The Seven-Branched Candlestick Part 1

The Seven-Branched Candlestick.

by Gilbert W. (Gilbert Wolf) Gabriel.

I

BY WAY OF PROLOGUE

"Years of Plenty" was the name an Englishman recently gave to a book of his school days. My own years of secondary school and college were different from his, by far, but no less full.

I shall only say by way of preface that they numbered seven. There were two of them at high school, one at a military school on the Hudson, and four at our city's university.

Seven in all. Because they were not altogether happy, I have no right to think of them as lean years. For each one of them meant much to me--means as much now as I look back and am chastened and strengthened by their memory. Each is as a lighted candle in the dark of the past that I look back upon. And I like to imagine that, since there are seven of them, they are in the seven-branched candlestick which is so stately and so reverent a symbol of my Faith.

For it was my school days which gave me that Faith.

Born a Jew, I was not one. And this I can blame on no person excepting myself. Before my parents' death, they had urged me, pleaded with me to go to Sunday school at our reformed synagogue, to attend the Sat.u.r.day morning services, to study the lore, that I might be confirmed into the religion of my fathers. That they did not absolutely insist upon it was because they wanted me to come to my G.o.d gratefully, voluntarily, considering his worship an exercise of love, of gladness, and not a task of impatient duty. I know that it must have grieved them--I know it now, even if I only half-guessed it then in that distorted but instinctive way that boys do guess things--and yet they said little to me of it.

Once or twice a year they took me with them to a Friday night service. I was too young, perhaps. I am willing to use my youth as an excuse for my falling asleep, or for my sitting uneasily, squirming, yawning, heavy-eyed, uninterested, unmoved ... hungry only to be out into the streets again, and back in my own room at home, with my copy of "Pilgrim's Progress," or "The Talisman," between my knees.

At best, I can excuse myself only because I lived in a neighborhood distinctly Christian. It was on one of those old, quiet streets of the Columbia Heights section of Brooklyn that our house stood. There was a priggish sedateness to it. There was much talk on either hand of "family": the Brooklyn people--of that neighborhood, anyhow--seem to set much stock by their early settling ancestors. Near our house was a preparatory school for girls and another for boys; they were hotbeds of sn.o.bbery and prejudice, these schools. The students who attended them had to pa.s.s down our block on their way home from school. Often, when they saw me playing there, some of them would stop and make fun of me and tease me with remarks about the Jews. I was a boy without much spirit. I always resented the taunts--but I always lacked the courage to call back ... and if my eyes did blaze involuntarily with anger, I usually turned away so that these bigger boys should not be able to see them.

My fear was behind it all. I was afraid to fight back. And, being ashamed of my cowardice, I grew quickly ashamed of that which had proved it. I grew ashamed of being a Jew.

Terribly, bitterly ashamed. So mortified, indeed, that it was more than I could do to speak of it to my father. And, usually, I could talk of anything to him. Once he himself mentioned it to me: asked me whether I was not proud of my race, whether I could not look with true contempt and easy forgiveness upon those rowdies who had taunted me. I tried to take that att.i.tude ... but I was not big and strong enough for it. I tried it only once--and then one of the big bullies of that fashionable preparatory school, on his way down the block, grew angry at my lordly unconcern towards his teasing, and hit me with his fist, and cut my lip open. I kicked him in the shins, I remember, and ran swiftly away.

That didn't help matters. I was as much a weakling as ever. When I went to public school, I used to cry with a snivelling vexation because the toughs of my cla.s.s made fun of me. One of them had a little sister in the cla.s.s below us, and I was very fond of her. I remember how, on St.

Valentine's day, I stole into her cla.s.s room at lunch time and, while she was absent, stuck a lacy, gaudy and beribboned missive in her desk.

I didn't understand, then, why the teacher t.i.ttered so nervously when I asked her permission to do it. But, when my own lunch was done, and I was back at my desk, I lifted the lid of it only to find that same valentine rammed into one corner, crushed and torn almost in half, and scrawled with the word, "Sheeny!"

Nor did the little romantic flight end there. For the next day, after sister and brother had been comparing notes, the former marched straight up to me, pulled my nose, and warned me to keep away, once and for all, from the true American daughter of a true American family, and to confine my sentiments to "some little Jew girl!"

