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THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK
The Schooldays of Young American Jew
by
GILBERT W. GABRIEL
New York
Bloch Publishing Company, Inc.
"The Jewish Book Concern"
1925
Copyright, 1917
Bloch Publishing Company
CONTENTS
I. BY WAY OF PROLOGUE 5
II. IN THE BEGINNING 16
III. FRIDAY NIGHT 25
IV. THE BOY AND THE SCHOOL 34
V. THE MILITARY ACADEMY 42
VI. MY STEERFORTH 51
VII. FRESHMAN YEAR 61
VIII. WITHIN THE GATES 70
IX. MY AUNT AND I 79
X. THE RULES OF THE GAME 88
XI. A MAN'S WORK 98
XII. THE HEART OF JUDEA 107
XIII. CHILD AND PARENT 116
XIV. AN UNGRATEFUL NEPHEW 125
XV. COLLEGE LIFE 135
XVI. THE HUN'S INVASION 144
XVII. MANY IMPULSES 154
XVIII. I STAND--BUT NOT ASIDE 163
XIX. "BATTLE ROYAL" 172
XX. THE CANDLES ARE LIGHTED 181
The Seven-Branched Candlestick
I
BY WAY OF PROLOGUE
"Years of Plenty" was the name an Englishman recently gave to a book of
his school days. My own years of secondary school and college were
different from his, by far, but no less full.
I shall only say by way of preface that they numbered seven. There were
two of them at high school, one at a military school on the Hudson, and
four at our city's university.
Seven in all. Because they were not altogether happy, I have no right to
think of them as lean years. For each one of them meant much to
me--means as much now as I look back and am chastened and strengthened
by their memory. Each is as a lighted candle in the dark of the past
that I look back upon. And I like to imagine that, since there are seven
of them, they are in the seven-branched candlestick which is so stately
and so reverent a symbol of my Faith.
For it was my school days which gave me that Faith.
Born a Jew, I was not one. And this I can blame on no person excepting
myself. Before my parents' death, they had urged me, pleaded with me to
go to Sunday school at our reformed synagogue, to attend the Saturday
morning services, to study the lore, that I might be confirmed into the
religion of my fathers. That they did not absolutely insist upon it was
because they wanted me to come to my God gratefully, voluntarily,
considering his worship an exercise of love, of gladness, and not a task
of impatient duty. I know that it must have grieved them--I know it now,
even if I only half-guessed it then in that distorted but instinctive
way that boys do guess things--and yet they said little to me of it.
Once or twice a year they took me with them to a Friday night service. I
was too young, perhaps. I am willing to use my youth as an excuse for my
falling asleep, or for my sitting uneasily, squirming, yawning,
heavy-eyed, uninterested, unmoved ... hungry only to be out into the
streets again, and back in my own room at home, with my copy of
"Pilgrim's Progress," or "The Talisman," between my knees.
At best, I can excuse myself only because I lived in a neighborhood
distinctly Christian. It was on one of those old, quiet streets of the
Columbia Heights section of Brooklyn that our house stood. There was a
priggish sedateness to it. There was much talk on either hand of
"family": the Brooklyn people--of that neighborhood, anyhow--seem to set
much stock by their early settling ancestors. Near our house was a
preparatory school for girls and another for boys; they were hotbeds of
snobbery and prejudice, these schools. The students who attended them
had to pass down our block on their way home from school. Often, when
they saw me playing there, some of them would stop and make fun of me
and tease me with remarks about the Jews. I was a boy without much
spirit. I always resented the taunts--but I always lacked the courage to
call back ... and if my eyes did blaze involuntarily with anger, I
usually turned away so that these bigger boys should not be able to see
them.
My fear was behind it all. I was afraid to fight back. And, being
ashamed of my cowardice, I grew quickly ashamed of that which had proved
it. I grew ashamed of being a Jew.
Terribly, bitterly ashamed. So mortified, indeed, that it was more than
I could do to speak of it to my father. And, usually, I could talk of
anything to him. Once he himself mentioned it to me: asked me whether I
was not proud of my race, whether I could not look with true contempt
and easy forgiveness upon those rowdies who had taunted me. I tried to
take that attitude ... but I was not big and strong enough for it. I
tried it only once--and then one of the big bullies of that fashionable
preparatory school, on his way down the block, grew angry at my lordly
unconcern towards his teasing, and hit me with his fist, and cut my lip
open. I kicked him in the shins, I remember, and ran swiftly away.
That didn't help matters. I was as much a weakling as ever. When I went
to public school, I used to cry with a snivelling vexation because the
toughs of my class made fun of me. One of them had a little sister in
the class below us, and I was very fond of her. I remember how, on St.
Valentine's day, I stole into her class room at lunch time and, while
she was absent, stuck a lacy, gaudy and beribboned missive in her desk.
I didn't understand, then, why the teacher tittered so nervously when I
asked her permission to do it. But, when my own lunch was done, and I
was back at my desk, I lifted the lid of it only to find that same
valentine rammed into one corner, crushed and torn almost in half, and
scrawled with the word, "Sheeny!"
Nor did the little romantic flight end there. For the next day, after
sister and brother had been comparing notes, the former marched
straight up to me, pulled my nose, and warned me to keep away, once and
for all, from the true American daughter of a true American family, and
to confine my sentiments to "some little Jew girl!"
