by Howard Fast
We are a village people, except for this city where I sit and write; and in that, as in a hundred things more, we are different from all other folk. For among other people in other lands, there are two stages and two stages only, master and slave. The masters, with those slaves they need to serve them, live in walled cities; the slaves, in mud and wattled huts, scarcely more noticeable than anthills. When the masters make war, they hire great armies of mercenaries, and then it may or may not be that the slaves in the mud huts in the countryside will have new masters; it makes little difference, for outside of the cities men are like beasts and less than beasts, half naked, scratching at the earth so that the masters may be fed, neither reading nor writing, not dreaming and not hoping, dying and giving birth… I say this not with pride because we are different, because we alone of all people do not live in walled cities; not with pride—how could I have pride and say the benediction, “We were slaves in Egypt”? Not with pride, but to make you who read and are not Jews understand how it is with us who are Jews—and even then there is so much I cannot explain!
I can only tell the tale of my glorious brothers and hope that something will come out of the telling. I can tell you that in Modin, then, there were two lines of ’dobe houses, and the street ran between them, from the house at one end of Ruben, the smith—though precious little iron to work came his way—to the house of Melek, the Mohel, the father of nine children which was at the other end. And in between were twenty-odd houses on either side of the street, all sunny and old and venerable in the wintertime, but in spring and summer covered over with a wonder of honeysuckle and roses, with hot bread steaming on the sills and fresh-made cheeses hanging by the doors, and then, in the fall, the houses were festooned with garlands of dried fruits, like maidens in necklaces going to dance. The streets were full of chickens and goats and children, too—but that changed, as you will see—and the nursing mothers would sit on the doorsteps, gossiping, while their bread cooled and while their men were out in the fields.
We were farmers in Modin, as we are farmers in a thousand other villages up and down the land, and our village lay like a nugget in the center of our vineyards, our wheat fields, our fig trees, and our barley patches.
In all the world there is no other land as rich as ours, but in all the world there are no other people who till their fields as free men. Whereupon, it is not strange that, talking of many things in Modin, we talked mostly of freedom.
***
My father was Mattathias ben John ben Simon, the Adon; always he had been the Adon. In some villages, one man is the Adon one year, and the next year another. But as long as people cared to recall, my father had been Adon. Even when he spent much of the year at the city, serving the Temple—for as I said we are Kohanim, out of the tribe of Levi and the blood of Aaron—he was still Adon at Modin.
We knew that. He was our father, but he was the Adon; and when our mother died, when I was twelve years old, he became less our father and more and more the Adon. It was not long after that, I remember, that he made one of his journeys to the Temple, taking the five of us with him for the first time. I have no memory of the Temple or of the city or of the city people before that; yet somehow I remember every detail of that trip—yes, and of the last trip the six of us made to the Temple some years later.
He woke us while it was yet dark, before the dawn, rooting us out of our pallets while we whimpered and protested and begged for more sleep—a tall, unsmiling, somber-eyed man, his red beard shot through with gray and here and there a streak of pure white, his arms frightening in their massive strength. He was fully dressed, in his long white trousers, his white waistcoat and his beautiful pale blue jacket, belted in with a silk girdle, his wide sleeves folded back. His great shock of hair fell behind almost to his waist, and his beard, uncropped, swept across his bosom like a splendid fan. Never in my life have I known or seen a man like my father, Mattathias; my earliest pictures of God substituted him. Mattathias was Adon, God was Adonai; I grouped them together; and sometimes, may He forgive me, I still do.
Sleepy, excited, and terrified with the prospect of our trip, we crawled into our clothes, went out into the cold to wash, came back and gulped the hot gruel John had prepared, combed our hair, wrapped ourselves in our long, striped woolen cloaks even as the Adon did with his, five stunted figures striped in black and one giant, and followed him out. The village was just waking when the Adon marched majestically by, and one by one we followed him, John first, then I, Simon; then Judas, then Eleazar, and finally the small, already gasping figure of Jonathan—only eight years old.
