HOPES AND DREAMS
The morning of the Great White Fast broke bleak and grey. Esther,
alone in the house save for the servant, wandered from room to room in
dull misery. The day before had been almost a feast-day in the
Ghetto--everybody providing for the morrow. Esther had scarcely eaten
anything. Nevertheless she was fasting, and would fast for over
twenty-four hours, till the night fell. She knew not why. Her record
was unbroken, and instinct resented a breach now. She had always
fasted--even the Henry Goldsmiths fasted, and greater than the Henry
Goldsmiths! Q.C.'s fasted, and peers, and prize-fighters, and actors.
And yet Esther, like many far more pious persons, did not think of her
sins for a moment. She thought of everything but them--of the bereaved
family in that strange provincial town; of her own family in that
strange distant land. Well, she would soon be with them now. Her
passage was booked--a steerage passage it was, not because she could
not afford cabin fare, but from her morbid impulse to identify herself
with poverty. The same impulse led her to choose a vessel in which a
party of Jewish pauper immigrants was being shipped farther West. She
thought also of Dutch Debby, with whom she had spent the previous
evening; and of Raphael Leon, who had sent her, _via_ the publishers,
a letter which she could not trust herself to answer cruelly, and
which she deemed it most prudent to leave unanswered. Uncertain of her
powers of resistance, she scarcely ventured outside the house for fear
of his stumbling across her. Happily every day diminished the chances
of her whereabouts leaking out through some unsuspected channel.
About noon her restlessness carried her into the streets. There was a
festal solemnity about the air. Women and children, not at synagogue,
showed themselves at the doors, pranked in their best. Indifferently
pious young men sought relief from the ennui of the day-long service
in lounging about for a breath of fresh air; some even strolled
towards the Strand, and turned into the National Gallery, satisfied to
reappear for the twilight service. On all sides came the fervent roar
of prayer which indicated a synagogue or a _Chevrah_, the number of
places of worship having been indefinitely increased to accommodate
those who made their appearance for this occasion only.
Everywhere friends and neighbours were asking one another how they
were bearing the fast, exhibiting their white tongues and generally
comparing symptoms, the physical aspects of the Day of Atonement more
or less completely diverting attention from the spiritual.
Smelling-salts passed from hand to hand, and men explained to one
another that, but for the deprivation of their cigars, they could
endure _Yom Kippur_ with complacency.
Esther passed the Ghetto school, within which free services were going
on even in the playground, poor Russians and Poles, fanatically
observant, foregathering with lax fishmongers and welshers; and
without which hulking young men hovered uneasily, feeling too out of
tune with religion to go in, too conscious of the terrors of the day
to stay entirely away. From the interior came from sunrise to
nightfall a throbbing thunder of supplication, now pealing in
passionate outcry, now subsiding to a low rumble. The sounds of prayer
that pervaded the Ghetto, and burst upon her at every turn, wrought
upon Esther strangely; all her soul went out in sympathy with these
yearning outbursts; she stopped every now and then to listen, as in
those far-off days when the Sons of the Covenant drew her with their
melancholy cadences.
At last, moved by an irresistible instinct, she crossed the threshold
of a large _Chevrah_ she had known in her girlhood, mounted the stairs
and entered the female compartment without hostile challenge. The reek
of many breaths and candles nearly drove her back, but she pressed
forwards towards a remembered window, through a crowd of bewigged
women, shaking their bodies fervently to and fro.
This room had no connection with the men's; it was simply the room
above part of theirs, and the declamation of the unseen cantor came
but faintly through the flooring, though the glamour of the general
masculine chorus kept the pious _au courant_ with their husbands. When
weather or the whims of the more important ladies permitted, the
window at the end was opened; it gave upon a little balcony, below
which the men's chamber projected considerably, having been built out
into the back-yard. When this window was opened simultaneously with
the skylight in the men's synagogue, the fervid roulades of the cantor
were as audible to the women as to their masters.