I knew none of that sort. What few boys and girls of my own race I had
met at playtime or at Sunday school, I purposely shunned. I thought, if
I went in their company, I should be inviting persecution. I thought my
only way to escape this was to escape all Jewish comrades ... to deny my
religion, if possible. I was so utterly ashamed of it!
Thus I went, with all of a child's fear and a child's cowardice, into
those days which were to mean so much to me. Had I had the pride, the
devotion to my religion which is a Jewish heritage, those days would
have meant less. Less in sorrow and bewilderment, that is, and
infinitely more in the building up of my character.
There are those who go stolidly, brusquely through life without ever
needing the comfort of religion. And there are those, like me, who lack
the self-reliance ... who cannot be content with a confessed
agnosticism, but who must take faith and strength from those rites and
codes which satisfy their sense of the mystically sublime. Now that I am
grown to man's estate I can know these things of myself--but how could
I know it then? How could a romping, light-hearted boy who cared more
for baseball and "Ivanhoe" than for anything else in the world
recognize, then, his own needs and cravings?
It was only after those few black, frightful days were over that I
realized that something was lacking in my life. But even then I did not
know what it was. I only felt the sharply personal loss, the inevitable
loneliness and helplessness ... and had not learned in what direction to
lift my eyes, to reach up my arms to ask for spiritual succor.
Those days were the ones in which my parents left me. My father was
killed in a railroad accident. My mother, about to give birth to another
child, was in bed at the time when the news was brought to her. She
never rose again. The shock killed her.
I remember that the funeral services were conducted by the rabbi of our
synagogue. They were according to the Jewish ritual, and I thought them
dull and unmeaning. They expressed for me none of the sorrow that I
felt. The Hebrew that was in them was mockery and gibberish to me. I am
afraid I was glad when it was over, and I was alone with my aunt with
whom I was to live.
This aunt, Selina Haberman, was a widow. Her husband had been a devout
Jew of the most orthodox type. She used to tell me with great amusement
how he would say his prayers each morning with his shawl and
phylacteries upon him, with his head bowed and a look of joyous devotion
on his face. She said she never could understand how a man, as educated
and broadminded as he was, could have had so simple and unquestioning a
loyalty to these worn old costumes of the past. But she said wistfully
that she thought he had died a much happier man because of his religion
... and that was what was hardest of all for her to understand.
Aunt Selina herself was a Christian. She put as little stock in
Christian Science, though, as in Judaism. It was a fad for her, and an
escape from the hindrances which connection with the Jewish faith would
have entailed. I think she had an idea that people would forget she had
ever been a Jewess and would accept her for a Christian without her
having to go through the extremer forms of proselytism. Like me, she
lacked spirit for either one thing or the other. Like me, she dreaded to
be classed among her own people. But in this we were unlike: that her
dread amounted to a vindictive and brutal antagonism towards whatever
and whoever smacked of Jewry. I think she even objected to adopting me
for a while, because my name was a distinctly Jewish one, and because it
would leave no doubt in her neighbor's eyes as to my race--and hence, no
doubt as to hers.
Aunt Selina lived on Central Park West in the City. She was full of
social ambitions. She had a good many friends from among the
intellectuals of Washington square: Christians, of course, most of them.
Her closest companion was a Mrs. Fleming-Cohen, who claimed to be a
Theosophist. Born with the name of Cohen, she had married a Mr. Fleming
who had made necessary, by his conduct, an early divorce. My aunt, Mrs.
Haberman, and Mrs. Fleming-Cohen lunched together very often, and I
suspect they had a tacit but inviolable agreement never to mention to
each other that bond of race and religion which, stronger than their
professed tastes, drew them instinctively together.
My life in Aunt Selina's apartment was a lonely one. She was hardly the
sort of woman to whom young folks would go for sympathy. She did not
mistreat me, of course, but left me entirely to my own devious ways. For
the ways of a boy of fourteen--especially of an orphan of somewhat shy
and melancholic disposition--are bound to be devious.
I had much to fight out with myself. I lacked any help from the
outside--and though I won over my impulses, my doubts and inner
conflicts, the struggle left me a weak, shy, shunning boy.
For the first year of my life with Aunt Selina I went to a nearby public
school. There were a good many Jewish boys in my class--many more than
there had been in the whole Brooklyn school--but I kept away from them
as a matter of course. I made a few friends among the Gentiles--not
many, because they were hard to make, and I could always feel, in my
supersensitive fashion, that they were fashioning a sort of favor out of
conferring their friendship upon me.
"It will be different when I am in high school," I told myself. "It will
be different because I myself shall be different. The boys will be older
there, will be more sensible and broadminded, and I shall be less
nervous about the difference between us!"
The difference ... I did not know what it was, but I felt it all the
time. I tried to hide it, to disregard it--but I knew that it was there,
in my blood, in my face, in my name ... and it held me apart from my
class as if it had been a shame and a lasting disgrace.
So it was that I looked forward more and more eagerly for the change and
liberation which I thought high school would bring me. Half a year, two
months, a month ... then only a few days ... and then it was over. My
public schools days were past. I had graduated into high school with
high honors and with an equally high hatred of whatever was Jewish.
