CHILDREN OF THE GHETTO
A Study of a Peculiar People
BY
I. ZANGWILL
Author of "The Master," "The King of Schnorrers" "Dreamers of the
Ghetto," "Without Prejudice," etc.
1914
Preface to the Third Edition.
The issue of a one-volume edition gives me the opportunity of thanking
the public and the critics for their kindly reception of this chart of a
_terra incognita_, and of restoring the original sub-title, which is a
reply to some criticisms upon its artistic form. The book is intended as
a study, through typical figures, of a race whose persistence is the
most remarkable fact in the history of the world, the faith and morals
of which it has so largely moulded. At the request of numerous readers I
have reluctantly added a glossary of 'Yiddish' words and phrases, based
on one supplied to the American edition by another hand. I have omitted
only those words which occur but once and are then explained in the
text; and to each word I have added an indication of the language from
which it was drawn. This may please those who share Mr. Andrew Lang's
and Miss Rosa Dartle's desire for information. It will be seen that most
of these despised words are pure Hebrew; a language which never died off
the lips of men, and which is the medium in which books are written all
the world over even unto this day.
I.Z.
London, March, 1893.
CONTENTS.
BOOK I. THE CHILDREN OF THE GHETTO.
Proem
I. The Bread of Affliction
II. The Sweater
III. Malka
IV. The Redemption of the Son and the Daughter
V. The Pauper Alien
VI. "Reb" Shemuel
VII. The Neo-Hebrew Poet
VIII. Esther and her Children
IX. Dutch Debby
X. A Silent Family
XI. The Purim Ball
XII. The Sons of the Covenant
XIII. Sugarman's Barmitzvah Party
XIV. The Hope of the Family
XV. The Holy Land League
XVI. The Courtship of Shosshi Shmendrik
XVII. The Hyams's Honeymoon
XVIII. The Hebrew's Friday Night
XIX. With the Strikers
XX. The Hope Extinct
XXI. The Jargon Players
XXII. "For Auld Lang Syne, My Dear"
XXIII. The Dead Monkey
XXIV. The Shadow of Religion
XXV. Seder Night
BOOK II. THE GRANDCHILDREN OF THE GHETTO.
I. The Christmas Dinner
II. Raphael Leon
III. "The Flag of Judah"
IV. The Troubles of an Editor
V. A Woman's Growth
VI. Comedy or Tragedy?
VII. What the Years brought
VIII. The Ends of a Generation
IX. The "Flag" flutters
X. Esther defies the Universe
XI. Going Home
XII. A Sheaf of Sequels
XIII. The Dead Monkey again
XIV. Sidney settles down
XV. From Soul to Soul
XVI. Love's Temptation
XVII. The Prodigal Son
XVIII. Hopes and Dreams
PROEM.
Not here in our London Ghetto the gates and gaberdines of the olden
Ghetto of the Eternal City; yet no lack of signs external by which
one may know it, and those who dwell therein. Its narrow streets
have no specialty of architecture; its dirt is not picturesque. It
is no longer the stage for the high-buskined tragedy of massacre
and martyrdom; only for the obscurer, deeper tragedy that evolves
from the pressure of its own inward forces, and the long-drawn-out
tragi-comedy of sordid and shifty poverty. Natheless, this London
Ghetto of ours is a region where, amid uncleanness and squalor, the
rose of romance blows yet a little longer in the raw air of English
reality; a world which hides beneath its stony and unlovely surface
an inner world of dreams, fantastic and poetic as the mirage of the
Orient where they were woven, of superstitions grotesque as the
cathedral gargoyles of the Dark Ages in which they had birth. And
over all lie tenderly some streaks of celestial light shining from
the face of the great Lawgiver.
The folk who compose our pictures are children of the Ghetto; their
faults are bred of its hovering miasma of persecution, their
virtues straitened and intensified by the narrowness of its
horizon. And they who have won their way beyond its boundaries must
still play their parts in tragedies and comedies--tragedies of
spiritual struggle, comedies of material ambition--which are the
aftermath of its centuries of dominance, the sequel of that long
cruel night in Jewry which coincides with the Christian Era. If
they are not the Children, they are at least the Grandchildren of
the Ghetto.
The particular Ghetto that is the dark background upon which our
pictures will be cast, is of voluntary formation.
People who have been living in a Ghetto for a couple of centuries, are
not able to step outside merely because the gates are thrown down, nor
to efface the brands on their souls by putting off the yellow badges.
