I
The older Isaac Levinsky grew, and the more he saw of the world after
business hours, the more ashamed he grew of the Russian Rabbi whom
Heaven had curiously chosen for his father. At first it seemed natural
enough to shout and dance prayers in the stuffy little Spitalfields
synagogue, and to receive reflected glory as the son and heir of the
illustrious Maggid (preacher) whose four hour expositions of Scripture
drew even West End pietists under the spell of their celestial
crookedness. But early in Isaac's English school-life--for cocksure
philanthropists dragged the younger generation to anglicization--he
discovered that other fathers did not make themselves ridiculously
noticeable by retaining the gabardine, the fur cap, and the ear-locks
of Eastern Europe: nay, that a few--O, enviable sons!--could scarcely
be distinguished from the teachers themselves.
When the guardian angels of the Ghetto apprenticed him, in view of his
talent for drawing, to a lithographic printer, he suffered agonies at
the thought of his grotesque parent coming to sign the indentures.
"You might put on a coat to-morrow," he begged in Yiddish.
The Maggid's long black beard lifted itself slowly from the worm-eaten
folio of the Babylonian Talmud, in which he was studying the tractate
anent the payment of the half-shekel head-tax in ancient Palestine.
"If he took the money from the second tithes or from the Sabbatical
year fruit," he was humming in his quaint sing-song, "he must eat the
full value of the same in the city of Jerusalem." As he encountered
his boy's querulous face his dream city vanished, the glittering
temple of Solomon crumbled to dust, and he remembered he was in exile.
"Put on a coat?" he repeated gently. "Nay, thou knowest 'tis against
our holy religion to appear like the heathen. I emigrated to England
to be free to wear the Jewish dress, and God hath not failed to bless
me."
Isaac suppressed a precocious "Damn!" He had often heard the story of
how the cruel Czar Nicholas had tried to make his Jews dress like
Christians, so as insidiously to assimilate them away; how the police
had even pulled off the unsightly cloth-coverings of the shaven polls
of the married women, to the secret delight of the pretty ones, who
then let their hair grow in godless charm. And, mixed up with this
story, were vaguer legends of raw recruits forced by their sergeants
to kneel on little broken stones till they perceived the superiority
of Christianity.
How the Maggid would have been stricken to the heart to know that
Isaac now heard these legends with inverted sympathies!
"The blind fools!" thought the boy, with ever growing bitterness. "To
fancy that religion can lie in clothes, almost as if it was something
you could carry in your pockets! But that's where most of their
religion does lie--in their pocket." And he shuddered with a vision of
greasy, huckstering fanatics. "And just imagine if I was sweet on a
girl, having to see all her pretty hair cut off! As for those
recruits, it served them right for not turning Christians. As if
Judaism was any truer! And the old man never thinks of how he is
torturing _me_--all the sharp little stones he makes _me_ kneel on."
And, looking into the future with the ambitious eye of conscious
cleverness, he saw the paternal gabardine over-glooming his life.