A Book of Great Worth by Dave Margoshes

worry. In a week’s time your desk will be covered with letters. Real ones.”
    My father thought long and hard, taking long late-night walks on deserted streets near his rooming house, staring thoughtfully into his glass of beer at the nearby tavern. As it turned out, the first few questions and answers he wrote proved to be so sensational they immediately helped make the column a success, but one of them – the very first – also returned to cause my father some discomfort later on.
    For his first column, he wrote this letter:
    Esteemed editor,
    Please help me!
    I am a nineteen-year-old woman, in good health, well-proportioned, attractive, or so men have told me. I come from a good, religious family. My blessed parents and my precious brothers and sisters love me. But now they have threatened to disown me!
    I am in love with a Red Indian man, a member of one of the Ohio tribes. He is a good man, educated in a government school, and refined, not a wild savage. He claims that his people are one of the Lost Tribes of Israel, that he is a Jew! I have no reason to disbelieve him.
    He knows little of Judaism but he seeks to learn. I love this man and want to marry him and together make a good, devout Jewish family. But my family say he is a charlatan and that I will be dead to them should I follow my heart.
    I cannot give up this man, but I cannot bear the thought of losing my family. What should I do?
    A distraught reader.
    This was followed by a painstakingly careful reply, written with Heshberg’s admonition in mind: “Avoid extremes. Take the middle ground whenever possible. Provoke but do not enrage”:
    Dear distraught reader,
    Your dilemma is certainly a profound and unique one, though it points to a more universal problem, namely: how shall Jewry interact with the world? Shall we seek to preserve our unique identity, as the Chosen People of God? Or should we attempt to take our part within the larger Brotherhood of Man, in which all are equal?
    This is a question for the rebbinim to ponder and debate, for philosophers, not politicians, and certainly not journalists. It is an old debate, and shows no sign of abating. As to your specific problem, we can only advise you to follow your heart, and wish you well.
    As he’d been instructed, he finished the letter with the words “With love, Yenta Schmegge.”
    My father stood nervously beside Heshberg’s desk as the editor read his typewritten copy, filled with the inevitable XXXd-over typing mistakes. He raised his head, a broad smile on his usually placid face. He had a thin moustache that was several shades darker than his unruly salt and pepper hair, as if he had run the tip of a pencil back and forth against it a number of times.
    “Brilliant, Morgenstern. Or should I call you Solomon? This is the stuff.”
    On the spot, Heshberg decided to change the title of the advice column from “With Love from Yenta” to “The Wisdom of Solomon,” though the former would remain as the signature. My father went back to his typewriter with his heart soaring.
    “The Wisdom of Solomon” was indeed what the column was titled when it appeared the following Monday and in days to come, always prominently dis played on the second page, above the obituaries, al though within the offices of The World it continued to be re ferred to as “the Schmegge.”
    The letter from the woman in love with the Indian ran that Monday and others that my father had concocted in the days that followed, but the week was not even out before the first real letters began to arrive, by hand and then through the post, and, as Heshberg had predicted, by the following week a steady stream of letters was arriving and my father no longer had to concoct lives wracked with heartbreaking dilemmas. Instead, the time allotted to this task was more than taken up by reading through the letters, selecting a couple of good ones for each day and writing the replies.
    The replies, he found, were considerably easier to