Please forgive me for writing all this. There’s such thunder and lightning in the window right now and the electric power, I’ve already told you—or have I?—has failed. By the way, writing by this lamp is very hard for me. The cigarettes I smoke choke the last breath out of me, but without them I nearly go mad. I do believe, though, that I’ll drink a little glass of brandy—just a wee drop. To the Devil’s health right now! Cheers!

My dear Eshkol, do you, too, tonight in Jerusalem, hear from the depths, from the belly of the storm, the wail of a freight train in the dark? Do you? Or don’t you? Because if you do you’ll understand better the frame of mind in which this pitiful letter is being penned. Just now, my good friend, I thought of some lines of the poet Rachel that you used to recite with great feeling and pathos: “Or was it no more than a vision I saw and you but a dream that I dreamed.”

Na. It’s an old, old story: the dreams, the fire in the breast, the selfless devotion—and the cunning, old age, and disillusionment too. An old story indeed. And now our time has come to die, unless, pace Gogol, we are already dead souls. Please forgive me for venting all this spleen on you. What, if I may ask, are your daughters up to these days? Ah, well! You needn’t answer, and you can forget that I asked. With sons like mine, in any case, one certainly can’t found a dynasty. Far from it. One has the green bile and the other the black. And a bug in his head—self-fulfillment, self-fulshmillment, doing his own thing, having his own fling, getting his whatsis together, all the possibilities he’s missing in the big world out there, and the Devil knows what else. (Incidentally, I assume you do too.) And that long hair of theirs! One might think every last one of them was an artist. A whole generation of artistes!. Half-asleep all the time too, the whole lot of them. And—there’s really no contradiction—mad about sports. Who kicked whose ball, who tripped whom, and all the rest of it. A groysser gesheft.