Children of the Ghetto

by Израэль Зангвилл

  And yet there were times when his tight-pursed lips unclenched themselves and he drew in great breaths even of Ghetto air with the huge contentment of one who has known suffocation. "One can breathe here," he seemed to be saying. The atmosphere, untainted by spies, venal officials, and jeering soldiery, seemed fresh and sweet. Here the ground was stable, not mined in all directions; no arbitrary ukase-veritable sword of Damocles-hung over the head and darkened the sunshine. In such a country, where faith was free and action untrammelled, mere living was an ecstasy when remembrance came over one, and so Joseph Strelitski sometimes threw back his head and breathed in liberty. The voluptuousness of the sensation cannot be known by born freemen.

  When Joseph Strelitski's father was sent to Siberia, he took his nine-year old boy with him in infringement of the law which prohibits exiles from taking children above five years of age. The police authorities, however, raised no objection, and they permitted Joseph to attend the public school at Kansk, Yeniseisk province, where the Strelitski family resided. A year or so afterwards the Yeniseisk authorities accorded the family permission to reside in Yeniseisk, and Joseph, having given proof of brilliant abilities, was placed in the Yeniseisk gymnasium. For nigh three years the boy studied here, astonishing the gymnasium with his extraordinary ability, when suddenly the Government authorities ordered the boy to return at once "to the place where he was born." In vain the directors of the gymnasium, won over by the poor boy's talent and enthusiasm for study, petitioned the Government. The Yeniseisk authorities were again ordered to expel him. No respite was granted and the thirteen-year old lad was sent to Sokolk in the Government of Grodno at the other extreme of European Russia, where he was quite alone in the world. Before he was sixteen, he escaped to England, his soul branded by terrible memories, and steeled by solitude to a stern strength.

  At Sugarman's he spoke little and then mainly with the father on scholastic points. After meals he retired quickly to his business or his sleeping-den, which was across the road. Bessie loved Daniel Hyams, but she was a woman and Strelitski's neutrality piqued her. Even to-day it is possible he might not have spoken to Gabriel Hamburg if his other neighbor had not been Bessie. Gabriel Hamburg was glad to talk to the youth, the outlines of whose English history were known to him. Strelitski seemed to expand under the sunshine of a congenial spirit; he answered Hamburg's sympathetic inquiries about his work without reluctance and even made some remarks on his own initiative.

  And as they spoke, an undercurrent of pensive thought was flowing in the old scholar's soul and his tones grew tenderer and tenderer. The echoes of Ebenezer's effusive speech were in his ears and the artificial notes rang strangely genuine. All round him sat happy fathers of happy children, men who warmed their hands at the home-fire of life, men who lived while he was thinking. Yet he, too, had had his chance far back in the dim and dusty years, his chance of love and money with it. He had let it slip away for poverty and learning, and only six men in Europe cared whether he lived or died. The sense of his own loneliness smote him with a sudden aching desolation. His gaze grew humid; the face of the young student was covered with a veil of mist and seemed to shine with the radiance of an unstained soul. If he had been as other men he might have had such a son. At this moment Gabriel Hamburg was speaking of paragoge in Hebrew grammar, but his voice faltered and in imagination he was laying hands of paternal benediction on Joseph Strelitski's head. Swayed by an overmastering impulse he burst out at last.

  "An idea strikes me!"

  Strelitski looked up in silent interrogation at the old man's agitated face.

  "You live by yourself. I live by myself. We are both students. Why should we not live together as students, too?"

  A swift wave of surprise traversed Strelitski's face, and his eyes grew soft. For an instant the one solitary soul visibly yearned towards the other; he hesitated.

  "Do not think I am too old," said the great scholar, trembling all over. "I know it is the young who chum together, but still I am a student. And you shall see how lively and cheerful I will be." He forced a smile that hovered on tears. "We shall be two rackety young students, every night raising a thousand devils. Gaudeamus igitur." He began to hum in his cracked hoarse voice the Burschen-lied of his early days at the Berlin Gymnasium.

  But Strelitski's face had grown dusky with a gradual flush and a deepening gloom; his black eyebrows were knit and his lips set together and his eyes full of sullen ire. He suspected a snare to assist him.

  He shook his head. "Thank you," he said slowly. "But I prefer to live alone."

  And he turned and spoke to the astonished Bessie, and so the two strange lonely vessels that had hailed each other across the darkness drifted away and apart for ever in the waste of waters.

