Ghetto Tragedies Part 24

VI

BETHULAH

I

The image of her so tragically trustful in that mountain village of Bukowina still haunts my mind, and refuses to be exorcised, as of yore, by the prose of life. One who is very dear to me advises driving her out at the point of the pen. Whether such recording of my life's strangest episode will lay these memories or not, the story itself may at least instruct my fellow-Jews in New York how variously their religion has manifested itself upon this perplexing planet. Doubtless many are still as ignorant as I was respecting their mediaeval contemporaries in Eastern Europe. True, they have now opportunities in their own Ghetto--which is, for cosmopolitanism, a New York within a New York--of studying strata from other epochs of Judaism spread out on the same plane of time as their own, even as upon the white sheet of that wonderful invention my aged eyes have lived to see, sequent events may be pictured simultaneously. In my youth these opportunities did not exist. Only in Baltimore and a few of the great Eastern cities was there any aggregation of Jews, and these were all--or wanted to be--good Yankees; while beyond the Mississippi, where my father farmed and hunted like a Christian, and where you might have scoured a thousand square miles to get _minyan_ (ten Jews for worship), our picturesque customs and ceremonies dwindled away from sheer absence of fellowship. My father used to tell of a bronzed trapper he breakfasted with on the prairie, who astonished him by asking him over their bacon if he were a Jew. "Yes," said my father.

"Shake!" said the trapper. "You're the first fellow-Jew I've met for twenty years." Though in my childhood my father taught me the Hebrew he had brought from Europe, and told me droll Jewish stories in his native German, it will readily be understood that the real influences I absorbed were the great American ideals of liberty and humanity, emanc.i.p.ation and enlightenment, and that therefore the strange things I witnessed among the Carpathians were far more startling to me than they can be to the Jews of to-day upon whom the Old World has poured its archaic inhabitants. Nevertheless, I cannot but think that even those who have met strange drifts of sects in New York will be astonished by the tradition which I stumbled upon so blindly in my first European tour. For, so far as I can gather, the Zloczszol legend is unique in Jewish history and confined exclusively to this out-of-the-way corner, however near other heresies may have approached to some of the underlying conceptions. My landlord Yarchi's view that it was a mere piece of local commercial myth-making, a gross artifice, would have at least the merit of explaining this uniqueness. It has, in my eyes, no other.

This tour of mine was to make not a circle, but a half-circle, for, landing at Hamburg I was to return by the Baltic, after a circuit through Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Buda-Pesth, Lemberg, (where my grandfather had once been a rabbi of consideration), Moscow, and St.

Petersburg. I did not linger at Hamburg; purchasing a stout horse, I started on my long ride. Of course it did not seem so long to me--who had already ridden from Kansas to both of our seaboards--as it would to a young gentleman of to-day accustomed to parlour cars, though the constant change of dialects and foods was somewhat unsettling.

But money speaks all languages, and a good Western stomach digests all diets. Bad water, however, no stomach can cope with; and I was laid up at Prague with a fever, which left me too weak to hurry on. I rambled about the Ghetto--the Judenstadt--which gave me my first insight into mediaeval Judaism, and was fascinated by the quaint alleys and houses, the Jewish town-hall, and the cellarlike _Alt-Neu_ synagogue with its miraculous history of unnumbered centuries. I heard the story of the great red flag on the pillar, with its "shield of David" and the Swede's hat, and was shown on the walls the spatterings of the blood of the martyrs of 1389.

What emotions I had in the old graveyard--a Ghetto of the dead--where the graves were huddled together, three and four deep, and the very tombstones and corpses had undergone Ghetto persecution! A whole new world opened out to me, crooked as the Ghetto alleys--so alien from the free life of the flowering prairies--as I walked about this "Judengarten," studying the Hebrew inscriptions and the strange symbolic sculptures--the Priest's hands of blessing, the Levite's ewer, the Israelites' bunch of grapes, the Virgin with roses--and trying to reconstruct the life these dead had lived. Strange ancestral memories seemed thrilling through me, helping me to understand. Many stories did I hear, too, of the celebrated Rabbi Low, and of the _golem_ he created, which brought him his meals: in sign whereof I was shown his grave, and his house marked with a lion on a blue background. I listened with American incredulity but hereditary sympathy. I was astonished to find men who still believed in a certain Sabbata Zevi, Messiah of the Jews, and one showed me a Sabbatian prayer-book with a turbaned head of this Redeemer side by side with King David's, and another who scoffed at this seventeenth-century impostor, yet told me the tradition in his own family, how they had sold their business and were about to start for Palestine, when the news reached them that so far from deposing the Sultan, this Redeemer of Israel had become his doorkeeper and a Mohammedan.

The year was pa.s.sing toward the Fall ere I got to Buda-Pesth (in those days the enchanted gateway of the Orient, resounding with gypsy music, and not the civilized capital I found it the other day), and I had not proceeded far on the northerly bend of my journey when, soon after crossing the Carpathians, I was imprisoned in the mountain village of Zloczszol by the sudden overflow of the Dniester. The village itself was sheltered from the floods by a mountain between it and the tributary of the Dniester; but all the roads northward were impa.s.sable, and the water came round by clefts and soused our bordering fields and oozed very near the maize-garden of Yarchi's pine cottage, to which I had removed from the dirty inn, where a squalling baby in a cradle had shared the private sitting-room. It was a very straggling village, which began to straggle at the mountain-foot, but, for fear of avalanches, I was told, the houses did not grow companionable till some half a mile down the plain.

