* * *
What strange foreign eatables you see here: vile-looking messy
dishes, anæmic cucumbers, queer salted meats, varied sausages of East
European origin, the inevitable onion, and, of course, olives.
Smoked salmon has customers at ten shillings a pound.
But the people are more interesting than their surroundings or their
food. Such gnarled, lined faces, such live eyes, such a patriarchal
air. That is the old orthodox generation. The new? Such smartish
young semi-Englishmen prospering in trade on an education for which
the old generation has starved itself. They can pronounce their w's
and their th's. They have an eye on Hampstead or even on the Golden
West. The daughters of Israel, powdered and rouged, flit with their
dark, and often alluring, eyes from dressmaker's shop to dressmaker's
shop, pert and self-assured, well dressed even in their working
clothes.
This rift between the old and the new generations is the first thing
that strikes you. There seem several hundred years between them.
What tragedies does it conceal, what human stories? Many an old man
nodding over his crowded counter has sent a son to the 'varsity.
This is not fiction, and those will not believe it who do not
understand that Israel has always given over its heart to its
children. If the elements of domestic tragedy are not here, where
are they?--for Israel, scattered in its wanderings and oppressed,
never lost the Tables of the Law, never forgot the old things, never
became quite deaf to the sounds of tents in a wind; but now the old
men can say to their children: "My thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways."
* * *
In a narrow street full of jewellers' shops I saw a bent old
patriarch gazing into a window at a nine-branched candlestick; on the
opposite side of the road came a young girl in her sand-coloured silk
stockings and her tight black coat, swinging a silver bag--very far
from the flocks and herds was she! Again I saw a limousine stop at a
tiny shop. An old woman ran out, a young man leapt from the car to
meet her, and when he kissed her there was joy shining in her eyes.
Joseph? The modern Prodigal Son?
* * *
I caught a penny omnibus back to England with the feeling that I
might have spent two hundred pounds and seen less of the East, less
of romance, and much less of life.