If Aunt Selina had been different ... but no, I am not going to blame it
on anyone excepting myself.
The summer after I graduated from public school I went with Aunt Selina
and her friend, Mrs. Fleming-Cohen, to a hotel in the White Mountains.
It was one of those hotels where Jews are not welcome. The management,
if I am not mistaken, had not been able to impress Aunt Selina with that
fact. They were constantly raising the price of our rooms, but the two
ladies seemed content to keep on paying what was asked for the rare
privilege of dwelling in forbidden places.
It was certainly not a pleasant summer. The other guests snubbed us
continually, left us to our own devices. I used to have to go walking
every morning and sit on the porch every afternoon in the company of the
two ladies ... because there was no one else for me to go with. For even
among the children there was a rigorous boycotting--and I was the
sufferer for it. It made me very melancholy; not indignant, of course,
because at that time I lacked entirely the spirit to be indignant--just
melancholy, and hateful to myself, spiteful to my aunt, ashamed of the
things I should have gloried in, hating the things I should have
worshiped.
Well, I told myself, it would all be different in the fall: it would all
be different when I was at high school. For then I was to begin those
seven years which were to be my real education. So far it had been
naught but childhood's prologue. And what a shabby little part I had
played in it!
But I did not know that, then!
II
IN THE BEGINNING
Immediately upon our return from the mountains I entered high school. My
aunt did her duty by accompanying me to the office of the principal and
assuring him that I was an honest and upright boy, aged fourteen.
It had been her ambition to have me attend one of the fashionable
boarding schools in Connecticut. I do not think she had me much in mind
when she made the attempt to enroll me at the St. Gregory Episcopalian
Institute. She told so many of her friends of this intention--and told
them it with such an evident pride--that I fear she was more concerned
with her own social prestige than with my education. And when St.
Gregory, through a personal visit from its headmaster, discovered that
Mrs. Haberman had no right to aspire to the exquisite preference which
God accords Episcopalians, and later sent us a polite but cursory letter
of regret that its roster's capacity was full for the year, she bore it
as a direct insult upon her ancestors. (Though, of course, even so sharp
a hurt to her pride would not let her admit openly that all of those
ancestors were Jews.)
At any rate, I went to the high school as a sort of a last resort. My
aunt dreaded the company I might have to keep there--all the public
riffraff, she called it. That was really why she accompanied me, that
first day, to assure herself that I was going to be placed among a
"perfectly horrid set of rude ruffians--ghetto boys, and the like!" and
to have something tangible and definite to worry about during the next
few years.
The principal, busy with the hundred details of school's opening, gave
us as much time and courtesy as he could afford. As I look back upon it,
I think he was remarkably patient with my aunt.
She told him her fears in a fretful, supercilious way; it was in exactly
the same tone that she ordered things from the butcher and grocer each
morning over the telephone. The principal heard her through--in fact,
prompted her whenever she faltered, nodded appreciatively when something
she said was most flagrantly out of place. When she was finished, he
turned to look very steadily at me.
"If you have such objections to the class of boys in a public high
school, why do you send your nephew here?" he asked.
"Because it--it is convenient," she stammered.
"I must confess, I wanted him to go to a boarding-school."
"Which one?"
"St. Gregory Episcopalian Institute."
The principal's mouth quivered with the smile he could hardly suppress:
"Episcopalian? The boy is a Jew, is he not?"
Mrs. Haberman sat up very straight. "His parents had Jewish
affiliations, I believe. They are both dead."
"I see." And I am sure he really did see! For a moment later he put a
deft end to the interview.
"Madam," he said, "this boy must take his chances like any other boy in
the school. He must make his own friends from among his own sort. He
must fight his own adversaries among those who are unlike him. That is
the law of life as well as of every school. If he is attracted to the
undesirable element, he would find it and mingle with it at St.
Gregory's as quickly as he would here. I have a fine lot of youths here.
I am proud of them--even of those who fail to come up to the standards.
I won't try to talk to you about the splendid spirit of
democracy--because you evidently don't want the boy to be democratic.
You don't want him to stand on his own merits as a Jew. If he did that,
he would be putting up an honest, spirited battle. I only know that all
men and all boys like an honest stand and a fair fight for the things
worth protecting. I know that if I were a Jew, I should never--well,
that's your business, not mine." He took out of his desk a little
leather-covered book. "It may interest you to know that this high school
is ranked very high scholastically." He turned the pages. "Also that the
St. Gregory Institution is ranked among the most unsuccessful schools in
the country in the matter of scholarship." He showed her a table of
figures, then closed the book and put it away, smiling. "Also," he
finished, "that I am an Episcopalian, and that I should rather send a
son or a nephew of mine to prison than to so harmful a place as St.
Gregory."
His remarks did not altogether convince my aunt, of course; and he said
no more, except to assure her that he would follow my course in his
school with much interest, and would do all in his power to make me
manly. To Mrs. Haberman, the promise to make a man of me meant little.
She left me at the school door, stepping gingerly across the pavement
into her limousine in order to escape the contamination of a group of
young Italians who were coming up the steps. As she slammed the machine
door and was driven away, I felt somewhat bewildered--very much alone
in a hallway of hundreds of boys whom I did not know, but who jostled
me, went by me, up and down the stairs with a great hollow stamping of
feet, an echoing laughter, a loud excitement of regathering after the
summer's recess. None of them paid the slightest attention to me.
