Part 14

"I beg of you, friend, come later on, when my husband is here; that's his affair! I've enough to do with the shop and six children. Go away, for goodness' sake!"

I make a note of six children, and ask how many are married.

"Married! I wish any of them were married, I should have fewer gray hairs."

"Are they all girls?"

"Three are boys."

"What are they doing?"

"What should they be doing? Plaguing my life out with their open mouths!"

"Why not teach them a trade?"

She turns up her nose, gives me a black look, and refuses to give any further answers.

I have an idea: I buy a packet of cigarettes. She looks less disagreeable, and I ask:

"How much does your husband earn?"

"_He?_ He earn anything? What use do you suppose _he_ is, when I can't even send him to fetch a dish from a neighbor's? He's been four hours already. It won't be thanks to _him_ if we get any supper to-night!"

She goes off into another fury. I have to go outside and catch the husband in the street. I knew him--he was carrying a dish!

AT THE SHOCHET'S

I am greeted by a mixture of different voices. A hero of a cock gives a proud crow, as though there were no such thing as a slaughter-knife in the world. Contrariwise, a calf lows sadly--it would seem to be hungry, while between the boards under the holes in the tall roof chirp quantities of small birds. They have wings and laugh at the Shochet. It is summer, the air is full of insects, men, even the poorest and stingiest, leave crumbs about. Zip! zip! and zip! and zip! zip! zip! The bed in the nest is made, the "he" is decked out in bright colors, the "she" is modest and silent, and the children have had enough to eat! They are warm, and are not "down" in someone's note-book for military service or in connection with the matter of a license.

But ask them what is the meaning of a "blemish in the holy offerings!" This question is being discussed by two young men, barefoot, in skull-caps, and undressed to their "little prayer-scarfs."[92]

The young men are only unfit for inspecting licenses or wares in the shop, but calves for the altar--as fast as you please!

When God portioned out the world, the peasant took the soil, the fisher the river, the hunter the forest, the gardener the fruit-trees, the merchant the weights and measures, and so on; but the poet lingered in a wood. The nightingale sang to him, the trees whispered all sorts of wood-gossip into his ear, and his eyes, the poetical eyes, could not look away from the girl kneeling by the stream, from the tadpole in her hand. And he came too late for everything! The world, when he arrived, was already divided up. God had nothing left for him but clouds, rainbows, roses, and song-birds. He did not even find the young washerwoman on his way back, she had engaged herself somewhere as nurse.

You have fancy! Create a world for yourself, said God.

And people envied the poet--his world was the best! The peasant tilled his land with sweat and toil. The fisher is not idle--breaking ice in winter time is no joke. The hunter wearies hunting and pursuing. Pippins are not so easily made out of crab-apples! The merchant must bestir himself, if only about falsifying the weights and measures, else he dies of hunger. _One_ is the poet, who lies on his stomach and creates worlds!

But it was a mistake. It turned out that his soul was only a camera-obscura that reflected the outside world with all its mud and pigs. So long as the pig keeps its place, it is not so bad, but when the pig gets into the foreground, the poet's world becomes as piggish as ours.

The only people who remain to be envied are our two young men, the Shochet's son with the Shochet's son-in-law. Our world with its pigs doesn't fit in with their world of "blemish in the sacrifice." There is no connection between the two, no bridge, no link whatever.

And as I have come into _their_ world out of _our_ world, the Gemorehs are shut, while the young faces express fear and wonder.

The Shochet is not at home, he has gone to a neighboring village; that is why the calf is still lowing in the house. The wife has a little draper's shop.

The daughter and a daughter-in-law stand by the fire and their faces are triply red.

First, from pride in their husbands with their Torah; secondly, from the crackling fire, and thirdly, with confusion before a stranger, a man, and a "German" to boot. One caught a corner of her apron in her mouth, the other moved a few steps backward, as in the synagogue at the end of the Kedushah. Both look at me in astonishment from under low foreheads with hairbands of plaited thread.

The young men, however, soon recover themselves. They have heard of the note-taker, and have guessed that I am he!

