“But we agreed to the higher figure!”

“Look at that! I slap your skin and immediately there is the impression of my hand. No, no, with circulation like that you are too great a risk. I could not afford it.”

“Wait!” cried Korngold, the furniture factory owner. “You have to! I want to win!”

This life insurance became a craze in our town, like Mah-Jongg or buttoned shoes. Everybody had to have a certificate, even childless, even unmarried people. The most popular policy was for Zl. 25,000, which in those days was an immense sum of money. Rabbi Nomberg, however, by paying a premium of two hundred a month, had guaranteed for himself a lump payment of fifty thousand zlotys. Once Fiebig and Greenkraut and the mill-owning Jews heard about that, the race was on. Mosk was the first to go over one hundred thousand, but his record did not last long. It was as if people were climbing on top of each other. Someone who only yesterday was looked up to because of his enormous policy, with double indemnity, the next day wasn’t worth notice—since Blum, the importer, had secured a clause that paid a quarter of a million should he be struck by lightning or drowned in a flood.

No one could stand up to Trumpelman. What a salesman! He knew how to stalk you, to jump on you the way a lion jumps on a deer.

“What are you, Zweideneck, some kind of microbe? An insect? Or are you in fact a wealthy man who sells pneumatic tires? A maggot thinks about itself, but a man worries about his wife, his children, his dear little babes. Look what is happening! I am upsetting myself over you! What if I lose my self-control? When I think of your children—little Giza, with her violin, and young Mordechai—I become crazy. When you drop dead they will be orphans! Penniless orphans! A vision! I see them! Rags on their backs, sores on their feet. Something to eat, they are saying. Something to eat! It makes me tremble! How easily that hardship could be avoided. One hundred a month! One hundred and fifty! What about Madame Zweideneck? Has she not broken into a rash? That is a nervous reaction from worrying night and day about her little chicks, her darlings. In my opinion, it’s almost murder. Not to save a life when you have a chance! It’s filthy, swinish behavior!” And here the doctor did begin to tremble in fact. At the corners of his mouth, spittle appeared. Zweideneck, a man, after all, not an insect, took a policy for Zl. 200,000.

There were, however, a handful of people, Orthodox rabbis, Socialists, who refused to buy insurance at all. It cannot be proved, but many people believed that these holdouts were called on by Rievesaltes or by Rievesaltes’ friends. Certainly many fires broke out and some things—a piano in one house, a broodmare in back of another—were burned. Also, at least one explosion occurred—in the office of Lipsky, the progressive lawyer. The long and short of it is that by the beginning of the new decade, the thirties, everyone who was anyone in our town was fully insured. That’s why we felt so good about the future.