CHILDREN OF THE LAW
As I look back to-day I see, within the wall raised around my
birthplace by the vigilance of the police, another wall, higher,
thicker, more impenetrable. This is the wall which the Czar with all
his minions could not shake, the priests with their instruments of
torture could not pierce, the mob with their firebrands could not
destroy. This wall within the wall is the religious integrity of the
Jews, a fortress erected by the prisoners of the Pale, in defiance of
their jailers; a stronghold built of the ruins of their pillaged
homes, cemented with the blood of their murdered children.
Harassed on every side, thwarted in every normal effort, pent up
within narrow limits, all but dehumanized, the Russian Jew fell back
upon the only thing that never failed him,--his hereditary faith in
God. In the study of the Torah he found the balm for all his wounds;
the minute observance of traditional rites became the expression of
his spiritual cravings; and in the dream of a restoration to Palestine
he forgot the world.
What did it matter to us, on a Sabbath or festival, when our life was
centred in the synagogue, what czar sat on the throne, what evil
counsellors whispered in his ear? They were concerned with revenues
and policies and ephemeral trifles of all sorts, while we were intent
on renewing our ancient covenant with God, to the end that His promise
to the world should be fulfilled, and His justice overwhelm the
nations.
On a Friday afternoon the stores and markets closed early. The clatter
of business ceased, the dust of worry was laid, and the Sabbath peace
flooded the quiet streets. No hovel so mean but what its casement sent
out its consecrated ray, so that a wayfarer passing in the twilight
saw the spirit of God brooding over the lowly roof.
Care and fear and shrewishness dropped like a mask from every face.
Eyes dimmed with weeping kindled with inmost joy. Wherever a head bent
over a sacred page, there rested the halo of God's presence.
Not on festivals alone, but also on the common days of the week, we
lived by the Law that had been given us through our teacher Moses. How
to eat, how to bathe, how to work--everything had been written down
for us, and we strove to fulfil the Law. The study of the Torah was
the most honored of all occupations, and they who engaged in it the
most revered of all men.
My memory does not go back to a time when I was too young to know that
God had made the world, and had appointed teachers to tell the people
how to live in it. First came Moses, and after him the great rabbis,
and finally the Rav of Polotzk, who read all day in the sacred books,
so that he could tell me and my parents and my friends what to do
whenever we were in doubt. If my mother cut up a chicken and found
something wrong in it,--some hurt or mark that should not be,--she
sent the housemaid with it to the rav, and I ran along, and saw the
rav look in his big books; and whatever he decided was right. If he
called the chicken "trefah" I must not eat of it; no, not if I had to
starve. And the rav knew about everything: about going on a journey,
about business, about marrying, about purifying vessels for Passover.
Another great teacher was the dayyan, who heard people's quarrels and
settled them according to the Law, so that they should not have to go
to the Gentile courts. The Gentiles were false, judges and witnesses
and all. They favored the rich man against the poor, the Christian
against the Jew. The dayyan always gave true judgments. Nohem
Rabinovitch, the richest man in Polotzk, could not win a case against
a servant maid, unless he were in the right.
Besides the rav and the dayyan there were other men whose callings
were holy,--the shohat, who knew how cattle and fowls should be
killed; the hazzan and the other officers of the synagogue; the
teachers of Hebrew, and their pupils. It did not matter how poor a man
was, he was to be respected and set above other men, if he were
learned in the Law.
In the synagogue scores of men sat all day long over the Hebrew books,
studying and disputing from early dawn till candles were brought in at
night, and then as long as the candles lasted. They could not take
time for anything else, if they meant to become great scholars. Most
of them were strangers in Polotzk, and had no home except the
synagogue. They slept on benches, on tables, on the floor; they picked
up their meals wherever they could. They had come from distant cities,
so as to be under good teachers in Polotzk; and the townspeople were
proud to support them by giving them food and clothing and sometimes
money to visit their homes on holidays. But the poor students came in
such numbers that there were not enough rich families to provide for
all, so that some of them suffered privation. You could pick out a
poor student in a crowd, by his pale face and shrunken form.
There was almost always a poor student taking meals at our house. He
was assigned a certain day, and on that day my grandmother took care
to have something especially good for dinner. It was a very shabby
guest who sat down with us at table, but we children watched him with
respectful eyes. Grandmother had told us that he was a lamden
(scholar), and we saw something holy in the way he ate his cabbage.
