The loan by Barnard Malabud

Lieb the baker is an innocent, honest, and easy-to-believe old man. His old friend, Kobotsky is a cunning, bad man.

One day Kobosky visits Lieb to ask him for 200 dollars. Although Lieb has a bitter memory with him because Kobosky has not returned 100 dollars, he forgives Kobosky and tries to lend him the money.

   While Lieb was talking with his wife about the loan, Kobosky “wet his half his handkerchief and held it to his dry eyes.” He even pares his fingernails. He tells he wants the money to build a tombstone for his wife. At which Lieb is moved and wants to lend him money.

  But LIeb’s wife, Bessie, refuses the loan telling Kobosky how miserable a life they have been leading.

  Giving up the scheme, Koboskey leaves Lieb, after Lieb and Kobosky press their mouths.”

  The story reveals as you read it that the three have gone through bitter poverty. As the conjugation “Haben, hatte, gehabt” suggests, both Lieb and Kobosky immigrate from Russia to Germany and then come to live in the United States. They must have spent a happy childhood. Bessie, a jew from Warsaw, went to Germany and then to the United States to marry Lieb. Her brother and his family end their lives in Hitler’s incinerators.

The story makes the reader sympathize with the miserable lives they had to go through. Even Kobosky’s made-up story can’t compete with the true miserable story Bessie tells.

The writer himself is a jew. So he might have condemned Hitler’s atrocity through “The loan.”