I knew none of that sort. What few boys and girls of my own race I had met at playtime or at Sunday school, I purposely shunned. I thought, if I went in their company, I should be inviting persecution. I thought my only way to escape this was to escape all Jewish comrades ... to deny my religion, if possible. I was so utterly ashamed of it!

Thus I went, with all of a child's fear and a child's cowardice, into those days which were to mean so much to me. Had I had the pride, the devotion to my religion which is a Jewish heritage, those days would have meant less. Less in sorrow and bewilderment, that is, and infinitely more in the building up of my character.

There are those who go stolidly, brusquely through life without ever needing the comfort of religion. And there are those, like me, who lack the self-reliance ... who cannot be content with a confessed agnosticism, but who must take faith and strength from those rites and codes which satisfy their sense of the mystically sublime. Now that I am grown to man's estate I can know these things of myself--but how could I know it then? How could a romping, light-hearted boy who cared more for baseball and "Ivanhoe" than for anything else in the world recognize, then, his own needs and cravings?

It was only after those few black, frightful days were over that I realized that something was lacking in my life. But even then I did not know what it was. I only felt the sharply personal loss, the inevitable loneliness and helplessness ... and had not learned in what direction to lift my eyes, to reach up my arms to ask for spiritual succor.

Those days were the ones in which my parents left me. My father was killed in a railroad accident. My mother, about to give birth to another child, was in bed at the time when the news was brought to her. She never rose again. The shock killed her.

I remember that the funeral services were conducted by the rabbi of our synagogue. They were according to the Jewish ritual, and I thought them dull and unmeaning. They expressed for me none of the sorrow that I felt. The Hebrew that was in them was mockery and gibberish to me. I am afraid I was glad when it was over, and I was alone with my aunt with whom I was to live.

This aunt, Selina Haberman, was a widow. Her husband had been a devout Jew of the most orthodox type. She used to tell me with great amus.e.m.e.nt how he would say his prayers each morning with his shawl and phylacteries upon him, with his head bowed and a look of joyous devotion on his face. She said she never could understand how a man, as educated and broadminded as he was, could have had so simple and unquestioning a loyalty to these worn old costumes of the past. But she said wistfully that she thought he had died a much happier man because of his religion ... and that was what was hardest of all for her to understand.

Aunt Selina herself was a Christian. She put as little stock in Christian Science, though, as in Judaism. It was a fad for her, and an escape from the hindrances which connection with the Jewish faith would have entailed. I think she had an idea that people would forget she had ever been a Jewess and would accept her for a Christian without her having to go through the extremer forms of proselytism. Like me, she lacked spirit for either one thing or the other. Like me, she dreaded to be cla.s.sed among her own people. But in this we were unlike: that her dread amounted to a vindictive and brutal antagonism towards whatever and whoever smacked of Jewry. I think she even objected to adopting me for a while, because my name was a distinctly Jewish one, and because it would leave no doubt in her neighbor's eyes as to my race--and hence, no doubt as to hers.

Aunt Selina lived on Central Park West in the City. She was full of social ambitions. She had a good many friends from among the intellectuals of Washington square: Christians, of course, most of them.

Her closest companion was a Mrs. Fleming-Cohen, who claimed to be a Theosophist. Born with the name of Cohen, she had married a Mr. Fleming who had made necessary, by his conduct, an early divorce. My aunt, Mrs.

Haberman, and Mrs. Fleming-Cohen lunched together very often, and I suspect they had a tacit but inviolable agreement never to mention to each other that bond of race and religion which, stronger than their professed tastes, drew them instinctively together.

My life in Aunt Selina's apartment was a lonely one. She was hardly the sort of woman to whom young folks would go for sympathy. She did not mistreat me, of course, but left me entirely to my own devious ways. For the ways of a boy of fourteen--especially of an orphan of somewhat shy and melancholic disposition--are bound to be devious.

I had much to fight out with myself. I lacked any help from the outside--and though I won over my impulses, my doubts and inner conflicts, the struggle left me a weak, shy, shunning boy.