The note-taking goes quickly. The Shochet gets four rubles a week, besides what he earns in the villages; were it not for the meat brought in from the villages round about, he would be doing very well.

The shop does not bring in much, but always something. Parnosseh, thank God, they have! As for the children, they will live with the parents, and when, in God's good time, the parents shall have departed this life, they will inherit, one, the father's profession, the other, the shop; the house will be in common.

They look better off than any in the town; better off than the traders, householders, workmen, better off even than the public-house keeper and the Feldscher together. There will come a time--I think as I go out--when even teaching will be one of the best paid professions.

It is all not so bad as people think: besides being a rabbi, a Shochet, a beadle, and a teacher, there is yet another good way of getting a living.

In the Shochet's house there is a female lodger; she pays fifteen rubles a year. The door is locked; through the window, which looks into the street, I see quite a nice little room. Two well-furnished beds with white pillows, red-painted wooden furniture; copper utensils hang on the wall by the fire-place; there is a bright hanging-lamp. The room is full of comfort and household cheer.

She has silver, too, they tell me. I see a large chest with brass fittings. There must be silver candle-sticks in it, and perhaps ornaments.

What do you think? they say. She has a lot of money, the whole town is in her pocket. She is a widow with three children. The door is locked all through the week, because she only comes home every Sabbath, excepting Shabbes Chazon.[93] She spends the whole week going round the villages in the neighborhood, begging, with all three children.

THE REBBITZIN OF SKUL

Esther the queen was sallow,[94] but a gleam of graciousness lighted up her countenance. Esther, the Skul rebbitzin, was also plain-featured, but it was not a gleam, rather a sun, of kindliness that shone in her face. An old, thin woman, her head covered with a thin, wrinkled, pale pink skin, droops like a fine Esrog over her red kerchief. Only this Esrog has two kind, serious eyes.

She is a native of the place, and lives by herself; she has married all her children in various parts of the country, but nothing would induce her to live with any one of them.

It is never advisable to let oneself be dependent on a son-in-law or daughter-in-law. The husband stands up for the wife--the wife for the husband (not without reason saith the holy Torah: "And therefore a man shall leave his parents, etc."). She will not give them occasion to transgress the command to honor a mother, that is a real case of "thou shalt not cause the blind to stumble."

"God, blessed be His Name, created man so that he should not see the faults of those nearest him, otherwise the world would be as full of divorces as of marriage contracts!"

Secondly--as the rabbi of Skul observed more than once--a widow who depends on her children is a double grass-widow, and "the words of the rabbi of Skul should be framed in gold and worn about the neck as an _Öibele_." True, she says with a low sigh, _Öibeles_ are not worn nowadays, imitation pearls are considered prettier!

She could not stay on in Skul. Since her husband the rabbi died, the place has become hateful to her. "Really," she says, "'its glory has departed, its splendor, and its beauty.'" She goes there once a year, for the anniversary of his death, but she cannot remain long--"it has grown empty."

She lived with the Skul rabbi forty years. Those that knew him say that she grew to be his second self.

He, may he forgive me! was a Misnagid; so she thinks nothing of "good Jews!" His "service" was the Torah in its plain meaning. She sits all day over the Pentateuch in Yiddish, or learns the Shulchan Aruch;[95] she quotes the Skul rabbi at every second word and it is his voice, his motions, his customs!

After the Skul rabbi's Kiddush and Havdoleh, she will listen to no other; she says her own over cake or currant wine. And _her_ Kiddush is _his_ Kiddush--the same low, dignified chant, the same sweetness. She eats "just kosher" and is very learned.

She can answer ritual questions! Forty years running she has stood by the hearth with her kind face turned to the table at which her husband sat and studied; her dove's eyes took in his every movement, her ears, half hidden under the head-kerchief, his every word, she was his true helpmeet, she hid his every thought in her brain and his goodness in her heart.

A river may have lain a hundred years in another bed, and all its previous twists and bends are wrought into the rocks of its first one. The Skul rabbi's life may have run more peacefully than a river, but the rebbitzin was no rock to him, rather a sponge that absorbed the whole of him.