A deep-voiced gong sounded through the hall and up the wide stair-well.
It was the signal to disperse to our classrooms.
I had a card in my hand, assigning me to room 7 on the third floor. I
climbed the stairs fearfully, my heart beating faster than usual, my
knees trembling a little. I was entering a strange and mystic land that
I had dreamed of, yet had never seen.
Room 7, third floor. It was a big, bare room, void of almost everything
excepting sunshine. There were desks, low and set decently apart. Along
the wall, behind gleaming glass, were cases of seashells and botanical
specimens. The teacher's desk, at the further end, was on a small,
shabby dais. Only a few of the boys had arrived, and the big room rang
with the echo of unfilled space.
I heard them telling each other what they had been doing over the
summer. One of them, brown and sturdy, was telling of Maine and the camp
he had attended there. Another, in ragged clothes, and of a thin, pale
face, spoke of the heated city during July and August, and of how he
had been swimming when he could get away from his summer job--swimming
in the East River. It shocked me to hear that. I had a picture of the
East River as I had seen it from the Brooklyn Bridge, a brown, littered
flood, choked with scurrying tugboats and the floating trails of refuse.
I hated that boy for a long while after I heard his story. But he had a
sharp, kindly face, and I wondered to see how popular he was with those
who knew him.
Coming, as I did, from a distant grammar school, it chanced that there
were no boys of my acquaintance in the classroom. I was absolutely
alone--a stranger to them all.
The teacher, on his dais, tapped with thin, white knuckles against the
side of his desk. He was a little, timid man with one of the saddest
faces I have ever seen. Mr. Levi, he said his name was.
The boy next to me stirred in his seat. "A Jew for a teacher! What do
you think of that!" he said to me. "A Jew for--" Then he stopped short
and looked at me. "Oh, gee! You're one yourself, ain't you?"
I felt my face grow very hot. I thought of the words which the principal
had only just spoken.... Could I stand up and fight like a man?
I wanted to--I really do believe that I wanted to. But somehow the
impulse that came to me to face this seatmate squarely and to tell him
that--yes, I was a Jew, too--and proud of it--dwindled away into a gulp
and a whimper and a sickly smile.
This other boy was red-headed, freckled. He was very tall, but I saw a
crutch at his side. Later on, when he rose, I could see that he was very
lame; also that around his neck (for he wore no collar) was a little
leather thong and tab. I did not know then--and I did not learn for many
months--that it was the scapular of a Roman Catholic.
He looked at me surlily, but laughing.
"You _are_ a Jew, ain't you?" he demanded.
I hung my head, wondering how to evade the directness of the question.
The lame boy seemed to be waiting for my reply.
"Well, no--not exactly." I stuttered. But I could feel my face flushing
again.
"What d'yer mean, not exactly? What's yer mom and pop?"
"My mother and father? They are dead."
That did not seem to check him. "Well, if you ain't a Jew, you look like
one. You look more like one than the teacher does." Whereupon, much to
my relief, he branched off the subject. "He don't seem to be such a bad
fellow, even with a name like Levi. Oi, oi, oi, Levi!" And he chuckled
with delight at the thought of how he would annoy and tease this teacher
at some future date.
There are some boys of whom we can know at a glance that they are
bullies and mischief makers. This boy, whose name was Geoghen, was one
of them. He used his very lameness as an excuse to boss and bully his
classmates. He was very strong, though as I was to learn only too
soon--and his size made him an undisputed leader.
There were no lessons this first day. There were only a speech of
welcome from the teacher, and an assignment of home work for the next
morning.
But when we were dismissed and had started for the door, Geoghen limped
up to me.
"So you ain't a Jew, eh?" he chuckled, looking hard into my face.
So as to avoid the retort, I fled from him, down the stairs into the
main hall. I was just about to gain the street when the principal,
coming out of his office, saw me.
"What's this?" he said in his deep likable voice. "Running away so
soon?"
"Yes, sir. We're dismissed for today."
"Oh, I see. Well, I suppose you've already begun to fight like a man,
haven't you? I hope so."
"Oh, yes, sir!"
But, as I went, I knew in my heart that it was not true. The whole first
day had been false.
III
FRIDAY NIGHT
Those first days at high school seemed terrible in the intensity of new
experiences. Had I but had my parents to encourage me, perhaps I should
not have felt so bitterly the loneliness of this new turn in the road.
I do not care how manly and resolute he is, a boy will always need the
kind words, the clasp and kiss which only his parents can give him. And
I was not half so resolute then, nor half so hardened to battle as I am
now.
I worried a good deal about my standing in the class room. It seemed to
me that I could not possibly pass each day's recitations creditably. And
yet I did, as I remember. It was only that I so sorely lacked
self-confidence.
My aunt, Mrs. Haberman, did her duty in taking me to a nerve specialist.
He charged her a pretty price to examine me and to assure her that,
physically, there was nothing wrong with me.
"Mentally, he is a little too active," was his sentence upon me. "And
that is what makes him melancholy. Let him study, let him get out and
meet boys of his own age.... Let him find something to be proud of, to
be interested in."
My aunt gave this last a few pettish, impatient moments of thought.