For the first year of my life with Aunt Selina I went to a nearby public school. There were a good many Jewish boys in my cla.s.s--many more than there had been in the whole Brooklyn school--but I kept away from them as a matter of course. I made a few friends among the Gentiles--not many, because they were hard to make, and I could always feel, in my supersensitive fashion, that they were fashioning a sort of favor out of conferring their friendship upon me.

"It will be different when I am in high school," I told myself. "It will be different because I myself shall be different. The boys will be older there, will be more sensible and broadminded, and I shall be less nervous about the difference between us!"

The difference ... I did not know what it was, but I felt it all the time. I tried to hide it, to disregard it--but I knew that it was there, in my blood, in my face, in my name ... and it held me apart from my cla.s.s as if it had been a shame and a lasting disgrace.

So it was that I looked forward more and more eagerly for the change and liberation which I thought high school would bring me. Half a year, two months, a month ... then only a few days ... and then it was over. My public schools days were past. I had graduated into high school with high honors and with an equally high hatred of whatever was Jewish.

If Aunt Selina had been different ... but no, I am not going to blame it on anyone excepting myself.

The summer after I graduated from public school I went with Aunt Selina and her friend, Mrs. Fleming-Cohen, to a hotel in the White Mountains.

It was one of those hotels where Jews are not welcome. The management, if I am not mistaken, had not been able to impress Aunt Selina with that fact. They were constantly raising the price of our rooms, but the two ladies seemed content to keep on paying what was asked for the rare privilege of dwelling in forbidden places.

It was certainly not a pleasant summer. The other guests snubbed us continually, left us to our own devices. I used to have to go walking every morning and sit on the porch every afternoon in the company of the two ladies ... because there was no one else for me to go with. For even among the children there was a rigorous boycotting--and I was the sufferer for it. It made me very melancholy; not indignant, of course, because at that time I lacked entirely the spirit to be indignant--just melancholy, and hateful to myself, spiteful to my aunt, ashamed of the things I should have gloried in, hating the things I should have worshiped.

Well, I told myself, it would all be different in the fall: it would all be different when I was at high school. For then I was to begin those seven years which were to be my real education. So far it had been naught but childhood's prologue. And what a shabby little part I had played in it!

But I did not know that, then!

II

IN THE BEGINNING

Immediately upon our return from the mountains I entered high school. My aunt did her duty by accompanying me to the office of the princ.i.p.al and a.s.suring him that I was an honest and upright boy, aged fourteen.

It had been her ambition to have me attend one of the fashionable boarding schools in Connecticut. I do not think she had me much in mind when she made the attempt to enroll me at the St. Gregory Episcopalian Inst.i.tute. She told so many of her friends of this intention--and told them it with such an evident pride--that I fear she was more concerned with her own social prestige than with my education. And when St.

Gregory, through a personal visit from its headmaster, discovered that Mrs. Haberman had no right to aspire to the exquisite preference which G.o.d accords Episcopalians, and later sent us a polite but cursory letter of regret that its roster's capacity was full for the year, she bore it as a direct insult upon her ancestors. (Though, of course, even so sharp a hurt to her pride would not let her admit openly that all of those ancestors were Jews.)

At any rate, I went to the high school as a sort of a last resort. My aunt dreaded the company I might have to keep there--all the public riffraff, she called it. That was really why she accompanied me, that first day, to a.s.sure herself that I was going to be placed among a "perfectly horrid set of rude ruffians--ghetto boys, and the like!" and to have something tangible and definite to worry about during the next few years.

The princ.i.p.al, busy with the hundred details of school's opening, gave us as much time and courtesy as he could afford. As I look back upon it, I think he was remarkably patient with my aunt.

She told him her fears in a fretful, supercilious way; it was in exactly the same tone that she ordered things from the butcher and grocer each morning over the telephone. The princ.i.p.al heard her through--in fact, prompted her whenever she faltered, nodded appreciatively when something she said was most flagrantly out of place. When she was finished, he turned to look very steadily at me.

"If you have such objections to the cla.s.s of boys in a public high school, why do you send your nephew here?" he asked.

"Because it--it is convenient," she stammered.