And that way, for thirteen long, cruel, bitter miles, up hill and down dale, I and my brothers kept pace with the Adon to the gates of the holy city, the one city we call our own—Jerusalem.
***
To a Jew, there is a time when he first sees Jerusalem—and how shall I explain that? Other peoples live in cities and look down on the countryside, but from the countryside we look at our city. Then, even then, you understand, we were a conquered people—not conquered the way we were later, not on the basis that Jew and all that Jew means must be wiped from the face of the earth forever, but under the heel of the Macedonian, subject and abject, allowed to live in peace as long as we did not mar the peace. They didn’t want us for slaves; there is a saying among the Gentiles, “Take a Jew for a slave and he’ll be your master yet,” but they wanted our wealth, the glass we make in our furnaces on the shores of the Dead Sea, our Lebanon suede, soft as butter yet enduring, our cedarwood, so fragrant and red, our great cisterns of olive oil, our dyes, our paper and our parchment, our finely woven linen, and the endless crops, so fruitful that, even on the seventh year when all the land lies fallow, no one hungers. So they taxed us and milked us and robbed us, but left us, at least for the time being, an illusion of tranquillity and liberty.
That in the villages. In the city it was something else, and that time, still a boy, walking with my brothers behind the Adon, I saw the first evidence of what men call Hellenization. The city was like a white jewel—or so it seems now, so long after—proud and high and lovely, its streets flushed by water from the great aqueducts that had brought water to our Temple from a time before any Roman dreamed of such a thing, its towers high and proud, its Temple the grand crown of the rest. But its people were a new thing, clean-shaven, bare-legged, as the Greeks go, many of them naked to the waist, watching us, sneering at us.
“Are they Jews?” I asked my father.
“They were Jews,” he said, his voice ringing loud enough for anyone within a score of paces to hear. “They are scum today!”
And then we strode on, the Adon with the same, steady measured pace he had kept from Modin, but we children, ready to drop with weariness, climbing higher and higher, past the lovely white buildings of the city—past the Greek stadium where naked Jews threw the discus and ran races; past the cafés, the restaurants, the hasheesh houses; through the exciting, bewildering turmoil of painted women with one breast hanging bare, Bedouin merchants, pimps and prostitutes, desert Arabs, Greeks, Syrians, Egyptians, Phoenicians; and everywhere, of course, the arrogant, swaggering mercenaries, the Macedonian troops—all colors, all races, these mercenaries, united only by the one and simple fact that their business was murder, for which they were paid and armored and fed.
To us children, it was one gorgeous tapestry; only later the parts sorted out. To us, there was only one recognizable factor, the mercenaries. Those we knew and understood. The rest was the bewildering complex of what had happened, over a generation, to Jews who wanted to be Greeks and who turned their sacred city into a whorehouse.
And finally, climbing on and on, we came to the Temple, and there we paused while the Adon said the blessings. Levites in white robes, bearded as the Adon was bearded, bowed to him and drew back the mighty wooden doors.
“And thou shalt love the Lord thy God,” the Adon said, in his deep, r
inging voice; “for we were slaves in Egypt, and He brought us out of slavery to build a Temple to His everlasting glory.”
***
It is not of childhood that I desire to tell you, dipping back as I do into the past, here and there, almost aimlessly, so that I may have enough eventually for me to understand—and perhaps you too—why a Jew is a Jew, blessed or cursed, as you look at it, but a Jew; not of childhood, which is forever without a sense of time or the passing of time, but of the brief manhood of my glorious brothers, so terribly brief. But the one fathers the other, as we say. I went to the Temple as a child, and I went again and again—and finally, the last time, as a man.
If there’s a mark of manhood, it’s the end of illusion. Then the city was a whore, and no magic pile of white stone. Then the Temple was a building and no more, and none too well built at that. Then the Levites, in their white robes, were dirty, cowardly scum and not the anointed messengers of God. You pay a price for manhood; you give up a world and get another, and then you have to weigh what it’s worth—article by article, measure by measure.