The isolation imposed from without will have come to seem the law of
their being. But a minority will pass, by units, into the larger, freer,
stranger life amid the execrations of an ever-dwindling majority. For
better or for worse, or for both, the Ghetto will be gradually
abandoned, till at last it becomes only a swarming place for the poor
and the ignorant, huddling together for social warmth. Such people are
their own Ghetto gates; when they migrate they carry them across the sea
to lands where they are not. Into the heart of East London there poured
from Russia, from Poland, from Germany, from Holland, streams of Jewish
exiles, refugees, settlers, few as well-to-do as the Jew of the proverb,
but all rich in their cheerfulness, their industry, and their
cleverness. The majority bore with them nothing but their phylacteries
and praying shawls, and a good-natured contempt for Christians and
Christianity. For the Jew has rarely been embittered by persecution. He
knows that he is in _Goluth_, in exile, and that the days of the Messiah
are not yet, and he looks upon the persecutor merely as the stupid
instrument of an all-wise Providence. So that these poor Jews were rich
in all the virtues, devout yet tolerant, and strong in their reliance on
Faith, Hope, and more especially Charity.
In the early days of the nineteenth century, all Israel were brethren.
Even the pioneer colony of wealthy Sephardim--descendants of the Spanish
crypto-Jews who had reached England _via_ Holland--had modified its
boycott of the poor Ashkenazic immigrants, now they were become an
overwhelming majority. There was a superior stratum of Anglo-German Jews
who had had time to get on, but all the Ashkenazic tribes lived very
much like a happy family, the poor not stand-offish towards the rich,
but anxious to afford them opportunities for well-doing. The _Schnorrer_
felt no false shame in his begging. He knew it was the rich man's duty
to give him unleavened bread at Passover, and coals in the winter, and
odd half-crowns at all seasons; and he regarded himself as the Jacob's
ladder by which the rich man mounted to Paradise. But, like all genuine
philanthropists, he did not look for gratitude. He felt that virtue was
its own reward, especially when he sat in Sabbath vesture at the head of
his table on Friday nights, and thanked God in an operatic aria for the
white cotton table-cloth and the fried sprats. He sought personal
interviews with the most majestic magnates, and had humorous repartees
for their lumbering censure.
As for the rich, they gave charity unscrupulously--in the same Oriental,
unscientific, informal spirit in which the _Dayanim_, those cadis of the
East End, administered justice. The _Takif_, or man of substance, was as
accustomed to the palm of the mendicant outside the Great Synagogue as
to the rattling pyx within. They lived in Bury Street, and Prescott
Street, and Finsbury--these aristocrats of the Ghetto--in mansions that
are now but congeries of "apartments." Few relations had they with
Belgravia, but many with Petticoat Lane and the Great _Shool_, the
stately old synagogue which has always been illuminated by candles and
still refuses all modern light. The Spanish Jews had a more ancient
_snoga_, but it was within a stone's throw of the "Duke's Place"
edifice. Decorum was not a feature of synagogue worship in those days,
nor was the Almighty yet conceived as the holder of formal receptions
once a week. Worshippers did not pray with bated breath, as if afraid
that the deity would overhear them. They were at ease in Zion. They
passed the snuff-boxes and remarks about the weather. The opportunities
of skipping afforded by a too exuberant liturgy promoted conversation,
and even stocks were discussed in the terrible _longueurs_ induced by
the meaningless ministerial repetition of prayers already said by the
congregation, or by the official recitations of catalogues of purchased
benedictions. Sometimes, of course, this announcement of the offertory
was interesting, especially when there was sensational competition. The
great people bade in guineas for the privilege of rolling up the Scroll
of the Law or drawing the Curtain of the Ark, or saying a particular
_Kaddish_ if they were mourners, and then thrills of reverence went
round the congregation. The social hierarchy was to some extent
graduated by synagogal contributions, and whoever could afford only a
little offering had it announced as a "gift"--a vague term which might
equally be the covering of a reticent munificence.
Very few persons, "called up" to the reading of the Law, escaped at the
cost they had intended, for one is easily led on by an insinuative
official incapable of taking low views of the donor's generosity and a
little deaf. The moment prior to the declaration of the amount was quite
exciting for the audience. On Sabbaths and festivals the authorities
could not write down these sums, for writing is work and work is
forbidden; even to write them in the book and volume of their brain
would have been to charge their memories with an illegitimate if not an
impossible burden. Parchment books on a peculiar system with holes in
the pages and laces to go through the holes solved the problem of
bookkeeping without pen and ink. It is possible that many of the
worshippers were tempted to give beyond their means for fear of losing
the esteem of the _Shammos_ or Beadle, a potent personage only next in
influence to the President whose overcoat he obsequiously removed on the
greater man's annual visit to the synagogue. The Beadle's eye was all
over the _Shool_ at once, and he could settle an altercation about seats
without missing a single response. His automatic amens resounded
magnificently through the synagogue, at once a stimulus and a rebuke. It
was probably as a concession to him that poor men, who were neither
seat-holders nor wearers of chimney-pot hats, were penned within an iron
enclosure near the door of the building and ranged on backless benches,
and it says much for the authority of the _Shammos_ that not even the
_Schnorrer_ contested it. Prayers were shouted rapidly by the
congregation, and elaborately sung by the _Chazan_. The minister was
_Vox et praeterea nihil_. He was the only musical instrument permitted,
and on him devolved the whole onus of making the service attractive. He
succeeded. He was helped by the sociability of the gathering--for the
Synagogue was virtually a Jewish Club, the focus of the sectarian life.
