Children of the Ghetto

by Израэль Зангвилл

  "Not I!" said David harshly. "But look to Hannah. She has fainted."

  "No, I am all right," said Hannah wearily, opening the eyes she had closed. "Do not make so certain, father. Look at your books again. Perhaps they do make an exception in such a case."

  The Reb shook his head hopelessly.

  "Do not expect that," he said. "Believe me, my Hannah, if there were a gleam of hope I would not hide it from you. Be a good girl, dear, and bear your trouble like a true Jewish maiden. Have faith in God, my child. He doeth all things for the best. Come now-rouse yourself. Tell David you will always be a friend, and that your father will love him as though he were indeed his son." He moved towards her and touched her tenderly. He felt a violent spasm traversing her bosom.

  "I can't, father," she cried in a choking voice. "I can't. Don't ask me."

  David leaned against the manuscript-littered table in stony silence. The stern granite faces of the old continental Rabbis seemed to frown down on him from the walls and he returned the frown with interest. His heart was full of bitterness, contempt, revolt. What a pack of knavish bigots they must all have been! Reb Shemuel bent down and took his daughter's head in his trembling palms. The eyes were closed again, the chest heaved painfully with silent sobs.

  "Do you love him so much, Hannah?" whispered the old man.

  Her sobs answered, growing loud at last.

  "But you love your religion more, my child?" he murmured anxiously. "That will bring you peace."

  Her sobs gave him no assurance. Presently the contagion of sobbing took him too.

  "O God! God!" he moaned. "What sin have I committed; that thou shouldst punish my child thus?"

  "Don't blame God!" burst forth David at last. "It's your own foolish bigotry. Is it not enough your daughter doesn't ask to marry a Christian? Be thankful, old man, for that and put away all this antiquated superstition. We're living in the nineteenth century."

  "And what if we are!" said Reb Shemuel, blazing up in turn. "The Torah is eternal. Thank God for your youth, and your health and strength, and do not blaspheme Him because you cannot have all the desire of your heart or the inclination of your eyes."

  "The desire of my heart," retorted David. "Do you imagine I am only thinking of my own suffering? Look at your daughter-think of what you are doing to her and beware before it is too late."

  "Is it in my hand to do or to forbear?" asked the old man, "It is the Torah. Am I responsible for that?"

  "Yes," said David, out of mere revolt. Then, seeking to justify himself, his face lit up with sudden inspiration. "Who need ever know? The Maggid is dead. Old Hyams has gone to America. So Hannah has told me. It's a thousand to one Leah's people never heard of the Law of Leviticus. If they had, it's another thousand to one against their putting two and two together. It requires a Talmudist like you to even dream of reckoning Hannah as an ordinary divorced woman. If they did, it's a third thousand to one against their telling anybody. There is no need for you to perform the ceremony yourself. Let her be married by some other minister-by the Chief Rabbi himself, and to make assurance doubly sure I'll not mention that I'm a Cohen" The words poured forth like a torrent, overwhelming the Reb for a moment. Hannah leaped up with a hysterical cry of joy.

  "Yes, yes, father. It will be all right, after all. Nobody knows. Oh, thank God! thank God!"

  There was a moment of tense silence. Then the old man's voice rose slowly and painfully.

  "Thank God!" he repeated. "Do you dare mention the Name even when you propose to profane it? Do you ask me, your father, Reb Shemuel, to consent to such a profanation of the Name?"

  "And why not?" said David angrily. "Whom else has a daughter the right to ask mercy from, if not her father?"

  "God have mercy on me!" groaned the old Reb, covering his face with his hands.

  "Come, come!" said David impatiently. "Be sensible. It's nothing unworthy of you at all. Hannah was never really married, so cannot be really divorced. We only ask you to obey the spirit of the Torah instead of the letter."

  The old man shook his head, unwavering. His cheeks were white and wet, but his expression was stern and solemn.

  "Just think!" went on David passionately. "What am I better than another Jew-than yourself for instance-that I shouldn't marry a divorced woman?"

  "It is the Law. You are a Cohen-a priest."

  "A priest, Ha! Ha! Ha!" laughed David bitterly. "A priest-in the nineteenth century! When the Temple has been destroyed these two thousand years."

  "It will be rebuilt, please God," said Reb Shemuel. "We must be ready for it."

