“But that’s the soup,” said Kleiderman, horror-stricken.

With a superhuman effort the Elder gripped the kettle, which was nearly as big as he was, and alone tipped its orangish contents onto the workroom floor. It took a few moments to pour out. The Jews stood there dazed, with hot, steaming shoes. Then Pipe, the finisher, fainted. Sheftelowitz stepped forward.

“Listen, Chaim. This is Pipe. He took part in the Russian Revolution of 1905. They want him to pay for a new needle. Of course now we won’t have anything to eat.”

Trumpelman slapped him on his face. In many speeches he said, Slackers and clock watchers will feel the weight of my hand.

“This way, Comrades! Toward a new day!” Little Kipnis, walking backward, beckoned the Mosk mill workers to follow.

Sheftelowitz started forward, then stopped. “But what about Pipe?”

“Mister Pipe is on strike,” said Edmund Trilling, a known Bundist, and he hoisted the unconscious man on his back.

“So am I!”

“I’m on strike, too!”

“Everyone out!” shouted Kleiderman, reversing the points of the toothpick in his mouth. “No chair tax!”

Five finishers, then ten, then the entire guild marched behind Kipnis, out the Mosk Mills door. A minute later the first buttonhole maker, Mister Marbled, walked out as well. One by one, then in groups, his fellows came after. Before the soup had dried, the last worker was gone. Trumpelman turned to Supervisor Luftgas. He said, “Lock all the doors.”

From our town there are not many Jews still living. Maybe two hundred in all. Some of them say that the catastrophe of the Baluty Suburb began then, on the day that Luftgas burst a button. Others trace our misfortune further back, to the disruption of Trumpelman’s wedding, or to the day when Trumpelman himself, with his two suitcases, stepped off the train at the Donati Station. Yet, once again, it is possible that everything would have happened just as it did, even if there hadn’t been a terrible strike, and even if the Elder had never arrived. Ladies and gentlemen, you decide.

At first it seemed that the strike of the finishers and buttonhole makers would end as soon as it began. The Judenrat did not stand back and watch. At midnight the Elite Guard, with a detachment of chimney sweepers, broke into the rooms of the left-wing Bundists and searched everywhere. They were looking for—but they couldn’t find—Lipsky. They arrested Edmund Trilling instead. Before dawn Trumpelman put out a new wall poster decree: every political party was banned. No more than five people could gather on the street, no more than ten unrelated Jews to be allowed in a single room. It was a brilliant stroke. Not only was the organized opposition suddenly shattered, but—more important—the soup kitchens these parties ran had to be closed. That meant you had to report to work in order to eat. That same morning, however, when the hungry pants workers and tailors—in other words the nonstrikers—arrived at the Mosk Works, they found that the gates were closed. Lockout.