Hard times and bitter had some of the fathers of the Ghetto, but they
ate their dry bread with the salt of humor, loved their wives, and
praised God for His mercies. Unwitting of the genealogies that would be
found for them by their prosperous grandchildren, old clo' men plied
their trade in ambitious content. They were meek and timorous outside
the Ghetto, walking warily for fear of the Christian. Sufferance was
still the badge of all their tribe. Yet that there were Jews who held
their heads high, let the following legend tell: Few men could shuffle
along more inoffensively or cry "Old Clo'" with a meeker twitter than
Sleepy Sol. The old man crawled one day, bowed with humility and
clo'-bag, into a military mews and uttered his tremulous chirp. To him
came one of the hostlers with insolent beetling brow.
"Any gold lace?" faltered Sleepy Sol.
"Get out!" roared the hostler.
"I'll give you de best prices," pleaded Sleepy Sol.
"Get out!" repeated the hostler and hustled the old man into the street.
"If I catch you 'ere again, I'll break your neck." Sleepy Sol loved his
neck, but the profit on gold lace torn from old uniforms was high. Next
week he crept into the mews again, trusting to meet another hostler.
"Clo'! Clo'!" he chirped faintly.
Alas! the brawny bully was to the fore again and recognized him.
"You dirty old Jew," he cried. "Take that, and that! The next time I
sees you, you'll go 'ome on a shutter."
The old man took that, and that, and went on his way. The next day he
came again.
"Clo'! Clo'!" he whimpered.
"What!" said the ruffian, his coarse cheeks flooded with angry blood.
"Ev yer forgotten what I promised yer?" He seized Sleepy Sol by the
scruff of the neck.
"I say, why can't you leave the old man alone?"
The hostler stared at the protester, whose presence he had not noticed
in the pleasurable excitement of the moment. It was a Jewish young man,
indifferently attired in a pepper-and-salt suit. The muscular hostler
measured him scornfully with his eye.
"What's to do with you?" he said, with studied contempt.
"Nothing," admitted the intruder. "And what harm is he doing you?"
"That's my bizness," answered the hostler, and tightened his clutch of
Sleepy Sol's nape.
"Well, you'd better not mind it," answered the young man calmly. "Let
go."'
The hostler's thick lips emitted a disdainful laugh.
"Let go, d'you hear?" repeated the young man.
"I'll let go at your nose," said the hostler, clenching his knobby fist.
"Very well," said the young man. "Then I'll pull yours."
"Oho!" said the hostler, his scowl growing fiercer. "Yer means bizness,
does yer?" With that he sent Sleepy Sol staggering along the road and
rolled up his shirt-sleeves. His coat was already off.
The young man did not remove his; he quietly assumed the defensive. The
hostler sparred up to him with grim earnestness, and launched a terrible
blow at his most characteristic feature. The young man blandly put it on
one side, and planted a return blow on the hostler's ear. Enraged, his
opponent sprang upon him. The young Jew paralyzed him by putting his
left hand negligently into his pocket. With his remaining hand he closed
the hostler's right eye, and sent the flesh about it into mourning. Then
he carelessly tapped a little blood from the hostler's nose, gave him a
few thumps on the chest as if to test the strength of his lungs, and
laid him sprawling in the courtyard. A brother hostler ran out from the
stables and gave a cry of astonishment.
"You'd better wipe his face," said the young man curtly.
The newcomer hurried back towards the stables.
"Vait a moment," said Sleepy Sol "I can sell you a sponge sheap; I've
got a beauty in my bag."
There were plenty of sponges about, but the newcomer bought the
second-hand sponge.
"Do you want any more?" the young man affably inquired of his prostrate
adversary.
The hostler gave a groan. He was shamed before a friend whom he had
early convinced of his fistic superiority.
"No, I reckon he don't," said his friend, with a knowing grin at the
conqueror.
"Then I will wish you a good day," said the young man. "Come along,
father."