It was only Ruth that remained untouched. What I felt for her and about her when I was twelve I felt when I was eighteen and when I was twenty-eight. I said we went to the Temple again and again, and finally a last time, but there were things that happened in between. We grew; we changed; the juice ran in us; we killed a man, we boys; and there was Ruth. She was the daughter of Moses ben Aaron ben Simon, a small, plain hard-working Jew who lived next door to us and who was a vintner, with nineteen rows of vines on the hillside. But he was a philosopher of sorts, as all vintners are; and in a way we are a nation of vintners, the people of the sorek, as the Egyptians call us out of their own, slave-infested ignorance, envying what they have not. The sorek is a black grape as big as a plum, fleshy and bursting with juice. In the spring, it gives us tirosh, in the summer the heady yayin, and through the winter shikar, the deep red brew that makes an old man young and a foolish man wise. A Roman or a Greek will say “wine,” but what do they know of the precious Keruhim, liquid gold, or Phrygia, as red as blood, or rose-colored Sharon, or yayin Kushi, clear and sweet as water, or aluntit or inomilin or roglit? There were thirty-two brews that Moses ben Aaron made in our little village of Modin, in his two deep stone cisterns, and when it was especially good, he would send Ruth with a beaker for the Adon. She would stand there by the table, her mouth open, her blue eyes anxious and troubled as the Adon poured himself the first cupful.
We shared her anxiety, the five of us; we would stand still and quiet, watching her and watching the Adon. Wine is the second blood of Israel, as we say often enough, a sacred drink whether you taste it at the seder or bathe in it, as Lebel the weaver was wont to do. The Adon never spared ceremony if ceremony was indicated.
“From your father, Moses ben Aaron ben Simon ben Enoch?” He prided himself on having at least seven generations of everyone in Modin at his fingertips.
Ruth would nod; later, many years later, she told me what terror and awe the Adon inspired in her.
“A new vintage?”
If it happened to be a blend or a spicing or a honey mixture or a souring, Ruth would wince with shame and regret.
“For the Adon’s judgment and pleasure,” she would usually say, forcing each word, casting furtive glances at the door, but beautiful, how beautiful, with her red hair and her wonderful coppery skin, pulling the heart out of me and making me think and dream of the day when I would defy the Adon and do her honor and her will.
Then the Adon would wash his crystal cup, which had belonged to his grandfather and his grandfather’s grandfather. He would pour a measure. He would scan it in the light. He would say the blessing, “…boray pri hagofin!” Then he would drain it down. Then he would render the verdict.
“My felicitations to Moses ben Aaron ben Simon ben Enoch ben Levi”—an extra generation if it pleased him particularly. “A noble wine, a gracious wine. You may tell your father that the table of the blessed King David ben Jesse served no better.” And then Ruth would flee.
But she was ours. She wept with our hurts. She suffered with our sorrows. When they overcame their fear of the Adon, she and her mother cooked for us and cleaned for us and sewed for us—even as other women in Modin did. But we are a people blessed with fruitfulness; only Moses ben Aaron was cursed with a single child and that a girl, so for Ruth’s mother the five sons of Mattathias became a recompense. But on my part, it was no curse, not of that sort. I loved her, and I never loved another woman.
***
So we lived in the endlessness of our childhood under the iron grip, the iron hand, and the unbending dignity of the old man, the Adon, our father—until suddenly childhood ended and was no more. When we did wrong, we were punished, as no other children in the village were. And, believe me, the Adon knew how to punish. There was a time when Judas was nine years old—already possessed of that unbelievable beauty and dignity that stayed with him all his life, already so different from me, Simon, already adored when he walked through the village, already offered the choicest of tidbits, sweets, cakes—and that time he was playing with my father’s crystal wineglass, which he dropped and smashed.
Only he and I were in the house when it happened; the Adon was out, plowing with John; Jonathan and Eleazar were somewhere else, I don’t remember where—and on the hearthstone were the slivers of that wonderful and ancient glass, brought back from Babylon when our people returned from the exile there. Never will I forget the abysmal terror on the face Judas turned up to me.
