The Promised Land Part 7

On the horses in the barn I bestowed the same calm attention as on the cow, speculative rather than affectionate. I was not a very tender-hearted infant. If I have been a true witness of my own growth, I was slower to love than I was to think. I do not know when the change was wrought, but to-day, if you ask my friends, they will tell you that I know how to love them better than to solve their problems.

And if you will call one more witness, and ask me, I shall say that if you set me down before a n.o.ble landscape, I feel it long before I begin to see it.

Idle child though I was, the day was not long enough sometimes for my idleness. More than once in the pleasant summer I stole out of bed when even the cow was still drowsing, and went barefoot through the dripping gra.s.s and stood at the gate, awaiting the morning. I found a sense of adventure in being conscious when all other people were asleep. There was not much of a prospect from the gateway, but in that early hour everything looked new and large to me, even the little houses that yesterday had been so familiar. The houses, when creatures went in and out of them, were merely conventional objects; in the soft gray morning they were themselves creatures. Some stood up straight, and some leaned, and some looked as if they saw me. And then over the dewy gardens rose the sun, and the light spread and grew over everything, till it shone on my bare feet. And in my heart grew a great wonder, and I was ready to cry, my world was so strange and sweet about me. In those moments, I think, I could have loved somebody as well as I loved later--somebody who cared to get up secretly, and stand and see the sun come up.

Was there not somebody who got up before the sun? Was there not Mishka the shepherd? Aye, that was an early riser; but I knew he was no sun-worshipper. Before the chickens stirred, before the lazy maid let the cow out of the barn, I heard his rousing horn, its distant notes harmonious with the morning. Barn doors creaked in response to Mishka's call, and soft-eyed cattle went willingly out to meet him, and stood in groups in the empty square, licking and nosing each other; till Mishka's little drove was all a.s.sembled, and he tramped out of town behind them, in a cloud of dust.

CHAPTER VI

THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

History shows that in all countries where Jews have equal rights with the rest of the people, they lose their fear of secular science, and learn how to take their ancient religion with them from century to awakening century, dropping nothing by the way but what their growing spirit has outgrown. In countries where progress is to be bought only at the price of apostasy, they shut themselves up in their synagogues, and raise the wall of extreme separateness between themselves and their Gentile neighbors. There is never a Jewish community without its scholars, but where Jews may not be both intellectuals and Jews, they prefer to remain Jews.

The survival in Russia of mediaeval injustice to Jews was responsible for the narrowness of educational standards in the Polotzk of my time.

Jewish scholarship, as we have seen, was confined to a knowledge of the Hebrew language and literature, and even these limited stores of learning were not equally divided between men and women. In the mediaeval position of the women of Polotzk education really had no place. A girl was "finished" when she could read her prayers in Hebrew, following the meaning by the aid of the Yiddish translation especially prepared for women. If she could sign her name in Russian, do a little figuring, and write a letter in Yiddish to the parents of her betrothed, she was called _wohl gelehrent_--well educated.

Fortunately for me, my parents' ideals soared beyond all this. My mother, although she had not stirred out of Polotzk, readily adopted the notion of a liberal education imported by my father from cities beyond the Pale. She heartily supported him in all his plans for us girls. Fetchke and I were to learn to translate as well as p.r.o.nounce Hebrew, the same as our brother. We were to study Russian and German and arithmetic. We were to go to the best _pension_ and receive a thorough secular education. My father's ambition, after several years'

sojourn in enlightened circles, reached even beyond the _pension_; but that was flying farther than Polotzk could follow him with the naked eye.

I do not remember our first teacher. When our second teacher came we were already able to read continuous pa.s.sages. Reb' Lebe was no great scholar. Great scholars would not waste their learning on mere girls.

Reb' Lebe knew enough to teach girls Hebrew. Tall and lean was the rebbe, with a lean, pointed face and a thin, pointed beard. The beard became pointed from much stroking and pulling downwards. The hands of Reb' Lebe were large, and his beard was not half a handful. The fingers of the rebbe were long, and the nails, I am afraid, were not very clean. The coat of Reb' Lebe was rusty, and so was his skull-cap.

Remember, Reb' Lebe was only a girls' teacher, and n.o.body would pay much for teaching girls. But lean and rusty as he was, the rebbe's pupils regarded him with entire respect, and followed his pointer with earnest eyes across the limp page of the alphabet, or the thumbed page of the prayer-book.

For a short time my sister and I went for our lessons to Reb' Lebe's heder, in the bare room off the women's gallery, up one flight of stairs, in a synagogue. The place was as noisy as a reckless expenditure of lung power could make it. The pupils on the bench shouted their way from _aleph_ to _tav_, cheered and prompted by the growl of the rebbe; while the children in the corridor waiting their turn played "puss in the corner" and other noisy games.