Esther had always affected the balcony; there the air was
comparatively fresh, and on fine days there was a glimpse of blue sky,
and a perspective of sunny red tiles, where brown birds fluttered and
cats lounged and little episodes arose to temper the tedium of endless
invocation; and farther off there was a back view of a nunnery, with
visions of placid black-hooded faces at windows; and from the distance
came a pleasant drone of monosyllabic spelling from fresh young voices
to relieve the ear from the monotony of long stretches of meaningless
mumbling.
Here, lost in a sweet melancholy, Esther dreamed away the long grey
day, only vaguely conscious of the stages of the service--morning
dovetailing into afternoon service, and afternoon into evening; of the
heavy-jowled woman behind her reciting a Jargon-version of the
Atonement liturgy to a devout coterie; of the prostrations full-length
on the floor, and the series of impassioned sermons; of the
interminably rhyming poems, and the acrostics with their recurring
burdens shouted in devotional frenzy, voice rising above voice as in
emulation, with special staccato phrases flung heavenwards; of the
wailing confessions of communal sin, with their accompaniment of sobs
and tears and howls and grimaces and clenching of palms and beatings
of the breast. She was lapped in a great ocean of sound that broke
upon her consciousness like the waves upon a beach, now with a cooing
murmur, now with a majestic crash, followed by a long receding moan.
She lost herself in the roar, in its barren sensuousness, while the
leaden sky grew duskier and the twilight crept on, and the awful hour
drew nigh when God would seal what He had written, and the annual
scrolls of destiny would be closed, immutable. She saw them looming
mystically through the skylight, the swaying forms below, in their
white grave-clothes, oscillating weirdly backwards and forwards, bowed
as by a mighty wind.
Suddenly there fell a vast silence; even from without no sound came to
break the awful stillness. It was as if all creation paused to hear a
pregnant word.
'"Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One!"' sang the cantor
frenziedly.
And all the ghostly congregation answered with a great cry, closing
their eyes and rocking frantically to and fro:
'"Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One!"'
They seemed like a great army of the sheeted dead risen to testify to
the Unity. The magnetic tremor that ran through the synagogue thrilled
the lonely girl to the core; once again her dead self woke, her dead
ancestors that would not be shaken off lived and moved in her. She was
sucked up into the great wave of passionate faith, and from her lips
came in rapturous surrender to an over-mastering impulse the
half-hysterical protestation:
'"Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One!"'
And then in the brief instant while the congregation, with
ever-ascending rhapsody, blessed God till the climax came with the
sevenfold declaration, 'The Lord, He is God,' the whole history of her
strange, unhappy race flashed through her mind in a whirl of
resistless emotion. She was overwhelmed by the thought of its sons in
every corner of the earth proclaiming to the sombre twilight sky the
belief for which its generations had lived and died--the Jews of
Russia sobbing it forth in their pale of enclosure, the Jews of
Morocco in their _mellah_, and of South Africa in their tents by the
diamond mines; the Jews of the New World in great free cities, in
Canadian backwoods, in South American savannahs; the Australian Jews
on the sheep-farms and the gold-fields and in the mushroom cities; the
Jews of Asia in their reeking quarters begirt by barbarian
populations. The shadow of a large mysterious destiny seemed to hang
over these poor superstitious zealots, whose lives she knew so well in
all their everyday prose, and to invest the unconscious shuffling sons
of the Ghetto with something of tragic grandeur. The grey dusk
palpitated with floating shapes of prophets and martyrs, scholars and
sages and poets, full of a yearning love and pity, lifting hands of
benediction. By what great highroads and queer byways of history had
they travelled hither, these wandering Jews, 'sated with contempt,'
these shrewd eager fanatics, these sensual ascetics, these human
paradoxes, adaptive to every environment, energising in every field of
activity, omnipresent like some great natural force, indestructible
and almost inconvertible, surviving--with the incurable optimism that
overlay all their poetic sadness--Babylon and Carthage, Greece and
Rome; involuntarily financing the Crusades, outliving the Inquisition,
illusive of all baits, unshaken by all persecutions--at once the
greatest and meanest of races? Had the Jew come so far only to break
down at last, sinking in morasses of modern doubt, and irresistibly
dragging down with him the Christian and the Moslem; or was he yet
fated to outlast them both, in continuous testimony to a hand moulding
incomprehensibly the life of humanity? Would Israel develop into the
sacred phalanx, the nobler brotherhood that Raphael Leon had dreamed
of, or would the race that had first proclaimed--through Moses for the
ancient world, through Spinoza for the modern--
'One God, one Law, one Element,'
become, in the larger, wilder dream of the Russian idealist, the main
factor in
'One far-off divine event
To which the whole Creation moves'?
