It was a secluded little town in Russia, a town within the
Pale--unpretentious, undignified. Very narrow and crooked were the
streets; dingy and dilapidated, the low-thatched shanties; bare and
bleak, the surrounding country. And the inhabitants partook of the
pervading grime. They stooped in their walk, and stuttered in their
speech--unerring tokens of the Jewish dwellers in the dominions of the
White Tsar.
Yet the town did not lack its few aristocrats, its scanty patricians,
before whom all the rest bent the crooked knee. But woe to the erstwhile
Crœsus who lost his all, and joined the tatterdemalions. The victim and
his progeny forever after stooped in their walk, faltered in their
speech, and no wisdom or virtue could raise them from the dust.
The town had its prying eye on the evergrowing list of the once mighty
who had slipped on the downhill road, soon to be cast into the trough of
oblivion.
Among those who still received the homage of the populace, but whose
star was on the wane, was Lea Reb Kalman’s. Her spouse, Reb Shloime,
like Enoch, walked with God. His days were spent in the synagogue,
enmeshed in a continuous maze of cabalistic hair-splitting. It was Lea
who, living up to the lofty opinion of the Psalmist, toiled and spun for
her household. The cares of the home, including the raising of funds,
devolved on her shoulders. The town, therefore, brushed aside the
master of the home, bearded Reb Shloime, who swallowed science and snuff
to excess, and the family was universally known by the patronymic of
Lea--the house of Lea Reb Kalman’s.
Long after the demise of the first Reb Kalman, the grandfather of Lea,
the town shook with the rumors of his vast wealth, the numbers of holy
scrolls he donated, the silver and gold utensils that lined the shelves
of his home. But grandpa Reb Kalman could not forestall the pending ruin
of the saintly Lea. The family pedigree was rated at a premium, but the
wolf at Lea’s door grew more and more daring. Then, too, there was a
marriageable daughter, but no dowry; a house filled with the furniture
used by two generations, and no prospect of change. Lea’s patience and
self-control and dissimulation were never found wanting. The true
situation had to be hidden from public gaze.
The very closest neighbors were kept in the dark. Lea blinded them by
the only link that still bound her impoverished family to its ancestral
glory, a seven-branched antique candelabrum of massive gold and of
excellent workmanship which Lea placed on a pedestal in the center of
the best room, to spread its halo of aristocracy over the largest
possible area. This Menorah enjoyed a local fame, and from near-by towns
people would often come to view the treasure of Reb Kalman. They entered
the house with reverence and awe, and were sure to overlook all that was
dingy.
Poor Lea played the financier, and felt the ground under her giving way.
The store of dry goods and miscellanies, which was left in the family in
her charge, dwindled away by degrees. What the town really knew to be
her journeys for the sake of business were frequently no more than
visits to some well-to-do branch of the family in a remote town. There
she would give vent to her pent-up tears and beg a loan to uphold the
family dignity, so that Reb Shloime would not be forced to leave his
spiritual heights and join the wicked ways of the pursuers of wealth.
“My enemies shall never live to see me go to work like Esau,” he would
often exclaim amidst a spasm of coughing. He looked upon Lea as the
guilty party, and she could not but agree with him. Never would she have
had the glory of being led to the canopy by such a saint, if it had not
been for the rating of her family. She could not now drag him into the
mire. On her rested the burden of keeping untarnished the crest of Reb
Kalman.
Slowly the plaster on the once stately mansion detached itself from the
moldy wall, and hung as if in mockery; more than one of the massive oak
chairs and tables became wabbly and was about to give way. Lea’s eyes
followed the ruin to its minutest detail; but she clung desperately to
the many-branched Menorah that cast its soft glamour over the sordid
house.
The eyes of old Lea gradually took on a hungry, startled look. Her body
was undersized. The face that looked out of the white kerchief was
pinched and furrowed criss-cross. Still she felt a latent power that
might turn her into a giant at the approach of danger to her only
treasure.
For interwoven into her very fiber was the consciousness that the golden
thread which bound her to her famed forefather was so feeble, that she,
and what was hers, might be instantly swallowed up by the crooked
streets, initiated into their ragged fraternity, engulfed in their mud,
wiped out--forgotten, forgotten. A cry of anguish would escape her
breast, and she would gaze at the golden relic as at a living thing, so
endeared to her heart. None would dare to impeach her standing with that
talisman before her. Her husband must respect her. The town must not
forget her.
Often, when the strain of making both ends meet became unbearable, Lea
prayed only for a husband for her daughter. After that, let the Most
High send what He willed. The town called her the wide awake mother.
All knew how she ran about, her kerchief halfway off her head, in search
of a bridegroom for her only daughter. And she contrived to make
appointments with the matchmaker for no other day but the Sabbath. Then
the candelabrum appeared more prominent on the silvery tablecloth, and
radiated such awe that the Shadchan could not have the audacity to
propose aught but the very flower of Israel. He could not for a moment
forget that he faced Lea Reb Kalman’s.
