[Issue 2025.74]

‘The Sons of Victor Levitak’, Rowley Amato

Art © 2025 Toeken

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“They were a culture, these New York Jewish Communists, a nation without a country, but for a brief moment, a generation, they did have land of their own: two square blocks in the Bronx.”
Vivian Gornick, The Romance of American Communism

“Will there be evil in the city if the Lord has not done it?”
Amos 3:6

Victor Levitak was not well-loved by the other residents of the Coop, but we sat a feeble shiva for him anyway.

We gathered in the lobby, draping old blankets and shawls over the mirrors and windows and reflective surfaces. We nibbled whitefish and rugelach from Liebman’s Deli and sipped tea from a dented copper samovar that Feiga Rosenthal schlepped down from the third floor.

The Coop chairman, Bert Katz, said a few uninspired words about Victor’s “commitment to the cause.” He spoke in vague terms about the “essential” role he played within our Coop and the Amalgamated Garment Workers Union as a whole.

Marty Feinberg worked with Victor on the fabric cutters’ line down at the Lefcourt lofts and was, by our estimation, the closest thing he had to a friend. We looked to him to deliver the mourner’s kaddish. He stared at his shoes and quickly rushed through words that held no meaning for us, until, eventually, his Hebrew failed him.

“Well, anyway… he found peace.” He shrugged. “A great blessing, in my opinion.”

True enough, we supposed.

Victor Levitak died sometime in his sleep. We didn’t know when, exactly, and the doctor who examined him provided no explanations. But we were told that he did not suffer.

His death saddened us, of course, but did we really mourn him? In truth, we didn’t feel much of anything at all. We went through the motions because it seemed like the right thing to do.

Victor had always been a puzzle.

We rarely saw him at Coop meetings. He did not participate in the chess club, or the Coop newsletter, or any of a dozen other activities. When pressed, he would say he was a Communist, though he did not attend any of our working groups. His praxis was lackadaisical, his contributions to the union unremarkable.

On the streets of New York, among the goyim, he could hide behind his lack of English. But all of us in the Coop spoke Yiddish, and most spoke Russian. When we saw him in the lobby, he seemed eager to escape any mild threat of conversation.

Marty returned to his seat. We bowed our heads in quiet reflection. Some of us tore loose threads from our shirtsleeves and the hems of our skirts, for we saw no use in rending perfectly good garments.

Amid the faint plucking of threads, we heard something else. Soft whispers, echoing in the floors and the wall, echoing through layers of plaster and asbestos.

We heard the faint rustling of wings.

---

We dreamed up our Coop in the smoke-filled union halls of Manhattan and the sunny Socialist colonies of the Catskills.

Imagine it: a sprawling cooperative housing complex for the men and women of the Amalgamated Garment Workers Union—radicals and rabblerousers all. The homes would be spacious and affordable, far from the noisome squalor of the Lower East Side, where cold water hellholes rented for twenty dollars a month and speculators traded buildings like butchers haggling over sides of beef.

We were Russians, Poles, Ruthenians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians, Romanians, Hungarians, people who hailed from every corner of the Pale. All were welcome in our Coop. It would be a worker’s paradise, greater than any single apartment building. It would be a monument to the movement, its very existence an act of insurrection.

The principles that guided us were simple: no family would ever be evicted and the rent would never be raised. A group of elected committees would manage day-to-day affairs, and all major decisions would be decided democratically, with every resident granted a vote.

The skeptics among us said it was doomed to fail. The iron fist of capital would smother it in the cradle, they said. The plutocrats in City Hall and Albany would see it crushed. And yet, we scrabbled away, gathering up our pennies and nickels and dimes, opening lines of credit with the union bank, drafting appeals in the pages of the Daily Worker and the Forward.

The union bought up virgin land in the Bronx, empty blocks on an empty grid. We followed news of the construction as if the Giants were on a pennant run. At union meetings, shop stewards delivered reports, announced setbacks, collected funds. And we happily gave.

When the buildings topped out, the union held a banquet at the Grand Theatre on Second Avenue. By summer, we had begun to relocate, marching forth from our Lower East Side hovels to the bright, sylvan reaches of the north Bronx.

