until the tears refused to come. Then he was overcome by a fainting
sensation, and he thought that death was near. It would come to him
just as he lay there. He stretched himself out, closed his eyes and
waited for death. To lie thus, to fall asleep forever and cease to be.
To be liberated once for all from the desolate days behind him and from
the misery ahead.
He yearned for death.
“Ah, to die!”
Before his sight there began to float dead bodies that he had seen
during his life. Such he desired now to become. Then he beheld before
him the hanging form of water-carrier Kirillo. All at once he sat up.
A certain thought had raised him: he, too, would hang himself. This
waiting for death would not do. He would not die so soon, if he waited.
He peered into the thick darkness and thought. The impression of his
whole life rose before him. Not a single day of happiness; not a moment
of rest. Years of unceasing care and of constant struggle, of laborious
toil and frequent hunger. And the future threatened still worse. As
black as the dense gloom about him. Long years of incarceration, in the
prisoners’ ranks, and then--hunger once more.
He raised his eyes to the iron bars of the window and felt the thick
rope by which his trousers were held in place. Then he looked around
and cocked his ear. Was anybody there? He heard no sound. He could
scarcely lift himself up. His legs barely sustained him and he was so
dizzy. He reached out to the wall and leaned for a moment against it.
Then, with soft step, he investigated the room, groping about with
hands outstretched. Nobody was there. He had frightened some mice and
could hear the patter of their retreating paws. He stopped at the
window and stretched his arms upward. He could not reach the bars. In
one of the corners, however, there was a bench, against which he had
stumbled as he groped about the cell. With difficulty he dragged it
over to the window. The effort so weakened him that he was forced to
sit down. Slowly he untied the rope around his trousers. He began to
fashion a noose, lapsing into thought as he did so. Once more he looked
back upon the wretched past and forward into the dark future. Again
he could see not a ray of light, neither behind nor before. With teeth
tightly clamped he made the knot and cursed life, and his heart seethed
with bitter hatred for all mankind. With the self-same noose that he
was now making, how gladly would he have encircled the necks of every
human being and strangled the whole world. So, and so, and so!
The noose had been ready for a long time, yet he still sat meditating.
He cursed and berated humanity, calling down upon it all manner of
misfortune. Ah, how gladly he would revenge himself upon them!
Gradually one thing became clear to him. His death in itself would
be a good vengeance. When day should come, and they would prepare to
resume their ill-treatment of him, they would find him dead. Ba-a-a! A
plague upon all of them! Good-by, Itsye! No more Itsye! No more Itsye
to oppress, to persecute, to abandon to starvation! They would stand
before his corpse like whipped curs, crestfallen, and would vent their
intense disappointment in a vile oath. Ah, that was a precious thought!
He sprang hastily to his feet, jumped upon the chair, reached to the
bars and tied the rope around them. His hands trembled; he shook with
fever. He poked his head into the noose and kicked over the bench.
And as the rope tightened he was seized with a desire to laugh. To
laugh like a conqueror, like a master. But his eyes began to bulge
out, his tongue protruded, and his face turned a pale blue.
But the protruding tongue still mocked.
“Ba-a! Good-bye, Itsye! No more Itsye!...”
--Translated by Isaac Goldberg.
A STRANGE CLIMATE
SHOLOM ASCH
Dr. Lazarovitch came home from the hospital in the evening, locked
himself in his cabinet, as his custom was of late, and remained alone
till supper. The servant had already knocked at the door several times,
calling him to eat. The doctor gave vent to the usual grunt that
meant he would soon come out, and remained locked in his cabinet. But
this time he was not let alone as usual. From the next room was heard
his wife, Anna Isakovna’s, soft, weak voice, saying: “Boris, we are
waiting.” The voice woke the doctor from his day-dream. He felt as if
he heard a strange, unusual sound.
For more than a year, ever since his oldest son, Mikhail, had gone
to Moscow, and had been admitted to the faculty of medicine in the
university, Dr. Lazarovitch tried to avoid his family. The family
consisted, besides his oldest son, of his wife Anna Isakovna, who was
always sick (and whom he saw seldom, anyhow), of a daughter, Jeyna, and
of a boy, Solomon, who attended the fifth grade of Gymnasium, and whom
he loved very much. The doctor avoided his home, trying to be there
as little as possible. And when he did come home from the hospital,
he always locked himself in his cabinet, as if he were working. But
to tell the truth, he did not work. He had not held a book in his
hands since he left the University. He thought of his oldest son, who
had gone to Moscow, and had entered the University through the good
offices of the doctor’s good friend, Vasili Ivanovitch, the president
of a District Court. Dr. Lazarovitch knew, as well as the rest of the
family, that his son had not been admitted through any good offices.