Not every man could hope to be a rav, but no Jewish boy was allowed to
grow up without at least a rudimentary knowledge of Hebrew. The
scantiest income had to be divided so as to provide for the boys'
tuition. To leave a boy without a teacher was a disgrace upon the
whole family, to the remotest relative. For the children of the
destitute there was a free school, supported by the charity of the
pious. And so every boy was sent to heder (Hebrew school) almost as
soon as he could speak; and usually he continued to study until his
confirmation, at thirteen years of age, or as much longer as his
talent and ambition carried him. My brother was five years old when he
entered on his studies. He was carried to the heder, on the first day,
covered over with a praying-shawl, so that nothing unholy should look
on him; and he was presented with a bun, on which were traced, in
honey, these words: "The Torah left by Moses is the heritage of the
children of Jacob."
After a boy entered heder, he was the hero of the family. He was
served before the other children at table, and nothing was too good
for him. If the family were very poor, all the girls might go
barefoot, but the heder boy must have shoes; he must have a plate of
hot soup, though the others ate dry bread. When the rebbe (teacher)
came on Sabbath afternoon, to examine the boy in the hearing of the
family, everybody sat around the table and nodded with satisfaction,
if he read his portion well; and he was given a great saucerful of
preserves, and was praised, and blessed, and made much of. No wonder
he said, in his morning prayer, "I thank Thee, Lord, for not having
created me a female." It was not much to be a girl, you see. Girls
could not be scholars and rabbonim.
I went to my brother's heder, sometimes, to bring him his dinner, and
saw how the boys studied. They sat on benches around the table, with
their hats on, of course, and the sacred fringes hanging beneath their
jackets. The rebbe sat at an end of the table, rehearsing two or three
of the boys who were studying the same part, pointing out the words
with his wooden pointer, so as not to lose the place. Everybody read
aloud, the smallest boys repeating the alphabet in a sing-song, while
the advanced boys read their portions in a different sing-song; and
everybody raised his voice to its loudest so as to drown the other
voices. The good boys never took their eyes off their page, except to
ask the rebbe a question; but the naughty boys stared around the room,
and kicked each other under the table, till the rebbe caught them at
it. He had a ruler for striking the bad boys on the knuckles, and in a
corner of the room leaned a long birch wand for pupils who would not
learn their lessons.
The boys came to heder before nine in the morning, and remained until
eight or nine in the evening. Stupid pupils, who could not remember
the lesson, sometimes had to stay till ten. There was an hour for
dinner and play at noon. Good little boys played quietly in their
places, but most of the boys ran out of the house and jumped and
yelled and quarrelled.
There was nothing in what the boys did in heder that I could not have
done--if I had not been a girl. For a girl it was enough if she could
read her prayers in Hebrew, and follow the meaning by the Yiddish
translation at the bottom of the page. It did not take long to learn
this much,--a couple of terms with a rebbetzin (female teacher),--and
after that she was done with books.
A girl's real schoolroom was her mother's kitchen. There she learned
to bake and cook and manage, to knit, sew, and embroider; also to spin
and weave, in country places. And while her hands were busy, her
mother instructed her in the laws regulating a pious Jewish household
and in the conduct proper for a Jewish wife; for, of course, every
girl hoped to be a wife. A girl was born for no other purpose.
How soon it came, the pious burden of wifehood! One day the girl is
playing forfeits with her laughing friends, the next day she is missed
from the circle. She has been summoned to a conference with the
shadchan (marriage broker), who has been for months past advertising
her housewifely talents, her piety, her good looks, and her marriage
portion, among families with marriageable sons. Her parents are
pleased with the son-in-law proposed by the shadchan, and now, at the
last, the girl is brought in, to be examined and appraised by the
prospective parents-in-law. If the negotiations go off smoothly, the
marriage contract is written, presents are exchanged between the
engaged couple, through their respective parents, and all that is left
the girl of her maidenhood is a period of busy preparation for the
wedding.
[Illustration: HEDER (HEBREW SCHOOL) FOR BOYS IN POLOTZK]
If the girl is well-to-do, it is a happy interval, spent in visits to
the drapers and tailors, in collecting linens and featherbeds and
vessels of copper and brass. The former playmates come to inspect the
trousseau, enviously fingering the silks and velvets of the
bride-elect. The happy heroine tries on frocks and mantles before her
glass, blushing at references to the wedding day; and to the question,
"How do you like the bridegroom?" she replies, "How should I know?
