Every once in awhile, when the night is too long and I can’t sleep, I pick up this wonderfully big book of short stories a friend gave me many years ago and begin to read. The pages I turned to this time were penned by a man named Isaac Bashevis Singer, the son of a Jewish rabbi and the grandson of two more. Born around the turn of the century in Poland, Singer also studied to be a rabbi but soon discovered his real love was writing. Eventually, in 1978, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, but in 1915 he was only 11 years old and living in Warsaw’s very old Jewish quarter. There he met an indomitable woman in her 70’s who was absolutely determined never to become a burden to anyone, and it is she who is memorialized in his short story, The Washwoman, the essence of which I have an urge to pass along to you.
Singer begins his story by explaining that the Gentile washwoman who came to his house every other week to pick up his family’s laundry was small, wrinkled, and broken in body, but that his mother had never been so pleased with a washwoman. “Every piece of linen she washed sparkled like polished silver. Every piece was also neatly ironed, yet she charged no more than the others. And laundering was not easy in those days. The old woman had no faucet where she lived but had to bring in the water from a pump. For the linens to come out so clean, they had to be scrubbed thoroughly in a washtub, rinsed with washing soda, soaked, boiled in an enormous pot, starched, then ironed. And the drying! It could not be done outside because thieves would steal the laundry. The wrung-out wash had to be carried up to the attic and hung on clotheslines. In the winter it would become as brittle as glass and almost break when touched. And there was always a to-do with other housewives and washwomen who wanted the attic clotheslines for their own use. Only God knows all the old woman had to endure each time she did a wash!”
The old woman actually had a rich son, but he was ashamed of her profession and refused to help her in any way. As the years went by, she became so poor “She could have begged at the church door or entered a home for the penniless and aged. But there was in her a certain pride and love of labor with which she had been blessed. The old woman did not want to become a burden on anyone, and so she bore her burdens alone.”
Finally, there came a really harsh winter. By then the old washwoman was almost 80. Her hands trembled and her fingers were gnarled from work and arthritis. When she placed a bundle of laundry on her shoulders, it made her sway, as though she were about to fall under the load. “It was fearful to watch the old woman staggering out with the enormous pack, out into the frost, where the snow was dry as salt and the air was filled with dusty white whirlwinds, like goblins dancing in the cold.”
Then one day, the old woman did not return in two weeks as she usually did. Then a month went by, then two. But one evening, when the frost had finally subsided, the old woman knocked weakly on the Singer’s front door.
“I ran toward the old woman and helped her unload her pack. She was even thinner now, and more bent. Her face had become more gaunt, and her head shook from side to side as though she were saying no. She could not utter a single clear word but mumbled something with her sunken mouth and pale lips.”
After the old woman recovered somewhat, she apologized for her late delivery and explained that she had been very, very ill, too ill to even get out of bed. “But I could not rest easy in my bed because of the wash. The wash would not let me die.”
The Washwoman ends with these memorable words: “The wash she had returned was her last effort on this earth. She had been driven by an indomitable will to return the property to its rightful owners, to fulfill the task she had undertaken. And now at last her body, which had long been no more than a shard supported only by the force of honesty and duty, had fallen. Her soul passed into those spheres where all holy souls meet, regardless of the roles they played on this earth, in whatever tongue, or whatever creed. I cannot imagine paradise without this Gentile washwoman. I cannot even conceive of a world where there is no recompense for such effort.”