Ghetto Comedies Part 13

'All right so long as we're under others!' gasped the artist. 'Do you realize what you're saying, Sir Asher? The Boers against whom you equipped volunteers fought frenziedly for three years not to be under others! And we--the thought of Jewish autonomy makes us foam at the mouth. The idea of independence makes us turn in the graves we call our fatherlands.'

Sir Asher dismissed the subject with a Podsnappian wave of the hand.

'This is all a waste of breath. Fortunately the acquisition of Palestine is impossible.'

'Then why do you pray for it--"speedily and in our days"?'

Sir Asher glared at the bold questioner.

'That seems a worse waste of breath,' added Barstein drily.

'I said you were a mocker,' said Sir Asher severely. 'It is a Divine event I pray for--not the creation of a Ghetto.'

'A Ghetto!' Barstein groaned in sheer hopelessness. 'Yes, you're an anti-Semite too--like your daughter, like your son, like all of us.

We're all anti-Semites.'

'I an anti-Semite! Ho! ho! ho!' Sir Asher's anger broke down in sheer amus.e.m.e.nt. 'I have made every allowance for your excitement,' he said, recovering his magisterial note. 'I was once in love myself. But when it comes to calling _me_ an anti-Semite, it is obvious you are not in a fit state to continue this interview. Indeed, I no longer wonder that you think yourself the Messiah.'

'Even if I do, our tradition only makes the Messiah a man; somebody some day will have to win your belief. But what I said was that G.o.d acts through man.'

'Ah yes,' said Sir Asher good-humouredly. 'Three-in-one and one-in-three.'

'And why not?' said Barstein with a flash of angry intuition. 'Aren't you a trinity yourself?'

'Me?' Sir Asher was now quite sure of the sculptor's derangement.

'Yes--the Briton, the Jew, and the anti-Semite--three-in-one and one-in-three.'

Sir Asher touched one of the electric bells with a jerk. He was quite alarmed.

Barstein turned white with rage at his dismissal. Never would he marry into these triune tribes. 'And it's the same in every land where we're emanc.i.p.ated, as it is called,' he went on furiously. 'The Jew's a patriot everywhere, and a Jew everywhere and an anti-Semite everywhere. Pa.s.sionate Hungarians, and true-born Italians, eagle-waving Americans, and loyal Frenchmen, imperial Germans, and double Dutchmen, we are dispersed to preach the Unity, and what we ill.u.s.trate is the Jewish trinity. A delicious irony! Three-in-one and one-in-three.' He laughed; to Sir Asher his laugh sounded maniacal.

The old gentleman was relieved to see his stalwart doorkeeper enter.

Barstein turned scornfully on his heel. 'Neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance,' he ended grimly.

THE SABBATH QUESTION IN SUDMINSTER

THE SABBATH QUESTION IN SUDMINSTER

I

There was a storm in Sudminster, not on the waters which washed its leading Jews their living, but in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of these same marine storekeepers. For a compet.i.tor had appeared in their hive of industry--an alien immigrant, without roots or even relatives at Sudminster. And Simeon Samuels was equipped not only with capital and enterprise--the showy plate-gla.s.s front of his shop revealed an enticing miscellany--but with blasphemy and bravado. For he did not close on Friday eve, and he opened on Sat.u.r.day morning as usual.

The rumour did not get round all Sudminster the first Friday night, but by the Sabbath morning the synagogue hummed with it. It set a clammy horror in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the congregants, distracted their prayers, gave an unreal tone to the cantor's roulades, brought a tremor of insecurity into the very foundations of their universe. For nearly three generations a congregation had been established in Sudminster--like every Jewish congregation, a camp in not friendly country--struggling at every sacrifice to keep the Holy Day despite the supplementary burden of Sunday closing, and the G.o.d of their fathers had not left unperformed His part of the contract. For 'the harvests' of profit were abundant, and if 'the latter and the former rain' of their unchanging supplication were mere dried metaphors to a people divorced from Palestine and the soil for eighteen centuries, the wine and the oil came in casks, and the corn in cakes. The poor were few and well provided for; even the mortgage on the synagogue was paid off. And now this Epicurean was come to trouble the snug security, to break the long chain of Sabbath observance which stretched from Sinai. What wonder if some of the worshippers, especially such as had pa.s.sed his blatant shop-window on their return from synagogue on Friday evening, were literally surprised that the earth had not opened beneath him as it had opened beneath Korah.

'Even the man who gathered sticks on the Sabbath was stoned to death,'

whispered the squat Solomon Barzinsky to the lanky Ephraim Mendel, marine-dealers both.

'Alas! that would not be permitted in this heathen country,' sighed Ephraim Mendel, hitching his praying-shawl more over his left shoulder. 'But at least his windows should be stoned.'