"Yes, ma son-in-law," said Sleepy Sol.
"Do you know who that was, Joe?" said his friend, as he sponged away the
blood.
Joe shook his head.
"That was Dutch Sam," said his friend in an awe-struck whisper.
All Joe's body vibrated with surprise and respect. Dutch Sam was the
champion bruiser of his time; in private life an eminent dandy and a
prime favorite of His Majesty George IV., and Sleepy Sol had a beautiful
daughter and was perhaps prepossessing himself when washed for the
Sabbath.
"Dutch Sam!" Joe repeated.
"Dutch Sam! Why, we've got his picter hanging up inside, only he's naked
to the waist."
"Well, strike me lucky! What a fool I was not to rekkernize 'im!" His
battered face brightened up. "No wonder he licked me!"
Except for the comparative infrequency of the more bestial types of men
and women, Judaea has always been a cosmos in little, and its
prize-fighters and scientists, its philosophers and "fences," its
gymnasts and money-lenders, its scholars and stockbrokers, its
musicians, chess-players, poets, comic singers, lunatics, saints,
publicans, politicians, warriors, poltroons, mathematicians, actors,
foreign correspondents, have always been in the first rank. _Nihil
alienum a se Judaeus putat_.
Joe and his friend fell to recalling Dutch Sam's great feats. Each
out-vied the other in admiration for the supreme pugilist.
Next day Sleepy Sol came rampaging down the courtyard. He walked at the
rate of five miles to the hour, and despite the weight of his bag his
head pointed to the zenith.
"Clo'!" he shrieked. "Clo'!"
Joe the hostler came out. His head was bandaged, and in his hand was
gold lace. It was something even to do business with a hero's
father-in-law.
But it is given to few men to marry their daughters to champion boxers:
and as Dutch Sam was not a Don Quixote, the average peddler or huckster
never enjoyed the luxury of prancing gait and cock-a-hoop business cry.
The primitive fathers of the Ghetto might have borne themselves more
jauntily had they foreseen that they were to be the ancestors of mayors
and aldermen descended from Castilian hidalgos and Polish kings, and
that an unborn historian would conclude that the Ghetto of their day was
peopled by princes in disguise. They would have been as surprised to
learn who they were as to be informed that they were orthodox. The great
Reform split did not occur till well on towards the middle of the
century, and the Jews of those days were unable to conceive that a man
could be a Jew without eating _kosher_ meat, and they would have looked
upon the modern distinctions between racial and religious Jews as the
sophistries of the convert or the missionary. If their religious life
converged to the Great _Shool_, their social life focussed on Petticoat
Lane, a long, narrow thoroughfare which, as late as Strype's day, was
lined with beautiful trees: vastly more pleasant they must have been
than the faded barrows and beggars of after days. The Lane--such was its
affectionate sobriquet--was the stronghold of hard-shell Judaism, the
Alsatia of "infidelity" into which no missionary dared set foot,
especially no apostate-apostle. Even in modern days the new-fangled
Jewish minister of the fashionable suburb, rigged out, like the
Christian clergyman, has been mistaken for such a _Meshumad_, and pelted
with gratuitous vegetables and eleemosynary eggs. The Lane was always
the great market-place, and every insalubrious street and alley abutting
on it was covered with the overflowings of its commerce and its mud.
Wentworth Street and Goulston Street were the chief branches, and in
festival times the latter was a pandemonium of caged poultry, clucking
and quacking and cackling and screaming. Fowls and geese and ducks were
bought alive, and taken to have their throats cut for a fee by the
official slaughterer. At Purim a gaiety, as of the Roman carnival,
enlivened the swampy Wentworth Street, and brought a smile into the
unwashed face of the pavement. The confectioners' shops, crammed with
"stuffed monkeys" and "bolas," were besieged by hilarious crowds of
handsome girls and their young men, fat women and their children, all
washing down the luscious spicy compounds with cups of chocolate;
temporarily erected swinging cradles bore a vociferous many-colored
burden to the skies; cardboard noses, grotesque in their departure from
truth, abounded. The Purim _Spiel_ or Purim play never took root in
England, nor was Haman ever burnt in the streets, but _Shalachmonos_, or
gifts of the season, passed between friend and friend, and masquerading
parties burst into neighbors' houses. But the Lane was lively enough on
the ordinary Friday and Sunday. The famous Sunday Fair was an event of
metropolitan importance, and thither came buyers of every sect. The
Friday Fair was more local, and confined mainly to edibles. The
Ante-Festival Fairs combined something of the other two, for Jews
desired to sport new hats and clothes for the holidays as well as to eat
extra luxuries, and took the opportunity of a well-marked epoch to
invest in new everythings from oil-cloth to cups and saucers. Especially
was this so at Passover, when for a week the poorest Jew must use a
supplementary set of crockery and kitchen utensils. A babel of sound,
audible for several streets around, denoted Market Day in Petticoat
Lane, and the pavements were blocked by serried crowds going both ways
at once.