There was such a crowd at the betrothal that I didn't see him."
Marriage was a sacrament with us Jews in the Pale. To rear a family of
children was to serve God. Every Jewish man and woman had a part in
the fulfilment of the ancient promise given to Jacob that his seed
should be abundantly scattered over the earth. Parenthood, therefore,
was the great career. But while men, in addition to begetting, might
busy themselves with the study of the Law, woman's only work was
motherhood. To be left an old maid became, accordingly, the greatest
misfortune that could threaten a girl; and to ward off that calamity
the girl and her family, to the most distant relatives, would strain
every nerve, whether by contributing to her dowry, or hiding her
defects from the marriage broker, or praying and fasting that God
might send her a husband.
Not only must all the children of a family be mated, but they must
marry in the order of their ages. A younger daughter must on no
account marry before an elder. A houseful of daughters might be held
up because the eldest failed to find favor in the eyes of prospective
mothers-in-law; not one of the others could marry till the eldest was
disposed of.
A cousin of mine was guilty of the disloyalty of wishing to marry
before her elder sister, who was unfortunate enough to be rejected by
one mother-in-law after another. My uncle feared that the younger
daughter, who was of a firm and masterful nature, might carry out her
plans, thereby disgracing her unhappy sister. Accordingly he hastened
to conclude an alliance with a family far beneath him, and the girl
was hastily married to a boy of whom little was known beyond the fact
that he was inclined to consumption.
The consumptive tendency was no such horror, in an age when
superstition was more in vogue than science. For one patient that went
to a physician in Polotzk, there were ten who called in unlicensed
practitioners and miracle workers. If my mother had an obstinate
toothache that honored household remedies failed to relieve, she went
to Dvoshe, the pious woman, who cured by means of a flint and steel,
and a secret prayer pronounced as the sparks flew up. During an
epidemic of scarlet fever, we protected ourselves by wearing a piece
of red woolen tape around the neck. Pepper and salt tied in a corner
of the pocket was effective in warding off the evil eye. There were
lucky signs, lucky dreams, spirits, and hobgoblins, a grisly
collection, gathered by our wandering ancestors from the demonologies
of Asia and Europe.
Antiquated as our popular follies was the organization of our small
society. It was a caste system with social levels sharply marked off,
and families united by clannish ties. The rich looked down on the
poor, the merchants looked down on the artisans, and within the ranks
of the artisans higher and lower grades were distinguished. A
shoemaker's daughter could not hope to marry the son of a shopkeeper,
unless she brought an extra large dowry; and she had to make up her
mind to be snubbed by the sisters-in-law and cousins-in-law all her
life.
One qualification only could raise a man above his social level, and
that was scholarship. A boy born in the gutter need not despair of
entering the houses of the rich, if he had a good mind and a great
appetite for sacred learning. A poor scholar would be preferred in the
marriage market to a rich ignoramus. In the phrase of our
grandmothers, a boy stuffed with learning was worth more than a girl
stuffed with bank notes.
Simple piety unsupported by learning had a parallel value in the eyes
of good families. This was especially true among the Hasidim, the sect
of enthusiasts who set religious exaltation above rabbinical lore.
Ecstasy in prayer and fantastic merriment on days of religious
rejoicing, raised a Hasid to a hero among his kind. My father's
grandfather, who knew of Hebrew only enough to teach beginners, was
famous through a good part of the Pale for his holy life. Israel
Kimanyer he was called, from the village of Kimanye where he lived;
and people were proud to establish even the most distant relationship
with him. Israel was poor to the verge of beggary, but he prayed more
than other people, never failed in the slightest observance enjoined
on Jews, shared his last crust with every chance beggar, and sat up
nights to commune with God. His family connections included country
peddlers, starving artisans, and ne'er-do-wells; but Israel was a
zaddik--a man of piety--and the fame of his good life redeemed the
whole wretched clan. When his grandson, my father, came to marry, he
boasted his direct descent from Israel Kimanyer, and picked his bride
from the best families.
The little house may still be standing which the pious Jews of Kimanye
and the neighboring villages built for my great-grandfather, close on
a century ago. He was too poor to build his own house, so the good
people who loved him, and who were almost as poor as he, collected a
few rubles among themselves, and bought a site, and built the house.