  "Oh yes, I'll be ready-Ha! Ha! Ha! A priest! Holy unto the Lord-I a priest! Ha! Ha! Ha! Do you know what my holiness consists in? In eating tripha meat, and going to Shool a few times a year! And I, I am too holy to marry your daughter. Oh, it is rich!" He ended in uncontrollable mirth, slapping his knee in ghastly enjoyment.

  His laughter rang terrible. Reb Shemuel trembled from head to foot. Hannah's cheek was drawn and white. She seemed overwrought beyond endurance. There followed a silence only less terrible than David's laughter.

  "A Cohen," burst forth David again. "A holy Cohen up to date. Do you know what the boys say about us priests when we're blessing you common people? They say that if you look on us once during that sacred function, you'll get blind, and if you look on us a second time you'll die. A nice reverent joke that, eh! Ha! Ha! Ha! You're blind already, Reb Shemuel. Beware you don't look at me again or I'll commence to bless you. Ha! Ha! Ha!"

  Again the terrible silence.

  "Ah well," David resumed, his bitterness welling forth in irony. "And so the first sacrifice the priest is called upon to make is that of your daughter. But I won't, Reb Shemuel, mark my words; I won't, not till she offers her own throat to the knife. If she and I are parted, on you and you alone the guilt must rest. You will have to perform the sacrifice."

  "What God wishes me to do I will do," said the old man in a broken voice. "What is it to that which our ancestors suffered for the glory of the Name?"

  "Yes, but it seems you suffer by proxy," retorted David, savagely.

  "My God! Do you think I would not die to make Hannah happy?" faltered the old man. "But God has laid the burden on her-and I can only help her to bear it. And now, sir, I must beg you to go. You do but distress my child."

  "What say you, Hannah? Do you wish me to go?"

  "Yes-What is the use-now?" breathed Hannah through white quivering lips.

  "My child!" said the old man pitifully, while he strained her to his breast.

  "All right!" said David in strange harsh tones, scarcely recognizable as his. "I see you are your father's daughter."

  He took his hat and turned his back upon the tragic embrace.

  "David!" She called his name in an agonized hoarse voice. She held her arms towards him. He did not turn round.

  "David!" Her voice rose to a shriek. "You will not leave me?"

  He faced her exultant.

  "Ah, you will come with me. You will be my wife."

  "No-no-not now, not now. I cannot answer you now. Let me think-good-bye, dearest, good-bye." She burst out weeping. David took her in his arms and kissed her passionately. Then he went out hurriedly.

  Hannah wept on-her father holding her hand in piteous silence.

  "Oh, it is cruel, your religion," she sobbed. "Cruel, cruel!"

  "Hannah! Shemuel! Where are you?" suddenly came the excited voice of Simcha from the passage. "Come and look at the lovely fowls I've bought-and such Metsiahs. They're worth double. Oh, what a beautiful Yomtov we shall have!"

  CHAPTER XXV. SEDER NIGHT.

  "Prosaic miles of street stretch all around,

  Astir with restless, hurried life, and spanned

  By arches that with thund'rous trains resound,

  And throbbing wires that galvanize the land;

  Gin palaces in tawdry splendor stand;

  The newsboys shriek of mangled bodies found;

  The last burlesque is
playing in the Strand-

  In modern prose, all poetry seems drowned.

  Yet in ten thousand homes this April night

  An ancient people celebrates its birth

  To Freedom, with a reverential mirth,

  With customs quaint and many a hoary rite,

  Waiting until, its tarnished glories bright,

  Its God shall be the God of all the Earth."

  To an imaginative child like Esther, Seder night was a charmed time. The strange symbolic dishes-the bitter herbs and the sweet mixture of apples, almonds, spices and wine, the roasted bone and the lamb, the salt water and the four cups of raisin wine, the great round unleavened cakes, with their mottled surfaces, some specially thick and sacred, the special Hebrew melodies and verses with their jingle of rhymes and assonances, the quaint ceremonial with its striking moments, as when the finger was dipped in the wine and the drops sprinkled over the shoulder in repudiation of the ten plagues of Egypt cabalistically magnified to two hundred and fifty; all this penetrated deep into her consciousness and made the recurrence of every Passover coincide with a rush of pleasant anticipations and a sense of the special privilege of being born a happy Jewish child. Vaguely, indeed, did she co-ordinate the celebration with the history enshrined in it or with the prospective history of her race. It was like a tale out of the fairy-books, this miraculous deliverance of her forefathers in the dim haze of antiquity; true enough but not more definitely realized on that account. And yet not easily dissoluble links were being forged with her race, which has anticipated Positivism in vitalizing history by making it religion.

