Ghetto Comedies Part 63

'What is there to discuss?' The Sejmist looked pityingly at David.

'The great question of the Duma elections, for one thing. To boycott or not to boycott. And if not, which candidates shall we support? Then there is the question of Jewish autonomy in the Russian Parliament--that is our great principle. Moreover, as a comparatively new Party, we have yet to thresh out our relations to all the existing Parties. With which shall we form _blocs_ in the elections? While most are dangerous to the best interests of the Jewish people and opposed to the evolution of historic necessity, with some we may be able to co-operate here and there, where our work intersects.'

'What work?' David insisted again.

'Doesn't our name tell you? We are the _Vozrozhdenie_--the Resurrectionists--our work is an unconditional historic necessity springing from the evolution of----!'

The door of the inn arrested the Sejmist's harangue. As he pushed it open, a babel of other voices made continuance impossible. The noise came entirely from a party of four, huddled in a cloud of cigarette-smoke near the stove. In one of the four David recognised the tea-merchant of the morning, but the tea-merchant seemed to have no recollection of David. He was still expatiating upon the Individuality of Israel, which, it appeared, was an essence independent of place and time. He nodded, however, to the young Sejmist, observing ironically:

'Behold, the dreamer cometh!'

'I a dreamer, forsooth!' The young man was vexed to be derided before his new acquaintance. 'It is you _Achad-Haamists_ who must wake up.'

The tea-merchant smiled with a superior air. 'The Vozrozhdenie would do well to study Achad-Haam's philosophy. Then they would understand that their strivings are bound to lead to self-constriction, not self-expression. You were saying that, too, weren't you, Witsky?'

Witsky, who was a young lawyer, demurred. 'What I said was,' he explained to the Sejmist, 'that in your search for territorial-proletariat practice you Sejmists have altogether lost the theory. Conversely the S.S.'s have sacrificed territorial practice to their territorial theory. In our party alone do you find the synthesis of the practical and the ideal. It alone----'

'May I ask whom you speak for?' intervened David.

'The newest Jewish Social Democratic Artisan Party of Russia!' replied Witsky proudly.

'Are you the newest?' inquired David drily.

'And the best. If we desire Palestine as the scene of our social regeneration, it is because the unconditional historic necessity----'

The Sejmist interrupted sadly: 'I see that our Conference will have to decide against relations with you.'

'Pooh! The S.D.A.'s will only be the stronger for isolation. Have we not of ourselves severed our relations with the D.K.'s? In the evolution of the forces of the people----'

'It is not right, Witsky, that you should mislead a stranger,' put in his sallow, spectacled neighbour. 'Or perhaps you misconceive the genetic moments of your own programme. What evolution is clearly leading to is a Jewish autonomous party in Parliament.'

'But we also say----' began the other two.

The sallow, spectacled man waved them down wearily. 'Who but the P.N.D.'s are the synthesis of the historic necessities? We subsume the Conservative elements of the Spojnia Narodowa National League and of the Party of Real Politics with the Reform elements of the Democratic League and the Progressive Democrats. Consequently----'

'But the true Polish Party----' began Witsky.

'The _Kolo Polskie_ (Polish Ring) is half anti-Semitic,' began the Sejmist. The three were talking at once. Through the chaos a thin piping voice penetrated clearly. It came from the fourth member of the group--a clean-shaven ugly man, who had hitherto remained silently smoking.

'As a philosophic critic who sympathizes with all Parties,' he said, 'allow me to tell you, friend Witsky, that your programme needs unification: it starts as economic, and then becomes dualistic--first inductive, then deductive.'

'_Moj Panie drogi_ (my dear sir),' intervened David, 'if you sympathize with all Parties, you will join a corps for the defence of them all.'

'You forget the philosophic critic equally disagrees with all Parties.'

David lost his temper at last. 'Gentlemen,' he shouted ironically, 'one may sit and make smoke-rings till the Messiah comes, but I a.s.sure you there is only one unconditional historic necessity, and that is _Samooborona_.'