In the centre of the village was a cobble-paved "Ring-Place" and market-place, on which gave a few streets of shops (the provision-shops benefiting hugely by the floods, which made imports difficult). It was a Jewish colony, with the exception of a few outlying farms, whose peasants brought touches of gorgeous colour into the procession of black gabardines. It was strange to me to live in a place in which every door-post bore a _Mezuzah_. It gave me a novel sense of being in a land of Israel, and sometimes I used to wonder how these people could feel such a sense of local patriotism as seemed to possess them. And yet I reflected that, like the giant cedar of Lebanon which rose from the plain in such strange contrast with the native trees of Zloczszol, Israel could be transplanted everywhere, and was made of as enduring and undying a wood--nay, that, even like this cedar-wood, it had strange properties of conserving other substances and arresting putrefaction. Hence its ubiquitous patriotism was universally profitable. Nevertheless, this was one of the surprises of my journey--to find Jews speaking every language under the European sun, regarding themselves everywhere as part of the soil, and often patriotic to the point of resenting immigrant Jews as foreigners. I myself was popularly known as "the Stranger," though I was not resented, because the couple of dollars at which I purchased the privilege of "ark-opening" on my first visit to the synagogue--a little Gothic building standing in a court-yard--gave me a further reputation as "the rich stranger." Once I blushed to overhear myself called "the handsome stranger," and I looked into my cracked mirror with fresh interest. But I told myself modestly a stalwart son of the prairies had an unfair advantage in such a world of stooping sallow students. Certainly I felt myself favoured both in youth and looks when I stepped into the Beth-Hamedrash, the house of study (which I had at first taken for a little mosque, like those I had seen on the slopes of Buda), and watched the curious gnarled graybeards crooning and rocking the livelong day over worm-eaten folios.

Despite such odd glimpses of the interesting, I grew as tired of waiting for the waters to abate as Noah himself must have felt in his zoological inst.i.tute.

One day as I was gazing from my one-story window at the melancholy marsh to which the flood had reduced the landscape, I said glumly to my hunchbacked landlord, who stood snuffing himself under the porch, "I suppose it will be another week before I can get away."

"Alas! yes," Yarchi replied.

"Why alas?" I asked. "It's an ill wind that blows n.o.body any good, and the longer I stay the better for you."

He shook his head. "The flood that keeps you here keeps away the pilgrims."

"The pilgrims!" I echoed.

"Ay," said he. "There will be three in that bed of yours."

"But what pilgrims?"

He stared at me. "Don't you know the New Year is nigh?"

"Of course," I said mendaciously. I felt ashamed to confess my ignorant unconcern as to the proximity of the solemn season of ram's-horn blasts and penitence.

"Well, it is at New Year the pilgrims flock to their Wonder Rabbi, that he may hear their pet.i.tions and bear them on high, likewise wrestle with Satan, and entreat for their forgiveness at the throne of Grace." There was a twinkle in Yarchi's eyes not quite consistent with the gravity of his words.

"Do Wonder Rabbis live nowadays?" I asked.

A pinch of snuff Yarchi was taking fell from between his fingers. "Do they live!" he cried. "Yes--and off white bread, for poverty!"

"We have none in America. I only heard of one in Prague," I murmured apologetically, fearing the genus might be of the very elements of Judaism.

"Ah, yes, the high Rabbi Low, his memory for a blessing," he said reverently. "But these new Wonder Rabbis can only work one miracle."

"What is that?" I asked.

"The greatest of all--making their worshippers support them like princes." And he laughed in admiration of his own humour.

"Then you are a heretic?" I said.

"Heretic!" Yarchi's black eyes exchanged their twinkle for a flash of resentment. "Nay; they are the heretics, breeding dissension in Israel. Did they not dance on the grave of the sainted Elijah Wilna?"

Tired of tossing the ball of conversation up and down, I left the window and joined the philosopher under his porch, where I elicted from him his version of the eighteenth-century movement of _Cha.s.sidim_, (the pious ones), which, in these days of English books on Judaism, will not be so new to American Jews as it was to me. These Shakers (or, as we should perhaps say nowadays, Salvationists), these protestants against cut-and-dried Judaism, who arose among the Carpathians under the inspiration of Besht (a word which Yarchi explained to me was made out of the initials of Baal Shem Tob--the Master of the Good Name), had, it seemed, pullulated into a thousand different sects, each named after the Wonder Rabbi whom it swore by, and in whose "exclusive divine right" (the phrase is Yarchi's) it believed.

"But _we_ have the divinest chief," concluded Yarchi, grinning.

"That's what they all say, eh?" I said, smiling in response.

"Yes; but the Zloczszol rabbi is stamped with the royal seal. He professes to be of the Messianic seed, a direct descendant of David, the son of Jesse." And the hunchback chuckled with malicious humour.

"I should like to see him," I said, feeling as if Providence had provided a new interest for my boredom.

Yarchi pointed silently with his discoloured thumb over the plain.

"You don't mean he is kept in that storehouse!" I said.

Yarchi guffawed in high good-humour.

"That! That's the _Klaus_!"

"And what's the _Klaus_?"

"The _Cha.s.sidim Stubele_ (little room)."

"Is that where the miracles are done?"

"No; that's their synagogue."

"Oh, they just pray there!"

"Pray? They get as drunk as Lot."

II

I returned to my window and gazed curiously at the _Klaus_, and now that my eye was upon it I saw it was astir with restless life. Men came and went continually. I looked toward the synagogue, and the more pretentious building seemed dead. Then I remembered what Yarchi had told me, that the _Cha.s.sidim_ had revolted against set prayer-times.

("They pray and drink at all hours," was his way of putting it.) Something must always be forward in the _Klaus_, I thought, as I took my hat and stick, on exploring bent. Instinctively I put my pistol in my hip pocket, then bethought myself with a laugh that I was not likely to be molested by the "pious ones." But as it was unloaded, I let it remain in the pocket.