The roar dwindled to a solemn silence, as though in answer to her
questionings. Then the ram's horn shrilled--a stern long-drawn-out
note, that rose at last into a mighty peal of sacred jubilation. The
Atonement was complete.
The crowd bore Esther downstairs and into the blank indifferent
street. But the long exhausting fast, the fetid atmosphere, the strain
upon her emotions, had overtaxed her beyond endurance. Up to now the
frenzy of the service had sustained her, but as she stepped across the
threshold on to the pavement she staggered and fell. One of the men
pouring out from the lower synagogue caught her in his arms. It was
Strelitski.
* * * * *
A group of three stood on the saloon deck of an outward-bound steamer.
Raphael Leon was bidding farewell to the man he reverenced without
discipleship, and the woman he loved without blindness.
'Look!' he said, pointing compassionately to the wretched throng of
Jewish emigrants huddled on the lower deck and scattered about the
gangway amid jostling sailors and stevedores and bales and coils of
rope; the men in peaked or fur caps, the women with shawls and babies,
some gazing upwards with lacklustre eyes, the majority brooding,
despondent, apathetic. 'How could either of you have borne the sights
and smells of the steerage? You are a pair of visionaries. You could
not have breathed a day in that society. Look!'
Strelitski looked at Esther instead; perhaps he was thinking he could
have breathed anywhere in her society--nay, breathed even more freely
in the steerage than in the cabin if he had sailed away without
telling Raphael that he had found her.
'You forget a common impulse took us into such society on the Day of
Atonement,' he answered after a moment. 'You forget we are both
Children of the Ghetto.'
'I can never forget that,' said Raphael fervently, 'else Esther would
at this moment be lost amid the human flotsam and jetsam below,
sailing away without you to protect her, without me to look forward to
her return, without Addie's bouquet to assure her of a sister's love.'
He took Esther's little hand once more. It lingered confidingly in his
own. There was no ring of betrothal upon it, nor would be, till
Rachel Ansell in America, and Addie Leon in England, should have
passed under the wedding canopy, and Raphael, whose breast-pocket was
bulging with a new meerschaum too sacred to smoke, should startle the
West End with his eccentric choice, and confirm its impression of his
insanity. The trio had said and resaid all they had to tell one
another, all the reminders and the recommendations. They stood without
speaking now, wrapt in that loving silence which is sweeter than
speech.
The sun, which had been shining intermittently, flooded the serried
shipping with a burst of golden light, that coaxed the turbid waves to
brightness, and cheered the wan emigrants, and made little children
leap joyously in their mother's arms. The knell of parting sounded
insistent.
'Your allegory seems turning in your favour, Raphael,' said Esther,
with a sudden memory.
The pensive smile that made her face beautiful lit up the dark eyes.
'What allegory is that of Raphael's?' said Strelitski, reflecting her
smile on his graver visage. 'The long one in his prize poem?'
'No,' said Raphael, catching the contagious smile. 'It is our little
secret.'
Strelitski turned suddenly to look at the emigrants. The smile faded
from his quivering mouth.
The last moment had come. Raphael stooped down towards the gentle
softly-flashing face, which was raised unhesitatingly to meet his, and
their lips met in a first kiss, diviner than it is given most mortals
to know--a kiss, sad and sweet, troth and parting in one: _Ave et
vale_--'hail and farewell.'
'Good-bye, Strelitski,' said Raphael huskily. 'Success to your
dreams.'
The idealist turned round with a start. His face was bright and
resolute; the black curl streamed buoyantly on the breeze.
'Good-bye,' he responded, with a giant's grip of the hand. 'Success to
your hopes.'
