The Unworthy Friend by Jorge Luis Borges — Read

The Unworthy FriendOur image of the city is always slightly out of date. Cafés have degenerated into barrooms; old arched entranceways with their grilled inner gates, once giving us a glimpse of patios and of overhanging grapevines, are now dingy corridors that lead abruptly to an elevator. For years, in this way, I thought that in a certain block of Talcahuano Street I might still find the Buenos Aires Bookstore. But one morning I discovered its place had been taken by an antique shop, and I was told that don Santiago Fischbein, its owner, had died. Fischbein had been a heavyset, rather overweight man, whose features I now remember less than our long talks. In a quiet but firm way he had always been against Zionism, which he held would turn the Jew into a man like anyone else-tied down to a single tradition and a single homeland, and no longer enriched by strife and complexities. He'd been at work, he once told me, putting together a comprehensive anthology of the writings of Baruch Spinoza, freed of all that Euclidean apparatus, which, while lending to its strange system an illusory rigor, bogs the reader down. He would not sell me, but let me look at, a rare copy of Rosenroth's Kabbala Denudata. At home I still have a few books on the Kabbalah by Ginsburg and by Waite which bear the seal of Fischbein's shop.

One afternoon, when the two of us were alone, he confided a story to me about his early life, and I feel I can now set it down. As may be expected, I will alter one or two details. Here is what Fischbein said.