After the doctor was gone, and she and I sat opposite each other at the
table, where the glass and silver made so ostentatious a showing, she
did her best to be practical about it.
"Now, dear, let's see," she pondered, her long white fingers stroking
the table cloth, "I'm sure we can find something to interest and amuse
you, dear. How about basket weaving? or coloring photographs or
something artistic like that?"
I wasn't very polite in my refusals. I declined basket weaving and
coloring photographs and even balked at the idea of installing a
billiard table in our apartment--which seemed to relieve Mrs. Haberman
immensely, since she considered billiards a brutal and vulgar game.
All her suggestions came to naught. Once she spoke of religion, but her
eyes fluttered and she changed the subject quickly, as if she had
accidently hit upon the truth and found it unpleasant. It was enough to
put an idea into my head.
I did not know then, but I do now, that the thing I needed was Faith. A
boy needs it--needs it as much as he needs his parents--and I had
neither one nor the other.
The days retreating into a gloomy background of autumn chills and fogs,
left me thoroughly weakened in spirit. Oftentimes--I could not guess
why--I came home from high school so exhausted that I could only throw
myself upon my bed, behind a locked door, and sob and sigh and shiver as
if with the ague. Everything that had happened during the day would come
pouring back into my memory with a distorted clarity, tinctured with
despair, hopelessly sombred with a boy's sense of wrong and persecution.
I did actually have enough to contend with at high school. I had begun
to feel the racial distinctions, the thoughtless slurs and boycottings
which Jewish lads must everywhere encounter. I tried to tell myself that
it didn't matter--that these were only rough, ill-bred boys to whom I
ought not lower myself to pay attention. But a boy of fourteen finds it
hard to argue himself into bravery, and I failed miserably, ridiculously
at the task. Years later, I was to learn that it was all natural--that I
was passing, as every boy must pass, through the difficult period of
adolescence. It was mostly that I was lonely, balked by the
unappreciative attitude of my aunt, without guidance or curb.
If in all this personal recital I am harsh to the memory of my aunt, you
will perhaps see that I have the right. I am grateful, truly grateful,
for all that she attempted to do for me, but I know that all her care
was misdirected. It was, besides, cruelly lacking in all of the finer
things which should have been mine; things which my parents would have
given me, things that, in my aggravated state, I needed.
Once I was asked by some other Jewish boys at high school to join a
little club which they were forming. I hesitated about it. They were
jolly, healthy boys--most of them from the poorer sections of the
city--who went up to Van Cortlandt Park on Saturday afternoons and
Sundays to play ball or to skate. It would have done me good to be one
of them, to join their sports and laughter--and yet....
Well, my aunt did not approve. I knew she wouldn't, long before I asked
her. If I was the least bit undecided before, she gave me clearly to
understand that companionship with Jewish boys would not be right for
me; that I must avoid this stigma of Judaism as I would avoid a crime.
She said it was for my _own_ good--but I cannot believe it very
heartily. She was trying at that time to make me join a dancing class of
Gentile boys and girls. She told me she thought their company would
counteract the effect of having to endure a high school's rabble.
There came a night, after a day of niggardly discouragements, when the
strange moroseness seemed too heavy to bear. I told my aunt that I did
not want any supper--a fact which did not worry her too much, since she
was in a hurry to dress and go off to a studio party of some silly sort.
And when she was gone and I was alone in the apartment, I could not read
or rest or do anything. I tried to study my next day's lessons, but had
to give them up.
And at last I put on my hat and coat and went down to the street. The
air was bracing, but I was not used to the streets at night--and a
white, wraith-like fog was beginning to seep up from the pavements and
cluster in misty, yellow patches around the lamp-lights.
Shivering, I went on. I did not know where I was bound. The old, savage
loneliness--here in the open, where the dampness brought the scent of
withered grass and lean, bare trees--was sharper, more embittering than
ever.
I went across the street and into the nearest entrance of Central Park.
The quietness of everything there frightened me, called up every
foolish, childhood fear and superstition. I went through dark lanes that
were branched over with creaking branches. I saw the lake, black, cold,
with the stippled reflections of shore lights shining up from its edges.
I felt the moist, chilly wind that came across the big lawns and struck
my face and chest and shoulders. I felt--I could not help but feel that
I must go on, go on and on--in search of I know not what.
I came at length to the Fifth Avenue side of the park. The huge white
stone and marble houses that flanked the street beyond were half lost in
the mist. The automobiles that went up and down the pavements, which
were wet and shining like the backs of seals, made no noise--went
silently, mystically, sweeping blurred trails of light upon the
sidewalks as they passed.
Against that white, low horizon of houses I saw one thing that loomed
dark and gropingly conspicuous.
I did not know what it was. Not then. But it held my attention: the
darkness, the gray curve of it against the sky. There was something
about it that was forbidding, deep, sombre. The lower front of it seemed
to be arched and pillared--and under each arch the shadows were
impenetrably black.
There were automobiles waiting in front of it, at the sidewalk's edge. A
long string of them, too, as if many persons were within upon some
mysterious business.
Then, softly, as if from far distant recesses, there came from within
the soft, resonant voice of an organ--playing.
Was it a church?
Then I remembered that it was Friday night--and I knew that this was a
synagogue--a temple of the Jewish Faith.