  The Matzoth that Esther ate were not dainty-they were coarse, of the quality called "seconds," for even the unleavened bread of charity is not necessarily delicate eating-but few things melted sweeter on the palate than a segment of a Matso dipped in cheap raisin wine: the unconventionally of the food made life less common, more picturesque. Simple Ghetto children into whose existence the ceaseless round of fast and feast, of prohibited and enjoyed pleasures, of varying species of food, brought change and relief! Imprisoned in the area of a few narrow streets, unlovely and sombre, muddy and ill-smelling, immured in dreary houses and surrounded with mean and depressing sights and sounds, the spirit of childhood took radiance and color from its own inner light and the alchemy of youth could still transmute its lead to gold. No little princess in the courts of fairyland could feel a fresher interest and pleasure in life than Esther sitting at the Seder table, where her father-no longer a slave in Egypt-leaned royally upon two chairs supplied with pillows as the Din prescribes. Not even the monarch's prime minister could have had a meaner opinion of Pharaoh than Moses Ansell in this symbolically sybaritic attitude. A live dog is better than a dead lion, as a great teacher in Israel had said. How much better then a live lion than a dead dog? Pharaoh, for all his purple and fine linen and his treasure cities, was at the bottom of the Red Sea, smitten with two hundred and fifty plagues, and even if, as tradition asserted, he had been made to live on and on to be King of Nineveh, and to give ear to the warnings of Jonah, prophet and whale-explorer, even so he was but dust and ashes for other sinners to cover themselves withal; but he, Moses Ansell, was the honored master of his household, enjoying a foretaste of the lollings of the righteous in Paradise; nay, more, dispensing hospitality to the poor and the hungry. Little fleas have lesser fleas, and Moses Ansell had never fallen so low but that, on this night of nights when the slave sits with the master on equal terms, he could manage to entertain a Passover guest, usually some newly-arrived Greener, or some nondescript waif and stray returned to Judaism for the occasion and accepting a seat at the board in that spirit of camaraderie which is one of the most delightful features of the Jewish pauper. Seder was a ceremonial to be taken in none too solemn and sober a spirit, and there was an abundance of unreproved giggling throughout from the little ones, especially in those happy days when mother was alive and tried to steal the Afikuman or Matso specially laid aside for the final morsel, only to be surrendered to father when he promised to grant her whatever she wished. Alas! it is to be feared Mrs. Ansell's wishes did not soar high. There was more giggling when the youngest talking son-it was poor Benjamin in Esther's earliest recollections-opened the ball by inquiring in a peculiarly pitched incantation and with an air of blank ignorance why this night differed from all other nights-in view of the various astonishing peculiarities of food and behavior (enumerated in detail) visible to his vision. To which Moses and the Bube and the rest of the company (including the questioner) invariably replied in corresponding sing-song: "Slaves have we been in Egypt," proceeding to recount at great length, stopping for refreshment in the middle, the never-cloying tale of the great deliverance, with irrelevant digressions concerning Haman and Daniel and the wise men of Bona Berak, the whole of this most ancient of the world's extant domestic rituals terminating with an allegorical ballad like the "house that Jack built," concerning a kid that was eaten by a cat, which was bitten by a dog, which was beaten by a stick, which was burned by a fire, which was quenched by some water, which was drunk by an ox, which was slaughtered by a slaughterer, who was slain by the Angel of Death, who was slain by the Holy One, blessed be He.