And without drinking his tea--which, indeed, the Resurrectionist had forgotten to order--he dashed into the street.

X

He was but a youth, driven into action by h.e.l.lish injustice. He had hitherto taken scant notice of all these Parties that had sprung up for the confusion of his people--these hybrid, kaleidoscopic combinations of Russian and Jewish politics--but as he fled from the philosophers through the now darkening streets, his every nerve quivering, it seemed to him as if the alphabet had only to be thrown about like dice to give always the name of some Party or other. He had a nightmare vision of bristling sects and pullulating factions, each with its Councils, Federations, Funds, Conferences, Party-Days, Agenda, Referats, Press-Organs, each differentiating itself with meticulous subtlety from all the other Parties, each defining with casuistic minuteness its relation to every contemporary problem, each equipped with inexhaustible polyglot orators speechifying through tumultuous nights.

Well, it could not be helped. In the terrible nebulous welter in which his people found themselves, it was not unnatural that each man should grope towards his separate ray of light. The Russian, too, was equally bewildered, and perhaps all this profusion of theories came in both from the same lack of tangibilities. Both peoples possessed nothing.

Perhaps, indeed, the ultimate salvation of the Jews lay in identifying themselves with Russia. But then, who could tell that the patriots who welcomed them to-day as co-workers would not reject them when the cause was won? Perhaps there was no hope outside preserving their own fullest ident.i.ty. Poor bewildered Russian Jew, caught in the bewilderments both of the Russian and the Jew, and tangled up inextricably in the double confusion of interlacing coils!

The Parties, then, were perhaps inevitable; he must make his account with them. How if he formed a secret _Samooborona_ Committee, composed equally of representatives of all Parties? But, then, how could he be sure of knowing them all? He might offend one by omitting or miscalling it; they formed and re-formed like clouds on the blue. A new Party, too, might spring up overnight. He might give deadly affront by ignoring this Jonah's gourd. Even as he thus mused, there came to him the voices of two young men, the one advocating a P.P.L.--a new Party of Popular Liberty--the other insisting that the new _Volksgruppe_ of all anti-Zionist Parties was an unconditional historic necessity. He groaned.

It seemed to him as he stumbled blindly through the ill-paved alleys that a plague of doctors of philosophy had broken out over the Pale, doctrinaires spinning pure logic from their vitals, and fighting bitterly against the slightest deviation from the pattern of their webs. But the call upon Israel was for Action. Was it, he wondered with a flash of sympathy, that Israel was too great for Action; too sophisticated a people for so primitive and savage a function; too set in the moulds of an ancient scholastic civilization, so that, even when Action was attempted, it was turned and frozen into Philosophy?

Or was it rather that eighteen centuries of poring over the Talmud had unfitted them for Action, not merely because the habit of applying the whole brain-force to religious minutiae led to a similar intellectualization of contemporary problems--of the vast new material suddenly opened up to their sharpened brains--but also because many of these religious problems related only to the time when Israel and his Temple flourished in Palestine? The academic leisure and scrupulous discrimination that might be harmlessly devoted to the dead past had been imported into the burning present--into things that mattered for life or death.

Yes, the new generation chopped the logic of Zionism or Socialism, as the old argued over the ritual of burnt-offerings whose smoke had not risen since the year 70 of the Christian era, or over the decisions of Babylonian _Geonim_, no stone of whose city remained standing. The men of to-day had merely subst.i.tuted for the world of the past the world of the future, and so there had arisen logically-perfect structures of Zionism without Zion, Jewish Socialism without a Jewish social order, Labour Parties without votes or Parliaments. The habit of actualities had been lost; what need of them when concepts provided as much intellectual stimulus? Would Israel never return to reality, never find solid ground under foot, never look eye to eye upon life?