At first realization, I moved a little away from it, down the street. A
synagogue--and all that it brought to my mind was the memory of my
parents. In former years they had been wont to take me with them when
they went on Friday nights. And those had been dull, wearisome nights
for me--but I had spent them at my parent's side. So that now, in the
shadow of God's house, my loneliness for them came back to me in wild
deluge, breaking the dam of reserve and doubts and petty limitations.
The music of the organ swelled louder, richer, blending all the majesty
of its bass notes with the triumph and fancy of its treble. Louder,
richer, louder--and I, who stood outside in the choking fog, felt my
heart give way to its pain and my eyes to the solace of their tears.
Until the service was ended, and the organ had ceased to play I stayed
there. Once or twice I heard the voice of the cantor at his solemn
chantings--and this too brought me a distinct memory of the cantor in
our Brooklyn synagogue, and of how I had listened to him with my hands
locked in my mother's.
Outside it was all so dark, so clammy with mist--and in there they--my
own sort of people--were worshipping God--my God. And when, soon
thereafter, the doors swung open in the black of the arches and bathed
the steps below with a great, glad, golden light, I ran forward, almost
involuntarily, to gaze within.
I caught a glimpse of rich things, bright and gleaming--of carpets
glowing, walls resplendent--of golden tracery and colors. And then
people began coming through the doors down the steps, blackening and
obscuring my view of the interior.
I saw some of their faces. They were Jewish people, of course--and I
heard a man among them talking rather loudly and laughingly. He talked
with an accent.
For me the spell was broken. All the old, petty prejudice which
circumstance had nurtured in me sprang up anew. A sense of anti-climax,
of disgust came over me: yes, these--such as these were my people--and I
hated them.
And I turned and ran away, back through the park, and home.
I did not ever tell my aunt where I had been, nor anything else of the
adventure. I knew she would not have understood it. But I did. And, boy
as I was, I knew now that I needed some Faith, some link to the company
and comfort of God--and that, sooner or later, as Jew or Christian, I
must seek and find that link.
But I knew, too, that my antipathy to my own people had become
deep-seated--had grown to be part of my whole life's code.
IV
THE BOY AND THE SCHOOL
High school's terrors developed for me into a more personal terror of
that young tough, Jim Geoghen. A thorough bully, he made me feel always
that he was aware of my religion, that he could at any moment disclose
it to the rest of my classmates and make me the subject of their taunts.
No doubt, they all knew as well as he that I was a Jew--but, for the
most part, they paid little attention to that fact. A large number of
them were Jews themselves: bright-eyed, poorly-dressed little fellows
who led the class in studies, but who mingled little with any other
element.
Something stronger than myself made me take up a half-hearted
companionship with these Jewish boys. I did not want to: I dreaded being
one of them--and yet, for all my aunt's sneers and warnings, and my own
perverted pride, I always felt more comfortable with them--more as if,
in walking home with one of them after school, instead of with some
Christian boy, I was where I belonged. I know it was only
self-consciousness that gave me this feeling--but after all, comfort
must play a big part in our companionships.
Geoghen, with his towering, menacing form, his dull, animal's face, his
swinging crutch, his mysterious scapular, haunted me continuously. I
remember distinctly dreaming of him once or twice at night--and that he
stood over my bedside, in those dreams, with his crutch upraised to
strike, and his little leather scapular writhing and hissing like a
coiled snake.
One day he did strike me. It was during the noon recess when a group of
us were in the asphalted yard, eating our lunches. Mine was always an
elaborate package of dainties, wrapped in much tissue paper and doilies.
Geoghen, on the other hand, had just a chunk of rye bread, covered over
with a slice of ham. His glance, long and greedy, betrayed how envious
of me he was.
"Eat ham?" he asked with a snicker.
He did not wait for an answer, but crammed a few shreds of it towards my
mouth, his dirty fingers striking my teeth. I jumped away from him and
he followed after me, hobbling with amazing swiftness.
"Tried to bite me, eh?" he cried.
I denied it--but he did not listen and, raising his crutch, dealt me a
stinging blow with the smaller end of it--though, at that, I was let
off easy.
Towards our teacher, Mr. Levi, Geoghen and some of the other boys acted
with all the pent-up meanness and savagery of mischievous youth. Mr.
Levi's manner invited the twitting, perhaps: his pale, thin face bore
always a nettled look, his eyes seemed ever hungry with some dark
sorrow, and his mouth was always twitching. There was a fine timidity
about his way of handling us. He did not seem to be able to scold or be
authoritative.
But when he would be teaching us our Roman History, for instance, and
would tell us of the beauties of Italian scenery or of Caesar's
centurions lost in the dark, tangled German forests or of how Cleopatra
came with purple sails--or of how Cleopatra came to meet Mark Antony in
a golden barge with purple sails--then his face would light up with a
look that was glorious, and even the rattiest, coarsest of us would
thrill and be hushed with the thrill--and know, no matter how dimly,
that he was in the presence of a great and beautiful spirit.
But those times were rare; and, as a rule, we made life miserable for
Mr. Levi. He seemed to feel, I am sure, the handicap of his religion--to
know that the Irish boys of the class, and dark, sullen-faced Italians,
were thinking it an insult to be taught by a Jew--and that they were
only waiting for the opportunity for an outburst.