And as we settled into our new apartments, we were struck, suddenly, by the feeling that the Coop had always been here. It had always existed. We had only to raise it like a megalithic monument from the Tuckahoe marble that slumbered beneath our feet.

There was a communal kitchen and a dining hall, a butcher and a grocery store, a school and a library. We constructed an auditorium, where we held our weekly Committee meetings, as well as concerts and plays and lectures.

An entire neighborhood, concentrated within two city blocks.

The building encircled a leafy courtyard modeled on a fanciful vision of an English country garden mixed with an august American university campus—cloistered kingdoms forbidden to our kind. Tufts of spirea and globes of hydrangea and great, sturdy elms flanked our stone paths. Ivy spurted up the brick walls and Japanese maples reached across pools filled with water lilies and tiny bejeweled goldfish.

Politics infused every aspect of life in the Coop.

At Committee meetings, we would rise to our feet and sing the “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “The Internationale”—the irony was not lost on us, but hadn’t we staked our lives on such contradictions?

We were all Jewish reds. But within that narrow palette existed a dozen different shades. In the lobbies and stairwells, Communists clashed with Socialists, Stalinists with Trotskyites, Anarchists with everyone else. We spoke a muddled dialect of Yiddish and English, though there were some Hebrew speakers, and even a few Esperantists (though everyone thought they were a bit nutty).

It was the high-water mark of the movement. The Crash of ‘29 exposed to the rest of the country the hermetic secret we had always known—that American Capital was an illusion, a rotten flimflam resting on a foundation of sand. An urgent optimism tinged those years, before Russia’s pact with the Nazis, before HUAC and the blacklist, before Khrushchev denounced Stalin and his terrible excesses.

Back then, The Communist Manifesto sat on every bedside table. We studied it like our grandfathers studied Talmud.

Marx explained the full spectrum of human experience. His writing illuminated the concealed gearworks of the world, and reading him helped us decode hidden meaning like sacred gematria. It stoked a fire that burned within each of our breasts and gave purpose to our endless toil, for even when we worked our fingers raw and bloody in the dreary sweatshops of the West Side, even when the bulls cracked our skulls on the picket lines, we knew that the forces and vectors of history impelled us ever forward.

Revolution lay just around the corner—five, perhaps ten years at most. Of this we were certain.

On the streets and in the factories and sweatshops, we were querulous kikes, pernicious pinkos, bomb-tossing commies. We were Jews without money—half-literate, hook-nosed strangers in a strange land, sneered at by the baronial Goldmans and Guggenheims of Fifth Avenue. The rabbis called us goyim in all but name; the Zionists called us sellouts and self-haters. But within the Coop, we were scientists in a laboratory, mystics standing on the cusp of the divine.

We were the vanguard of a righteous army.

Arrogant? Yes, but hadn’t we earned the right? With our bare hands we had conjured utopia, a model that would be studied for generations to come.

We were beholden to no boss or landlord, and no power on earth could uproot us.

---

Strange incidents bedeviled the Coop in the bleak winter months that followed Victor Levitak’s death.

Late at night, in the basement’s empty corridors, we heard muffled whispers and sudden, groaning croaks. In windowless rooms, we felt the tickle of breeze on the napes of our necks. In the third floor’s darkened alcoves, we saw flashing eyes, like those of the feral cats that skulked in Van Cortlandt Park.

The Cooperator Times, our little mimeographed biweekly, carried breathless reports of burst pipes, shattered lightbulbs, erupting sinks. A noxious stench permeated the entire south wing, and tendrils of black mold crept up the walls of the stairwell.

The Coop Committee dispatched commando squads of handymen and plumbers and electricians, all of whom returned shrugging.

Wild ideas coalesced. We heard whispers of a cabal of nefarious counterrevolutionary elements—a snake pit of landlords, bosses, and government agents. They had infiltrated our ranks to wage a clandestine sabotage campaign. And because we would not bow at the altar of the dollar, they sought to destroy us, like the mamzer Palmer after the war.

But among the elderly residents, another theory spread over games of bridge and pinochle—a shared joke among those old enough to still cling to the superstitions of their lost childhoods.

