From that time onward, the doctor was a famous man. He was invited to the best parties—the ones given by Madame Greenkraut, by Madame Zweideneck. He gave lectures on hygiene to the Zionist Association. You could see him at the local concerts and the light musical shows. In the late twenties he changed his membership from the Synagogue of the Fur Trimmers to the celebrated Italianate Synagogue, whose rabbi, Nomberg, he treated for pains in the lower back. In 1931 the Jewish Community Council was dissolved and new elections held. Trumpelman finished sixteenth in a list of forty and took up a position as Deputy Chairman of the Department of Public Health. For a stranger, a man from Lithuania, this was an astounding achievement.

Throughout those years, Trumpelman never stopped going to the Astoria Café. Only now he sat in the front instead of the back. There would always be a glass of clear liqueur hidden in his outsized hands. Kümmel perhaps. Important people dropped by his table, people like Fiebig, the financier, or Rievesaltes, who wore a pistol inside his armpit. Once Mosk himself, the owner of a hundred thousand spindles, sat down beside him and at once started to speak.

“Doctor, you don’t know who I am, but if I told you that when I get up in the morning, when I sit up too fast, I see spots in front of my eyes, what would you say?”

Rievesaltes wanted to know if anything could be done about the fact that he had been born with one leg a little longer than the other. And why was it that Fiebig’s gums had started to bleed? More than once Trumpelman would cut short such questions. “Shhh!” he would say. “Quiet!” Then he would turn toward the stage, where the singer, Miss Lubliver, was thrusting a leg through her slitted gown and staring from under her black helmet of bangs.

Then came the biggest scandal of all. Only eighteen months after he had taken up his position with the Community Council, Deputy Chairman I. C. Trumpelman was forced to resign. Not only that, but he disappeared from our town completely. The reason the doctor fell into disgrace was his new insurance business, which he ran side by side his medical practice. He did not insure dry goods, or people’s houses against damage from fire—no, he gambled with their very lives.

“Let me see if I understand this correctly,” said H. Korngold, little Leib’s father. “You take the position that I am going to live another twenty, thirty, or even forty years, and all that time I pay you seventy-five zlotys every month. I take the position that I might die suddenly, next year, or perhaps tomorrow, in which case you have to pay whoever I say twenty thousand in cash. Yes, that much is clear. But where I get lost is—isn’t it like betting against yourself? Wouldn’t you get the evil eye?”

The doctor—this was in the surgery—put his ear to the patient’s pink chest. “You are too fat, Korngold. There is fat in the valves of your heart. I am a fool to write you a policy, even for five thousand, not to mention twenty.”