Home! the most horrible word for the poor. Home! The whole world calls
home the place where one lives. For the poor, the old ones who cannot
work any longer, "the Home" is the place where they die. It's the place
that stamps them, brands them as eternal paupers. It's the crowning
glory of a life of work, manual work. I know you will say: "What else
could we do with the poor, incapable of earning their living?" But now
come with me down to a few "homes." Don't become ecstatic over the
beauty of the lawn in front of the house, nor admire the cleanliness of
the kitchen. Come down to look at the men. Do you see this old man
there? The one with flowing white beard and bushy eyebrows? That old Jew
has made chairs and tables all his life, has made your chair, too, and
his neighbour there--the one with trembling hands--he has worked on
coats and overcoats, enough for thousands. Look at his hands now. They
tremble. Look at your coat. The seam is straight, you want a straight
seam. He is here now, in a Home. Look at them all. They have worked all
their lives long.
"Come here, old man. What is your trade?"
"A furrier."
"Old man, what is your trade?"
"A tinsmith."
"And yours? and yours? and yours?"
"Tailor, dressmaker, machinist"--every trade is represented.
The veterans of industry. The temple of Invalids.
The widow's father lived there only two months. I saw him buried in the
cold ground. An old man from the Home stood near the grave.
"I wish to be buried right here," he said.
"Why?"
"I got used to him--we were neighbours. His bed was next to mine."
"What was the matter with the old Baruch?" I asked.
"The servants did not like him," he answered.
"Was he ill? I mean old Baruch."
"No, the servants did not like him."
"But that's no reason for a man to die!"
The old man looked at me from under his bushy eyebrows. His look said
plainly: "You stupid ass." Then he turned away from me and mingled with
the other people. He avoided me when I approached him.
On the next day I visited the Home again. It was meal time. They all sat
around a big table, much like the one I had seen at the orphanage. In
the orphanage are fatherless children, in the Homes childless fathers.
They sat around the table and tried to chew what was on their plates.
Their toothless mouths worked in vain. When the superintendent remarked
to me that most of them have stomach ailments and I suggested that a
dentist examine their teeth the lady could not stifle her laughter. She
was herself a woman of sixty and her mouth was in perfect condition--it
was the dentist's work of course.
After the meal was over I tried very hard to get some of the old men to
talk. They had nothing to say--this was the answer I got from a few.
"Are you satisfied here?" I asked, to which one fine looking old fellow
replied:
"It all depends what one expects, you know. In the Talmud is a story how
a man, once very rich, was not satisfied with a supper that three poor
men together would have been satisfied about."
I humoured the old fellow and got him to walk with me about the
grounds. When out of hearing of the others he told me how the attendants
beat every one of them for the slightest infraction of the rules of the
house.
"Why don't you complain to the superintendent?" I suggested.
"The ones that do so shorten their lives."
"You mean?"
"Don't ask any further." A man understands closed lips.
In a rolling chair, at the further end of the garden, sat a paralysed
old man.
"How are you feeling, Uncle?" I greeted him.
"Fine, fine," he answered. "I am all right, now."
"He is a lucky dog," remarked my companion, the old man of the Talmud
story. "He is paralysed all over."
"Do you call that lucky?--man, it's the greatest misfortune."
"Not in a Home," he answered. "The paralysed are like the dead--they
don't feel when they are hurt." Once his tongue was loosened the old man
went on. "There is an attendant here, a brute. When he gets mad he runs
around to find fault with some one, to hit him. Then we all get out of
his way. This fellow here, he has a bad stomach. He would always be the
scapegoat. My, how he would suffer. Only his legs got paralysed at
first and he had to be turned over in his bed. When that drunkard would
get through with him the poor fellow's body was black and blue from
pinches and punches. Now he does not feel anything. He punches him and
hits and pinches and gets mad to see that the fellow does not feel pain
at all."
"Is that true?" I turned to the old man in the rolling chair.
"You bet it's true, and I have my revenge now, to see him get wild.
'Hullo, Harry! Why don't you pinch me a bit. Come on, Harry, have a
pinch,' and he gets mad--like a savage."
I see you shake your head. Fiction! Fiction! Then read the letter sent
by a young man and a young woman who worked at a "Home" in New York. The
letter was printed in "Our Health" of January, 1913. The Institution did
not even offer an excuse. Deny, it could not.