She is not satisfied with the world as it is to-day. "If it is no longer pious, the Almighty must have a care; if His people behave so, it is doubtless because He wishes it. Only, there is no 'purpose' in it all; the present-day stuffs are spider-webs, and people don't sew as they used to, they cut it all up into seams!

"Don't talk to me of the curtains before the Ark, you can't make so much as a frock for a child out of them! The old-fashioned head-dresses get dearer every day, a head-kerchief ought to last forever, and even out of a bosom-kerchief you can always draw a gold or silver thread, but imitation pearls and glass spangles are good for nothing. And, believe me, it is all much uglier, in my opinion!"

But she bears no one a grudge: "My husband, the Skul rabbi, was a Misnagid, but he never persecuted a Chossid, heaven forbid!"

She remembers how the householders once came crying out that the Chassidîm of the place were late in reciting the Shema,[96] and she heard from his own lips the reply: "There are," he said to them, "different armies, and they have different weapons, different customs, but they all serve the same kingdom. Even boots," he added with his smile, "are not all made by the same pattern."

She remembers all his sayings and lives according to his ideas.

He used to get very angry if a workman rose and stood before him as a sign of respect, for he was greatly in favor of people working with their hands, therefore when she came here with her few hundred rubles, she set up soap-making--sooner than live on others.

She knows that even a woman is under the law bidding every one do something for his own support--it is not one of the laws bound to a certain time, from which women are exempt. When they "kept" her money, she remained dependent on the soap only. "It wouldn't be a bad business," she says, "blessed be His Name! I make three to four rubles a week before a holiday. My soap, may His Name be praised! has a reputation in the whole neighborhood, only--just now it's all on credit. Some day the business will fail."

I look round on all sides, I see no utensils, no instruments for the work.

Nothing extra is wanted for it, she gives me to understand: "You take some ashes from the hearth, potatoes, and other vegetables, work them together in water, let them steam and then simmer over the fire; in that way you get 'unclear' soap, and if you do the same thing over again, you get _liter_, that is, good soap!" When I leave, she asks a little troubled and ashamed:

"Tell me, I beg of you, when your writings come into the hands of the great people, will they not say I must take out a license?"

INSURED

A quiet summer night. Over there the celebrated wood shows black on the sky-line; our forefathers engraved in its trees the names of the divisions of the Talmud they completed as they went along. Yonder, not far off, they halted, and the "head of the dispersion" said "Pöh lîn!" (here abide!), and the land has ever since been called "Pöhlin;"[97] but the other nations cannot make out the reason.

And the wood has a short cut to Jerusalem. There was once a goat belonging to one of the native Làmed-Wòfniks, and the goat knew the road; she used to trot every morning to pasture on the Temple Mount, and return with three pitcherfuls of milk for the holy man.

To the right of the wood, beside a river, lies the town. It is divided into two parts. One part is a long strip--a straight, paved street with walled-in houses under sheet-metal roofs, quite substantial, fastened to the earth with foundations. The inhabitants of the street know for certain that they will live and die in them; that all the winds of heaven may blow without causing them to move an inch.

Then comes the second part, another world, quite spiritual: flimsy "hen-houses" entirely built of straw and fir planks, with only an occasional slate-roof. A breeze blows over them, and they are gone. Do their dwellers hope to find the short cut to the Temple Mount, like the immortal goat, or do they speculate on the fire-insurance?

And how like are the houses to their inhabitants! These are narrow-chested, with darkened eyes, and crouch under crooked straw caps.

Cocks crow out of the huts, ducks quack, and geese cackle. From out the marsh, which licks the threshold with seventy tongues, croak well-fed, portly frogs. A Jewish calf frequently contributes a bleat, and is answered out of the long street by a Gentile dog. I shall begin to take notes early in the morning.