They said that a brood of sheydim haunted our Coop.

The old folks would sit in the lobby, sipping black tea through sugar cubes clenched in their teeth and gnawing slabs of desiccated date-nut bread. Suddenly, a hush would fall over them, and they would toss a pinch of salt over the shoulder or spit three times—puh-puh-puh.

At first, we rolled our eyes at this behavior. Few of us attended shul, and we had done much to banish the shtetl hocus-pocus of our less enlightened past. Marxist doctrine precluded such childish fantasies, which clashed with the rational materialism that guided our project.

And yet, once loosed, the trickle of rumor would not be staunched. Soon, the “Coop sheydim” became scapegoats. They assumed the blame for lost watches and clogged toilets. Whenever a fuse blew out or a flower vase broke, we would glance at each other with raised eyebrows.

Old Rifka Gittelman suggested that we enlist the services of the Rav Patai, but this suggestion was not taken seriously.

They grew bolder as winter dragged on. Not content merely to rattle our cutlery and spring leaks in our plumbing, they lashed out in more unnerving ways.

One night, Myra Stein was shelving books in the Coop library when a small shadow darted behind a row of bookcases. A moment later, the shelves collapsed, sending the collected works of Sholem Aleichem tumbling across the floor.

Bonny Abramovich, in 4-D, returned from the laundry room and found her porcelain ashtray shattered. The ashes had been dumped in her simmering pot of cholent, forming a gray archipelago.

As Hedda Dubinsky, 3-K, rummaged through her closet for a can of floor wax, a small, clawed hand shoved her inside. The door slammed shut and locked, trapping her for three hours, until her husband returned home from work.

Vivian Chaiken, 2-H, awoke to the sound of her baby crying. When she went to check on him, she saw, crouched on the edge of the crib, a small, squat shadow leering down at him.

---

News of our haunting spread, and we began to host journalists. The Yiddish press, mostly—the Morgen Freiheit, the Forward—though even the goyishe New Leader sent up a cub reporter. They descended like tourists, eager to gawk and write about the bizarre case of the Amalgamated Garment Workers Cooperative Apartments.

In all this time, we came no closer to finding a solution to our tsuris.

The Coop Committee had written to rabbis of all denominations—men with knowledge of such matters. The letters went unanswered, though one rabbi who led an Orthodox congregation in Yonkers expressed his sympathies and said that he would recite a Mi Shebeirach.

The entire building crowded into the auditorium at the next Coop meeting, trudging across the frozen courtyard. As we settled into our seats, the dusting of snow on our hats and shoulders melted. We steamed in the heat of so many bodies, shuddering and lowing like damp beasts in some lonely frontier barn.

The evening agenda listed but a single item: what will be done about the sheydim?

The Mazur brothers—two Bundist firebrands who lived on the third floor with their long-suffering mother—proposed forming resident patrols and arming them with baseball bats and socks full of ball bearings. Lewis Tabachnick said that we should appeal to the Comintern for help—but he said that about every little thing, and no one paid him much heed.

Our librarian, Myra Stein, declared that evicting the entities would constitute a violation of our Coop Agreement. For hadn’t we built a community that rejected the barbarism of capital in favor of solidarity? To throw them out would be a betrayal of our most basic ideals. How could we live with ourselves?

This comment drew laughter and jeers, but a few residents stood and applauded.

In the back sat Moishe Bernstein, a tarry stratum of cigarette butts forming around his feet. He was a notorious schicker, and he took nips from a flask hidden in his jacket. The debates grew more circular, more convoluted, and his groans grew louder. He slumped deeper in his chair, his tie loosening until it draped around his shoulders like rumpled tallis.

As our Yiddish instructor, Herb Zavin, droned on about Hegel and the master-slave dialectic, Moishe suddenly leapt to his feed.

“No more! No more!” he yelled. “I can’t take it.”

“Please sit down, Comrade Moishe,” said Bert Katz, our Coop Chairman. “Comrade Herb has the floor.”

“It’s too much, I say.” He swayed on the balls of his feet. Some shook their heads; some laughed.

