See Under by David Grossman (famous ebook reader TXT) 📕

Canal, and what about those stupid postcards somebody stuck Momik’s name on, and he had to send off more and more postcards with names of people he didn’t even know, you erase the top name on the list and add the name of another boy at the bottom, or God forbid something terrible will happen to him, like the banker from Venezuela who didn’t take it seriously and lost all his money and his wife died, poor man, and don’t even ask how much those postcards cost him, though luckily Mama didn’t skimp on this and gave him whatever he needed to mail them all, so anyway besides all the regular things there was that kid Laizer from seventh grade, who’d been snatching Momik’s sandwich every day now for three months. At first it really scared him, because how could a boy only three years older than him be such a crook and a shvartzer and desperate enough maybe to commit a terrible crime like extortion which you can go to jail for. But Momik realized that since this was how things stood, he’d better not think about it too much because he had to save his energy for more important things, and since Laizer was stronger than him anyhow, what good would it do to think about it all the time and feel insulted and want to die and start crying, right? And since Momik is a scientific boy who is very good at making decisions, he walked right up to Laizcr and explained to him in a logical way that if the other children saw him give his sandwich away, they’d tell the teacher on him, and therefore he had a more spylike method to propose. The extortionist criminal who lived in a hut and had a big scar on his forehead was about to get angry and say something, but then he thought over what Momik told him and just kept quiet. Momik took a piece of paper from his right pocket with a list of the six safestplaces in school where you could hide a sandwich which someone else could pick up later without getting into trouble. Momik detected as he read the list out that Laizer was beginning to regret the whole thing, but he was just beginning to develop a little confidence now. From his left pocket he took out a second list he’d made for Laizer. This was a list of all the days of our first trial month (he told Laizer), noting where the sandwich would be on each particular day. Laizer was clearly sorry about the whole thing now. He started to say, Cut the crap, Helen Keller, I was only fooling, who needs your stinkin’ sandwich anyway, but Momik wouldn’t hear of it, he felt stronger than the criminal now, and though he could have just said okay then, no more extortion, he didn’t want to stop, and he practically shoved the papers at Laizer, telling him, We start tomorrow, and the next day he put the sandwich in the appointed place and sat waiting in ambush according to plan, and watched as Laizer walked up, glanced at the paper, looked both ways, and picked up the goods, though he didn’t look very happy about it to Momik; in fact, when he peered into the little bag Momik had packed so nicely, he looked thoroughly revolted but there was no choice, like it or lump it, he had to do what Momik said so as not to spoil this devious plan which was more than he and maybe Momik too could handle. And to top it off, Momik had the Beast to fight in various ways he thought up from day to day, because it was clearer than ever now that he must not fail, this was really serious, too many people and things were involved and everything depended on him, and if the Beast wouldn’t take off its disguise, it was just being trickier than him, that’s all, it had more combat experience than he had, but if it ever did decide to show itself, it would show itself to Momik and no one else, because who else but Momik would challenge it like this, with so much daring, chutzpah, and the devotion of soldiers who charge ahead and fling themselves on the barbed-wire fence so the others can climb over them. And by the end of winter, when the wind was having one last fling at wrecking Beit Mazmil, Momik reversed his tactics, figuring that what he needed in order to fight the Beast was the very thing that most scared it, the thing he’d been avoiding all along, which was to get to know more about the Beast and its crimes, because otherwise he’d just be wasting energy no matter what he did, because the fact of the matter is, he didn’t have a clue about how to fight it. And that’s the truth. Which is how he got involved with the Holocaust and all that. In totalsecrecy, Momik joined the public library (his parents wouldn’t allow him to be a member of two libraries) and he would take the Number 18 bus to town some afternoons and read everything the library had on it. The library had a big shelf with a sign saying LIBRARY OF THE HOLOCAUST AND VALOR, and Momik started going through it book by book. He read incredibly fast because he was afraid that time was running out, and though he didn’t understand most of it, he knew that someday he would. He read Mysteries of Fate and The Diary of Anne Frank; Let Me Stay the Night, Feifel; The Doll House; The Cigarette Vendors of Three-Cross Square; and many other books. The children he met in the library were kind of like him, like he’d always felt deep inside all these years. They spoke Yiddish at home with their parents and didn’t have to hide it, and they were also fighting