“Attention!” the doctor would say to the boys, and when they stood against the wall like soldiers, he would thrust a thermometer like a baton under their arms. The girls he rode on his knee, at a real jogging pace, until their pinched faces grew healthy and flushed. “Stop! Chaim!” they would call, using his middle name. In spite of his famous temper, he never struck, never screamed at, these patients. Once he stepped from the surgery into the waiting room and discovered a pale, pudgy boy with his arm in the fishbowl and the two little fish alive on the floor. “Ho! Ho! What big trout you have caught! Yes, my Franz! You’re a brave hunter!” Then Trumpelman scooped up the minnows. As for the trembling Volksdeutscher, all the doctor did was pinch him a bit on the ear.

Trumpelman did not just treat these children; he tended their mothers as well. Best to say here that all through the twenties and thirties his name was connected to one type of scandal or another. Much of that reputation—for being a roué, a ladies’ man—began at Lepecky 6. People believed that with his blue eyes he knew how to hypnotize his female patients and make them do what he wished. It became a kind of fashion to develop a rash or a fever and then let it be known that the doctor from Vilna was attempting to bring on a cure. Rumors began to circulate about his past. You heard that he had already had three different wives, two of whom died in childbirth and one of whom was hit by a train. Or that, as a result of some liaison, he had killed a Lithuanian officer in a duel. Such stories explained why—crushed by tragedy, or a fugitive from justice—he had suddenly appeared among us. But whether they were true or not, or even whether his reputation was a deserved one, nobody could say for sure. Leib Korngold, who later grew up in our town, used to tell everyone how he once pushed open the door to Trumpelman’s office and discovered Malka Korngold, his own mother, without any clothes. She was walking up and down, he said, on the back of the physician. The odd thing was, it seemed as if it were Trumpelman who had been hypnotized. He looked, with a dazed expression, right through the boy.

These are not pleasant stories. And there are worse things, terrible things, to come. Ladies and gentlemen, whatever you hear in the future, at least remember the true, genuine feeling of this man for all the little Leibs and Meilechs and Franzes, who were the first ones to call him Chaim. All too soon the whole town, or at least the Jews in it, tens of thousands of people, would call to him, would cry out to him, by that very name. We all became his children.

But first the years had to pass. In 1923 Trumpelman bought a new suit. This was camel-colored, and always had a neat white handkerchief in the breast pocket. The next year he got an overcoat to match. In 1926 the doctor hired a nurse, a Polish girl, Miss Wysocka. She had dark hair and a dimpled chin. All this meant that Trumpelman was prosperous, that he was respected. But it was only after the Walburska Pogrom in the spring of 1927 that he became a really well-known figure.