“We’re beating around the bushes here. We all know what we must do.”

“And what’s that, comrade?”

“The Rav Patai. He is a friend to the worker. He will help us.”

Vigorous nods. A smattering of applause. Bert Katz sighed.

We knew of Rav Patai by reputation, of course. Everyone back on the Lower East Side knew him. They called him the Ba’al Shem of the Bowery.

He was an actual rabbi once, years ago and an ocean away.

We heard he was a student of the Netziv of Volozhin, a correspondent of the wise and prolific Ish Shalom, renowned across the Pale of Settlement as a scholar of Talmud and learned in the fractal secrets of the Zohar. From Odessa to Vilna, he performed small miracles across the Tsar’s consumptive empire—healing the sick and infirm, casting dybbuks from temperamental dairy cows, fixing shattered wagon wheels

There were other rumors too. People said that he was a pariah among the rabbinate—those old men who sat hunched in their yeshivas, blind to the suffering of the world while they argued about whether the Torah permitted the peeling of an onion on Shabbos.

They cast him out because they knew how easily he spoke the Tetragrammaton and its innumerable syllables, how readily he bellowed the ineffable Seventy-Two Names of God. They knew about his perambulations in desolate shtetl cemeteries, his nocturnal communions with all manner of sheyd.

Now, he worked out of the basement of a laundry on Henry Street down by the East River. We always saw him going from one job to another, dodging traffic as he scuttled across Delancey Street. He was a fixture of the streetscape, like a mailbox.

But to seek the aid of such a man…so many of us resisted the idea. Rabbis were one thing, but a witch doctor? A street peddler who eked out a living selling potions and amulets to batty old yentas? It seemed to admit defeat. It implied a weakness in our system, a catastrophic flaw for which Marx failed to account.

And yet, our Coop was built on contradictions.

The meeting adjourned with a vote to send a letter to the Rav Patai. Our so-called Ba’al Shem.

---

Our savior arrived a few nights later. He came with no emissary, no fanfare, emerging from the snow as if from a dream. Word of his arrival spread quickly through the Coop, as members of the Young Pioneers ran through the halls banging on doors.

We crowded into the lobby to get a glimpse of the dark figure standing in the doorway. He wore a stained kaftan and an enormous mangy shtreimel. Payes fringed his leathery face, the hanks of gray hair knotted like the wool of a ram, merging with his voluminous beard.

Though he still dressed and looked like a rabbi, he had held no clerical authority for years. Still, some of the older residents bowed their heads, as if the sight of such a man kindled some buried ancestral memory.

“I have come to see about your sheydim,” he said, accent thick as pale borscht.

Bert Katz bowed his head and led him through the lobby. We followed from a distance, murmuring to each other.

In the lobby, the Ba’al Shem paused every few steps to run his fingers along the lobby’s dusty molding. He rapped his knuckles on the tiles and pressed his ear against the cracked plaster, like an exterminator hunting a nest of rats.

They ascended the stairs to Victor Levitak’s apartment. We followed close behind.

“Nu,” he said. “You can see their mark.”

He pointed to a scarified symbol burned into the corner of the door as if someone had held a branding iron to it. The letter ש, pronged like a pitchfork. Or the footprint of a bird in wet cement.

We heard the faint sounds of rustling wings and trilling coos. “Do not come in,” he said, as he entered the apartment. “Under no circumstance.”

The door slammed shut behind him.

We waited in the quiet halls. We could hear each other breathing.

“Can he be trusted?” Fred Slivken hissed.

Ruby Gopnik shrugged. “You’ve heard the stories.”

Everyone seemed to know someone whose friend or cousin or grandmother or neighbor had witnessed the miracles of the Ba’al Shem.

We heard that he distributed scrolls to dockworkers during the big harbor strike a few years back. When the cops charged the picket line, their night sticks shattered like spun sugar.

We heard that he once captured an estrie that had taken up residence in a Chrystie Street brothel. He lured the parasite up to the roof and trapped her by tying up her hair with a length of silver thread.

Another time, a family of Galicians under threat of eviction called upon him. He raised a golem in their aid—a hulking automaton sculpted from the muck and rubbish dredged from the bottom of the East River. The golem proceeded to maul the offending landlord, dragging him, screaming, into the river’s watery depths.

