I
The image of her so tragically trustful in that mountain village of
Bukowina still haunts my mind, and refuses to be exorcised, as of
yore, by the prose of life. One who is very dear to me advises driving
her out at the point of the pen. Whether such recording of my life's
strangest episode will lay these memories or not, the story itself may
at least instruct my fellow-Jews in New York how variously their
religion has manifested itself upon this perplexing planet. Doubtless
many are still as ignorant as I was respecting their mediaeval
contemporaries in Eastern Europe. True, they have now opportunities in
their own Ghetto--which is, for cosmopolitanism, a New York within a
New York--of studying strata from other epochs of Judaism spread out
on the same plane of time as their own, even as upon the white sheet
of that wonderful invention my aged eyes have lived to see, sequent
events may be pictured simultaneously. In my youth these opportunities
did not exist. Only in Baltimore and a few of the great Eastern
cities was there any aggregation of Jews, and these were all--or
wanted to be--good Yankees; while beyond the Mississippi, where my
father farmed and hunted like a Christian, and where you might have
scoured a thousand square miles to get _minyan_ (ten Jews for
worship), our picturesque customs and ceremonies dwindled away from
sheer absence of fellowship. My father used to tell of a bronzed
trapper he breakfasted with on the prairie, who astonished him by
asking him over their bacon if he were a Jew. "Yes," said my father.
"Shake!" said the trapper. "You're the first fellow-Jew I've met for
twenty years." Though in my childhood my father taught me the Hebrew
he had brought from Europe, and told me droll Jewish stories in his
native German, it will readily be understood that the real influences
I absorbed were the great American ideals of liberty and humanity,
emancipation and enlightenment, and that therefore the strange things
I witnessed among the Carpathians were far more startling to me than
they can be to the Jews of to-day upon whom the Old World has poured
its archaic inhabitants. Nevertheless, I cannot but think that even
those who have met strange drifts of sects in New York will be
astonished by the tradition which I stumbled upon so blindly in my
first European tour. For, so far as I can gather, the Zloczszol legend
is unique in Jewish history and confined exclusively to this
out-of-the-way corner, however near other heresies may have approached
to some of the underlying conceptions. My landlord Yarchi's view that
it was a mere piece of local commercial myth-making, a gross artifice,
would have at least the merit of explaining this uniqueness. It has,
in my eyes, no other.
This tour of mine was to make not a circle, but a half-circle, for,
landing at Hamburg I was to return by the Baltic, after a circuit
through Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Buda-Pesth, Lemberg, (where my
grandfather had once been a rabbi of consideration), Moscow, and St.
Petersburg. I did not linger at Hamburg; purchasing a stout horse, I
started on my long ride. Of course it did not seem so long to me--who
had already ridden from Kansas to both of our seaboards--as it would
to a young gentleman of to-day accustomed to parlour cars, though the
constant change of dialects and foods was somewhat unsettling.
But money speaks all languages, and a good Western stomach digests all
diets. Bad water, however, no stomach can cope with; and I was laid up
at Prague with a fever, which left me too weak to hurry on. I rambled
about the Ghetto--the Judenstadt--which gave me my first insight into
mediaeval Judaism, and was fascinated by the quaint alleys and houses,
the Jewish town-hall, and the cellarlike _Alt-Neu_ synagogue with its
miraculous history of unnumbered centuries. I heard the story of the
great red flag on the pillar, with its "shield of David" and the
Swede's hat, and was shown on the walls the spatterings of the blood
of the martyrs of 1389.