I know beforehand what it will be: if not thirty-six rubles a year, it will be thirty-three or thirty-two.... I shall find "many trades and few blessings,"[98] more soap factories, any number of empty houses.... The beadle will reckon up for me: _he_ is a messenger, _she_, a huckstress; two daughters are out in service in Lublin, in Samoscz.... one son is a "helper" in a Cheder, the other serving his time in the army, and the daughter-in-law with three, four, five children has gone home to her father and mother....

I shall find neglected children tumbling about in the swamp with the ducks and geese; mites of babies screaming their throats out in the cradles; sick people left alone in bed; boarded-out children sitting over Gemorehs; young women in furry wigs and with or without shyness; I hardly shut my eyes, before these same weary, livid, pale, twisted faces, walking sorrows, rise before me ... there is seldom one who smiles, one with a dimple ... all the men so unmanly, so mummy-like, women with running eyes, carrying a load of fruit, a sack of onions, or else an unborn child together with the onions. I know I shall come across an unlicensed third-rate public-house, two or three horse-stealers, and more than two or three receivers of stolen goods. But what about the statistics? Can they answer the question, how many empty stomachs, useless teeth? how many people whose eyes are drawn out of their sockets as with pincers at the sight of a piece of dry bread? how many people who have really died of hunger?

All you gain by statistics is that you find out about an unlicensed public-house, or a horse-thief, or a receiver of stolen goods.

Scientific medicine has invented a machine for checking heart-beats, one by one; the foolish statistics play with figures. Do statistics record the anxious heart-beats that thumped in the breast of the grandson of the descendant from Spanish ancestors, or the son of the author of the _Tevuas Shor_, before they committed their first illegality? Do they measure how their hearts bled _after_ they committed it? Do they count the sleepless nights before and after?

Can they show how many were the days of hunger? How many times the children flung themselves about in convulsions, how often hands and feet shook when the first glass was filled by the unlicensed brandy-seller? Livid, ghastly, blue faces float before me in the empty air, and blue-brown, parched lips whisper: "There has been no fire in my chimney for twenty-four days."

"We have eaten potato peelings for ten."

"Three died without a doctor or a prescription; I _had_ to save the fourth!"

The hoarse voices cut me to the heart, like a blunt knife; I leave the window where I have been standing; but the room is full of ghosts.

By the stove stands a red Jew, well-nourished: "Hee, hee!" he laughs. "Steal? buy stolen things? a business like any other ... not less than a month's imprisonment ... in a month I would have lost a fortune ... all the noblemen will bear me witness ... honestly! honestly!"

That voice is worse; it saws ... I throw myself on the bed, I shut my eyes, and there appears to me the good old rebbitzin of Skul.

"Well," she says with her childlike, silvery voice, "and suppose the result of your inquiries were not favorable for the Jews, shall you he able to say: 'Thy people are all righteous?'" I feel as if her kind, blue, dove-like eyes rested soothingly on my hot forehead.

I fell asleep beneath them, and I dreamt of the two angels, the good inclination and the evil one. I saw them flying earthward before day-break, enveloped in a thin, pink mist. The evil inclination carried, in one hand, a blue paper with a large, black eye in the top left-hand corner, evidently a deed relating to a house or some property ... expensive dresses, besides fur caps, braided kaftans, silk sashes, also a top-hat and frock-coat as if for one person; also handkerchiefs, head-kerchiefs, kerchiefs with tinsel, pearl necklaces, as well as silk and satin trains of all colors--all that in one hand, and in the other--potato peelings....

The good inclination--naked, without clothes or things to carry, as God made him....

Both fly ... it seems as if the good inclination wanted to tell me something, he opens his pretty mouth ... but not his voice, a cry of alarm wakes me. Fire! I spring out of bed, there is a fire just opposite!

A long tongue of flame stretches out toward me and seems to say:

"Don't be frightened: it's insured!"

THE FIRE

The fiery tongue was put out at me by Reb Chaïm Weizensang's house. The tongue grew larger and the house smaller till it fell in, into a sea of wails and screams of terror. There was fortunately no wind at the time of the conflagration.