Built, let it be known, with their own hands; for they were too poor
to hire workmen. They carried the beams and boards on their shoulders,
singing and dancing on the way, as they sang and danced at the
presentation of a scroll to the synagogue. They hauled and sawed and
hammered, till the last nail was driven home; and when they conducted
the holy man to his new abode, the rejoicing was greater than at the
crowning of a czar.
That little cabin was fit to be preserved as the monument to a
species of idealism that has rarely been known outside the Pale. What
was the ultimate source of the pious enthusiasm that built my
great-grandfather's house? What was the substance behind the show of
the Judaism of the Pale? Stripped of its grotesque mask of forms,
rites, and mediæval superstitions, the religion of these fanatics was
simply the belief that God was, had been, and ever would be, and that
they, the children of Jacob, were His chosen messengers to carry His
Law to all the nations. Beneath the mountainous volumes of the
Talmudists and commentators, the Mosaic tablets remained intact. Out
of the mazes of the Cabala the pure doctrine of ancient Judaism found
its way to the hearts of the faithful. Sects and schools might rise
and fall, deafening the ears of the simple with the clamor of their
disputes, still the Jew, retiring within his own soul, heard the
voice of the God of Abraham. Prophets, messiahs, miracle workers
might have their day, still the Jew was conscious that between
himself and God no go-between was needed; that he, as well as every
one of his million brothers, had his portion of God's work to do. And
this close relation to God was the source of the strength that
sustained the Jew through all the trials of his life in the Pale.
Consciously or unconsciously, the Jew identified himself with the
cause of righteousness on earth; and hence the heroism with which he
met the battalions of tyrants.
No empty forms could have impressed the unborn children of the Pale so
deeply that they were prepared for willing martyrdom almost as soon as
they were weaned from their mother's breast. The flame of the burning
bush that had dazzled Moses still lighted the gloomy prison of the
Pale. Behind the mummeries, ceremonials, and symbolic accessories, the
object of the Jew's adoration was the face of God.
This has been many times proved by those who escaped from the Pale,
and, excited by sudden freedom, thought to rid themselves, by one
impatient effort, of every strand of their ancient bonds. Eager to be
merged in the better world in which they found themselves, the escaped
prisoners determined on a change of mind, a change of heart, a change
of manner. They rejoiced in their transformation, thinking that every
mark of their former slavery was obliterated. And then, one day,
caught in the vise of some crucial test, the Jew fixed his alarmed
gaze on his inmost soul, and found there the image of his father's
God.
* * * * *
Merrily played the fiddlers at the wedding of my father, who was the
grandson of Israel Kimanyer of sainted memory. The most pious men in
Polotzk danced the night through, their earlocks dangling, the tails
of their long coats flying in a pious ecstasy. Beggars swarmed among
the bidden guests, sure of an easy harvest where so many hearts were
melted by piety. The wedding jester excelled himself in apt allusions
to the friends and relatives who brought up their wedding presents at
his merry invitation. The sixteen-year-old bride, suffocated beneath
her heavy veil, blushed unseen at the numerous healths drunk to her
future sons and daughters. The whole town was a-flutter with joy,
because the pious scion of a godly race had found a pious wife, and a
young branch of the tree of Judah was about to bear fruit.
When I came to lie on my mother's breast, she sang me lullabies on
lofty themes. I heard the names of Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah as early
as the names of father, mother, and nurse. My baby soul was enthralled
by sad and noble cadences, as my mother sang of my ancient home in
Palestine, or mourned over the desolation of Zion. With the first
rattle that was placed in my hand a prayer was pronounced over me, a
petition that a pious man might take me to wife, and a messiah be
among my sons.
I was fed on dreams, instructed by means of prophecies, trained to
hear and see mystical things that callous senses could not perceive. I
was taught to call myself a princess, in memory of my forefathers who
had ruled a nation. Though I went in the disguise of an outcast, I
felt a halo resting on my brow. Sat upon by brutal enemies, unjustly
hated, annihilated a hundred times, I yet arose and held my head high,
sure that I should find my kingdom in the end, although I had lost my
way in exile; for He who had brought my ancestors safe through a
thousand perils was guiding my feet as well. God needed me and I
needed Him, for we two together had a work to do, according to an
ancient covenant between Him and my forefathers.
This is the dream to which I was heir, in common with every sad-eyed
child of the Pale. This is the living seed which I found among my
heirlooms, when I learned how to strip from them the prickly husk in
which they were passed down to me. And what is the fruit of such seed
as that, and whither lead such dreams? If it is mine to give the
answer, let my words be true and brave.