After what seemed like hours, the Ba’al Shem emerged from the apartment. He straightened his patchy fur hat and smoothed his beard.

“The Banim Shovavim haunt this house,” he said. “As I suspected.”

We did not know these words before. He could have been referring to a strain of fungus.

“They are called ‘the Lost Children,’” he said, sensing our bewilderment. “Mischievous abominations, born of union between man and demon.”

He leaned in close and whispered, “The man who lived here has lain with the Screech Owl.”

Victor Levitak. Victor Levitak—our putz of a neighbor, a man unremarkable in every way. Except, apparently, for the fact that he had shtupped a demon.

“Do they… do they mean us harm, Rav Patai?” Lewis Tabachnick asked.

He shrugged. “Eh. Depends. Tell me about the man.”

We looked at Marty Feinberg, who worked on the line with Victor and delivered the mourner’s kaddish at our slapdash shiva. He seemed abashed.

“What is there to say, Rav Patai? Victor Levitak was a difficult man who kept to himself. He was a good fabric cutter.”

“Married?”

Marty swallowed. “Yes. Back in Kishinev. Sarah, her name was. He had a boy, too. Max. They… well, they died in the pogrom.”

The Ba’al Shem nodded. “No heirs, then. There is precedent for this, I fear. Do you know of the Posen haunting?”

We shook our heads.

“I thought not,” he sighed. “No matter. In time, we will learn their intentions.”

---

We began to see him at all hours wandering the halls, murmuring to himself in Hebrew, performing strange rites.

He erected an eruv—a ritual boundary—by tying a colossal piece of string to the streetlights that flanked our Coop and running it along the perimeter of the building. He distributed mezuzahs and had them nailed to every single door and archway in the complex, from our lobby’s grand entryway to narrow bathroom closets. He festooned the ceilings with garlands of garlic and scattered salt as he shuffled down the corridors like a serf sowing grain.

We did not understand the purpose of these rituals. When asked, the Ba’al Shem provided cryptic explanations that made little sense to us.

“The Banim Shovavim are here,” he said. “Yet, they are not. They are mere wisps of smoke—indications of a distant fire. They must be coaxed and bound. They must be reasoned with.”

He recruited a minyan from our ranks—a ten-man posse consisting of Coopniks of varying degrees of piety. He trained and drilled them in ceremonies of thaumaturgy and exorcism.

Everywhere he went, his minyan followed. Beside the courtyard fishpond, they dug a makeshift mikveh rimmed with ice. In the dining hall, they built an ark from scavenged boards, in which the Ba’al Shem placed a homemade Sefer Torah, a scrolled patchwork of animal hides collected from the ashcans of kosher butchers. The Torah was inscribed with ink boiled from onionskin, so red that it looked almost like blood.

Strange though it was to live in a house cursed by demons, it felt stranger still to live, suddenly, in a house blessed by Hashem.

His presence stirred within us a quiet spiritual fervor. We excavated frayed, moth-eaten yarmulkes and tallis from the backs of our closets. We read old Torahs streaked with mildew, the words of blessing and prayer returning like once-forgotten lullabies.

The old women of the Coop began trading the cures and talismans of their shtetl childhoods, vague recollections of recipes and decoctions passed down by their own grandmothers. In their purses, they carried embroidered sachets of herbs purchased from a Chinatown apothecary—cloves, orris, rue, acacia.

He sent them to a Sephardic healer with whom he had dealings on Orchard Street. They procured from her bottles of olive oil steeped with the wrinkled bodies of newborn mice, which they warmed over a flame and daubed in their ears. They returned with little paper packages of mumia, a precious powder made from dried and pulverized foreskins. They slept with the substance under their pillows for three nights, in honor of the three patriarchs.

The creatures continued to harass us, as if the holy man in our midst only agitated them. Sometimes, we would hear wings flapping through the halls, claws clicking and clacking over the black-and-white checkered tiles.

Sometimes, when we looked through our peepholes, we would see a pair of yellow eyes staring back at us.