When the sun rose from out the mist, blushing red like a beautiful and innocent maiden after the bath, she saw nothing but long, black, male heads turning over the ruins with sticks. They were looking for the remnants of Weizensang's riches in the remnants of his house.

Groups of yellow-faced women are already standing around it. The brown shawls are held with washed fingers over their unwashed heads, and pale lips lament and bewail the house.

With the morning came a fresh wind. A little sooner, and it would have played havoc. Now it just shakes the remaining old chimney over the women's heads as though it were a palm. The chimney rocks and groans sadly, as though it felt deserted, and perhaps it listens to the inn-keeper telling me the tale of the destruction of the house, and affirms with a nod: "True, true!"

You would sooner pick up every thread, every dust-grain of life out of which the sleep-angel has woven you a fantastic dream, than discover all the devices a Jew must resort to before he hears the clink of copper coin.

If I were to describe everything, you would think I had been dreaming myself.... Who shall read the Divine countenance when a wretched creature stands before Him, lifts its head with its racked brain, extinguished eyes, and trembling voice, and pressing its empty stomach with cracked and bony hands, prays without a voice, without a language; the tongue will not move, but the blood cries: "Lord of the world, I have done my part, now--Thou must help! Lord of the world, feed me like the ravens! In what am I more worthless than they are? Lord of the world, where are _my_ crumbs? When will it be _my_ 'Sabbath of Song?'"[99]

And for all the body he has, he might very well be a bird; nothing is wanting but the wings, and the nest with the crumbs.

And therefore the Jewish Parnossehs are so specialized that their like will only be in the twenty-first century, when one specialist will lift the upper eye-lid, a second press down the lower, and a third examine the sick eye.

If a dish of roast veal, a rag in a paper-factory, or an exported egg had a mouth to speak with and the rabbi Reb Heshil's memory, they would still be unable to say how many Jewish hands had taken them out and put them in, from the peasant's shed into the roasting-pan, from the manure-box into the "Holländer,"[100] from servitude into freedom.... And a Jewish Parnosseh is just such a ladder as Jacob our father saw in a dream, the night when all stones united into one stone for his head, a ladder standing on the earth, and the top of it reaches into the sky.

How deep it is chained into the earth, is known only to the worm at its foot, and how high it reaches--to the star only that shines above it.

_We_ grow giddy gazing up the height; and when we peer down into the depths, our stomach turns, and we look green forever after.

Angels ascend and descend the ladder; men, alas, _climb_ it with their last remaining strength, and fall down it when their strength is exhausted. And even if he can thank his stars his neck is not broken, the Jew has no strength left to begin climbing again.

Such is the ladder that was partly climbed by our "burnt-out" one. First he travelled between the villages as a "runner," on business for other people; the earth was hot to his bare feet. It was not the cry of a brother's blood this Cain heard, it was the cry of wife and children for bread.

Heaven came to his assistance; he bought very cheaply for two or three years on end, and then he was promoted from a "runner" to a "walker." There was already provision at home for a week at a time, and he only came back Fridays with the result of a week's bargaining; the brain was more composed, and had time to take in the fact that the feet were becoming swollen, that the father of six children ought always to walk and not run, if he wishes his feet to carry him till at least one of them is confirmed. And God helped further; he is now, blessed be the Name, a village peddler, that is, he walks only when there is no "opportunity"[101] to ride in from one village to another for a kopek; if the "opportunity" is there, he rides.

God helped him on again; another year or two, and he has his own horse and cart!

Time does not stand still, and he took no rest, and God helped. The one horse turned into two, the cart into a trap, and it even came to a driver! And he is now a produce dealer; first he deals with peasants and then with gentlemen.

And, God helping, he gets into favor first with the head of the dairy farm, then with the manager, after that with the bailiff, after that again with the steward, and at last with the count himself. O, by that time he is an inhabitant, settled in the place, the driver becomes a domestic servant, horse and carriage are sold, and pockets are lined with the count's receipts....

What is he now?

He is like the sun round which circle the stars--smaller traders, and little stars--brokers.