It was only gradually that the community was Anglicized. Under the sway
of centrifugal impulses, the wealthier members began to form new
colonies, moulting their old feathers and replacing them by finer, and
flying ever further from the centre. Men of organizing ability founded
unrivalled philanthropic and educational institutions on British lines;
millionaires fought for political emancipation; brokers brazenly foisted
themselves on 'Change; ministers gave sermons in bad English; an English
journal was started; very slowly, the conventional Anglican tradition
was established; and on that human palimpsest which has borne the
inscriptions of all languages and all epochs, was writ large the
sign-manual of England. Judaea prostrated itself before the Dagon of its
hereditary foe, the Philistine, and respectability crept on to freeze
the blood of the Orient with its frigid finger, and to blur the vivid
tints of the East into the uniform gray of English middle-class life. In
the period within which our story moves, only vestiges of the old gaiety
and brotherhood remained; the full _al fresco_ flavor was evaporated.
And to-day they are alt dead--the _Takeefim_ with big hearts and bigger
purses, and the humorous _Schnorrers_, who accepted their gold, and the
cheerful pious peddlers who rose from one extreme to the other, building
up fabulous fortunes in marvellous ways. The young mothers, who suckled
their babes in the sun, have passed out of the sunshine; yea, and the
babes, too, have gone down with gray heads to the dust. Dead are the
fair fat women, with tender hearts, who waddled benignantly through
life, ever ready to shed the sympathetic tear, best of wives, and cooks,
and mothers; dead are the bald, ruddy old men, who ambled about in faded
carpet slippers, and passed the snuff-box of peace: dead are the
stout-hearted youths who sailed away to Tom Tiddler's ground; and dead
are the buxom maidens they led under the wedding canopy when they
returned. Even the great Dr. Sequira, pompous in white stockings,
physician extraordinary to the Prince Regent of Portugal, lies
vanquished by his life-long adversary and the Baal Shem himself, King of
Cabalists, could command no countervailing miracle.
Where are the little girls in white pinafores with pink sashes who
brightened the Ghetto on high days and holidays? Where is the beauteous
Betsy of the Victoria Ballet? and where the jocund synagogue dignitary
who led off the cotillon with her at the annual Rejoicing of the Law?
Worms have long since picked the great financier's brain, the
embroidered waistcoats of the bucks have passed even beyond the stage of
adorning sweeps on May Day, and Dutch Sam's fist is bonier than ever.
The same mould covers them all--those who donated guineas and those who
donated "gifts," the rogues and the hypocrites, and the wedding-drolls,
the observant and the lax, the purse-proud and the lowly, the coarse and
the genteel, the wonderful chapmen and the luckless _Schlemihls_, Rabbi
and _Dayan_ and _Shochet_, the scribes who wrote the sacred scroll and
the cantors who trolled it off mellifluous tongues, and the betting-men
who never listened to it; the grimy Russians of the capotes and the
earlocks, and the blue-blooded Dons, "the gentlemen of the Mahamad," who
ruffled it with swords and knee-breeches in the best Christian society.
Those who kneaded the toothsome "bolas" lie with those who ate them; and
the marriage-brokers repose with those they mated. The olives and the
cucumbers grow green and fat as of yore, but their lovers are mixed with
a soil that is barren of them. The restless, bustling crowds that
jostled laughingly in Rag Fair are at rest in the "House of Life;" the
pageant of their strenuous generation is vanished as a dream. They died
with the declaration of God's unity on their stiffening lips, and the
certainty of resurrection in their pulseless hearts, and a faded Hebrew
inscription on a tomb, or an unread entry on a synagogue brass is their
only record. And yet, perhaps, their generation is not all dust.
Perchance, here and there, some decrepit centenarian rubs his purblind
eyes with the ointment of memory, and sees these pictures of the past,
hallowed by the consecration of time, and finds his shrivelled cheek wet
with the pathos sanctifying the joys that have been.
BOOK I.
CHILDREN OF THE GHETTO.
CHAPTER I.
THE BREAD OF AFFLICTION.
