Ghetto Tragedies Part 21

A customer came in, and the tragic universe dwindled to a prosaic place in which ribbons existed in unsatisfactory shades.

"Of course we must go this minute," Leah said, as Srul clanked the coins into the till. "Biela cannot ever live here with you now."

"Yes, it is better so," he a.s.sented sulkily. "Besides, you may as well know at once. I keep open on the Sabbath, and that would not have pleased Biela. That is another reason why it was best not to marry Biela. Tsirrele doesn't seem to mind."

The very ruins of her world seemed toppling now. But this new revelation of Tsirrele's and his own wickedness seemed only of a piece with the first--indeed, went far to account for it.

"You break the Sabbath, after all!"

He shrugged his shoulders. "We are not in Poland any longer. No dead flies here. Everybody does it. Shut the store two days a week! I should get left."

"And you bring your mother's gray hairs down with sorrow to the grave."

"My mother's gray hairs are no longer hidden by a stupid black _Shaitel_. That is all. I have explained to her that America is the land of enlightenment and freedom. Her eyes are opened."

"I trust to G.o.d, your father's--peace be upon him!--are still shut!"

said Leah as she walked with slow steady steps into the parlour, to bear off her wounded lamb.

V

TO DIE IN JERUSALEM

V

TO DIE IN JERUSALEM

I

The older Isaac Levinsky grew, and the more he saw of the world after business hours, the more ashamed he grew of the Russian Rabbi whom Heaven had curiously chosen for his father. At first it seemed natural enough to shout and dance prayers in the stuffy little Spitalfields synagogue, and to receive reflected glory as the son and heir of the ill.u.s.trious Maggid (preacher) whose four hour expositions of Scripture drew even West End pietists under the spell of their celestial crookedness. But early in Isaac's English school-life--for c.o.c.ksure philanthropists dragged the younger generation to anglicization--he discovered that other fathers did not make themselves ridiculously noticeable by retaining the gabardine, the fur cap, and the ear-locks of Eastern Europe: nay, that a few--O, enviable sons!--could scarcely be distinguished from the teachers themselves.

When the guardian angels of the Ghetto apprenticed him, in view of his talent for drawing, to a lithographic printer, he suffered agonies at the thought of his grotesque parent coming to sign the indentures.

"You might put on a coat to-morrow," he begged in Yiddish.

The Maggid's long black beard lifted itself slowly from the worm-eaten folio of the Babylonian Talmud, in which he was studying the tractate anent the payment of the half-shekel head-tax in ancient Palestine.

"If he took the money from the second t.i.thes or from the Sabbatical year fruit," he was humming in his quaint sing-song, "he must eat the full value of the same in the city of Jerusalem." As he encountered his boy's querulous face his dream city vanished, the glittering temple of Solomon crumbled to dust, and he remembered he was in exile.

"Put on a coat?" he repeated gently. "Nay, thou knowest 'tis against our holy religion to appear like the heathen. I emigrated to England to be free to wear the Jewish dress, and G.o.d hath not failed to bless me."

Isaac suppressed a precocious "d.a.m.n!" He had often heard the story of how the cruel Czar Nicholas had tried to make his Jews dress like Christians, so as insidiously to a.s.similate them away; how the police had even pulled off the unsightly cloth-coverings of the shaven polls of the married women, to the secret delight of the pretty ones, who then let their hair grow in G.o.dless charm. And, mixed up with this story, were vaguer legends of raw recruits forced by their sergeants to kneel on little broken stones till they perceived the superiority of Christianity.

How the Maggid would have been stricken to the heart to know that Isaac now heard these legends with inverted sympathies!

"The blind fools!" thought the boy, with ever growing bitterness. "To fancy that religion can lie in clothes, almost as if it was something you could carry in your pockets! But that's where most of their religion does lie--in their pocket." And he shuddered with a vision of greasy, huckstering fanatics. "And just imagine if I was sweet on a girl, having to see all her pretty hair cut off! As for those recruits, it served them right for not turning Christians. As if Judaism was any truer! And the old man never thinks of how he is torturing _me_--all the sharp little stones he makes _me_ kneel on."

And, looking into the future with the ambitious eye of conscious cleverness, he saw the paternal gabardine over-glooming his life.

II

One Friday evening--after Isaac had completed his 'prentice years--there was anxiety in the Maggid's household in lieu of the Sabbath peace. Isaac's seat at the board was vacant. The twisted loaves seemed without salt, the wine of the consecration cup without savour.

The mother was full of ominous explanations.

"Perturb not the Sabbath," reproved the gabardined saint gently, and quoted the Talmud: "'No man has a finger maimed but 'tis decreed from above."

"Isaac has gone to supper somewhere else," suggested his little sister, Miriam.

"Children and fools speak the truth," said the Maggid, pinching her cheek.

But they had to go to bed without seeing him, as though this were only a profane evening, and he amusing himself with the vague friends of his lithographic life. They waited till the candles flared out, and there seemed something symbolic in the gloom in which they groped their way upstairs. They were all shivering, too, for the fire had become gray ashes long since, the Sabbath Fire-Woman having made her last round at nine o'clock and they themselves being forbidden to touch even a candlestick or a poker.

The sunrise revealed to the unclosed eyes of the mother that her boy's bed was empty. It also showed--what she might have discovered the night before had religion permitted her to enter his room with a light--that the room was empty, too: empty of his scattered belongings, of his books and sketches.

"G.o.d in Heaven!" she cried.

Her boy had run away.

She began to wring her hands and wail with oriental amplitude, and would have torn her hair had it not been piously replaced by a black wig, neatly parted in the middle and now grotesquely placid amid her agonized agitation.

The Maggid preserved more outward calm. "Perhaps we shall find him in synagogue," he said, trembling.

"He has gone away, he will never come back. Woe is me!"

"He has never missed the Sabbath service!" the Maggid urged. But inwardly his heart was sick with the fear that she prophesied truly.

This England, which had seduced many of his own congregants to Christian costume, had often seemed to him to be stealing away his son, though he had never let himself dwell upon the dread. His sermon that morning was acutely exegetical: with no more relation to his own trouble than to the rest of contemporary reality. His soul dwelt in old Jerusalem, and dreamed of Israel's return thither in some vague millennium. When he got home he found that the postman had left a letter. His wife hastened to s.n.a.t.c.h it.

"What dost thou?" he cried. "Not to-day. When Sabbath is out."

"I cannot wait. It is from him--it is from Isaac."

"Wait at least till the Fire-Woman comes to open it."