sound of his voice seemed to light up the darkness for a moment.
‘Yes’, answered the schoolboy. ‘It’s all right!’
‘Hush! They might hear you’, said the owner of the cellar, catching
each of them by the arm and pulling them down.
The new-comers placed themselves by the wall, while one of them was
rubbing his forehead with his hand.
‘What is the matter?’ asked the schoolboy in a whisper.
‘It is blood.’
Then they grew silent. The injured man applied a handkerchief to
his wound, and became quiet. There followed again a thick silence,
untroubled by time. Again a sleepless breathing!
On the top, underneath the ceiling, a very faint whiteness appeared.
The schoolboy was asleep, but the other four raised their heads and
looked up. They looked long, for about half an hour, so that their
muscles were aching through the protracted craning of their necks. At
last it became clear that it was a tiny little window through which
dawn peeped in.
Then hasty, frightened steps were heard, and there appeared a tall,
coatless man, followed by a woman with a baby in her arms. The dawn was
advancing, and one could read the expression of wild fear that stamped
itself upon their faces.
‘This way! This way!’ whispered the man.
‘They are running after us, they are looking out for us’, said
the woman. Her shoes were put on her bare feet, and her young body
displayed strange, white, malignant spots, reminding one of a corpse.
‘They won’t find us; but, for God’s sake, be quiet!’
‘They are close by in the courtyard. Oh! be quiet, be quiet....’
The wounded man got hold of the merchant and the owner by the hand,
while the merchant seized the man who had no coat. There they stood,
forming a live chain, looking on at the mother with her baby.
All of a sudden there broke out a strange though familiar sound, so
close and doomful. What doom it foreboded they felt at once, but their
brains were loath to believe it.
The sound was repeated. It was the cry of the infant. The merchant made
a kindly face and said: ‘Baby is crying....’
‘Lull him, my dear’, said he, rushing to the mother. ‘You will cause
the death of us all.’
Everybody’s chest and throat gasped with faintness. The mother marched
up and down the cellar lulling and coaxing.
‘You must not cry; sleep, my golden one ... It is I, your mother ... my
heart....’
But the child cried on obstinately, wildly. There must have been
something in the mother’s face that was not calculated to produce a
tranquilizing effect.
And now, in this warm and strange underground atmosphere, the woman’s
brain wrenched out a wild, mad, idea. It seemed to her that she had
read it in the eyes, in the suffering silence of these unknown people.
And these unhappy, frightened men understood that she was thinking of
them. They understood it by the unutterably mournful tenderness with
which she chanted, while drinking in the infant’s eyes with her own.
‘He will soon fall asleep. I know. It is always like that; he cries for
a moment, then he falls asleep at once. He is a very quiet boy.’ She
addressed the tall man with a painful, insinuating smile. From outside
there broke in a distant noise. Then came a thud, and a crack, shaking
the air.
‘They are searching’, whispered the schoolboy.
But the infant went on crying hopelessly.
‘He will undo us all’, blurted out the tall man.
‘I shall not give him away ... no, never!’ ejaculated the distracted
mother.
‘O God’, whispered the merchant, and covered his face with his hands.
His hair was unkempt after a sleepless night. The tall man stared at
the infant with fixed, protruding eyes....
‘I don’t know you’, the woman uttered, low and crossly, on catching
that fixed look. ‘Who are you? What do you want of me?’
She rushed to the other men, but everybody drew back from her with fear.
The infant was crying on, piercing the brain with its shouting.
‘Give it to me’, said the merchant, his right eyebrow trembling.
‘Children like me.’
All of a sudden it grew dark in the cellar; somebody had approached
the little window and was listening. At this shadow, breaking in so
suddenly, they all grew quiet. They felt that it was coming, it was
near, and that not another second must be lost.
The mother turned round. She stood up on her toes, and with high,
uplifted arms she handed over her child to the merchant. It seemed to
her that by this gesture she was committing a terrible crime ... that
hissing voices were cursing her, rejecting her from heaven for ever and
ever....
Strange to say, finding itself in the thick, clumsy, but loving hands
of the merchant, the child grew silent.
But the mother interpreted this silence differently. In sight of
everybody the woman grew grey in a single moment, as if they had
poured some acid over her hair. And as soon as the child’s cry died
away, there resounded another cry, more awful, more shattering and
heart-rending.
The mother rose up on her toes; and grey, terrible, like the goddess of
justice herself, she howled in a desperate, inhuman voice that brought
destruction with it.... Nobody had expected that sudden madness. The
schoolboy fell in a swoon.