There had been times when it was not so difficult for Lea to keep the
secret of her growing poverty from the world. Long after her marriage
the house looked bright, and enjoyed many relics from the departed
grandfather. There was a silver cup of rare design, the luster of which
kept the neighbors for a long time from detecting that the home library
of holy books was dwindling away. A string of pretty pearls hung from
Lea’s neck, distracting attention from the threadbare dress of _moire_
antique. A younger daughter was then alive, a slender, airy creature who
added aristocratic grace to the bliss of the Sabbath, when the candles
in the Menorah burned brightly, each little flame representing the soul
of a departed kinsman. Old Shloime did not cough then, and he paced the
room in his Sabbath caftan, his earlocks dangling, while he snapped his
fingers and sang aloud his greetings to the angels that bring peace to
the home.
Through the arts of Lea, the final disappearance of the pearls and books
had little effect on the neighbors. She had let them go so gradually,
with such finely shaded diminuendo, that her reputation had suffered but
little.
When the town was in want of some one to go the rounds, and collect for
the poor, it turned to Lea Reb Kalman’s. She walked from house to house,
her ears tingling, her eyes aflame; and she collected groschens for the
needy.
To the silver cup she clung tenaciously for a long time; and used it,
together with the candelabrum, as a stalking horse. The value of the cup
was slight, but she dreaded its loss; and she feared Reb Shloime, who
kept the mug for his “wine of blessing.”
Once, however, when the younger child grew ill, Shloime noticed that Lea
took the cup with her on one of her journeys. He fastened his eyes on
her trembling hands, as she cast wild glances at the Menorah. For a
moment he saw ruin before him, the devastation of everything. But she
took only the cup, and with the little money tried to save the child,
relying on the Almighty for the rest. When the girl died, and the mother
threw her arms wildly in the air, and uttered her protest against the
Lord, pious old Shloime shouted: “Silence, you have not sacrificed
enough; you--” He was interrupted, for Lea was carried swooning into the
open air.
Later, when the little corpse of their child lay on the ground, near its
head two burning candles stuck into the lustrous candelabrum, and the
assembled mourners, glancing at the celebrated relic, spoke in
respectful whispers of the great Reb Kalman who died in the Lord, Reb
Shloime felt a guilty shame, despite his habitual exaltation, toward his
poor wife.
Lea would stay for hours near her golden gift, caressing it with her
wrinkled hands, watching lest a speck of dust should dim its gloss.
Every Friday, at sundown, as she stood with her face covered by her
hands, murmuring her prayers over the lighted candles, she also prayed
for the soul of the departed child. Then her husband’s harsh words would
suddenly startle her, “You have not sacrificed enough,” and she would
turn from the candelabrum, her face livid, her breast heaving.
One day, Lea returned from one of her journeys with a fire in her dimmed
eyes that Shloime had never noticed before. In tones that sounded to him
at first like an apology, and then like an atonement, she spoke of good
news.
“A young man of birth, a family of means,” she related with scanty
breath,--“an excellent match for our daughter. They wanted such high
dowry. But thank God, as soon as you acquiesce we shall have her
betrothed.”
Reb Shloime marveled at her abrupt speech. Even he noticed that Lea’s
lips were parched, her eyes aflame, and that she spoke as if she had
swallowed her sobs. But he ascribed it all to the excitement of leading
a daughter to the canopy.
For the first time since her marriage, Lea had a secret which she kept
from her husband. She was aware that she could not ward off the
inevitable. Soon, not only her husband, the entire town, would learn of
her fall. Her little body was shaken by a chill that ran from the roots
of her hair to the tips of her fingers. Her teeth chattered in her mouth
with the effort to keep from shouting the terrible secret at the top of
her voice. But her trembling old lips moved in a whisper, in a
continuous mumble: “O Lord of my fathers, O dear God, you know a
mother’s heart--I had to sell grandpa’s Menorah, my magic Menorah.”
Shloime could not make out her incoherent cry at night, “I did not have
enough for the dowry.”
It was one of her relatives on the paternal side who had bought Reb
Kalman’s legacy, the candelabrum, yielding to the condition that Lea
should keep the treasure till after her daughter’s betrothal.
In a frenzy, Lea had run to the tailor’s long before it was time. While
her husband was away at the synagogue, celebrating with his cronies, she
was afraid to stay alone at the house with the treasure that was no
longer hers. She managed to spend the days before the ceremony amid the
rustle of linens, the clicking of scissors, the flying of needles.
The night of the wedding, she frisked about and danced so wildly that
the guests eyed one another in astonishment. Even at “the covering of
the bride,” when the young girl sheds tears under her veil, while the
bard, accompanied by the sighing violins and the wails of the women,
speaks of happiness and misery, of life and death--even then Lea stood
with eyes dry and staring.
Only for a moment her face contracted spasmodically, as she imagined
that she was the cause of the wailing; even as the Talmud says: “Yea,
the poor are likened unto the dead.” Better had she been now a
corpse--she, the daughter of Israel who reduced her learned spouse to
penury; she, who was no more the aristocratic Lea Reb Kalman’s. With an
effort she straightened up, for fear that her husband might suspect
something. She recalled a song she knew in her childhood, and, placing
herself before the bride, she sang in a falsetto:
And when you depart hence,
And when you depart,--
Oh, think how lonely you leave me.
And Reb Shloime, with eyes somewhat the worse for the wine, looked shyly
at her and laughed hoarsely, and nudged his neighbors, with the
incessant remark: “Isn’t she as blooming as a bride? As I am a Jew, she
looks as young as a bride!”