  But Jonathan Sugarman's eye was on more tragic episodes. Gradually the plates emptied, for the guests openly followed up the more substantial elements of the repast by dessert, more devastating even than the rear manoeuvres. At last there was nothing but an aching china blank. The men looked round the table for something else to "nash," but everywhere was the same depressing desolation. Only in the centre of the table towered in awful intact majesty the great Bar-mitzvah cake, like some mighty sphinx of stone surveying the ruins of empires, and the least reverent shrank before its austere gaze. But at last the Shalotten Shammos shook off his awe and stretched out his hand leisurely towards the cake, as became the master of ceremonies. But when Sugarman the Shadchan beheld his hand moving like a creeping flame forward, he sprang towards him, as the tigress springs when the hunter threatens her cub. And speaking no word he snatched the great cake from under the hand of the spoiler and tucked it under his arm, in the place where he carried Nehemiah, and sped therewith from the room. Then consternation fell upon the scene till Solomon Ansell, crawling on hands and knees in search of windfalls, discovered a basket of apples stored under the centre of the table, and the Shalotten Shammos's son told his father thereof ere Solomon could do more than secure a few for his brother and sisters. And the Shalotten Shammos laughed joyously, "Apples," and dived under the table, and his long form reached to the other side and beyond, and graybearded men echoed the joyous cry and scrambled on the ground like schoolboys.

  "Leolom tikkach-always take," quoted the Badchan gleefully.

  When Sugarman returned, radiant, he found his absence had been fatal.

  "Piece of fool! Two-eyed lump of flesh," said Mrs. Sugarman in a loud whisper. "Flying out of the room as if thou hadst the ague."

  "Shall I sit still like thee while our home is eaten up around us?" Sugarman whispered back. "Couldst thou not look to the apples? Plaster image! Leaden fool! See, they have emptied the basket, too."

  "Well, dost thou expect luck and blessing to crawl into it? Even five shillings' worth of nash cannot last for ever. May ten ammunition wagons of black curses be discharged on thee!" replied Mrs. Sugarman, her one eye shooting fire.

  This was the last straw of insult added to injury. Sugarman was exasperated beyond endurance. He forgot that he had a wider audience than his wife; he lost all control of himself, and cried aloud in a frenzy of rage, "What a pity thou hadst not a fourth uncle!"

  Mrs. Sugarman collapsed, speechless.

  "A greedy lot, marm," Sugarman reported to Mrs. Hyams on the Monday. "I was very glad you and your people didn't come; dere was noding left except de prospectuses of the Hamburg lotter_ee vich I left laying all about for de guests to take. Being Shabbos I could not give dem out."

  "We were sorry not to come, but neither Mr. Hyams nor myself felt well," said the white-haired broken-down old woman with her painfully slow enunciation. Her English words rarely went beyond two syllables.

  "Ah!" said Sugarman. "But I've come to give you back your corkscrew."

  "Why, it's broken," said Mrs. Hyams, as she took it.

  "So it is, marm," he admitted readily. "But if you taink dat I ought to pay for de damage you're mistaken. If you lend me your cat"-here he began to make the argumentative mov
ement with his thumb, as though scooping out imaginary kosher cheese with it; "If you lend me your cat to kill my rat," his tones took on the strange Talmudic singsong-"and my rat instead kills your cat, then it is the fault of your cat and not the fault of my rat."

  Poor Mrs. Hyams could not meet this argument. If Mendel had been at home, he might have found a counter-analogy. As it was, Sugarman re-tucked Nehemiah under his arm and departed triumphant, almost consoled for the raid on his provisions by the thought of money saved. In the street he met the Shalotten Shammos.

  "Blessed art thou who comest," said the giant, in Hebrew; then relapsing into Yiddish he cried: "I've been wanting to see you. What did you mean by telling your wife you were sorry she had not a fourth uncle?"

  "Soorka knew what I meant," said Sugarman with a little croak of victory, "I have told her the story before. When the Almighty Shadchan was making marriages in Heaven, before we were yet born, the name of my wife was coupled with my own. The spirit of her eldest uncle hearing this flew up to the Angel who made the proclamation and said: 'Angel! thou art making a mistake. The man of whom thou makest mention will be of a lower status than this future niece of mine.' Said the Angel; 'Sh! It is all right. She will halt on one leg.' Came then the spirit of her second uncle and said: 'Angel, what blazonest thou? A niece of mine marry a man of such family?' Says the Angel: 'Sh! It is all right. She will be blind in one eye.' Came the spirit of her third uncle and said: 'Angel, hast thou not erred? Surely thou canst not mean to marry my future niece into such a humble family.' Said the Angel: 'Sh! It is all right. She will be deaf in one ear.' Now, do you see? If she had only had a fourth uncle, she would have been dumb into the bargain; there is only one mouth and my life would have been a happy one. Before I told Soorka that history she used to throw up her better breeding and finer family to me. Even in public she would shed my blood. Now she does not do it even in private."

  Sugarman the Shadchan winked, readjusted Nehemiah and went his way.

  CHAPTER XIV. THE HOPE OF THE FAMILY.

