Category: Novels

Forward from Babylon

Russia--here was the first Babylon. Sitting on the metal stool, his second-hand velvet suit fraying against the heat of the oven, Philip's big eyes were round with horror of this immense, inscrutable place. Everything they said was portentous, not wholly real. Many of their wo...

Chapters

8. CHAPTER VI

Philip realized at no earlier age than is customary that life, anyhow externally, is a succession of illusions, and that, if reality actually exists, it must be isolated from fa...

16. CHAPTER XIV

The tramcar stopped at a corner nearer the station by one block of buildings than Angel Street. Rayman, the butcher, was hacking away with indecent enthusiasm at a hulk of ribs....

6. CHAPTER IV

The vicissitudes of school and Angel Street represented only the secular side of Philip's existence. The Jewish, the clerical side, claimed his servitude as soon as he pushed op...

15. CHAPTER XIII

For the first day at Wenton Philip was almost drunk with the abrupt change from Doomington to the fresh air and the hills. The atmosphere in Wenton House, to be sure, was a litt...

11. CHAPTER IX

Some time previously, in the spring of the same year, the walls of Doomington had fallen to their last stone upon the blast of the trumpets of spring. Philip and Harry had adven...

18. CHAPTER XVI

A certain hesitancy checks me upon the appearance of Wilfrid Strauss in this narration; even though I am aware how easy and profitable it is to philosophize upon the _deus ex ma...

7. CHAPTER V

Not the most enthusiastic observer could have foretold the growth of a friendship between Philip and Mottele. On the other hand, Reb Monash regarded with some alarm the growing...

9. CHAPTER VII

When the storm had subsided, Philip felt like a sea-battered hulk, shorn of spars, incompetent to face wind and tide. The muscle of his left arm suffered peculiarly. Really, the...

14. CHAPTER XII

Dorah was a tall, raw-boned woman, carrying all the implicit angles of Reb Monash to an explicit extreme. In the civil strife at Angel Street her sympathy had always been on the...

5. CHAPTER III

At no time did Philip find the society of his coevals congenial; the society at least of the young males of his age; which was an element in his composition not, I venture, to b...

3. CHAPTER I

Russia--here was the first Babylon. Sitting on the metal stool, his second-hand velvet suit fraying against the heat of the oven, Philip's big eyes were round with horror of thi...

17. CHAPTER XV

Three times daily for the following seven days, a little community, necessarily never less than ten adults, and frequently intersprinkled with a few of those more pious _chayder...

13. CHAPTER XI

Such then was the spiritual adolescence of Philip Massel, and such, as lately described, the situation which was its inevitable result--a result not wholly unforeseen by one or...

12. CHAPTER X

It was noon on the Day of Atonement which followed nine days after the _Rosh Hashonah_ memorable to more than one by the oration of Reb Monash, noon in Cambridge Street, a thoro...

4. CHAPTER II

Philip had not yet recovered from the dull dismay with which he had found himself installed as a scholar in the Infants' Class of the Bridgeway Elementary School. He had attaine...

10. CHAPTER VIII

If Philip's oration on the croft, despite its immediate consequences, had been a triumph for Philip, the fatality which had irresistibly drawn his feet homeward after his escapa...

1. BOOK I

2. BOOK III