The Fox That Changed
by Ben Ehrenreich
When my father was four years old, his father was diagnosed with tuberculosis. At the time this was very nearly a death sentence. Treatment with antibiotics was still experimental and the going remedy was what it had been for decades: bed rest and fresh air. So in 1947, Joseph Ehrenreich left his family in Philadelphia to convalesce at the Deborah Sanitorium, deep in the Pine Barrens of central New Jersey. He would remain there until 1949, when a trial course of streptomycin—14 shots a day—cured him of the disease that had killed so many millions.
My father remembers my grandfather’s absence as a time of great anxiety and financial precarity, with his mother struggling to care for him and his little cousin David, who had moved in with them after the death of his own mother. My grandfather, though, would recall those months as among the happiest of his life. Under the protective care of the Deborah Jewish Consumptive Relief Society, with death hanging like a sword above each bed, he found with his fellow patients an easy intimacy and community unattainable among the healthy, one that defied the class and ethnic boundaries that elsewhere structured mid-century American life. There was little to do but talk. And, it turned out, to write.
In the 18-odd months that he spent in the sanitorium, my grandfather composed at least two dozen short stories and mailed them to his son and nephew in Philadelphia. If he were alive now to introduce them, I know he would dismiss them with a laugh as trifles, childish tales woven to pass the hours and to entertain the boys at home. They were surely written with a preschool-aged audience in mind, but their themes were adult ones, and many of them feel no less relevant today than they must have in the late 1940s. This one in particular. It’s called “The Fable of the Fox That Changed.”
—Ben Ehrenreich
The Fable of the Fox That Changed
by Joseph Ehrenreich
In the green, green woods there lived a fox, and a hard-working fox he was. All day long he poked his nose here, and poked his nose there, in the search for good fresh meat to put into his stomach. But there was not much meat to be found, and most of the time the fox was hungry.
“I know what I’ll do,” thought the fox. “I’ll run off to the city and become a dog.”
Keep us breathing fire!
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