A dead and gone wag called the street "Fashion Street," and most of the
people who live in it do not even see the joke. If it could exchange
names with "Rotten Row," both places would be more appropriately
designated. It is a dull, squalid, narrow thoroughfare in the East End
of London, connecting Spitalfields with Whitechapel, and branching off
in blind alleys. In the days when little Esther Ansell trudged its
unclean pavements, its extremities were within earshot of the
blasphemies from some of the vilest quarters and filthiest rookeries in
the capital of the civilized world. Some of these clotted spiders'-webs
have since been swept away by the besom of the social reformer, and the
spiders have scurried off into darker crannies.
There were the conventional touches about the London street-picture, as
Esther Ansell sped through the freezing mist of the December evening,
with a pitcher in her hand, looking in her oriental coloring like a
miniature of Rebecca going to the well. A female street-singer, with a
trail of infants of dubious maternity, troubled the air with a piercing
melody; a pair of slatterns with arms a-kimbo reviled each other's
relatives; a drunkard lurched along, babbling amiably; an organ-grinder,
blue-nosed as his monkey, set some ragged children jigging under the
watery rays of a street-lamp. Esther drew her little plaid shawl tightly
around her, and ran on without heeding these familiar details, her
chilled feet absorbing the damp of the murky pavement through the worn
soles of her cumbrous boots. They were masculine boots, kicked off by
some intoxicated tramp and picked up by Esther's father. Moses Ansell
had a habit of lighting on windfalls, due, perhaps, to his meek manner
of walking with bent head, as though literally bowed beneath the yoke of
the Captivity. Providence rewarded him for his humility by occasional
treasure-trove. Esther had received a pair of new boots from her school
a week before, and the substitution, of the tramp's foot-gear for her
own resulted in a net profit of half-a-crown, and kept Esther's little
brothers and sisters in bread for a week. At school, under her teacher's
eye, Esther was very unobtrusive about the feet for the next fortnight,
but as the fear of being found out died away, even her rather morbid
conscience condoned the deception in view of the stomachic gain.
They gave away bread and milk at the school, too, but Esther and her
brothers and sisters never took either, for fear of being thought in
want of them. The superiority of a class-mate is hard to bear, and a
high-spirited child will not easily acknowledge starvation in presence
of a roomful of purse-proud urchins, some of them able to spend a
farthing a day on pure luxuries. Moses Ansell would have been grieved
had he known his children were refusing the bread he could not give
them. Trade was slack in the sweating dens, and Moses, who had always
lived from hand to mouth, had latterly held less than ever between the
one and the other. He had applied for help to the Jewish Board of
Guardians, but red-tape rarely unwinds as quickly as hunger coils
itself; moreover, Moses was an old offender in poverty at the Court of
Charity. But there was one species of alms which Moses could not be
denied, and the existence of which Esther could not conceal from him as
she concealed that of the eleemosynary breakfasts at the school. For it
was known to all men that soup and bread were to be had for the asking
thrice a week at the Institution in Fashion Street, and in the Ansell
household the opening of the soup-kitchen was looked forward to as the
dawn of a golden age, when it would be impossible to pass more than one
day without bread. The vaguely-remembered smell of the soup threw a
poetic fragrance over the coming winter. Every year since Esther's
mother had died, the child had been sent to fetch home the provender,
for Moses, who was the only other available member of the family, was
always busy praying when he had nothing better to do. And so to-night
Esther fared to the kitchen, with her red pitcher, passing in her
childish eagerness numerous women shuffling along on the same errand,
and bearing uncouth tin cans supplied by the institution. An
individualistic instinct of cleanliness made Esther prefer the family
pitcher. To-day this liberty of choice has been taken away, and the
regulation can, numbered and stamped, serves as a soup-ticket. There was
quite a crowd of applicants outside the stable-like doors of the kitchen
when Esther arrived, a few with well-lined stomachs, perhaps, but the
majority famished and shivering. The feminine element swamped the rest,
but there were about a dozen men and a few children among the group,
most of the men scarce taller than the children--strange, stunted,
swarthy, hairy creatures, with muddy complexions illumined by black,
twinkling eyes. A few were of imposing stature, wearing coarse, dusty
felt hats or peaked caps, with shaggy beards or faded scarfs around
their throats. Here and there, too, was a woman of comely face and
figure, but for the most part it was a collection of crones, prematurely
aged, with weird, wan, old-world features, slip-shod and draggle-tailed,
their heads bare, or covered with dingy shawls in lieu of bonnets--red
shawls, gray shawls, brick-dust shawls, mud-colored shawls. Yet there
was an indefinable touch of romance and pathos about the tawdriness and
witch-like ugliness, and an underlying identity about the crowd of
Polish, Russian, German, Dutch Jewesses, mutually apathetic, and
pressing forwards. Some of them had infants at their bare breasts, who
drowsed quietly with intervals of ululation. The women devoid of shawls
had nothing around their necks to protect them from the cold, the dusky
throats were exposed, and sometimes even the first hooks and eyes of the
bodice were unnecessarily undone. The majority wore cheap earrings and
black wigs with preternaturally polished hair; where there was no wig,
the hair was touzled.
