Wandering Stars
AN ANTHOLOGY OF JEWISH FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION
Edited by Jack Dann
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Acknowledgment is made for permission to print the following material:
“On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi” by William Tenn. Copyright © 1974 by William Tenn.
“The Golem” by Avram Davidson. Copyright © 1955 by Fantasy House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Unto the Fourth Generation” by Isaac Asimov. Copyright © 1959 by Mercury Press. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Look, You Think You’ve Got Troubles” by Carol Carr. Copyright © 1969 by Damon Knight. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Goslin Day” by Avram Davidson. Copyright © 1970 by Damon Knight. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“The Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV” by Robert Silverberg. Copyright © 1974 by Robert Silverberg.
“Trouble With Water” by Horace L. Gold. Copyright © 1939 by Street & Smith. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Gather Blue Roses” by Pamela Sargent. Copyright © 1971 by Mercury Press, Inc. From The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, by permission of the author.
“The Jewbird” by Bernard Malamud. Reprinted with the permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., from Idiots First by Bernard Malamud, copyright © 1963 by Bernard Malamud.
“Paradise Last” by Geo. Alec Effinger. Copyright © 1974 by Geo. Alec Effinger.
“Street of Dreams, Feet of Clay” by Robert Sheckley. Copyright © 1968 by Robert Sheckley. From Galaxy Magazine, reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Sterling Lord Agency, Inc.
“Jachid and Jechidah” by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Reprinted with the permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., from Short Friday by Isaac Bashevis Singer, copyright © 1964 by Isaac Bashevis Singer.
“I’m Looking for Kadak” by Harlan Ellison. Copyright © 1974 by Harlan Ellison.
To my mother Edith N. Dann, who still makes the best chicken soup.
Contents
Introduction:
Why Me? by Isaac Asimov
WILLIAM TENN
On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi
AVRAM DAVIDSON
The Golem
ISAAC ASIMOV
Unto the Fourth Generation
CAROL CARR
Look, You Think You’ve Got Troubles
AVRAM DAVIDSON
Goslin Day
ROBERT SILVERBERG
The Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV
HORACE L. GOLD
Trouble with Water
PAMELA SARGENT
Gather Blue Roses
BERNARD MALAMUD
The Jewbird
GEO. ALEC EFFINGER
Paradise Last
BOBERT SHECKLEY
Street of Dreams, Feet of Clay
ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER
Jachid and Jechidah
HARLAN ELLISON
I’m Looking for Kadak
About the Authors
Copyright
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The editor would like to thank the following people for their help and ideas:
Rabbi David S. Boros
George Zebrowski
Gardner Dozois
Joe W. Haldeman
Harry Altshuler
and, of course, Victoria Schochet.
INTRODUCTION
Why Me?
Isaac Asimov
When I was asked to do the introduction to this collection, that was the question I asked.
“Why me?”
One answer is that I am suspected of being Jewish. At least, my mother is Jewish and my father’s mother was Jewish, and that makes both my father and myself Jewish by definition.
I don’t do anything about it, you understand. I attend no services and follow no ritual and have never even undergone that curious puberty rite, the bar mitzvah. It doesn’t matter. I am Jewish.
How can that be? Oh, well, even without the kosher stamp of religion, I bear the cultural stigmata (you should excuse the expression). I was born in a Russian shtetl, and I was brought up in Brooklyn in the very last decade in which you could still find pushcarts lining the streets and candy stores on every corner. In fact, I worked for thirteen years in my father’s candy store. What’s more I can tell jokes in a Yiddish dialect like a master, and I can speak Yiddish itself quite fluently. I like music in the minor, and turn faint when my favorite person places butter on her corned-beef sandwich. “Mustard,” I whisper. “Mustard!”
“Why me?”
Well, I write science fiction and fantasy.
There was a time, you know, when you didn’t associate Jews with science fiction and fantasy. To write great novels—yes, that was permitted Jewish boys, along with playing violins (not saxophones or guitars), playing chess (not poker or pool) and becoming a doctor or a lawyer (or, in an emergency, a dentist or an optometrist—but not a ballplayer).
The result is that a great many novels written in America deal with Jewish themes. After all, what else are all those great Jewish novelists going to write about? Methodists?
But science fiction and fantasy (in cheap magazines yet—feh) was different. In the days when I was an avid groper for those cheap magazines, the stories dealt entirely with Americans of northwest-European extraction who fought Homeric battles with space pirates, outer-world monsters, and evil wizards (to say nothing of Martian princesses in brassieres). What kind of a place was that for Jewish boys?
I do not say, mind you, that there were no Jews among the scribblers who filled the pulp magazines. There must have been, for despite her best efforts, an occasional Jewish mother lost control. Think of all the Jewish boys who went on the burlesque stage (bums!) and became millionaires (geniuses!).
Many of the Jewish pulp writers, however, used pen names as a matter of sound business sense. A story entitled “War-Gods of the Oyster-Men of Deneb” didn’t carry conviction if it was written by someone named Chaim Itzkowitz.