* * * * *
Afterwards, the newspapers reported details of the killing of six men
and an infant by the mob; for none had dared to touch the mad old woman
of twenty-six.
OSSIP DYMOV, 1906.
UNDER THE ROMANOFFS
THE plaything of a heartless bureaucracy, the natural prey of all the
savage elements of society, loaded with fetters in one place, and in
another driven out like some wild beast, the Russian Jew finds that
for him, at least, life is composed of little else than bitterness,
suffering, and degradation.
For magnitude and gloom the tragical situation has no parallel in
history. Some six millions of human beings are unceasingly subjected
to a State-directed torture which is both destructive and demoralizing,
and constitutes at once a crime against humanity and an international
perplexity.
LUCIEN WOLF, 1912.
* * * * *
EACH crime that wakes in man the beast,
Is visited upon his kind.
The lust of mobs, the greed of priest,
The tyranny of kings, combined
To root his seed from earth again,
His record is one cry of pain.
*****
Coward? Not he, who faces death,
Who singly against worlds has fought,
For what? A name he may not breathe,
For liberty of prayer and thought.
EMMA LAZARUS, 1882.
‘SOLDIERS OF NICHOLAS’[34]
THERE was one thing the Gentiles might do to me worse than burning or
rending. It was what was done to unprotected Jewish children who fell
into the hands of priests or nuns. They might baptize me. That would
be worse than death by torture. Every Jewish child had that feeling.
There were stories by the dozen of Jewish boys who were kidnapped by
the Czar’s agents and brought up in Gentile families till they were old
enough to enter the army, where they served until forty years of age;
and all those years the priests tried, by bribes and daily tortures,
to force them to accept baptism, but in vain. This was the time of
Nicholas I.
Some of these ‘soldiers of Nicholas’, as they were called, were taken
as little boys of seven or eight――snatched from their mothers’ laps.
They were carried to distant villages, where their friends could never
trace them, and turned over to some dirty, brutal peasant, who used
them like slaves, and kept them with the pigs. No two were ever left
together; and they were given false names, so that they were entirely
cut off from their own world. And then the lonely child was turned over
to the priests, and he was flogged and starved and terrified――a little
helpless boy who cried for his mother; but still he refused to be
baptized. The priests promised him good things to eat, fine clothes,
and freedom from labour; but the boy turned away, and said his prayers
secretly――the Hebrew prayers.
As he grew older, severer tortures were invented for him; still he
refused baptism. By this time he had forgotten his mother’s face, and
of his prayers perhaps only the ‘Shema’ remained in his memory; but he
was a Jew, and nothing would make him change. After he entered the army,
he was bribed with promises of promotions and honours. He remained a
private, and endured the cruellest discipline. When he was discharged,
at the age of forty, he was a broken man, without a home, without a
clue to his origin, and he spent the rest of his life wandering among
Jewish settlements, searching for his family, hiding the scars of
torture under his rags, begging his way from door to door.
There were men in our town whose faces made you old in a minute. They
had served Nicholas I, and come back, unbaptized.
MARY ANTIN, 1911.
BONTZYE SHWEIG[35]
(BONTZYE THE SILENT)
DOWN here, in this world, Silent Bontzye’s death made no impression at
all. Ask any one you like who Bontzye was, how he lived, and what he
died of; whether of heart failure, or whether his strength gave out, or
whether his back broke under a heavy load, and they won’t know. Perhaps,
after all, he died of hunger.
Bontzye lived quietly and died quietly. He passed through our world
like a shadow. He lived like a little dun-coloured grain of sand on
the sea-shore, among millions of his kind; and when the wind lifted him
and blew him over to the other side of the sea, nobody noticed it. When
he was alive, the mud in the street preserved no impression of his feet;
after his death the wind overturned the little board on his grave. The
grave-digger’s wife found it a long way off from the spot, and boiled a
potful of potatoes over it. Three days after that, the grave-digger had
forgotten where he had laid him.
A shadow! His likeness remained photographed in nobody’s brain, in
nobody’s heart; not a trace of him remained.
‘No kith, no kin!’ He lived and died alone.