Fetchke and I, however, soon began to have our lessons in private, at our own home. We sat one on each side of the rebbe, reading the Hebrew sentences turn and turn about.

When we left off reading by rote and Reb' Lebe began to reveal the mysteries to us, I was so eager to know all that was in my book that the lesson was always too short. I continued reading by the hour, after the rebbe was gone, though I understood about one word in ten.

My favorite Hebrew reading was the Psalms. Verse after verse I chanted to the monotonous tune taught by Reb' Lebe, rocking to the rhythm of the chant, just like the rebbe. And so ran the song of David, and so ran the hours by, while I sat by the low window, the world erased from my consciousness.

What I thought I do not remember; I only know that I loved the sound of the words, the full, dense, solid sound of them, to the meditative chant of Reb' Lebe. I p.r.o.nounced Hebrew very well, and I caught some mechanical trick of accent and emphasis, which was sufficiently like Reb' Lebe's to make my reading sound intelligent. I had a clue to the general mood of the subject from the few Psalms I had actually translated, and drawing on my imagination for details, I was able to read with so much spirit that ignorant listeners were carried away by my performance. My mother tells me, indeed, that people used to stop outside my window to hear me read. Of this I have not the slightest recollection, so I suppose I was an unconscious impostor. Certain I am that I thought no ign.o.ble thoughts as I chanted the sacred words; and who can say that my visions were not as inspiring as David's? He was a shepherd before he became a king. I was an ignorant child in the Ghetto, but I was admitted at last to the society of the best; I was given the freedom of all America. Perhaps the "stuff that dreams are made of" is the same for all dreamers.

When we came to read Genesis I had the great advantage of a complete translation in Yiddish. I faithfully studied the portion a.s.signed in Hebrew, but I need no longer wait for the next lesson to know how the story ends. I could read while daylight lasted, if I chose, in the Yiddish. Well I remember that Pentateuch, a middling thick octavo volume, in a crumbly sort of leather cover; and how the book opened of itself at certain places, where there were pictures. My father tells me that when I was just learning to translate single words, he found me one evening poring over the _humesh_ and made fun of me for pretending to read; whereupon I gave him an eager account, he says, of the stories of Jacob, Benjamin, Moses, and others, which I had puzzled out from the pictures, by the help of a word here and there that I was able to translate.

It was inevitable, as we came to Genesis, that I should ask questions.

Rebbe, translating: "In the beginning G.o.d created the earth."

Pupil, repeating: "In the beginning--Rebbe, when was the beginning?"

Rebbe, losing the place in amazement: "'S _gehert a ka.s.se_? (Ever hear such a question?) The beginning was--the beginning--the beginning was in the beginning, of course! _Nu! nu!_ Go on."

Pupil, resuming: "In the beginning G.o.d made the earth.--Rebbe, what did He make it out of?"

Rebbe, dropping his pointer in astonishment: "What did--? What sort of a girl is this, that asks questions? Go on, go on!"

The lesson continues to the end. The book is closed, the pointer put away. The rebbe exchanges his skull-cap for his street cap, is about to go.

Pupil, timidly, but determinedly, detaining him: "Reb' Lebe, _who made G.o.d_?"

The rebbe regards the pupil in amazement mixed with anxiety. His emotion is beyond speech. He turns and leaves the room. In his perturbation he even forgets to kiss the _mezuzah_[2] on the doorpost.

The pupil feels reproved and yet somehow in the right. Who _did_ make G.o.d? But if the rebbe will not tell--will not tell? Or, perhaps, he does not know? The rebbe--?

It was some time after this conflict between my curiosity and his obtuseness that I saw my teacher act a ridiculous part in a trifling comedy, and then I remember no more of him.

Reb' Lebe lingered one day after the lesson. A guest who was about to depart, wishing to fortify himself for his journey, took a roll of hard sausage from his satchel and laid it, with his clasp knife, on the table. He cut himself a slice and ate it standing; and then, noticing the thin, lean rebbe, he invited him, by a gesture, to help himself to the sausage. The rebbe put his hands behind his coat tails, declining the traveller's hospitality. The traveller forgot the other, and walked up and down, ready in his fur coat and cap, till his carriage should arrive. The sausage remained on the table, thick and spicy and brown. No such sausage was known in Polotzk. Reb' Lebe looked at it. Reb' Lebe continued to look. The stranger stopped to cut another slice, and repeated his gesture of invitation. Reb' Lebe moved a step towards the table, but his hands stuck behind his coat tails.

