Jemimah Loew had never read Shakespeare, had indeed never even heard of him, and all she was able to surmise from my rambling dissertations on this writer was that I was comparing her to various pagan and Christian women and she smiled incredulously at me and one day, round about the middle of autumn, just as the first signs of winter were in the air, as the leaves of the elder and lilac were turning to their autumn tints just like all the other leaves, one day in mid-autumn she grabbed my hand and dragged me down a gloomy graveyard path to a cemetery wall where there was a grave that we had not so far looked at.
She read me the inscription on the headstone and stated: "That'll be me!" The word MAHALATH had been chiselled thereon in Hebrew letters and underneath it the date: 1780.
Why did I feel so frightened? Was it not foolishness on my part to stare like a numbskull, as if the cat had got my tongue, at the girl now standing next to me?
And yet she was not laughing at me, nor was she pleased at the successful outcome of a jest. With melancholy gravity and folded arms she stood there, leaning against the headstone, and said, without so much as waiting to be asked: "Her name was Mahalath and that's exactly what she was: in other words, a dancer. Her heart was sick like mine and she was the last woman to be laid to rest here in this, our Beth-Chaim, the very last. After that the good emperor Joseph forbade that any more of our people should be interred in this cemetery. This woman, Mahalath, was the last of them. The good emperor Joseph also dismantled the wall of the Jewish ghetto hereabouts and gave to it his own compassionate and glorious name as a living memorial to his and to our own posterity. He it was who smashed down the walls of this prison and at long last let us breathe again in the company of other nations. May the God of Israel have mercy on his ashes."
"But who was this Mahalath? What do you have to do with Mahalath,
Jemimah?" I enjoined.
"Her heart was sick and it broke."
"Don't be so silly. How can you know that about someone who was buried in the year 1780?"
"We remember our people for a long time. I know Mahalath like a sister and I also know that her fate will be my fate too."
"Now you're being ridiculous!" I shouted. But at this, Jemimah Loew suddenly put her hand over her heart and her face twitched with pain as if she were suffering some great physical discomfort.
Once more I was violently assailed by fear and when she took my hand and placed it on her bosom, my fear increased.