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."
No comments:
Post a Comment