“India yourself!” chorded the old man. “But what’s India got to do with it? The demon that’s got into you and your friends, Fimuchka, isn’t from India; it’s all too European. It’s a crying shame that precious young people like you have suddenly decided to sell the entire Jewish heritage for a mess of pottage of sham European pacifism. You want to be Jesus of Nazareth. You want to teach the Christians a lesson in turning the other cheek. You love our enemies and you hate Uri Tsvi and even his grandfather the Holy Seraph. But we’ve had it up to here with the famous European humanism. Our backs still carry the scars of your dear Western civilization. We’ve been on the receiving end of it, all the way from Kishinev to Auschwitz. Let me tell you a poignant tale about a cantor who was once marooned—it shouldn’t happen to us!—on a desert island, and at the High Holy Days of all times. There stands a solitary Jew in the midst of the world in the midst of the times and wonders . . .”

“Hold on a minute,” Fima erupted, “you with your wondering cantors. Chmielnicki and Hitler equal Western civilization the way India equals an Arab state. What a ridiculous idea! If it weren’t for Western civilization, for your information, my dear sir, there would not be left of us one that pisseth against the wall. Who do you think sacrificed tens of millions of lives to defeat Hitler? Wasn’t it Western civilization? Including Russia? Including America? Who was it who saved us, your holy rabbi from Strelisk? Was it the Messiah who gave us a state? Is it Uri Tsvi who makes us a present of tanks and jet planes and pours three billion dollars on us every year, as pocket money, so that we can carry on behaving like hooligans? Make a note of this, Dad: Every time in history that the Jews have gone out of their minds and started navigating their way through this world with messianic charts instead of real, universal ones, millions of them have paid with their lives. Apparently we still haven’t managed to get it into the famous Jewish head that the Messiah is really our exterminating angel. That’s it in a nutshell, Baruch: the Messiah is our angel of death. So it’s perfectly okay to disagree about where we want to go; that is a legitimate subject for argument. But on one unshakable condition: Wherever we decide to go, we must use real, universal charts, not Messianic ones.”