It came at the end of my year in high school. That last month is always
a rebellious one. The spring weather, the sense of approaching vacation
make gamins of the quietest of us.
Mr. Levi had been absent from the room for a little while. Geoghen in
that time had left his seat, hobbled up to the dais and opened the
teacher's desk. This bit of boldness drew a crowd of laughing boys to
the front of the room. They rummaged the desk, overturning and
scattering its papers, tumbling books to the floor.
Suddenly one of them stooped and picked up a book which lay sprawled
with its pages open. There was an immediate shouting, coarse and
repellent to hear.
The book of Mr. Levi's which they had found, was a Hebrew prayer book.
Geoghen took it from the other boy. He held it open and up close to his
leering face. Then slowly, with the others in his trail, he began to
march around the room, making believe to sing a heathenish jargon which
he must have thought to resemble Hebrew, twisting his face grotesquely
to seem like a Jew's, making lewd gestures--breaking off now and again
to shriek with laughter at the comicality of it all.
Then suddenly Mr. Levi returned.
He charged into the line, spun Geoghen about and tore the book from his
hands. Geoghen reached for it, as if loath to let go of so much fun--his
face impudent, grossly humorous--and Mr. Levi knocked him down.
I shall never forget how the teacher looked. His pale face, paler than
ever, gleamed as if it were cut smooth out of marble. The eyes flashed
with a noble fury. The mouth had stopped its twitching and was drawn
taut, and his teeth showed at the corners of it. And when he struck at
Geoghen his whole slender tenseness seemed to be thrown into the blow.
The crippled lad lay there for a moment, stunned. Then he got unsteadily
to his feet and picked up his crutch. A stream of profanity began to
come from his mouth. I don't think any of us had ever heard such talk
before. All the obscene things which the lowest scum of humanity can
pick up in the course of living years in the gutter, he spat out at Mr.
Levi.
But the teacher had gone back to his dais and desk and stood facing him
silently, calmly, a look of mild reproach taking the place of the anger
in his eyes. He let Geoghen have his miserable say, and then silently
pointed to the door and motioned to him to get out. And Geoghen went.
That wasn't the end of it, though. For, within a week the newspapers had
taken up the incident and enlarged it, exaggerated it--and Geoghen's
father who, it seems, was a political vassal of the alderman of this
district, had managed to have Mr. Levi brought before the Board of
Education for an investigation.
Mr. Levi had no show in that trial. He told his story truthfully. I
remember that, according to the newspapers, he made scarcely any effort
to defend himself. He merely explained that he had caught this boy
defiling the traditions of the Jewish faith, mocking what was most
sacred to him, and that he was indeed sorry that, in order to wrest the
book away from his impure hands, he had had to strike and knock down a
crippled pupil.
The newspapers called Mr. Levi a dangerous and cruel fanatic, the Board
of Education decided that he was incompetent, and Mr. Levi--his face
paler than ever, his manner more mild and saddened--announced to us on
the last day of school that he would not be with us in the next year.
I felt somehow that I would have liked to say goodby to him, but I was
afraid that he would ask me why I, in his absence on that terrible day,
had not prevented Geoghen from doing what he did--and my conscience made
a coward of me. I had a foolish idea, besides, that he did not like me.
Any man who cared so much for his religion would not be able to respect
a boy in my position. It was all very unfortunate--I was sorry for him,
to be sure--but I must not sympathize too much with him.
I told my aunt of the affair, of course, and she shuddered with
distaste.
"What a fearful lot of ruffians they must be!" she sighed. "And worst of
all, a Russian Jew for a teacher!"
I spent the summer at a Y. M. C. A. camp on the Maine coast. There were
no other Jewish boys there, but my aunt had managed to have me placed on
the roll-call somehow. I was glad enough of it. I did not want another
summer at a fashionable hotel in her and other ladies' company.
Of course, I was "Ike" to the boys of the camp. They were a good,
rough-and-ready sort who swam well, ran, tramped, sang rollicking songs
on weekdays and hymns on Sundays, grew brown and muscle-bound and manly.
Such teasing as I had from them was good-natured, and I suppose I should
have taken it in the same spirit. But I had none of their assurance, was
like a stranger in a strange land--and came out of the summer with a
still deeper shrinking from contact with other boys.
High school began again, went on and on from lagging month to month, and
soon enough was over for a second year. But this time my aunt had been
as much aroused as she could be to the baffling condition of my mind and
spirits. I had by no means lost the old loneliness. I had learned to
bear it with greater patience, but it still galled and depressed me.
Only, after that evening when I stood outside the synagogue, I had some
dim conception of what the inevitable cure would have to be.
At any rate, my aunt called in the nerve specialist a second time. He
insisted that I must be sent away. Perhaps he saw into the unsympathetic
quality of our home life.
This sent my aunt into tremors of delight. She had now a legitimate
excuse for shipping me off to a fashionable boarding school of some
sort. For days she made a feverish study of monogrammed and
photogravured catalogues from various schools in the East. It was upon a
military school on the upper Hudson that her choice finally fell. And I
am sure that this was due to the expensive appearance, the coat of arms
and Latin motto of the catalogue's cover.