Had the world been less busy, some one might have remarked that
Bontzye (also a human being) went about with two extinguished eyes and
fearfully hollow cheeks; that even when he had no load on his shoulders
his head drooped earthward as though, while yet alive, he were looking
for his grave. When they carried Bontzye into the hospital, his corner
in the underground lodging was soon filled――there were ten of his like
waiting for it, and they put it up for auction among themselves. When
they carried him from the hospital bed to the dead-house, there were
twenty poor sick persons waiting for the bed. When he had been taken
out of the dead-house, they brought in twenty bodies from under a
building that had fallen in. Who knows how long he will rest in his
grave? Who knows how many are waiting for the little plot of ground?
A quiet birth, a quiet life, a quiet death, and a quieter burial.
* * * * *
But it was not so in the Other World. There Bontzye’s death made a
great impression.
The blast of the great Messianic Shofar sounded through all the seven
heavens; Bontzye Shweig has left the earth! The largest angels with the
broadest wings flew about and told one another; Bontzye Shweig is to
take his seat in the Heavenly Academy! In Paradise there was a noise
and a joyful tumult: Bontzye Shweig! Just fancy! Bontzye Shweig!
Little child-angels with sparkling eyes, gold thread-work wings, and
silver slippers, ran delightedly to meet him. The rustle of the wings,
the clatter of the little slippers, and the merry laughter of the fresh,
rosy mouths, filled all the heavens and reached to the Throne of Glory.
Abraham our father stood in the gate, his right hand stretched out with
a hearty greeting, and a sweet smile lit up his old face.
What are they wheeling through heaven? Two angels are pushing a golden
arm-chair into Paradise for Bontzye Shweig.
What flashed so brightly? They were carrying past a gold crown set with
precious stones all for Bontzye Shweig.
‘Before the decision of the Heavenly Court has been given?’ ask
the saints, not quite without jealousy. ‘Oh’, reply the angels, ‘that
will be a mere formality. Even the prosecutor won’t say a word against
Bontzye Shweig. The case will not last five minutes.’ Just consider!
Bontzye Shweig!
All this time, Bontzye, just as in the other world, was too frightened
to speak. He is sure it is all a dream, or else simply a mistake. He
dared not raise his eyes, lest the dream should vanish, lest he should
wake up in some cave full of snakes and lizards. He was afraid to speak,
afraid to move, lest he should be recognized and flung into the pit.
He trembles and does not hear the angels’ compliments, does not see how
they dance round him, makes no answer to the greeting of Abraham our
father, and when he is led into the presence of the Heavenly Court he
does not even wish it ‘Good morning!’ He is beside himself with terror.
‘Who knows what rich man, what rabbi, what saint, they take me for?
He will come――and that will be the end of me!’ His terror is such, he
never even hears the president call out: ‘The case of Bontzye Shweig!’
adding, as he hands the deeds to the advocate, ‘Read, but make haste!’
The whole hall goes round and round in Bontzye’s eyes; there is a
rushing in his ears. And through the rushing he hears more and more
clearly the voice of the advocate, speaking sweetly as a violin.
‘His name’, he hears, ‘fitted him like the dress made for a slender
figure by the hand of an artist-tailor.’
‘What is he talking about?’ wondered Bontzye, and he heard an impatient
voice break in with: ‘No similes, please!’
‘He never’, continued the advocate, ‘was heard to complain of either
God or man; there was never a flash of hatred in his eye; he never
lifted it with a claim on heaven.’
Still Bontzye does not understand, and once again the hard voice
interrupts: ‘No rhetoric, please!’
‘Job gave way――this one was more unfortunate.’
‘Facts, dry facts.’
‘He kept silent’, the advocate went on, ‘even when his mother died and
he was given a stepmother at thirteen years old――a serpent, a vixen.’
‘Can they mean me after all?’ thought Bontzye.
‘No insinuations against a third party’, said the president, angrily.
‘She grudged him every mouthful――stale, mouldy bread, tendons instead
of meat――and she drank coffee with cream.’
‘Keep to the subject’, ordered the president.
‘She grudged him everything but her finger-nails, and his black
and blue body showed through the holes in his torn and fusty clothes.
Winter time, in the hardest frost, he had to chop wood for her,
barefoot in the yard; and his hands were too young and too weak, the
logs too thick, the hatchet too blunt. But he kept silent, even to his
father.’
‘To that drunkard?’ laughs the accuser, and Bontzye feels cold in every
limb.
‘And always alone’, he continued; ‘no playmates, no school, nor
teaching of any kind――never a whole garment――never a free moment.’
‘Facts, please!’ reminded the president.