---

The Coop buzzed as the date of the ceremony approached. The Ba’al Shem and his minyan fasted, consuming nothing but bread and water and pinches of salt. We felt like denizens of a city under siege—the Zealots of Masada, or the Republicans in Madrid.

The night before, we unplugged our appliances and shut off our lights for Shabbos. We watched from our windows as the minyan bathed in the frigid courtyard mikveh, blushing at the sight of our naked neighbors, our own fathers and brothers and sons. They dressed in white shrouds, clutched tight against the February night. They wrapped themselves in tefillin, the thin leather straps cutting into their flesh.

When the time came, we walked down to the basement’s communal dining hall as if in a funeral procession. Tepid sunlight seeped through the high egress windows of the basement. The Ba’al Shem sat at the head of a long table, flanked by his minyan.

In his right hand, he clutched a large human skull. It seemed impossibly old, the bone smooth and brown like the shell of a chestnut. Jagged glyphs were carved into the cranial dome—letters in Hebrew and other, older languages.

The gaping eye sockets seemed to follow us as we filed into the room. We knew then why the Rav Patai had so rankled his fellow rabbis. We knew then why he fled to America.

When the sun began to set, he recited Havdalah to conclude the Sabbath, pouring syrupy wine from a small tin kiddush cup. We sipped from mismatched glasses and tore loaves of challah and sniffed matchboxes full of heady cloves.

He lit a single braided candle. The match sputtered, but the flame held strong. The minyan lit more candles, clustering them on our tables, leaving the rest of the room in murky gloom. We could see through the basement’s windows the first evening stars—planets, surely—just barely visible in the luminescent haze of the city.

He unfurled the Sefer Torah to the Book of Tehillim. He faced the wall of darkness, his congregation of shadows. He held the skull in the palm of his left hand and a tarnished Torah pointer in his right.

He read the words of the psalm, the thick, phlegmy Hebrew thundering across the basement hall.

“You need not fear the terror by night, or the arrow that flies by day;
The plague that stalks in the darkness, or the scourge that ravages at noon;
A thousand may fall at your left side, ten thousand at your right, but it shall not
reach you;
You will see it with your eyes, you will witness the punishment of the wicked;
Because you took the Lord—my refuge, the Most High—as your haven;
No harm will befall you, no disease will touch your tent.
For He will order His angels to guard you wherever you go.”

He repeated the psalm, then repeated it twice, three times. The room shivered and contracted.

They were with us. We could sense them slinking in the dark.

He spoke the names of God and His angels and their heavenly spheres. The litany of Sefirot tumbled from his lips with the rote indifference of a child reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

We felt a slight breeze. The wall of shadows shifted.

He spoke louder. “Reveal yourself.”

A pair of thin flames wavered in the eyes of the skull.

“Reveal yourself.”

The flames grew. The letters inscribed on the bone burned, glowing red like dying embers. We could hear the Ba’al Shem’s fingers sizzle, smell his charred flesh. Myra Stein—who, as a young seamstress, had narrowly escaped the great Triangle blaze—nearly fainted.

The rabbi clutched the skull tighter.

“Reveal yourself.”

A thin claw emerged from the skull’s parted mouth. Then another and another, until a pair of small hands clasped the broken teeth, prying them wider.

“In His name, reveal yourself.”

A gust of wind blew forth from the darkness, extinguishing the candles on our tables. We heard a commotion as the rabbi spat orders at his minyan. They scurried around the room relighting candles, executing this work with the deftness of stagehands moving scenery.

The mouth of the skull yawned, black jaws unclenching. A pale head squeezed through the opening.

The rabbi held the skull in his outstretched arms. A thin neck attached to a stocky, round body heaved itself out from the open mouth. The thing tumbled out onto the floor, righting itself as it fell. It crouched on the linoleum tiles, staring up at us with a pair of enormous yellow eyes.

The creature shrieked.

It was the size of an infant with the face of a boy, yet its mouth converged into an orange beak. It squatted on the floor on crooked legs, its twisted genitalia dangling between a pair of scaly talons that scratched and gouged holes in the tiles. Its arms were flat and lightly feathered, the dead wings of a half-plucked chicken.

