The Tear

     The envelope I found was sealed and I was tempted to not open it.

     A sealed envelope, after all, contains a mystery and I like mysteries, sometimes more than explanations.  On the other hand, I thought, perhaps the oytser was in there just waiting for me to claim it.  A rich man only needs one fortune, at least according to some old saw I once heard. 

     So I carefully slit the edge and opened it up to find a single bill inside.  It was a ten-dollar bill from the 1920s.  I immediately went online to recalculate my net worth but found, sadly, that this kind of bill was quite common, not worth even a moment’s fantasy.  And it was not in very good shape, all wrinkly and with one corner torn.

     I showed it at one point to my aunt just to amuse her but, to my surprise, she seemed to recognize it as belonging to my grandfather Nachum, her father.

     “How do you know that?” I asked.

     “See the torn edge?  He did that to all his bills.  Papa always tore the edges off the bills he kept in his wallet.”

     Suddenly this silly bill, as a memento from my grandfather, took on some meaning if not value.  Perhaps as a kind of legacy from a man with no castle to hand down.

     “Why would he do that?” I asked.  “Why tear the corners off bills?”

     “Superstition,” she said.

     “It’s good luck?”

     “Kineahora,” she explained.

     I knew all about that.  It was a Yiddish word made from the German for no and for evil eye.  Saying it was supposed to ward off bad shit.  But it was also an attitude about not bragging or boasting about yourself lest an envious person or even a dybbuk cast a spell on you. 

     “How did tearing the corners off of bills ward off evil?” I asked.

     “Papa was always nervous about success.  That it would be taken away from him. Kineahora, my daughter’s not that gorgeous, my business is not so wonderful, and so on.  Your mother was like that too.”

     “Tell me about it,” I said, meaning she did not have to.  Gloating was the original sin to her and, I am afraid, to me as well.  I have never once tempted fate to put me in my place.  Though it has anyway.  “So he was defacing the currency to prove…what exactly?”

     “That it was not important to him.  That he wasn’t showing off when he paid for something.”

     “Okay,” I said kindly, being quite used to oddity at this point in my family journey.  “That’s pretty crazy.”

     “That’s what I always thought.  I used to say ‘Papa, it’s still the same bill, just with a corner torn off.  What does it matter?’”

     I nodded and put the bill back in the envelope.  Without any extra value, I figured I would seal the envelope again and keep the secret.  Not for me, obviously, but for the next schnook in line searching for treasures.

     “Until that time that it did,” my aunt added.

     “Huh?”

     “Yes, it happened on the lower East Side.  Papa was coming home from work and three crooks stopped him in the street and took his money.  It was a dangerous neighborhood then.  Papa told a cop on the beat but the policeman only laughed.  He didn’t believe that a dumb immigrant would even have a ten-dollar bill.”

     “I guess it was a lot of money then.”

     “It was.  And the three muggers did not even run off.  They were sitting on a stoop down the block, knowing the cop would not believe him.  Knowing he would never take the immigrant’s word against theirs.”

     “I see where this is going,” I said and took the bill out of the envelope again.

     “So Papa told the cop that the bill they stole from him had the corner torn off.  An old Jewish custom, he said.  The cop searched the crooks and Papa got his money back.”

     I touched the tear on the corner with new respect for superstition, at least where money was concerned.

     “We told that story about how he outsmarted the crooks at dinner that night,” my aunt said, “but Papa just raised his hand to silence us and said ‘Kineahora, I’m not so smart.  A smart man would be tearing the corners off of twenties, not tens."