To give an actual case, that excellent writer Horace L. Gold, whose marvelously funny story “Trouble with Water” is included in this collection, and who is as Jewish as stuffed kishke, wrote outstanding science fiction for years under the name of Clyde Crane Campbell, you should again pardon the expression.
Jewish names which sounded German were, of course, permitted, for after all they might really be German, and Germans were northwest Europeans, who (though they were not quite as superior as they thought they were) were pretty superior, for people who didn’t speak English.
As far as I know, though, I was the first science fiction writer of note who used his own name, where that name was a mixture of a Biblical Isaac and a Slavic Asimov.
Why? Because I didn’t know any better, that’s why. To me, the name Isaac Asimov had a swing to it. For some reason (possibly superior genes) I was happy with it. I never longed for anything mo
re glamorous. Had someone offered me the name Leslie Fotheringay-Phipps and begged me with tears in his eyes to take it, I would have refused.
In fact, I adopted so proprietary an attitude toward my name that for a long time I felt annoyed at my brother for sharing my last name and at I. Bashevis Singer for sharing my first name. However, my brother is a nice guy, and I. B. S. is a good writer, as you can see from his story in this collection—so I’ll permit it for a while longer anyway.
Then, too, one of my major reasons for wanting to write was to see my name in print. My name, not some stranger’s.
Take William Tenn, who also has a story in this collection. His name isn’t William Tenn. Who, in his whole life, ever heard of a name like William Tenn? What William Tenn’s name really is, is Philip Klass. Now whenever Phil claims to be William Tenn, he is met with profound disbelief. Words like “hallucinatory megalomania” and in gantzen ah meshugener are heard.
This, at least, I was never troubled with. My pen name and my real name are identical and both are as Jewish as I am.
Only I didn’t write on Jewish themes. I didn’t think of Jews, particularly, in connection with robots, wrecked spaceships, strange worlds with six suns, and Galactic Empires. The subject didn’t come up in my mind.
And yet sometimes it popped up. My first science fiction novel, Pebble in the Sky, dealt with a stiff-necked group of Earth people facing a Galactic Empire that felt contempt for them. Some people thought they saw a resemblance to Judea and the Roman Empire of the first century there and, who knows, maybe they were right. And one of my chief characters was named Joseph Schwartz. I didn’t come right out and say he was Jewish, but I’ve never found anyone who thought he wasn’t.
Sometimes, too, it was necessary for me to have a character whom, for nefarious purposes of my own, I wanted the reader to underestimate. The easiest trick was to give him a substandard version of English, for then he would be dismissed as a comic character with at most a certain limited folk wisdom. Since the only substandard version of English I can handle faultlessly is the Yiddish dialect, some of the characters in The Foundation Trilogy speak it.
But times changed. After World War II, with the vanishing of the Nazi menace and the rise of the United Nations, racism became unrespectable. At once, all kinds of ethnic consciousnesses became popular and, to my own personal amazement, science fiction and fantasy, dealing with Jewish themes, turned out to be possible—so that a superb collection such as this one could be put together eventually.
Indeed, caught up in the new spirit, even I wrote a fantasy that was deliberately and entirely based on a Jewish theme. It was “Unto the Fourth Generation” and it is included in this collection.
That is still another answer to the question “Why me?”—because I have a story in this collection.
Anyway, what with one thing and another, even without the bar mitzvah and the ritual, I feel I’m doing my bit and I grow impatient with those who take up a Jewisher-than-thou attitude.
Which reminds me of a phone conversation I once had with a gentleman whose real name I won’t use (because I have forgotten it) but to whom I will give, at the proper time, a fictional name of equivalent aura.
It came about because the Boston Globe gave a bookfair at which I was asked to speak and at which I did speak. As it happened, the fair fell upon Rosh Hashanah, something I didn’t realize, because unless someone tells me, I never know when it comes. That is not an excuse, just a statement, because if I had known it was Rosh Hashanah, I would have delivered my speech anyway.
The next day, however, I received a phone call from a stranger, who said he was Jewish, and who demanded to know why I had consented to talk on Rosh Hashanah. I explained, politely, that I didn’t keep the holidays and that seemed to infuriate him. At once, he flung himself into a self-righteous lecture in which he descanted on my duties as a Jew, and ended by accusing me of trying to conceal my Jewishness.
Breathing a short prayer to the God of Aristotle, of Newton and of Einstein, I said, quite calmly, “You have the advantage of me, sir. You know my name. I don’t know yours. To whom am I speaking?”
And the Lord God of Science proved to be on the job, for the man on the phone answered, “My name is Jackson Davenport.”
I said, “Really? Well, my name, as you know, is Isaac Asimov, and if I were trying to conceal my Jewishness, the very first move I would make would be to change my name to Jackson Davenport.”
Somehow that ended the conversation.
But to Jackson Davenport (not his real name, remember), wherever he is, I have this further word: The reason I am writing this introduction is that, despite all my infidel ways and beliefs, I am Jewish enough.
