Yakov Ivanov (Bronze)

The protagonist of "Rothschild's Fiddle": a seventy-year-old coffin-maker in a decayed provincial town, nicknamed "Bronze," who supplements his trade by playing fiddle in a Jewish klezmer band. Dominated by a compulsive, ledger-driven habit of tallying every loss -- lost income, lost workdays, lost opportunities -- Yakov spends most of the story in a state of habitual, groundless hostility toward the Jewish flautist Rothschild, culminating in a curse, a near-blow, and (indirectly) the mob violence against Rothschild that follows. His wife Marfa's death forces open a different reckoning: walking home from her funeral he recognizes, for the first time in fifty-two years of marriage, that he never once showed her tenderness -- a recognition that widens, under the old willow where he and Marfa once sang together, into a full retrospective indictment of his own temper, including his casual cruelty toward Rothschild. On his own deathbed, confessing to a priest, his failing memory produces only two images -- Marfa's suffering and Rothschild's -- and his sole act of amends is to bequeath Rothschild his fiddle, the one thing of value he owns.