‘He kept silent even later, when his father seized him by the hair
in a fit of drunkenness and flung him out into the street on a snowy
winter’s night. He quietly picked himself up out of the snow and ran
whither his feet carried him. He kept silent all the way to the great
town――however hungry he might be, he only begged with his eyes. Bathed
in a cold sweat, crushed under heavy loads, his empty stomach convulsed
with hunger――he kept silent. Bespattered with mud, spat at, driven with
his load off the pavement and into the road among the cabs, carts, and
tramways, looking death in the eyes every moment. He never calculated
the difference between other people’s lot and his own――he kept silent.
And he never insisted loudly on his pay; he stood in the doorway like
a beggar, with a dog-like pleading in his eyes――‘Come again later!’ and
he went like a shadow to come again later, and beg for his wage more
humbly than before. He kept silent even when they cheated him of part,
or threw in a false coin.
‘He took everything in silence.’
‘They mean me after all’, thought Bontzye.
* * * * *
‘Once’, continued the advocate, after a sip of water, ‘a change came
into his life: there came flying along a carriage on rubber tires,
drawn by two runaway horses. The driver already lay some distance off
on the pavement with a cracked skull, the terrified horses foamed at
the mouth, sparks shot from their hoofs, their eyes shone like fiery
lamps on a winter’s night――and in the carriage, more dead than alive,
sat a man.
‘And Bontzye stopped the horses. And the man he had saved was a
charitable Jew who was not ungrateful. He put the dead man’s whip into
Bontzye’s hands, and Bontzye became a coachman. More than that, he was
provided with a wife. And Bontzye kept silent!’
‘Me, they mean me!’ Bontzye assured himself again, and yet had not the
courage to give a glance at the Heavenly Court.
He listens to the advocate further:
‘He kept silent also when his protector became bankrupt and did not pay
him his wages. He kept silent when his wife ran away from him.’
‘Me, they mean me!’ Now he is sure of it.
* * * * *
‘He kept silent even’, began the angelic advocate once more in a still
softer and sadder voice, ‘when the same philanthropist paid all his
creditors their due but him――and even when (riding once again in a
carriage with rubber tires and fiery horses) he knocked Bontzye down
and drove over him. He kept silent even in the hospital, where one may
cry out. He kept silent when the doctor would not come to his bedside
without being paid fifteen kopeks, and when the attendant demanded
another five――for changing his linen.
‘He kept silent in the death struggle――silent in death.
‘Not a word against God; not a word against men!
‘Dixi!’
Once more Bontzye trembled all over. He knew that after the advocate
comes the prosecutor. Who knows what he will say? Bontzye himself
remembered nothing of his life. Even in the other world he forgot every
moment what had happened in the one before. The advocate had recalled
everything to his mind. Who knows what the prosecutor will not remind
him of?
‘Gentlemen’, begins the prosecutor, in a voice biting and acid as
vinegar――but he breaks off.
‘Gentlemen’, he begins again, but his voice is milder, and a second
time he breaks off.
Then from out the same throat comes in a voice that is almost gentle:
‘Gentlemen! He was silent! I will be silent too!’
There is a hush――and there sounds in front a new, soft, trembling voice:
‘Bontzye, my child!’ It speaks like a harp. ‘My dear child, Bontzye!’
And Bontzye’s heart melts within him. Now he would lift up his eyes,
but they are blinded with tears; he never felt such sweet emotion
before. ‘My child! Bontzye!’――no one, since his mother died, had spoken
to him with such words in such a voice.
‘My child’, continues the presiding judge, ‘you have suffered and kept
silent; there is no whole limb, no whole bone in your body without a
scar, without a wound, not a fibre of your soul that has not bled――and
you kept silent. There they did not understand. Perhaps you yourself
did not know that you might have cried out, and that at your cry
the walls of Jericho would have shaken and fallen. You yourself knew
nothing of your hidden power.
‘In the other world your silence was not understood, but that is the
World of Delusion; in the World of Truth you will receive your reward.
The Heavenly Court will not judge you; the Heavenly Court will not pass
sentence on you; they will not apportion you a reward. Take what you
will! Everything is yours.’
Bontzye looks up for the first time. He is dazzled; everything shines
and flashes and streams with light.
‘_Taki_――really?’ he asks, shyly.
‘Yes, really!’ answers the presiding judge, with decision; ‘really,
I tell you, everything is yours; everything in heaven belongs to you.
Because all that shines and sparkles is only the reflection of your
hidden goodness, a reflection of your soul. You only take of what is
yours.’