WILLIAM TENN
On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi
What is a Jew? Is “Jewishness” a mystical experience, a system of laws, a sense of kinship, a religion, or a myth? Is there a Jewish ethic, a Jewish character, a Jewish mystique? If the Jew can be identified, can he be as easily defined—or is he, as Franz Rosenzweig claimed, an indefinable essence?
There is a story from the Talmud that suggests the character of the Jew and the “essence” of his religion. A proselyte came to the great sage Hillel and said, “Teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot.” Without losing his temper Hillel replied, “What is hateful to you, do not do to others. This is the whole Torah, the rest is commentary. Go and study it.” As Hayim Donin says, “It is, however, still essential to ‘go and study’ the rest.”
In William Tenn’s story of the future, the Jews are still studying, still suffering, making jokes, myth, religion, and still being Jewish. If that “indefinable essence” cannot be defined, it can certainly be described. Can a creature that looks like a pillow growing a short gray tentacle be a Jew? To answer that question Tenn keeps asking, What is a Jew?
Mark Twain has written, “If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of; but he is heard of, has always been heard of.... He has made a marvelous fight in this world, in all the ages; and he has done it with his hands tied behind him.”
On Tenn’s Venus the Jews are still fighting with their hands tied. In the best tradition of Twain and, of course, Sholom Aleichem, Milchik, the TV repairman who speaks for all the Jews in the universe and the entire human race, tells his story.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an original story written expressly for this volume and cause for celebration, since it is the first story that William Tenn has written in seven years. That is a long time to keep your readers waiting. The editor hopes this is the beginning of a William Tenn renaissance. Welcome home.
*
SO YOU’RE LOOKING AT ME, Mr. Big-Shot Journalist, as if you’re surprised to see a little, gray-haired, gray-bearded man. He meets you at the spaceport and he’s driving a piece of machinery that on Earth you wouldn’t even give to a dog’s grandmother, she should take it with her to the cemetery and be buried in it. This is the man—you’re saying to yourself—this nobody, this piece of nothing, who’s supposed to tell you about the biggest, strangest development in Judaism since Johannan Ben Zakkai sat down with the Sanhedrin in Jabne and said, “The meeting will please come to order.”
Are you talking to the wrong man, you want to know? Did you come across space, fifty, sixty, I don’t know, maybe seventy million miles just to see a schlemiel in a cracked helmet with a second hand oxygen canister on his back? The answer is this: you are not talking to the wrong man. Poor as he is, shabby as he is, unlucky as he is, you are talking to the one man who can tell you all you want to know about those trouble-makers from the fourth planet of the star Rigel. You are talking to Milchik, the TV repairman. Himself. In person.
All we do is put your belongings in the back of the module and then we get in the front. You have to slam the door—a little harder, please—and then, if this is still working and that
is still working, and the poor old module feels like making another trip, we’ll be off. Luxury it definitely is not, a spaceport limousine you certainly could not call it, but—module, shmodule—it gets you there.
You like dust storms? That’s a dust storm. If you don’t like dust storms, you shouldn’t come to Venus. It’s all we got in the way of scenery. The beach at Tel Aviv we don’t got. Grossinger’s, from ancient times in the Catskills, we don’t got. Dust storms we got.
But you’re saying to yourself, I didn’t come for dust storms, I didn’t come for conversation. I came to find out what happened to the Jews of the galaxy when they all gathered on Venus. Why should this schmendrik, this Milchik the TV man, have anything special to tell me about such a big event? Is he a special wise man, is he a scholar, is he a prophet among his people?
So I’ll tell you. No, I’m not a wise man, I’m not a scholar, I’m certainly not a prophet. A living I barely make, going from level to level in the Darjeeling Burrow with a tool box on my back, repairing the cheapest kind of closed-circuit sets. A scholar I’m not, but a human being I am. And that’s the first thing you ought to know. Listen, I say to Sylvia, my wife, don’t our Sages say that he who murders one man murders the entire human race? So doesn’t it follow then that he who listens to one man listens to the whole human race? And that he who listens to one Jew on Venus is listening to all the Jews on Venus, all the Jews in the universe, even, from one end to the other.
But Sylvia—go talk to a woman!—says, “Enough already with your Sages! We have three sons to marry. Who’s going to pay for their brides’ transportation to Venus? You think for nothing a nice Jewish girl will come here, from another planetary system maybe—she’ll come to this gehenna of a planet and go live in a hole in the ground, she’ll raise children, they won’t see the sun, they won’t see the stars, they’ll only see plastic walls and elevators and drunken cadmium miners coming in to spend their pay and have a goyische good time. You think just because a girl likes the stereo transcript of one of our sons and is willing to come here and marry him, we don’t have to pay her fare and maybe something a little extra she should enjoy herself on the way? Where do the Sages say the money comes from? Do they say maybe we should nail up a new collection box in the shul: ‘Help the Milchik boys find brides—their father is too busy with philosophy’?”
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