After Adam and Eve were driven out of Paradise Eve became suddenly the prey of a deep and incurable melancholy. Adam adapted himself fairly soon to the new life, which he found more interesting than the idleness of Eden, but Eve had lost her pretty smiles, all her vivacious gayety, and from day to day she sank deeper into the gloom of her sadness and despair.
In the beginning Adam tried to console her, told her how lovely she looked in her new leaf-frock and how pleased he was with her cooking, but all his tender words were of no avail. Eve was unhappy and remained unhappy, so he finally accepted her despondency as an inevitable feminine mood and thought no more about it.
But Eve’s Guardian Angel was less willing to let the matter rest, and one night, while Adam was sleeping peacefully after the day’s labors, he appeared before Eve and begged her to confide to him the reason of her persistent unhappiness.
“Do you mourn because you have lost Eden?” he asked.
“No,” said Eve. “The Garden was nice enough, but I knew every corner in it and every pathway, and it had utterly lost ‘the unspent beauty of surprise.’ A paradise which one knows too well is hardly paradise any longer. No, it is not for Eden I mourn.”
“Then, perhaps, Adam is not kind to your?” inquired the Angel “or you do not like the hut ### which you live?”
But Eve denied this too. “Poor Adam tries to please me,” she said, “even if he does get sometimes on my nerves, and the hut is probably not worse than any other hut would be. It is foolish to move constantly about, one hardly betters himself. No, my sorrow is of a deeper and more hopeless kind than all these superficialities.”
But if it is neither the lost Eden, not Adam’s behavior, nor your present abode that make you so unhappy, what is it then? Can’t you tell me?”
“It is the apple,” confessed Eve.
“The apple? I do not understand you.”
“Well, you ought to. You know the whole, story. The apple was forbidden fruit and I coveted it. It looked so tempting and alluring -the desire grew stronger and stronger-at last I could not resist any longer and I tasted it-“
“Well, and now you repent?”
“No, but now I know what a fool I’ve been. I sinned and I lost Paradise. I took the burden of life upon my shoulders and I have to bear the curse of death. I have given away innocence, peace, pride and salvation, all to taste the forbidden apple. I have paid the full price and I paid it willingly, but the apple-“
“Yes, yes,” impatiently said the Angel who felt that now he stood before the real tragedy of Eve, the true tragedy of every fair and frail and foolish Eve who listens to the counsel of the serpent, “the apple-“
“The apple,” sobbed Eve, her eyes blurred with the tears of her final disillusionment, “the apple did not taste good.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