“Simon—Simon,” he said. “Simon, he’ll kill me! Simon, what will I do—what will I do?”
“Stop crying!”
He couldn’t stop crying; he wept as if his heart would break, and when the Adon came, I told him, calmly enough, that I had done it. Just once, the Adon struck me, and then for the first time I realized the mighty force in the arm of the old man, the blow hurling me across the room and against the wall. And Judas, who had to let it out of him somehow, told Ruth—who came to me as I lay in the sun in the courtyard behind the house, bent over me and kissed me and whispered, “Oh, good, good Simon ben Mattathias, oh, good and sweet Simon—” I don’t know why I write of that, for Judas was a child and I was already a man, as we reckon manhood, although close enough to Judas in age; and in any case, our childhood was not made of such things, but of a slower and sweeter pace.
We lay on the hillsides, watching the goats and counting the fleecy clouds in the sky; we fished in the cold streams; we once hiked to the great trunk road that passed north to south, and lay there in the underbrush as twenty thousand Macedonian mercenaries marched by, a proud show in their shining armor, on their way to fight the Egyptians; and we crouched on overhanging cliffs and pelted them with stones as they slunk back, turned away by the quiet word of Rome. And once, for a whole morning, we five of us traveled westward until from a high rock we saw the endless, shining expanse of the sea, the blue and gentle Mediterranean, with one white sail to mar its fine surface. It was Jonathan who said then:
“I’ll go that way, westward, someday—”
“How?”
“With a ship,” he said.
“Have you ever heard of a Jewish ship?”
“The Phoenicians have ships,” Jonathan said thoughtfully, “and so have the Greeks. We can take them.”
Three of us laughed, but Judas didn’t laugh. He stood there staring at the sea, the first fair shadow of a beard on his clean-cut face, something in his eyes that I had never seen there before.
Jonathan was smaller than the rest of us, even when he reached his full growth, wiry and fast as a gazelle. He ran down a wild pig once, threw it nimbly and cut its throat. Judas, in a rage, struck his arm a blow that paralyzed it, so that his knife fell to the ground. When Jonathan would have leaped at Judas, I caught them both and hurled them apart.
“He kills for
the sake of killing!” Judas cried. “Even when the meat is unclean and no good to anyone.”
“You don’t strike your brother,” I said slowly and deliberately.
But I tear these things out of a past that was like a golden time. We were five of us always together, the five sons of Mattathias the Adon, growing like pups first, then together working, building, playing, laughing, weeping sometimes, browning under the golden sun of the land.
***
And then a man was slain by our hand and it was over—that long sun-drenched childhood in the old, old land of Israel, the land of milk and honey, of vineyards and fig trees, of wheat fields and barley fields, the land where our plows turn up ever and again the bones of another Jew, the land of valleys where the topsoil has no bottom, and of terraced hillsides that make it a more wonderful garden than ever the famous hanging gardens of Babylon were. Our play was over, our running wild and thoughtless, our games in the village street, our hours lying in the sweet grass, our sullen times with Lebel the teacher, his growling, “Would you be like a heathen, so that the holy word of God drummed on your ears, but you could never see it with your two eyes?” We were done with our wandering in the pine forests, our caves in the snow, our traps for the wild partridge.
We shed blood and it was over, that time that has no beginning, and the brief, glorious manhood of my brothers began. Yet that is what I set out to tell, to put down here, to make both a tale and an answer to the riddle of my people, so that even a Roman may understand us, who of all the world’s folks live without walls to guard us, without mercenaries to fight for us, and with no God that man can lay eyes on.
There was a warden of all the hill country from Modin to Bethel to Jericho, and three hundred and twenty villages were his to bleed and suck and squeeze. His name was Pericles, and he had a little Greek in him as well as other things. Those are the worst Hellenes, those who have just a trace of it or none at all, for it becomes a passion with them to become more Greek than the Greeks. Along with other things, Pericles had a little Jew in him, and for that reason, to purge himself over and over, his hand was more heavy than it had to be—which was, indeed, heavy enough.