At half-past five the stable-doors were thrown open, and the crowd
pressed through a long, narrow white-washed stone corridor into a
barn-like compartment, with a white-washed ceiling traversed by wooden
beams. Within this compartment, and leaving but a narrow, circumscribing
border, was a sort of cattle-pen, into which the paupers crushed,
awaiting amid discomfort and universal jabber the divine moment. The
single jet of gas-light depending from the ceiling flared upon the
strange simian faces, and touched them into a grotesque picturesqueness
that would have delighted Doré.
They felt hungry, these picturesque people; their near and dear ones
were hungering at home. Voluptuously savoring in imagination the
operation of the soup, they forgot its operation as a dole in aid of
wages; were unconscious of the grave economical possibilities of
pauperization and the rest, and quite willing to swallow their
independence with the soup. Even Esther, who had read much, and was
sensitive, accepted unquestioningly the theory of the universe that was
held by most people about her, that human beings were distinguished from
animals in having to toil terribly for a meagre crust, but that their
lot was lightened by the existence of a small and semi-divine class
called _Takeefim_, or rich people, who gave away what they didn't want.
How these rich people came to be, Esther did not inquire; they were as
much a part of the constitution of things as clouds and horses. The
semi-celestial variety was rarely to be met with. It lived far away from
the Ghetto, and a small family of it was said to occupy a whole house.
Representatives of it, clad in rustling silks or impressive broad-cloth,
and radiating an indefinable aroma of superhumanity, sometimes came to
the school, preceded by the beaming Head Mistress; and then all the
little girls rose and curtseyed, and the best of them, passing as
average members of the class, astonished the semi-divine persons by
their intimate acquaintance with the topography of the Pyrenees and the
disagreements of Saul and David, the intercourse of the two species
ending in effusive smiles and general satisfaction. But the dullest of
the girls was alive to the comedy, and had a good-humored contempt for
the unworldliness of the semi-divine persons who spoke to them as if
they were not going to recommence squabbling, and pulling one another's
hair, and copying one another's sums, and stealing one another's
needles, the moment the semi-celestial backs were turned.
To-night, semi-divine persons were to be seen in a galaxy of splendor,
for in the reserved standing-places, behind the white deal counter, was
gathered a group of philanthropists. The room was an odd-shaped polygon,
partially lined with eight boilers, whose great wooden lids were raised
by pulleys and balanced by red-painted iron balls. In the corner stood
the cooking-engine. Cooks in white caps and blouses stirred the steaming
soup with long wooden paddles. A tradesman besought the attention of the
Jewish reporters to the improved boiler he had manufactured, and the
superintendent adjured the newspaper men not to omit his name; while
amid the soberly-clad clergymen flitted, like gorgeous humming-birds
through a flock of crows, the marriageable daughters of an east-end
minister.
When a sufficient number of semi-divinities was gathered together, the
President addressed the meeting at considerable length, striving to
impress upon the clergymen and other philanthropists present that
charity was a virtue, and appealing to the Bible, the Koran, and even
the Vedas, for confirmation of his proposition. Early in his speech the
sliding door that separated the cattle-pen from the kitchen proper had
to be closed, because the jostling crowd jabbered so much and
inconsiderate infants squalled, and there did not seem to be any general
desire to hear the President's ethical views. They were a low material
lot, who thought only of their bellies, and did but chatter the louder
when the speech was shut out. They had overflowed their barriers by this
time, and were surging cruelly to and fro, and Esther had to keep her
elbows close to her sides lest her arms should be dislocated. Outside
the stable doors a shifting array of boys and girls hovered hungrily and
curiously. When the President had finished, the Rabbinate was invited to
address the philanthropists, which it did at not less length, eloquently
seconding the proposition that charity was a virtue. Then the door was
slid back, and the first two paupers were admitted, the rest of the
crowd being courageously kept at bay by the superintendent. The head
cook filled a couple of plates with soup, dipping a great pewter pot
into the cauldron. The Rabbinate then uplifted its eyes heavenwards, and
said the grace:
"Blessed art Thou, O Lord, King of the Universe, according to whose
word all things exist."