But as the last patch of sunset faded out of the strip of wintry sky, David suddenly felt infinitely weary of reality; a great yearning came over him for that very unreality, that very 'dead past' in which pious Jewry still lived its happiest hours. Oh, to forget the Parties, the jangle of politics and philosophies, the _tohu-bohu_ of his unhappy day! He must bathe his soul in an hour's peace; he would go back like a child to the familiar study-house of his youth, to the _Beth Hamedrash_ where the greybeards pored over the great worm-eaten folios, and the youths rocked in their expository incantations. There lay the magic world of fantasy and legend that had been his people's true home, that had kept them sane and cheerful through eighteen centuries of tragedy--a watertight world into which no drop of outer reality could ever trickle. There lay Zion and the Jordan, the Temple and the Angels; there the Patriarchs yet hovered protectively over their people. Perhaps the Milovka study-house boasted even Cabbalists starving themselves into celestial visions and graduating for the Divine kiss. How infinitely restful after the Milovka market-place! No more, for that day at least, would he prate of Self-Defence and the horrible Modern.

He asked the way to the _Beth Hamedrash_. How fraternally the sages and the youths would greet him! They would inquire in the immemorial formula, 'What town comest thou from?' And when he told them, they would ask concerning its Rabbi and what news there was. And 'news,'

David remembered with a tearful smile, meant 'new interpretations of texts.' Yes, this was all the 'news' that ever ruffled that peaceful world. Man lived only for the Holy Law; the world had been created merely that the Law might be studied; new lights upon its words and letters were the only things that could matter to a sensible soul.

Time and again he had raged against the artificiality of this quietist cosmos, accusing it of his people's paralysis, but to-night every fibre of him yearned for this respite from the harsh reality. He rummaged his memory for 'news'--for theological ingeniosities, textual wire-drawings that might have escaped the lore of Milovka; and as one who draws nigh to a great haven, he opened the door of the _Beth Hamedrash_, and, murmuring 'Peace be to you,' dropped upon a bench before an open folio whose commentaries and super-commentaries twined themselves lovingly in infinite convolutions round its holy text.

Immediately he was surrounded by a buzzing crowd of youths and ancients.

'Which Party are you of?' they clamoured eagerly.

XI

The _pogrom_ arrived. But it arrived in a new form for which even David was unprepared. Perhaps in consequence of the Rabbi's warning to the Governor, Self-Defence was made ridiculous. No Machiavellian paraphernalia of _agents provocateurs_, no hooligans with false grey beards, masquerading as Jewish rioters or blasphemers. Artillery was calmly brought up against the Jewish quarter, as though Milovka were an enemy's town.

As the sh.e.l.ls began to burst over the close-packed houses, David felt grimly that an economic Providence had saved him from wasting his time in training pistoliers.

The white-faced landlord, wringing his hands and saying his _Vidui_ (death-bed confession), offered him and his violin-case a place in the cellar, but he preferred to climb to the roof, from which with the aid of a small gla.s.s, he had a clear view of the cordon drawn round the doomed quarter. A ricocheting cannon-ball crashed through the chimney-pots at his side, but he did not budge. His eyes were glued upon a figure he had espied amid the cannon.

It was Ezekiel Leven, his whilom lieutenant, with whom he had dreamed of Maccabean deeds. The new conscript, in the uniform of an artilleryman, was carefully taking sight with a Gatling gun.

'Poor Ezekiel!' David cried. 'Yours is the most humorous fate of all!

But have you forgotten there is still one form of _Samooborona_ left?'

And with an ironic laugh he turned his pistol upon himself.

The great guns boomed on hour after hour. When the bombardment was over, the peace of the devil lay over the Ghetto of Milovka. Silent were all the fiery orators of all the letters of the alphabet; silent the Polish patriots and the lovers of Zion and the lovers of mankind; silent the bourgeois and the philosophers, the timber-merchants and the horse-dealers, the bankers and the Bundists; silent the Socialists and the Democrats; silent even the burly censor, and the careless Karaite and the cheerful _Cha.s.sid_; silent the landlord and his revolutionary infant in their fortified cellar; silent the Rabbi in his study, and the crowds in the market-place.

The same unconditional historic necessity had overtaken them all.

THE END