What emotions I had in the old graveyard--a Ghetto of the dead--where
the graves were huddled together, three and four deep, and the very
tombstones and corpses had undergone Ghetto persecution! A whole new
world opened out to me, crooked as the Ghetto alleys--so alien from
the free life of the flowering prairies--as I walked about this
"Judengarten," studying the Hebrew inscriptions and the strange
symbolic sculptures--the Priest's hands of blessing, the Levite's
ewer, the Israelites' bunch of grapes, the Virgin with roses--and
trying to reconstruct the life these dead had lived. Strange ancestral
memories seemed thrilling through me, helping me to understand. Many
stories did I hear, too, of the celebrated Rabbi Loew, and of the
_golem_ he created, which brought him his meals: in sign whereof I was
shown his grave, and his house marked with a lion on a blue
background. I listened with American incredulity but hereditary
sympathy. I was astonished to find men who still believed in a certain
Sabbatai Zevi, Messiah of the Jews, and one showed me a Sabbatian
prayer-book with a turbaned head of this Redeemer side by side with
King David's, and another who scoffed at this seventeenth-century
impostor, yet told me the tradition in his own family, how they had
sold their business and were about to start for Palestine, when the
news reached them that so far from deposing the Sultan, this Redeemer
of Israel had become his doorkeeper and a Mohammedan.
The year was passing toward the Fall ere I got to Buda-Pesth (in those
days the enchanted gateway of the Orient, resounding with gypsy music,
and not the civilized capital I found it the other day), and I had not
proceeded far on the northerly bend of my journey when, soon after
crossing the Carpathians, I was imprisoned in the mountain village of
Zloczszol by the sudden overflow of the Dniester. The village itself
was sheltered from the floods by a mountain between it and the
tributary of the Dniester; but all the roads northward were
impassable, and the water came round by clefts and soused our
bordering fields and oozed very near the maize-garden of Yarchi's pine
cottage, to which I had removed from the dirty inn, where a squalling
baby in a cradle had shared the private sitting-room. It was a very
straggling village, which began to straggle at the mountain-foot, but,
for fear of avalanches, I was told, the houses did not grow
companionable till some half a mile down the plain.
In the centre of the village was a cobble-paved "Ring-Place" and
market-place, on which gave a few streets of shops (the
provision-shops benefiting hugely by the floods, which made imports
difficult). It was a Jewish colony, with the exception of a few
outlying farms, whose peasants brought touches of gorgeous colour into
the procession of black gabardines. It was strange to me to live in a
place in which every door-post bore a _Mezuzah_. It gave me a novel
sense of being in a land of Israel, and sometimes I used to wonder how
these people could feel such a sense of local patriotism as seemed to
possess them. And yet I reflected that, like the giant cedar of
Lebanon which rose from the plain in such strange contrast with the
native trees of Zloczszol, Israel could be transplanted everywhere,
and was made of as enduring and undying a wood--nay, that, even like
this cedar-wood, it had strange properties of conserving other
substances and arresting putrefaction. Hence its ubiquitous patriotism
was universally profitable. Nevertheless, this was one of the
surprises of my journey--to find Jews speaking every language under
the European sun, regarding themselves everywhere as part of the soil,
and often patriotic to the point of resenting immigrant Jews as
foreigners. I myself was popularly known as "the Stranger," though I
was not resented, because the couple of dollars at which I purchased
the privilege of "ark-opening" on my first visit to the synagogue--a
little Gothic building standing in a court-yard--gave me a further
reputation as "the rich stranger." Once I blushed to overhear myself
called "the handsome stranger," and I looked into my cracked mirror
with fresh interest. But I told myself modestly a stalwart son of the
prairies had an unfair advantage in such a world of stooping sallow
students. Certainly I felt myself favoured both in youth and looks
when I stepped into the Beth-Hamedrash, the house of study (which I
had at first taken for a little mosque, like those I had seen on the
slopes of Buda), and watched the curious gnarled graybeards crooning
and rocking the livelong day over worm-eaten folios.
Despite such odd glimpses of the interesting, I grew as tired of
waiting for the waters to abate as Noah himself must have felt in his
zoological institute.
One day as I was gazing from my one-story window at the melancholy
marsh to which the flood had reduced the landscape, I said glumly to
my hunchbacked landlord, who stood snuffing himself under the porch,
"I suppose it will be another week before I can get away."
"Alas! yes," Yarchi replied.
"Why alas?" I asked. "It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and
the longer I stay the better for you."
He shook his head. "The flood that keeps you here keeps away the
pilgrims."
"The pilgrims!" I echoed.
"Ay," said he. "There will be three in that bed of yours."
"But what pilgrims?"