The “good offices” were mentioned only before other people. Mikhail had
adopted Christianity. Though no one spoke of it, and the family never
mentioned it, yet Dr. Lazarovitch had begun to feel lonely since that
time, and used to sit whole nights locked up in his cabinet. And when,
after two hours he left his room, he would find the table deserted,
and laid for one. His whole family had become very serious, each being
occupied with his own concerns, and Ana Isakovna went to bed very
early, as was her custom. The doctor would thoughtfully and hurriedly
finish his meal, go back to his cabinet, take up an old “Ryech,”
and bury himself in a year-old speech of a Constitutional Democrat
regarding the Budget.
It was his custom to fall asleep over the speech. Sometimes he would
not awake until morning. Sometimes the old servant who had been with
him many years would come in and wake him. Then he would undress
and throw himself on a lounge that stood in the corner, on which he
examined patients in the daytime, and above which hung an old magazine
reproduction of Rembrandt’s “School of Anatomy.”
Because of this, the doctor was so much surprised when he heard his
wife calling him. He understood that something new must have happened,
and he was afraid of this new thing. When he came out of his cabinet he
found his family waiting for him at the table. This was so new to him
that he grew glad and thought to himself that it was a very good thing
to eat together with his children. But in his heart of hearts he was
afraid of the sudden innovation. He was too nervous to wait long, so he
asked as soon as he sat down: “What has happened?”
The children looked at each other, and remained silent. Anna Isakovna,
who felt better than usually, answered: “Nothing has happened.”
At the silence that reigned at the table, the doctor became still more
excited. He cried that something must have happened; that they ought
not torture him, but tell him at once. Anna Isakovna answered him as if
imparting a great sorrow: “Mikhail writes that he is coming home for
Passover.”
The doctor grew silent. The rest were silent also, as if a dead man
were in the house.
That night the doctor did not fall asleep over the “Ryech.” He was
thinking of himself and his son. Truth to say, he did not understand
why Mikhail’s apostasy had made such an impression on him. Neither he
nor his had ever been religious Jews. He himself remembered very little
of his religion. Passover and Yom Kippur were to him merely vague
memories of childhood. His father, a storekeeper in a little town, had
been a pious Jew. But since he had left the town in his youth going to
study in Moscow, he had not seen his father and had lost track of the
holidays. Anna Isakovna, with whom he had become acquainted in Moscow,
and whom he had married there, also knew nothing of Jewish holidays.
And his children were reared like the children of so many parents in
his circumstances, without any traditions. They lived according to
customs and holidays of his Gentile neighbors. And naturally, Mikhail
grew up ripe for Christianity. He was able, and from the fifth grade on
he began to show an exceptional faculty for mathematics. When he began
to study in earnest, no one of the family had the slightest doubt that
Mikhail, in order to avoid the obstacles that lay between himself and
his career, would have to adopt Christianity. The father, the mother,
and Mikhail himself, had always thought so, though they never said a
word about it. Then, why did it torture him so, now that Mikhail had
already done it? What new thing was it that was waking in him, making
him a stranger in his own house?
The doctor had thought much about this in the last days, trying to
revive the memories of his own lost years to the utmost of his powers.
But it was hard. When he began to think of them he would grow tired.
His broad-boned body grew heavy and he became sleepy, for in the
twenty-three years that he had spent in the provincial town within
the Pale, he had forgotten how to think. Once upon a time, like other
students of his age, he had been an idealist. He would finish his
studies, he then thought, and go to the people. He would establish
himself in some out-of-the-way village, there to heal the peasants
and their wives and teach the little boys to read and write, for many
students talked of that at the time. But when Dr. Lazarovitch was
graduated he did not go to any out-of-the-way village. He fell in love
with Anna Isakovna, a daughter of Director Solomon. Solomon, an old,
worked-out factory invalid, who had four daughters, was often visited
by the Jewish students in Moscow. The girls played the piano, and the
Director’s home was aristocratic. The lackey, an old Gentile, served
at the table in gloves, though there was not much to serve. The gloved
lackey and the piano-playing made a deep impression on Dr. Lazarovitch,
and to his share fell the weakest and ugliest of the Director’s
daughters, Anna.
But as soon as he married the aristocrat he forgot all his ideals. He
went with his wife, who began to ail shortly after the wedding, to a
town in the Jewish Pale, where Director Solomon had many relatives and
acquaintances. Here he began to build up a practice. This partly meant
that even in the Pale one could do much, that ideals are necessary
not only in the village, but also in the town. But soon the doctor
became acquainted with the intellectuals of the town, with the druggist
and the President of the Court, and spent most of his nights at the
club, with them, playing cards. He tried to avoid being at home. He
did not love his wife over much after she began to ail, but this did
not prevent his having five children with her, two of which had been
still-born; the other three had grown up almost without his knowledge,
till his card-playing had been interrupted by the apostasy of Mikhail.