It then tasted a spoonful of the soup, as did also the President and
several of the visitors, the passage of the fluid along the palate
invariably evoking approving ecstatic smiles; and indeed, there was more
body in it this opening night than there would be later, when, in due
course, the bulk of the meat would take its legitimate place among the
pickings of office. The sight of the delighted deglutition of the
semi-divine persons made Esther's mouth water as she struggled for
breathing space on the outskirts of Paradise. The impatience which
fretted her was almost allayed by visions of stout-hearted Solomon and
gentle Rachel and whimpering little Sarah and Ikey, all gulping down
the delicious draught. Even the more stoical father and grandmother were
a little in her thoughts. The Ansells had eaten nothing but a slice of
dry bread each in the morning. Here before her, in the land of Goshen,
flowing with soup, was piled up a heap of halves of loaves, while
endless other loaves were ranged along the shelves as for a giant's
table. Esther looked ravenously at the four-square tower built of edible
bricks, shivering as the biting air sought out her back through a sudden
interstice in the heaving mass. The draught reminded her more keenly of
her little ones huddled together in the fireless garret at home. Ah!
what a happy night was in store. She must not let them devour the two
loaves to-night; that would be criminal extravagance. No, one would
suffice for the banquet, the other must be carefully put by. "To-morrow
is also a day," as the old grandmother used to say in her quaint jargon.
But the banquet was not to be spread as fast as Esther's fancy could
fly; the doors must be shut again, other semi-divine and wholly divine
persons (in white ties) must move and second (with eloquence and length)
votes of thanks to the President, the Rabbinate, and all other available
recipients; a French visitor must express his admiration of English
charity. But at last the turn of the gnawing stomachs came. The motley
crowd, still babbling, made a slow, forward movement, squeezing
painfully through the narrow aperture, and shivering a plate glass
window pane at the side of the cattle-pen in the crush; the semi-divine
persons rubbed their hands and smiled genially; ingenious paupers tried
to dodge round to the cauldrons by the semi-divine entrance; the
tropical humming-birds fluttered among the crows; there was a splashing
of ladles and a gurgling of cascades of soup into the cans, and a hubbub
of voices; a toothless, white-haired, blear-eyed hag lamented in
excellent English that soup was refused her, owing to her case not
having yet been investigated, and her tears moistened the one loaf she
received. In like hard case a Russian threw himself on the stones and
howled. But at last Esther was running through the mist, warmed by the
pitcher which she hugged to her bosom, and suppressing the blind impulse
to pinch the pair of loaves tied up in her pinafore. She almost flew up
the dark flight of stairs to the attic in Royal Street. Little Sarah was
sobbing querulously. Esther, conscious of being an angel of deliverance,
tried to take the last two steps at once, tripped and tumbled
ignominiously against the garret-door, which flew back and let her fall
into the room with a crash. The pitcher shivered into fragments under
her aching little bosom, the odorous soup spread itself in an irregular
pool over the boards, and flowed under the two beds and dripped down the
crevices into the room beneath. Esther burst into tears; her frock was
wet and greased, her hands were cut and bleeding. Little Sarah checked
her sobs at the disaster. Moses Ansell was not yet returned from evening
service, but the withered old grandmother, whose wizened face loomed
through the gloom of the cold, unlit garret, sat up on the bed and
cursed her angrily for a _Schlemihl_. A sense of injustice made Esther
cry more bitterly. She had never broken anything for years past. Ikey,
an eerie-looking dot of four and a half years, tottered towards her (all
the Ansells had learnt to see in the dark), and nestling his curly head
against her wet bodice, murmured:
"Neva mind, Estie, I lat oo teep in my new bed."
The consolation of sleeping in that imaginary new bed to the possession
of which Ikey was always looking forward was apparently adequate; for
Esther got up from the floor and untied the loaves from her pinafore. A
reckless spirit of defiance possessed her, as of a gambler who throws
good money after bad. They should have a mad revelry to-night--the two
loaves should be eaten at once. One (minus a hunk for father's supper)
would hardly satisfy six voracious appetites. Solomon and Rachel,
irrepressibly excited by the sight of the bread, rushed at it greedily,
snatched a loaf from Esther's hand, and tore off a crust each with their
fingers.
"Heathen," cried the old grandmother. "Washing and benediction."
Solomon was used to being called a "heathen" by the _Bube_. He put on
his cap and went grudgingly to the bucket of water that stood in a
corner of the room, and tipped a drop over his fingers. It is to be
feared that neither the quantity of water nor the area of hand covered
reached even the minimum enjoined by Rabbinical law. He murmured
something intended for Hebrew during the operation, and was beginning to
mutter the devout little sentence which precedes the eating of bread
when Rachel, who as a female was less driven to the lavatory ceremony,
and had thus got ahead of him, paused in her ravenous mastication and
made a wry face. Solomon took a huge bite at his crust, then he uttered
an inarticulate "pooh," and spat out his mouthful.
There was no salt in the bread.