  In wealthy houses this Hagadah was read from manuscripts with rich illuminations-the one development of pictorial art among the Jews-but the Ansells had wretchedly-printed little books containing quaint but unintentionally comic wood-cuts, pre-Raphaelite in perspective and ludicrous in draughtsmanship, depicting the Miracles of the Redemption, Moses burying the Egyptian, and sundry other passages of the text. In one a king was praying in the Temple to an exploding bomb intended to represent the Shechinah or divine glory. In another, Sarah attired in a matronly cap and a fashionable jacket and skirt, was standing behind the door of the tent, a solid detached villa on the brink of a lake, whereon ships and gondolas floated, what time Abraham welcomed the three celestial messengers, unobtrusively disguised with heavy pinions. What delight as the quaking of each of the four cups of wine loomed in sight, what disappointment and mutual bantering when the cup had merely to be raised in the hand, what chaff of the greedy Solomon who was careful not to throw away a drop during the digital manoeuvres when the wine must be jerked from the cup at the mention of each plague. And what a solemn moment was that when the tallest goblet was filled to the brim for the delectation of the prophet Elijah and the door thrown open for his entry. Could one almost hear the rustling of the prophet's spirit through the room? And what though the level of the wine subsided not a barley-corn? Elijah, though there was no difficulty in his being in all parts of the world simultaneously, could hardly compass the greater miracle of emptying so many million goblets. Historians have traced this custom of opening the door to the necessity of asking the world to look in and see for itself that no blood of Christian child figured in the ceremonial-and for once science has illumined naive superstition with a tragic glow more poetic still. For the London Ghetto persecution had dwindled to an occasional bellowing through the keyhole, as the local rowdies heard the unaccustomed melodies trolled forth from jocund lungs and then the singers would stop for a moment, startled, and some one would say: "Oh, it's only a Christian rough," and take up the thread of song.

  And then, when the Ajikuman had been eaten and the last cup of wine drunk, and it was time to go to bed, what a sweet sense of sanctity and security still reigned. No need to say your prayers to-night, beseeching the guardian of Israel, who neither slumbereth nor sleepeth, to watch over you and chase away the evil spirits; the angels are with you-Gabriel on your right and Raphael on your left, and Michael behind you. All about the Ghetto the light of the Passover rested, transfiguring the dreary rooms and illumining the gray lives.

  Dutch Debby sat beside Mrs. Simons at the table of that good soul's married daughter; the same who had suckled little Sarah. Esther's frequent eulogiums had secured the poor lonely narrow-chested seamstress this enormous concession and privilege. Bobby squatted on the mat in the passage ready to
challenge Elijah. At this table there were two pieces of fried fish sent to Mrs. Simons by Esther Ansell. They represented the greatest revenge of Esther's life, and she felt remorseful towards Malka, remembering to whose gold she owed this proud moment. She made up her mind to write her a letter of apology in her best hand.

  At the Belcovitches' the ceremonial was long, for the master of it insisted on translating the Hebrew into jargon, phrase by phrase; but no one found it tedious, especially after supper. Pesach was there, hand in hand with Fanny, their wedding very near now; and Becky lolled royally in all her glory, aggressive of ringlet, insolently unattached, a conscious beacon of bedazzlement to the pauper Pollack we last met at Reb Shemuel's Sabbath table, and there, too, was Chayah, she of the ill-matched legs. Be sure that Malka had returned the clothes-brush, and was throned in complacent majesty at Milly's table; and that Sugarman the Shadchan forgave his monocular consort her lack of a fourth uncle; while Joseph Strelitski, dreamer of dreams, rich with commissions from "Passover" cigars, brooded on the Great Exodus. Nor could the Shalotten Shammos be other than beaming, ordering the complex ceremonial with none to contradict; nor Karlkammer be otherwise than in the seven hundred and seventy-seventh heaven, which, calculated by Gematriyah, can easily be reduced to the seventh.

  Shosshi Shmendrik did not fail to explain the deliverance to the ex-widow Finkelstein, nor Guedalyah, the greengrocer, omit to hold his annual revel at the head of half a hundred merry "pauper-aliens." Christian roughs bawled derisively in the street, especially when doors were opened for Elijah; but hard words break no bones, and the Ghetto was uplifted above insult.

  Melchitsedek Pinchas was the Passover guest at Reb Shemuel's table, for the reek of his Sabbath cigar had not penetrated to the old man's nostrils. It was a great night for Pinchas; wrought up to fervid nationalistic aspirations by the memory of the Egyptian deliverance, which he yet regarded as mythical in its details. It was a terrible night for Hannah, sitting opposite to him under the fire of his poetic regard. She was pale and rigid, moving and speaking mechanically. Her father glanced towards her every now and again, compassionately, but with trust that the worst was over. Her mother realized the crisis much less keenly than he, not having been in the heart of the storm. She had never even seen her intended son-in-law except through the lens of a camera. She was sorry-that was all. Now that Hannah had broken the ice, and encouraged one young man, there was hope for the others.