The creature sprang up to the table and shrieked once more.

From the skull’s open mouth, still in the grip of the Ba’al Shem, another hand reached out and another creature emerged. Then another, and another. They gushed forth like an unclogged faucet, a dense spray of puckered flesh the color of schmaltz left out on the kitchen counter—waxen, seminal. We pressed our palms to our ears as they hooted and screeched on our Shabbos tables, too many to count.

We felt something else in the room, too. An immense shadow skirted the circle of candlelight. A mass of feathers and claws and eyes—so many eyes, flashing in the dark like a pack of predators. We could feel ebony wings stretching, filling the basement, enveloping us in the smell of decay—not the stench of putrefaction but the rich, heady aroma of the forest floor, a fallen bough teeming with life.

The Ba’al Shem placed the gnarled skull on the table and stepped toward the looming shadow.

“Speak, O Screech Owl,” he said.

A rumbling growl reverberated from the shadows. The eyes flashed like shoals of herring, whirling and settling into a glittering sequence of shapes that ran together like a zoetrope. A vibrant cipher of light and color.

And in these lights, we bore witness.

In the days that followed, we could hardly talk about this moment, though we had all experienced it, like a shared dream.

---

In the night, she came to him as Sarah. His Sarah.

He sat up in bed and stared up at this woman he loved. He studied the touch of moonlight in her red hair, the splotchy birthmark on her left rib, the curve of her breast, as he alone remembered her. When he moved closer to the edge of the bed, he saw her folded wings, her sharpened talons.

He knew, in his heart, that his Sarah was dead, that the thing standing in his bedroom merely wore her skin. And yet, as their eyes met, they seemed to come to an understanding. An arrangement of mutual benefit.

She led him to her bedchamber, deep in the coiled caverns of his dreams. She pushed him onto her bed, and he gazed up at her—not with shame or brutish lust, like so many others, but with pious, venerating terror.

When she was done, she quickly upraised herself from his body and gathered up the seed that dripped down her talons. She drew blood from his veins and luminous ichor from her own. She squeezed sweat from his flesh and wrung waxy oils from her shining black plumage, like bolts of dyed fabric.

She formed this mixture into a tacky unguent, kneading and folding, kneading and folding. And from this dough, she plucked tiny globules that she rolled and shaped into a clutch of perfect, crystalline eggs.

Between her slender fingers, Victor Levitak glimpsed the Four Worlds—the great, limitless whirlwind of Qliphoth.

She tended to her babies in a nest crafted from her own feathers and bones. The eggs hardened and thrummed with life, and when he came to her in his dreams, she would press his palm to their shells. He would feel the flutter of tiny hearts, the flow of blood through delicate veins, and when he held a flame to the shells, he saw the shadows of his children, floating like languid fish.

Bones calcified. Musculature congealed. Flesh thickened. And when the evening came that they cracked their shells and lifted their pink heads to the light, he looked into their cinched, blind eyes, little blue blood blisters, and tears welled in his own.

And those nights as they lay together—their legs intertwined, their souls entangled—he told her stories.

He told her about the Socialist meetings on the outskirts of Kishinev where he first met Sarah, how he saw her standing in a circle of men, shouting about the downfall of the Tsar, her thick red hair piled high in a braid. He told her about the wedding in provincial Zguritza, how his bride fought with his uncles about politics at the reception. And he told her about his son, shy little Max, who crawled between his mother’s legs and clutched at Victor’s fingers with clumsy little hands.

He told her about the fearful rumors, the foreboding sense of doom. The marching priests who carried Bibles in one hand and torches in another. The stench of woodsmoke and vodka. Distant screams. Blood on the doorstep. Brains dashed on the cobblestones.

He told her how he wandered out of the city in a daze, since nothing remained for him in smoldering Kishinev. How he crossed the dusky Carpathians, hurling himself into overgrown hedgerows at the sight of another traveler on the road, hiding in musty barns at night.

He told her about his bleary months in Hamburg and the lurching Atlantic crossing, the entire ship reeking of vomit and coalsmoke and fresh paint.