Raphael darted away with his long stride. The sun was still bright,
but for a moment everything seemed chill and dim to Esther Ansell's
vision. With a sudden fit of nervous foreboding she stretched out her
arms towards the vanishing figure of her lover. But she saw him once
again in the tender, waving his handkerchief towards the throbbing
vessel that glided with its freight of hopes and dreams across the
great waters towards the New World.
GLOSSARY
GLOSSARY
_H._ = Hebrew. _G._ = German. _Gk._ = Greek. _R._ = Russian.
_S._ = Spanish. _c._ = corrupt.
Achi-Nebbich (_Etymology obscure_), Alas, poor thing (s.).
Afikoman (_Hebraicised Gk._), portion of a Passover cake taken
at the end of Seder-meal (_q.v._).
Amidah (_H._), series of Benedictions said standing.
Arbah Kanfus (_H._), lit. four corners; a garment consisting
of two shoulder-straps supporting a front and back piece
with fringes at each corner (Num. xv. 37-41).
Avirah (_H._), Sin.
Ashkenazim (_H._), German, hence also Russian and Polish Jews.
Badchan (_H._), professional jester.
Bensh (?), say grace.
Beth Din (_H._), Court of Judgment.
Beth Medrash (_H._), College.
Bube (_G._), grandmother.
Cabbalah (_H._), Cabbulah (_c._), lit. tradition; mystic lore.
Calloh (_H._), bride, _fiancee_.
Chazan (_H._), cantor.
Chevrah (_H._), small congregation; a society.
Chine (_H._), playful humour; humorous anecdote.
Chocham (_H._), wise man.
Chomutz (_H._), leaven.
Chosan (_H._), bridegroom, _fiance_.
Chuppah (_H._), wedding canopy.
Cohen (_H._), priest.
Dayan (_H._), Rabbi who renders decisions.
Din (_H._), law, decision.
Droshes (_H._), sermons.
Epikouros (_H. from Gk._), heretic, scoffer; Epicurean.
Froom (_c. G._), pious.
Gelt (_c. G._), money.
Gematriyah (_Hebraicised Gk._), mystic, numerical
interpretation of Scripture.
Gemorah (_H._), part of the Talmud.
Gonof (_H._), thief.
Goyah (_H._), non-Jewess.
Hagadah (_H._), narrative portion of the Talmud; Passover-eve
ritual.
Halachah (_H._), legal portion of the Talmud.
Havdalah (_H._), ceremony separating conclusion of Sabbath or
Festival from the subsequent days of toil.
Imbeshreer (_c. G. ohne beschreien_), without bewitching;
unbeshrewn.
Kaddish (_H._), prayer in praise of God; specially recited by
male mourners.
Kehillah (_H._), congregation.
Kind, Kinder (_G._), child, children.
Kosher (_H._), ritually clean.
Kotzon (_H._), rich man.
Link (_G._), lit. left, _i.e._, not right; hence lax, not
pious.
Longe Verachum (_G._ and _c. H._), lit. The long 'and He being
merciful.' A long extra prayer, said on Mondays and
Thursdays.
Lulov (_H._), palm-branch dressed with myrtle and willow, and
used at the Feast of Tabernacles.
Maaseh (_H._), story, tale.
Machzor (_H._), Festival Prayer-Book.
Maggid (_H._), preacher.
Mazzoltov (_H._), Good luck, congratulations.
Megillah (_H._), lit. scroll. The Book of Esther.
Meshuggah, Meshuggene (H.), mad.
Meshumad (_H._), apostate.
Metsiah (_H._), lit. finding, cp. Fr. _trouvaille_; bargain.
Mezuzah (_H._), case containing a scroll, with Heb. verses
(Deut. vi. 4-9, 13-21), affixed to every door-post.
Midrash (_H._), Biblical exposition.
Minchah (_H._), afternoon prayer.
Minyan (_H._), quorum of ten males over thirteen necessary for
public worship.
Mishpochah (_H._), family.
Mishnah, Mishnayis (_H._), collection of the Oral Law.
Missheberach (_H._), synagogal benediction.
Mitzvah (_H._), a commandment, _i.e._, a good deed.
Mizrach (_H._), East; a sacred picture hung on the east wall
in the direction of Jerusalem, to which the face is turned
in praying.