* * * * *
Dr. Lazarovitch became more and more restless as the time of his
son’s arrival from Moscow approached. The entire house lapsed into
silence. All seemed afraid of something. The doctor began to feel like
a stranger in his own house, and could not find a place for himself
anywhere. He ceased to go to the club, and could no longer sit over the
“Ryech” in his cabinet. First it seemed to him that he was restless
because he was unused to things, and was afraid of the new event in his
home life. As soon as he would get used to the fact that his son was a
Christian, and the town would know of it, and all would cease to talk
of it at last, he too, would become quiet, and his life would resume
its natural course. But soon he realized that his restlessness was not
due to any _strange_ circumstances, but lay much deeper. He was afraid
of something, and did not know the cause. He said a thousand times to
himself that nothing had happened, that his son’s apostasy had changed
neither himself nor his son. He himself was not so religious and
fanatical as to believe that his son’s change of religion should have
a deeper meaning, because, in truth, neither he nor his son believed
in God. So how could his son’s outer metamorphosis change his inner
psychological condition? And again, would it pay the able young man to
give up his career, his abilities, his future, all for the sake of a
religious superstition? Had not Mikhail acted logically when he removed
once and for all the obstacles that barricaded the path of his future?
But all these explanations could bring the doctor no rest. He felt
that something more than a mere outward change had taken place; that
a wall stood between him and his son; that it divided one generation
from the other; that his son was not a continuation of himself, but
that something ended in his own self, and something new had begun in
his son; that they already belonged to two different worlds. And he was
afraid and restless when he contemplated the wall that stood between
them.
Two days before Passover, Mikhail came home. The doctor could not see
him. He was afraid to meet him face to face. He would run about among
his patients and come home late at night, and when in the mornings he
heard his son’s voice in the next room he would tremble. He would look
through a crack in the door and try to see how the boy looked. But his
son had not changed at all. The same childish face with its familiar
childish eyes which always touched the doctor’s fathering heart. The
doctor wondered that his son had not at all changed after baptism. He
still looked exactly the same. But the doctor was afraid of him.
Throughout the time Mikhail was at home the house seemed dead. The
usual noise of the children on their arrival from school was heard no
longer. The children, who always walked on tiptoe now, could not be
heard in the next room. They sat reading, each in a different corner,
as if they were ashamed to look at each other. The silence strained
the doctor’s nerves still more. He wanted to go to the children many
times, and play with them, as he used to do when they were small. But
as soon as he saw Mikhail through the keyhole, he grew frightened and
restrained himself.
And yet the apostate touched his heart more than the others. It seemed
to him that the boy looked weaker and sadder since he had become a
Christian, and the doctor began to pity him. He had never felt so near
to any of his children before. He was glad and yet sorry that he felt
so toward his son. Once he saw him through a window reading in a corner
of the room, dressed in the blue uniform that fitted him but poorly.
The boy felt strange in the house, and was afraid to talk loud. His
face was pale. In his eyes and about his lips lay the shadow of a great
grief like that which lingers about a girl who has lost her innocence.
The doctor noticed it and a wave of pity swept over him for the child
who was inaugurating his career in such a sin. He could not restrain
himself, walked into the room, approached the boy, laid his wide, thick
hand on the weak, childish shoulders, and looked into Mikhail’s eyes.
“Mikhail, how do you feel?”
The boy trembled. At sight of his father he grew pale, and confusedly
and involuntarily pressing himself to his father, cried: “Papa.” But he
soon reminded himself of something, and remained standing, silent and
shamefaced. “How did you enter the University?” Dr. Lazarovitch asked
roughly, and wiped his thick face with a broad hand.
The boy was silent for a moment. At last he viciously bit his thin pale
lips and answered: “I didn’t know you would take it like this.”
The father was silent.
In a minute the boy again said:
“If you want me to, I will leave the University, and become a Jew
again. Do you think I liked to do it?”
“It is unnecessary,” the father sternly answered.
“Why?” the boy asked.
The doctor moved closer to the boy, looked straight in his eyes, with a
moody, sinister glance, and said: “We aren’t talking of religion. You
know I am not religious. We are discussing a principle. And you have
denied that principle once. What would the good be in your becoming a
Jew again? You can’t change what you have done. Just like a girl who
has lost her honor--she can’t regain it. Understand?”
The doctor seized the boy’s head and kissed him, perhaps for the first
time in his life. Then he left the room.
* * * * *
A few days later the doctor heard another bit of news: Joseph
Kalmanovitch, Mikhail’s schoolmate, had also turned Christian. It was
an open secret that Joseph was in love with Jenya. The town considered
them already engaged. The doctor waited till the young man came to
his house to see how his daughter would treat him. In a few days the
doctor found the young man in his house, and Jenya went out with him as
if nothing had happened. Joseph had been treated as usual. The doctor
began to wonder and it occurred to him that after all, it was only he
who was so reactionary and superstitious that apostasy made too deep
an impression on him. Yet the doctor could not understand how his
daughter could receive the young man after Mikhail’s apostasy, and how
Anna Isakovna bore the thing so patiently. He promised himself to talk
to his daughter. She told him clearly that she did not care whether
her husband was a Jew or a Christian. She loved the man. If her father
objected to a marriage between them, she would live with Joseph anyway.
