a trap. "I have no desire to engage in a religious disputation, Father. All I want to do is find a good home for these fine books."
"Where did you get them?" the priest asked.
"They are from the estate of Master Hans Hene of Hanau, may his memory be a blessing."
The priest looked startled. "The printer? I had not heard that he died! May his soul rest in peace. And you, a Jew, why do you bless his memory?"
"Should I curse a man simply because he was not of my religion?" Yossie asked. "I worked in Master Hene's print shop for many years."
In the end, the encounter with the priest turned out better than Yossie had feared. He even sold the volume of Aquinas and a supply of paper to the priest. Not long after that, he sold all that was left of the green-tinted window glass they'd purchased in the Spessart.
Moische, meanwhile, had been searching out what they should buy with their profits. It was no surprise to Yossie that this included more wine, but Moische also bought several empty barrels.
"Why these?" Yossie asked, grimacing after taking a sniff at one of the bung holes. The strong vinegar smell made it clear that that they were old wine barrels.
"Vinegar prevents vermin," Moische said. "These should sell well after we leave the vineyards."
Twenty-first of Iyyar, 5391 (May 23, 1631)
By the week's end, all of the travelers were sick of the sight and smell of beef in all of its forms. They had dealt with everything from raw beef, dried strips of beef, cooked beef, suet, and, most of all, sausage.
Friday afternoon, in addition to keeping a charcoal fire going under the hanging meat, they began to heat kettles of water to be added to the bath. As the Sabbath drew closer on Friday afternoon, each of them left work in turn to bathe and change into their best clothes. The meat was prepared to the point that what work remained could wait for Sunday. What the sausages needed most was to hang in the chimney over the banked fire for as long as possible.
Yossie had never encountered a private bath before. In Frankfurt and Hanau, and even in Hammelburg, the bathhouses had been communal affairs. The structure was not as old as the house, but it had obviously been there for generations. The masonry lining was sound but undecorated, and the room was plain. The bath met the letter of the law, being dug into the ground and open to the sky. As with every other bath he had used, the opening to the sky was a narrow chimney that ended just above the water in one corner. Anything more would have let in far too much cold air in the winter.
Yossie washed himself using a clean rag and a pot of warm water so as not to pollute the bath water with dirt when he finally immersed himself. The five pots of boiling water they had added to the bath had not warmed it enough that he wanted to spend much time there, but that was not the point. The point was to
make a clear separation between the week past and the Sabbath to come, a spiritual cleansing.
Once he was dry and dressed, Yossie helped Yakov bring the case holding the old rabbi's Torah scroll in from their cart. The case was large and heavy enough that it took two men to carry it comfortably. It was not ornate, but nonetheless its solid construction signaled that it held something precious. The scroll inside was the most central symbol of Judaism, but it was also precious because of the labor it represented. The many sheets of parchment sewn into the scroll had all been specially prepared, as had the ink. Yakov himself had written every letter in the scroll, using exactly the letter forms required by tradition.
Yitzach led the evening service welcoming the Sabbath, as was his right as master of the house, but he also made a point of involving the others. Of the eleven men that made up their congregation, three were still young, one not much over thirteen, and Yossie enjoyed watching their response when they were asked to lead some of the simpler prayers.
After the evening kiddush over bread and wine had been said, their guests left for their Sabbath dinners. As promised, Yitzach's brother and his two nephews left with his cousin. As the men left, the women rejoined the group and Yankel asked a question that was also on Yossie's mind.
"Reb Yitzach, you did not begin your service with the Kaballos Shabbos psalms."
"No," Yitzach said, "and neither did my father, nor his father, nor his. Welcoming Shabbos with psalms is a beautiful innovation, but what's wrong with the order of the traditional service?"
"Saying the Kaballos Shabbos psalms helps to put you in the right frame of mind for the service," Yankel said. "It makes your prayers more effective."
Yitzach shook his head. "That would imply that our reward is not for carrying out the six hundred and thirteen commandments in the Torah. That our reward is not for prayer, repentance and doing justice, but for being in the right frame of mind. That sounds like something a Lutheran would say; that we are saved by our faith, not by what we do."