The traveller resumed his walk. Reb' Lebe moved another step. The stranger was not looking. The rebbe's courage rose, he advanced towards the table; he stretched out his hand for the knife. At that instant the door opened, the carriage was announced. The eager traveller, without noticing Reb' Lebe, swept up sausage and knife, just at the moment when the timid rebbe was about to cut himself a delicious slice. I saw his discomfiture from my corner, and I am obliged to confess that I enjoyed it. His face always looked foolish to me after that; but, fortunately for us both, we did not study together much longer.

Two little girls dressed in their best, shining from their curls to their shoes. One little girl has rosy cheeks, the other has staring eyes. Rosy-Cheeks carries a carpet bag; Big-Eyes carries a new slate.

Hand in hand they go into the summer morning, so happy and pretty a pair that it is no wonder people look after them, from window and door; and that other little girls, not dressed in their best and carrying no carpet bags, stand in the street gaping after them.

Let the folks stare; no harm can come to the little sisters. Did not grandmother tie pepper and salt into the corners of their pockets, to ward off the evil eye? The little maids see nothing but the road ahead, so eager are they upon their errand. Carpet bag and slate proclaim that errand: Rosy-Cheeks and Big-Eyes are going to school.

I have no words to describe the pride with which my sister and I crossed the threshold of Isaiah the Scribe. Hitherto we had been to heder, to a rebbe; now we were to study with a _lehrer_, a secular teacher. There was all the difference in the world between the two.

The one taught you Hebrew only, which every girl learned; the other could teach Yiddish and Russian and, some said, even German; and how to write a letter, and how to do sums without a counting-frame, just on a piece of paper; accomplishments which were extremely rare among girls in Polotzk. But nothing was too high for the grandchildren of Raphael the Russian; they had "good heads," everybody knew. So we were sent to Reb' Isaiah.

My first school, where I was so proud to be received, was a hovel on the edge of a swamp. The schoolroom was gray within and without. The door was so low that Reb' Isaiah had to stoop in pa.s.sing. The little windows were murky. The walls were bare, but the low ceiling was decorated with bundles of goose quills stuck in under the rafters. A rough table stood in the middle of the room, with a long bench on either side. That was the schoolroom complete. In my eyes, on that first morning, it shone with a wonderful light, a strange glory that penetrated every corner, and made the stained logs fair as tinted marble; and the windows were not too small to afford me a view of a large new world.

Room was made for the new pupils on the bench, beside the teacher. We found our inkwells, which were simply hollows scooped out in the thick table top. Reb' Isaiah made us very serviceable pens by tying the pen points securely to little twigs; though some of the pupils used quills. The teacher also ruled our paper for us, into little squares, like a surveyor's notebook. Then he set us a copy, and we copied, one letter in each square, all the way down the page. All the little girls and the middle-sized girls and the pretty big girls copied letters in little squares, just so. There were so few of us that Reb' Isaiah could see everybody's page by just leaning over. And if some of our cramped fingers were clumsy, and did not form the loops and curves accurately, all he had to do was to stretch out his hand and rap with his ruler on our respective knuckles. It was all very cosey, with the inkwells that could not be upset, and the pens that grew in the woods or strutted in the dooryard, and the teacher in the closest touch with his pupils, as I have just told. And as he labored with us, and the hours drew themselves out, he was comforted by the smell of his dinner cooking in some little hole adjoining the schoolroom, and by the sound of his good Leah or Rachel or Deborah (I don't remember her name) keeping order among his little ones. She kept very good order, too, so that most of the time you could hear the scratching of the laborious pens accompanied by the croaking of the frogs in the swamp.

Although my sister and I began our studies at the same time, and progressed together, my parents did not want me to take up new subjects as fast as Fetchke did. They thought my health too delicate for much study. So when Fetchke had her Russian lesson I was told to go and play. I am sorry to say that I was disobedient on these occasions, as on many others. I did not go and play; I looked on, I listened, when Fetchke rehea.r.s.ed her lesson at home. And one evening I stole the Russian primer and repaired to a secret place I knew of. It was a storeroom for broken chairs and rusty utensils and dried apples.

n.o.body would look for me in that dusty hole. n.o.body did look there, but they looked everywhere else, in the house, and in the yard, and in the barn, and down the street, and at our neighbors'; and while everybody was searching and calling for me, and telling each other when I was last seen, and what I was then doing, I, Mashke, was bending over the stolen book, rehearsing A, B, C, by the names my sister had given them; and before anybody hit upon my retreat, I could spell B-O-G, _Bog_ (G.o.d) and K-A-Z-A, _Kaza_ (goat). I did not mind in the least being caught, for I had my new accomplishment to show off.