Narrischkeit (_c. G._), foolishness.
Nash (_c. G._), pilfer (dainties).
Niddah (_H._), Talmudical tractate on the purification of
women.
Nu (_R._), Well?
Olov Hasholom (_H._), Peace be upon him! (loosely applied to
deceased females also).
Omer (_H._), the seven weeks between Passover and Pentecost.
Parnass (_H._), President of the Congregation.
Pesachdik (_H._), proper for Passover.
Pidyun Haben (_H._), redemption of the first-born son.
Piyut (_Hebraicised Gk._), liturgical poem.
Potch (_c. G._), slap.
Pullack (_c. G._), Polish Jew.
Rashi (_H._), Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac, whose Commentary is
often printed under the Hebrew text of the Bible.
Schlemihl (_H._), unlucky, awkward person.
Schmuck (_c. G._), lubberly person.
Schmull (_c. G. schmollen_), pout, sulk.
Schnecks (? _c. Schnake_, gay nonsense), affectations.
Schnorrer (_c. G._), beggar.
Seder (_H._), Passover-eve ceremony.
Selaim (_H._), old Jewish coins.
Sephardim (_H._), Spanish and Portuguese Jews.
Shaaloth u-Teshuvoth (_H._), questions and answers;
casuistical treatise.
Shabbas (_H._), Sabbath.
Shadchan (_H._), professional match-maker.
Shaitel (_c. G._), wig worn by married women.
Shammos (_c. H._), beadle.
Shass (_H. abbreviation_), the six sections of the Talmud.
Shechitah (_H._), slaughter.
Shemah beni (_H._), Hear, my son! = Dear me.
Shemang (_H._), Confession of the Unity of God.
Shidduch (_H._), match.
Shiksah (_H._), non-Jewish girl.
Shnodar (_H._), offer money to the synagogue. (An
extraordinary instance of Jewish jargon--a compound Hebrew
word meaning 'who vows'--being turned into an English verb
and conjugated accordingly in _-ed_ and _-ing_).
Shochet (_H._), official slaughterer.
Shofar (_H._), trumpet of ram's horn, blown during the
Penitential season.
Shool (_c. G._), synagogue.
Shulchan Aruch (_H._), a sixteenth-century compilation,
codifying Jewish law.
Simchath Torah (_H._), festival of the rejoicing of the Law.
Snoga (_Sp._), Sephardic synagogue.
Spiel (_G._), play.
Takif (_H._), rich man; swell.
Talith (_H._), a shawl with fringes, worn by men during
prayer.
Tanaim (_H._), betrothal contract or ceremony.
Terah, Torah (_H._), Law of Moses.
Tephillin (_H._), phylacteries.
Tripha (_H._), ritually unclean.
Wurst (_G._), sausage.
Yiddish, Yiddishkeit (_c. G._), Jewish Judaism.
Yigdal (_H._), hymn summarising the thirteen creeds drawn up
by Maimonides.
Yom Kippur (_H._), Day of Atonement.
Yom Tov (_H._), lit. good day; Festival.
Yontovdik (_hybrid H._), pertaining to the Festival.
Yosher-Kowach (_c. H._), May your strength increase! = Thank
you; a formula to express gratitude--especially at the end
of a reading.
[Illustration: H.C.]
THE TEMPLE PRESS, PRINTERS, LETCHWORTH
* * * * *
+------------------------------------------------------------+
| Typographical errors corrected in text: |
| |
| Page 125: Shemuels' replaced with Shemuel's |
| Page 126: Pinchass' replaced with Pinchas's |
| Page 127: "its just ruining our reputation" replaced with |
| "it's just ruining our reputation" |
| Page 135: "little Sampson" replaced with "Little Sampson" |
| Page 175: "He won't listen to reason at al" replaced with |
| "He won't listen to reason at all" |
| Page 207: "mora consciousness" replaced with |
"moral consciousness" |
| Page 212: Jusaism replaced with Judaism |
| |
| The definition of Mosaism: n. Attachment to the system or |
| doctrines of Moses; that which is peculiar to the Mosaic |
| system or doctrines. |
| |
+------------------------------------------------------------+