  It was a cold, bleak Sunday afternoon, and the Ansells were spending it as usual. Little Sarah was with Mrs. Simons, Rachel had gone to Victoria Park with a party of school-mates, the grandmother was asleep on the bed, covered with one of her son's old coats (for there was no fire in the grate), with her pious vade mecum in her hand; Esther had prepared her lessons and was reading a little brown book at Dutch Debby's, not being able to forget the London Journal sufficiently; Solomon had not prepared his and was playing "rounder" in the street, Isaac being permitted to "feed" the strikers, in return for a prospective occupation of his new bed; Moses Ansell was at Shool, listening to a Hesped or funeral oration at the German Synagogue, preached by Reb Shemuel over one of the lights of the Ghetto, prematurely gone out-no other than the consumptive Maggid, who had departed suddenly for a less fashionable place than Bournemouth. "He has fallen," said the Reb, "not laden with age, nor sighing for release because the grasshopper was a burden. But He who holds the keys said: 'Thou hast done thy share of the work; it is not thine to complete it. It was in thy heart to serve Me, from Me thou shalt receive thy reward.'"

  And all the perspiring crowd in the black-draped hall shook with grief, and thousands of working men followed the body, weeping, to the grave, walking all the way to the great cemetery in Bow.

  A slim, black-haired, handsome lad of about twelve, dressed in a neat black suit, with a shining white Eton collar, stumbled up the dark stairs of No. 1 Royal Street, with an air of unfamiliarity and disgust. At Dutch Debby's door he was delayed by a brief altercation with Bobby. He burst open the door of the Ansell apartment without knocking, though he took off his hat involuntarily as he entered Then he stood still with an air of disappointment. The room seemed empty.

  "What dost thou want, Esther?" murmured the grandmother rousing herself sleepily.

  The boy looked towards the bed with a start He could not make out what the grandmother was saying. It was four years since he had heard Yiddish spoken, and he had almost forgotten the existence of the dialect The room, too, seemed chill and alien.-so unspeakably poverty-stricken.

  "Oh, how are you, grandmother?" he said, going up to her and kissing her perfunctorily. "Where's everybody?"

  "Art thou Benjamin?" said the grandmother, her stern, wrinkled face shadowed with surprise and doubt.

  Benjamin guessed what she was asking and nodded.

  "But how richly they have dressed thee! Alas, I suppose they have taken away thy Judaism instead. For four whole years-is it not-thou hast been with English folk. Woe! Woe! If thy father had married a pious woman, she would have been living still and thou wouldst have been able to live happily in our midst instead of being exiled among strangers, who feed thy body and starve thy soul. If thy father had left me in Poland, I should have died happy and my old eyes would never have seen the sorrow. Unbutton thy waistcoat, let me see if thou wearest the 'four-corners' at least." Of this harangue, poured forth at the rate natural to thoughts running ever in the same groove, Benjamin understood but a word here and there. For four years he had read and read and read English books, absorbed himself in English composition, heard nothing but English spoken about him. Nay, he had even deliberately put the jargon out of his mind at the commencement as something degrading and humiliating. Now it struck vague notes of old outgrown associations but called up no definite images.

  "Where's Esther?" he said.

  "Esther," grumbled the grandmother, catching the name. "Esther is with Dutch Debby. She's always with her. Dutch Debby pretends to love her like a mother-and why? Because she wants to be her mother. She aims at marrying my Moses. But not for us. This time we shall marry the woman I select. No person like that who knows as much about Judaism as the cow of Sunday, nor like Mrs. Simons, who coddles our little Sarah because she thinks my Moses will have her. It's plain as the eye in her head what she wants. But the Widow Finkelstein is the woman we're going to marry. She is a true Jewess, shuts up her shop the moment Shabbos comes in, not works right into the Sabbath like so many, and goes to Shool even on Friday nights. Look how she brought up her Avromkely, who intoned the whole Portion of the Law and the Prophets in Shool before he was six years old. Besides she has money and has cast eyes upon him."

  The boy, seeing conversation was hopeless, murmured something inarticulate and ran down the stairs to find some traces of the intelligible members of his family. Happily Bobby, remembering their former altercation, and determining to have the last word, barred Benjamin's path with such pertinacity that Esther came out to quiet him and leapt into her brother's arms with a great cry of joy, dropping the book she held full on Bobby's nose.

  "O Benjy-Is it really you? Oh, I am so glad. I am so glad. I knew you would come some day. O Benjy! Bobby, you bad dog, this is Benjy, my brother. Debby, I'm going upstairs. Benjamin's come back. Benjamin's come back."

  "All right, dear," Debby called out. "Let me have a look at him soon. Send me in Bobby if you're going away." The words ended in a cough.

  Esther hurriedly drove in Bobby, and then half led, half dragged Benjamin upstairs. The grandmother had fallen asleep again and was snoring peacefully.

  "Speak low, Benjy," said Esther. "Grandmother's asleep."

  "All right, Esther. I don't want to wake her, I'm sure. I was up here just now, and couldn't make out a word she was jabbering."

  "I know. She's losing all her teeth, poor thing."