It was only then that his situation grew clear in the doctor’s eyes.
His children were leaving his house and his religion, and he himself
would remain in his old age lost among strange beliefs and perhaps be
supported by his children, and bring up strange grandchildren. And
maybe his children would baptize him before death so that he should
lie in the graveyard together with them. This woke the doctor from his
apathetic condition, and he resolved to take action.
At the same time the doctor persuaded himself that he had become
religious, and he would seek out small groups that congregated to pray
at certain places and visit them between evening prayers. But he could
not deceive himself. The prayers of the common, every-day Jews who ran
into the small synagogue to free themselves for an hour from a day’s
work, and to give God His due, desirous of getting through with their
duties as soon as they could, made no impression on him at all. He did
not understand the prayers. He did not understand the grimaces they
made, and their continued whining and shaking struck him as being wild.
Yet he did not lose hope, and was inwardly sure that somewhere there
did exist a great, strong Judaism, a Judaism that repaid the burdens
borne for its sake, a Judaism that gave Jews strength to bear suffering
and still remain Jews--and it was his to seek out that Judaism which
would repay him for the happiness lost in his children.
He tried to observe the Jewish holidays in his home. He himself did
not know much about them. He remembered nothing about them, and
appeared comical in his own eyes when he went out on the street to buy
Kosher meat, or bread, or matzoth and bring it home. Yet the people
in the house had taken it all very seriously; on Passover the matzoth
were placed on a serving dish, put on the table, and all were afraid
even to touch it. They all tried to be as serious about it as was he
himself--but he knew that it was a farce. No one in the house knew
anything about the holidays. The holidays they kept were the holidays
of their neighbors. Where any part of the town celebrated, the doctor’s
house celebrated with it--Easter with the Russians, Christmas with the
Catholics, but of their own holidays they knew nothing. Because of this
it was rather comical that he should all of a sudden try to celebrate
their “own” holidays.
Mainly he did it for his fourteen-year-old son, Solomon, who caused
him more unrest than all the others. He knew that the boy suffered,
that he was of a different make-up than the other children. It had
been very hard to make it possible for the boy to enter the gymnasium.
It was at a time when hate toward Jews was already raging among their
Gentile neighbors, and was more than ever in style. The boy was forced
to suffer much at the hands of his Gentile schoolmates. Often, when
he came home from school, his wet, frightened eyes seemed to ask the
terrible question: “Why?” In the beginning, when he was yet a child,
he asked his father: “Why did the Jews do that?” He was tortured so
at school, but when the doctor was unable to give him a clear, true
answer, he ceased to ask the question. Soon the child knew the full
taste of being a Jew; he grew used to it, and bore it like a grown-up,
with humility and patience. He asked no more questions, and it was seen
that he withdrew further and further into himself. He had grown very
much in the few years he spent in the gymnasium. He read serious books,
and his forehead was already wrinkled. He was quiet, and a sneering
smile towards everything and everybody lingered about his lips--the
smile of the suffering Jew towards the rest of the world. The doctor
was more ashamed of himself before the boy than before his other
children, and felt that he must do something to change the situation.
He knew the responsibility he carried in the eyes of the child: that
it was his to take care that this boy too did not become an apostate.
This drove him to think of some practical remedy. He often wanted to
speak to the youngest son about the older one’s apostasy, but he could
not. He was afraid to hear the truth from him--a thing he had heard
from none heretofore--that the fact that Mikhail turned Christian was
due more to himself than to Mikhail. He did nothing to prevent his
son from changing faith. He already read the answer in the sneering
smile that hung on the boy’s lips, and even more, in that the boy
avoided the house more than he himself did. He spent most of his time
at a schoolmate’s and was rarely seen in the house. Since the oldest
brother had become a Christian he had avoided the house still more.
In this avoidance of the house the doctor saw a personal insult to
himself. “The child avoids me,” he said to himself. This made him feel
still worse and he would think: “Why does he avoid me?” And once when
he was told that Solomon had not come home for two nights (those were
the first nights after the arrival of the apostate), the doctor sought
the boy out at his friend’s and spoke to him:
“Why don’t you come home? Why do you run from the house?”
“I run from the house? It is you, father, who runs from the house,” the
boy answered boldly.
In the answer the doctor heard the whole inner truth--that he was
lonely and avoided the house which he had built up; in this answer he
heard the whole poverty, the whole forlornness of the situation in
which he found himself, and he ceased to trouble his son with further
questions.