"The patients are mistreated, beaten, kicked, insulted," runs the
letter. It has two signatures, the man's and the woman's. If this be not
true, why did not the Montefiore Home sue the calumniators? But it is
true. They keep quiet. They are afraid of revelations. Some old man or
old woman might take his last days into his own hands and come out with
the truth.
Another old man was punished by the attendant with two days' fast. He
sat at the table but was forbidden to eat. The cause of the punishment
was that the old man had soiled the tablecloth.
When visitors come the lawn is shown, the clean kitchen, the beautiful
dining room, the spacious rooms. Nothing of the inhuman treatment to
which the inmates are subject comes to light. The gross insults:
"Beggar, schnorrer, pauper, liar," are not heard then.
One "Home" is under the same roof with an orphan house. Upstairs the
children, downstairs the old people, as though it were a prophecy: "Here
you start, there you finish."
The callousness of this shows the sentiment of the people supporting the
institutions. An old woman, while peeling potatoes, remarked: "All they
miss is a dressmaking shop between the floors and a cemetery in the yard
and their whole life would stretch before them."
"BISMARCK"
Amongst the people in the Home were two chums of olden days. Moise Hertz
and "Bismarck." They knew one another from childhood, were born in the
same village in Russia, had gone to the same school (cheder) and were
both, later on, with their wives and children, driven from home. Once
across the border they drifted apart. Moise Hertz with his family went
to Germany and "Bismarck" with his wife and children went to England.
Both men were tailors. Moise Hertz's two sons returned to Russia during
the revolution. One was hanged; the other is in Sachalin (Siberia). His
wife died in New York.
"Bismarck's" son is in Denver, trying to cure himself of tuberculosis.
His daughter is blind. His wife is in a Home for women.
The two men had not met for fifteen years, though they both lived in New
York a good deal of this time. (When they told one another the stories
of their lives they found out that they even worked for a time in the
same shop, on different floors.) Then one day, as Moise Hertz filled
his pipe he felt some one looking at him intently. The years are not so
kind to the poor as to the rich, especially to poor Jews, but Moise
Hertz's eyes were keen and the two old chums embraced and called one
another by their first names. "Moise--Abe!" In their joy they even
blessed the place where they met. Moise Hertz's loneliness was over. He
had somebody to talk to of his younger days. They told one another their
misfortunes. All hope for a better to-morrow was gone. They only had the
past--a rich past, rich in suffering. Once a week Bassie, Bismarck's
wife, would come to visit her husband. The trio would then sit together
and figure out how their old friends' children were getting along. "He
was born during the second cholera." "No, during the Ritual blood
accusation of 'Thisza Esler.'" "No, that's impossible!" Bassie would
explain. "My Baruch was three years old then and she married during the
Pogrom in Kiev." They would quarrel on such subjects and their parting
words would still contain an assurance from Bassie that she knew the
right year of Leah's birth.
So passed a full year. The insults of the servants bothered them little.
Then one morning Abe Schmenovitz (at that time he was not nicknamed
Bismarck) complained to his friend that his arms pained him. Moise led
his friend to the doctor's room. The man of science had a look and
prescribed something. In spite of the medicine the old man's arms became
paralysed. From that day on he was attended to by his chum. Moise Hertz
would dress and wash him and at meal times he would feed the old cripple
like a mother does her baby. Moise never ate before his friend was
through with his meal. When the old fellow complained about his lost
arms his chum consoled him:
"What's the difference how one does, whether with usable arms or not? I
have arms for you--better tell me how you got on in London--a big town?"
So he would make his friend forget the sorrows of his actual state by
forcing him to recall other sufferings.
For two days Moise Hertz was too ill to attend to his friend. When
mealtime arrived the cripple sat before his plate and looked at the
food--there was no one to help him. He was very hungry. He dared not ask
the attendant to help him, so he bent his head and got hold of a piece
of meat with his mouth and while he tried to eat it fell out of his
toothless mouth several times. He had to get it again--shook his head
and reached further--bespattered himself, his face was coloured with the
sauce from the plate. The other inmates howled and cursed. But the
attendant called the whole servantdom to see the show, and they all
laughed and laughed.
The institution had a dog called "Bismarck," and Abe Schmenovitz got
this nickname from the chambermaid that day. It stuck to him to his last
day. For several days the attendants forbade Moise Hertz to feed his
friend. They wanted to see the show--a man eating like a dog. The old
fellow forgot his real name in the course of time.
When he died the servant announced his death to the superintendent in
the following way:
"Bismarck died."
"The dog?" The gentleman sprang from his chair.
"No, the man--sir."