Solomon Barzinsky smiled, with a gleeful imagining of the shattering of the shameless plate-gla.s.s. 'Yes, and that wax-dummy of a sailor should be hung as an atonement for his--Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory.' The last phrase Solomon suddenly shouted in Hebrew, in antiphonal response to the cantor, and he rose three times on his toes, bowing his head piously.

'No wonder he can offer gold lace for the price of silver,' he concluded bitterly.

'He sells shoddy new reach-me-downs as p.a.w.ned old clo,' complained Lazarus Levy, who had taken over S. Cohn's business, together with his daughter Deborah, 'and he charges the Sudminster donkey-heads more than the price we ask for 'em as new.'

Talk of the devil----! At this point Simeon Samuels stalked into the synagogue, late but serene.

Had the real horned Asmodeus walked in, the agitation could not have been greater. The first appearance in synagogue of a new settler was an event in itself; but that this Sabbath-breaker should appear at all was startling to a primitive community. Escorted by the obsequious and unruffled beadle to the seat he seemed already to have engaged--that high-priced seat facing the presidential pew that had remained vacant since the death of Tevele the p.a.w.nbroker--Simeon Samuels wrapped himself reverently in his praying-shawl, and became absorbed in the service. His glossy high hat bespoke an immaculate orthodoxy, his long black beard had a Rabbinic religiousness, his devotion was a rebuke to his gossiping neighbours.

A wave of uneasiness pa.s.sed over the synagogue. Had he been the victim of a jealous libel? Even those whose own eyes had seen him behind his counter when he should have been consecrating the Sabbath-wine at his supper-table, wondered if they had been the dupe of some hallucination.

When, in accordance with hospitable etiquette, the new-comer was summoned canorously to the reading of the Law--'Shall stand Simeon, the son of Nehemiah'--and he arose and solemnly mounted the central platform, his familiarity with the due obeisances and osculations and benedictions seemed a withering reply to the libel. When he descended, and the _Parna.s.s_ proffered his presidential hand in pious congratulation upon the holy privilege, all the congregants who found themselves upon his line of return shot forth their arms with remorseful eagerness, and thus was Simeon Samuels switched on to the brotherhood of Sudminsterian Israel. Yet as his now trusting co-religionists pa.s.sed his shop on their homeward walk--and many a pair of legs went considerably out of its way to do so--their eyes became again saucers of horror and amaze. The broad plate-gla.s.s glittered nakedly, unveiled by a single shutter; the waxen dummy of the sailor hitched devil-may-care breeches; the gold lace, ticketed with layers of erased figures, boasted brazenly of its cheapness; the procession of customers came and went, and the pavement, splashed with sunshine, remained imperturbably, perturbingly acquiescent.

II

On the Sunday night Solomon Barzinsky and Ephraim Mendel in pious black velvet caps, and their stout spouses in gold chains and diamond earrings, found themselves playing solo whist in the _Parna.s.s's_ parlour, and their religious grievance weighed upon the game. The _Parna.s.s_, though at heart as outraged as they by the new departure, felt it always inc.u.mbent upon him to display his presidential impartiality and his dry humour. His authority, mainly based on his being the only retired shopkeeper in the community, was greatly strengthened by his slow manner of taking snuff at a crisis. 'My dear Mendel,' observed the wizened senior, flicking away the spilth with a blue handkerchief, 'Simeon Samuels has already paid his annual subscription--and you haven't!'

'My money is good,' Mendel replied, reddening.

'No wonder he can pay so quickly!' said Solomon Barzinsky, shuffling the cards savagely.

'How he makes his money is not the question,' said the _Parna.s.s_ weightily. 'He has paid it, and therefore if I were to expel him, as you suggest, he might go to Law.'

'Law!' retorted Solomon. 'Can't we prove he has broken the Law of Moses?'

'And suppose?' said the _Parna.s.s_, picking up his cards placidly. 'Do we want to wash our dirty _Talysim_ (praying-shawls) in public?'

'He is right, Solomon,' said Mrs. Barzinsky. 'We should become a laughing-stock among the heathen.'

'I don't believe he'd drag us to the Christian courts,' the little man persisted. 'I pa.s.s.'

The rubber continued cheerlessly. 'A man who keeps his shop open on Sabbath is capable of anything,' said the lanky Mendel, gloomily sweeping in his winnings.

The _Parna.s.s_ took snuff judicially. 'Besides, he may have a Christian partner who keeps all the Sat.u.r.day profits,' he suggested.

'That would be just as forbidden,' said Barzinsky, as he dealt the cards.

'But your cousin David,' his wife reminded him, 'sells his groceries to a Christian at Pa.s.sover.'

'That is permitted. It would not be reasonable to destroy hundreds of pounds of leaven. But Sabbath partnerships are not permitted.'

'Perhaps the question has never been raised,' said the _Parna.s.s_.