‘_Taki?_’ asks Bontzye again, this time in a firmer voice.
‘_Taki!_ taki! taki!’ they answer from all sides.
‘Well, if it is so’, Bontzye smiles, ‘I would like to have every day,
for breakfast, a hot roll with fresh butter.’
The Court and the angels looked down, a little ashamed; the prosecutor
laughed.
J. L. PERETZ, 1894.
(_Trans. Helena Frank._)
THE WATCH ON THE JORDAN[36]
(ZIONIST HYMN)
LIKE the crash of the thunder
Which splitteth asunder
The flame of the cloud,
On our ears ever falling
A voice is heard calling
From Zion aloud.
‘Let your spirits’ desires
For the land of your sires
Eternally burn;
From the foe to deliver
Our own holy river,
To Jordan return.’
Where the soft-flowing stream
Murmurs low as in dream
There set we our watch!
Our watchword, ‘The sword
Of our land and our Lord’;
By Jordan then set we our watch.
Rest in peace, lovéd land,
For we rest not, but stand,
Off-shaken our sloth.
When the bolts of war rattle,
To shirk not the battle
We make thee our oath.
As we hope for a heaven,
Thy chains shall be riven,
Thine ensign unfurled.
And in pride of our race
We will fearlessly face
The might of the world.
When our trumpet is blown,
And our standard is flown,
Then set we our watch!
Our watchword, ‘The sword
Of our land and our Lord’;
By Jordan then set we our watch.
Yea, as long as there be
Birds in air, fish in sea,
And blood in our veins;
And the lions in might,
Leaping down from the height,
Shaking, roaring, their manes;
And the dew nightly laves,
The forgotten old graves
Where Judah’s sires sleep;
We swear, who are living,
To rest not in striving,
To pause not to weep.
Let the trumpet be blown,
Let the standard be flown,
Now set we our watch;
Our watchword, ‘The sword
Of our land and our Lord’;
In Jordan now set we our watch.
N. H. IMBER.
(_Trans. I. Zangwill._)
THE TRAGEDY OF ASSIMILATION
WHAT I understand by assimilation is loss of identity. It is this kind
of assimilation, with the terrible consequences indicated, that I dread
most――even more than pogroms.
It _is_ a tragedy to see a great, ancient people, distinguished for
its loyalty to its religion, and its devotion to its sacred Law, losing
thousands every day by the mere process of attrition. It _is_ a tragedy
to see a language held sacred by all the world, in which Holy Writ was
composed, which served as the depository of Israel’s greatest and best
thoughts, doomed to oblivion. It _is_ a tragedy to see the descendants
of those who revealed religion to the world, and who developed the
greatest religious literature in existence, so little familiar with
real Jewish thought that they have no other interpretation to offer
of Israel’s Scriptures, Israel’s religion, and Israel’s ideals and
aspirations and hopes, than those suggested by their natural opponents,
slavishly following their opinions, copying their phrases, and
repeating their catchwords. I am not accusing anybody. I am only
stating facts. We are helpless spectators of the Jewish soul wasting
away before our very eyes.
Now, the rebirth of Israel’s national consciousness and the revival
of Judaism are inseparable. When Israel found itself, it found its
God. When Israel lost itself, or began to work at its self-effacement,
it was sure to deny its God. The selection of Israel, the
indestructibility of God’s covenant with Israel, the immortality of
Israel as a nation, and the final restoration of Israel to Palestine,
where the nation will live a holy life, on holy ground, with all the
wide-reaching consequences of the conversion of humanity, and the
establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth――all these are the common
ideals and the common ideas that permeate the whole of Jewish
literature extending over nearly four thousand years.
S. SCHECHTER, 1906.
* * * * *
THERE has been one short period in modern Jewish history when Israel
grew utterly weary of toil and trouble, and began to take pleasure in
the fleeting hour, as other nations do. But this was a mere passing
phase, a temporary loss of consciousness. The prophetic spirit cannot
be crushed, except for a time. It comes to life again, and masters
the Prophet in his own despite. So, too, the prophetic People regained
consciousness in its own despite. The Spirit that called Moses
thousands of years ago and sent him on his mission, against his own
will, now calls again the generation of to-day, saying, ‘_And that
which cometh into your mind shall not be at all; in that ye say, We
will be as the nations ... As I live, saith the Lord God, surely with
a mighty hand ... will I be king over you._’
ACHAD HA’AM, 1904.
(_Trans. Leon Simon._)
THE VALLEY OF DRY BONES