I remember the littered place, and the high chest that served as my table, and the blue gla.s.s lamp that lighted my secret efforts. I remember being brought from there into the firelit room where the family was a.s.sembled, and confusing them all by my recital of the simple words, B-O-G, _Bog_, and K-A-Z-A, _Kaza_. I was not reproached for going into hiding at bedtime, and the next day I was allowed to take part in the Russian lesson.

Alas! there were not many lessons more. Long before we had exhausted Reb' Isaiah's learning, my sister and I had to give up our teacher, because the family fortunes began to decline, and luxuries, such as schooling, had to be cut off. Isaiah the Scribe taught us, in all, perhaps two terms, in which time we learned Yiddish and Russian, and a little arithmetic. But little good we had from our ability to read, for there were no books in our house except prayer-books and other religious writings, mostly in Hebrew. For our skill in writing we had as little use, as letter-writing was not an everyday exercise, and idle writing was not thought of. Our good teacher, however, who had taken pride in our progress, would not let us lose all that we had learned from him. Books he could not lend us, because he had none himself; but he could, and he did, write us out a beautiful "copy"

apiece, which we could repeat over and over, from time to time, and so keep our hands in.

I wonder that I have forgotten the graceful sentences of my "copy"; for I wrote them out just about countless times. It was in the form of a letter, written on lovely pink paper (my sister's was blue), the lines taking the shape of semicircles across the page; and that without any guide lines showing. The script, of course, was perfect--in the best manner of Isaiah the Scribe--and the sentiments therein expressed were entirely n.o.ble. I was supposed to be a high-school pupil away on my vacation; and I was writing to my "Respected Parents," to a.s.sure them of my welfare, and to tell them how, in the midst of my pleasures, I still longed for my friends, and looked forward with eagerness to the renewal of my studies. All this, in phrases half Yiddish, half German, and altogether foreign to the ears of Polotzk. At least, I never heard such talk in the market, when I went to buy a kopeck's worth of sunflower seeds.

This was all the schooling I had in Russia. My father's plans fell to the ground, on account of the protracted illness of both my parents.

All his hopes of leading his children beyond the intellectual limits of Polotzk were trampled down by the monster poverty who showed his evil visage just as my sister and I were fairly started on a broader path.

One chance we had, and that was quickly s.n.a.t.c.hed away, of continuing our education in spite of family difficulties. Lozhe the Rav, hearing from various sources that Pinchus, son-in-law of Raphael the Russian, had two bright little girls, whose talents were going to waste for want of training, became much interested, and sent for the children, to see for himself what the gossip was worth. By a strange trick of memory I recall nothing of this important interview, nor indeed of the whole matter, although a thousand trifles of that period recur to me on the instant; so I report this anecdote on the authority of my parents.

They tell me how the rav lifted me up on a table in front of him, and asked me many questions, and encouraged me to ask questions in my turn. Reb' Lozhe came to the conclusion, as a result of this interview, that I ought by all means to be put to school. There was no public school for girls, as we know, but a few pupils were maintained in a certain private school by irregular contributions from city funds. Reb' Lozhe enlisted in my cause the influence of his son, who, by virtue of some munic.i.p.al office which he held, had a vote in fixing this appropriation. But although he pleaded eloquently for my admission as a city pupil, the rav's son failed to win the consent of his colleagues, and my one little crack of opportunity was tightly stopped.

My father does not remember on what technicality my application was dismissed. My mother is under the impression that it was plainly refused on account of my religion, the authorities being unwilling to appropriate money for the tuition of a Jewish child. But little it matters now what the reason was; the result is what affected me. I was left without teacher or book just when my mind was most active. I was left without food just when the hunger of growth was creeping up. I was left to think and think, without direction; without the means of grappling with the contents of my own thought.

In a community which was isolated from the ma.s.s of the people on account of its religion; which was governed by special civil laws in recognition of that fact; in whose calendar there were twoscore days of religious observance; whose going and coming, giving and taking, living and dying, to the minutest details of social conduct, to the most intimate particulars of private life, were regulated by sacred laws, there could be no question of personal convictions in religion.

One was a Jew, leading a righteous life; or one was a Gentile, existing to hara.s.s the Jews, while making a living off Jewish enterprise. In the vocabulary of the more intelligent part of Polotzk, it is true, there were such words as freethinker and apostate; but these were the names of men who had forsaken the Law in distant times or in distant parts, and whose evil fame had reached Polotzk by the circuitous route of tradition. n.o.body looked for such monsters in his neighborhood. Polotzk was safely divided into Jews and Gentiles.