What ever it was, her choice was made. She talked a good deal of
splendid uniforms, of flags unfurled to the sunset--and fired me with a
lust for the new chapter in my life.
V
THE MILITARY ACADEMY
My introduction to military school was hardly auspicious. I was now
sixteen years old--nearly seventeen. I did not look that old, however;
the commandant of the school, in examining me, took me for much less and
assigned me to a room with a boy of twelve.
At seventeen, our age is a most important item. We think so, anyhow. And
this incident dampened my spirits most disproportionately. Especially
when I discovered that this roommate was to be the only other Jew in the
school. It seemed to me a very pointed and personal insult.
He was a meek little boy, though--meeker even than I. And all through
that first night he wept aloud, smothering his tears upon his pillow and
crying for his mama--and for _kartoffel salat_. It was a Friday night, I
remember, and it must have been a Sabbath custom in his house to have
potato salad for supper. At any rate he kept me awake long into the
night.
And once, taking savage pity on him, I got up and went over to him in my
bare feet and nightgown, and told him brusquely how satisfied he ought
to be to have a mother at all; that both my father and mother were dead,
and I should never see them again, no matter how homesick I grew or how
long I waited for their coming. This silenced him on that score, but he
went on whimpering for the _kartoffel salat_.
The next day I screwed up my courage to complain to the commandant. He
was a very tall, majestic figure of a soldier who had fought through the
Spanish and Boer wars and now, in times of peace, was reduced to
teaching the manual of arms and simple drill formations to young sons of
the rich. He was the most pompous, mean and utterly selfish man I ever
met. One could see it on his handsome face.
He heard my complaint through. Then, because, being an ignorant "plebe,"
I had forgotten to salute him, he made me perform that act and retell
the whole story word for word. But he could not change my room until I
had agreed to take a cot in the general dormitory--this being reserved
for students who paid less tuition.
"You may write your aunt," he said stiffly, twirling his long mustaches,
"that we did all we could to make you comfortable. We purposely put you
in a room with young Private Ornstein because we thought it would be
more--er, more congenial."
I saw what he was driving at, and went away miserable. So they knew it
up here, too: I was a Jew, and must be separated from the others as if I
had the plague! I felt sorry for myself.
I was not particularly homesick, though I had never been able to develop
much love for my Aunt Selina. She had not given me the chance. But the
unaccustomed severing from all that was mine: my room at home, the
street that I saw from its window, the burly, Irish "cop" who stood on
the corner and passed me an occasional lofty jest--and a thousand other
things, intimate and absurdly unimportant I missed with dull emptiness.
The school was comfortable enough. It was a huge, barn-like affair,
built in the previous generation and hardly ever repainted since then,
to look at it. The towers at either end of it had tin and battered
battlements, and the flanks of steps which went up the hill on which it
stood were worn with the tread of the hundreds of boys who had marched
upon them, each succeeding year. It was so with the stairs all through
the building: each step had a shallow, smooth cup which years of
treading had ground out. It gave me a creepy sense of the place's
antiquity.
There was a large parade ground at the back of the building. Its grass
was brown and mealy, and a flag pole, sagging slightly to one side,
jutted up from the center of it like a long, lone fin.
In the quadrangle where we formed in line to march to the mess-hall,
stood a huge oak tree, century-old, with twisted limbs and browning
leaves. On one of those limbs, they told me, an American spy was hanged
by the British in Revolutionary days--but it may have been only a fable.
I have since learned that almost every military school along the Hudson
has its Revolutionary oak--but, at the time, it made a deep impression
on me, so that I could not bear to hear the creaking of the branches
against my dormitory window.
This dormitory, to which I and my belongings repaired, was a long,
narrow, whitewashed room, crowded with iron cots and intruding
wardrobes. At night, when the bugle had blown taps and the lights were
dimmed, there was a ghostly quality to the rows of white and huddled
figures that lay the length of the room. There was never absolute quiet.
Sometimes some little boy would be sobbing, sometimes two of the older
ones would be telling each other the sort of jokes that daylight
forbids--and sometimes it would be the heavy, asthmatic breathing of the
proctor who was there to keep charge.
Of the boys themselves I could not judge at first. I was too young to
judge, at that: but I was not too young that I could not realize they
were not of the same sort as I had known in the city. There I had known
the pupils of a public school, poor, rough, almost always hard workers,
eager for whatever seemed fair and quick and democratic. But these boys
were of wealthy parents, most of them. There were only a few of them who
held scholarships, and these did jobs so menial and embarrassing that,
even under the most ideal conditions, they must have suffered in the
opinions of the rest of the school. As a matter of fact, we were a
brutal little crowd of snobs, and made life miserable for these poorer
scholars who must sweep the halls and wash dishes.
I do not think all military schools are like the one I attended. I hope
not. I gained from my year there much in the way of physical
development--but that is all. For every inch of muscle that I put on I
lost something worth incalculably more: honesty and cleanliness of mind
and what little shred of self-reliance I possessed. Somehow or other, it
seemed to me that I had reached the lowest rung of boyhood here--and, as
I look back upon it, I know that I was not much mistaken.
I wrote to ask my aunt to take me away. She refused to come to see
me--but scribbled a few empty lines to accuse me of homesickness, and to
assure me I should soon be rid of it.