He told her about New York. How it overwhelmed him, how he felt like he didn’t exist amid the swarms of people in the street, how he spent sleepless nights sitting on a stiff boarding house mattress, eyes red and teary, a pair of fabric shears pressed to his throat.

She listened to his stammered, fragmented stories. And when he finished, she sat up and caressed his cheek. Slowly, she began to change. Her limbs stretched, her eyes widened and fractured, her back bent into an arch, and her joints and bones cracked, until she rose to her full height. She grew taller than an oak, a skyscraper, a mountain. She sloughed off the skin of Sarah Levitak like a bathrobe and revealed her true self—her ancient, terrible beauty.

A dazzling galaxy of eyes stared down at him and a voice, both soft and monstrous, rumbled.

“Go to them,” the voice said. “Go to them in the World to Come.”

Victor nodded. Tears welled in his eyes.

The tips of her expansive wings swooped down and brushed his lips.

The bedchamber fell away and so did he, hurtling through the vast gulf of space, whether by her will or some other inscrutable force that dwelled within the creases and folds of the Four Worlds, unseen yet palpable, like the gravitational pull of an undiscovered planet.

---

The glittering lights dimmed. The entire experience was but a fleeting moment, like déjà vu.

The shadow had dissipated, gone to attend to other business in other worlds, the nature of which we could not possibly fathom. We looked around at the flock of children roosting in our basement.

The Ba’al Shem sat in the chair off to the side. In his burnt fingers, he held a small piece of challah, which he offered to the creature he had struck with his Torah pointer. It eyed him warily, then snatched it away and scampered off under the table.

In the back of the room, someone was murmuring softly. We turned in our seats.

Marty Feinberg spoke the mourner’s kaddish. The words came easily to him this time. Myra Stein joined him. Then Bert Katz and the Ba’al Shem. Then Moishe Bernstein. More and more joined in, until the entire Coop uttered the words together. Our voices swelled as one in remembrance for our neighbor, our comrade, our Victor Levitak.

“May his memory be a blessing,” Marty Feinberg said.

“May his memory be a blessing,” we responded.

“May his memory be a blessing,” trilled the Banim Shovavim, their voices high and reedy like a chorus of castrati.

We did not know Victor Levitak—we did not care to know him. But as we sat in the darkened basement, we felt as if his litany of pains might be our own. How many of us had fled—from Odessa, Warsaw, Zhitomir, Bialystok, Shedlits, and a hundred other villages and shtetls whose names time would soon forget? How many of us had buried a wife, a husband, a child? How many of us had felt the aching despair of existence in a foreign, uncaring land?

The Banim Shovavim bounced and capered and pecked at our plates. And as we watched them, we realized that Victor Levitak’s strange little sons—his lost and wayward boys—were our own. They had always been ours, since the night he left us to travel byways unknown. We could no sooner cast them out than our own flesh and blood.

Myra Stein was right. How could we live with ourselves?

---

The Ba’al Shem drew up the covenant. It was signed with pens and talons dipped in ink and sealed with globs of paraffin wax.

They mostly congregated in the library. Something about it drew them—the quiet, hidden alcoves, maybe. During the day they slept, roosting in the contemporary Yiddish fiction section, preening over the circulation desk.

They curled up like housecats in the bookshelves’ nooks and crannies, constructing delicate papier-mâché nests from strips of rag and newspaper. When we checked out books, we nudged their plump, squawking bodies out of the way.

But these annoyances were minor. We had lived with worse neighbors. Plus, they made excellent exterminators, since their diet seemed to consist primarily of rats and cockroaches. All over the basement, we would step over their regurgitated pellets, little cottony kishkes stuffed with brittle bones and carapaces.

Sometimes, late at night, if we happened to be walking back to our apartments from the basement, we would pass by the library. Sometimes, we saw the librarian, Myra Stein, sitting on a stool in the center of the room, surrounded by the sons of Victor Levitak.

They would train their wide saucer eyes on her, their bodies still as porcelain dolls. She would read aloud selections of Marx—Capital, The Eighteenth Brumaire, the Manifesto—and they would let out little chirps of contentment.

© 2025 Rowley Amato

[Issue 2025.74]

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