“The day has gone, the night is here,The work is done, oh! do not fear.Saint Florian your house will keep,Saint Johan he will guard your sleep,Saint Nepornuk will watch the streams.The saints, they all will pray for you,The Virgin intercede for you,Now go to sleep, the Lord’s awake,And plan no sin, for Jesus’ sake.”
“The day has gone, the night is here,The work is done, oh! do not fear.Saint Florian your house will keep,Saint Johan he will guard your sleep,Saint Nepornuk will watch the streams.The saints, they all will pray for you,The Virgin intercede for you,Now go to sleep, the Lord’s awake,And plan no sin, for Jesus’ sake.”
I am sure there were two closing lines which summed up the prevailing theology, but I do not remember them.
For many years, this orthodox song put us to sleep, and a similar one, just as piously solicitous, awakened us, and neither Lutheran nor Jew objected to its Roman Catholic phraseology. With the general nationalistic awakening, however, there was a closer drawing of religious and racial lines, and when the town elected a Lutheran Burgomaster, he appointed a night watchman who also was a Lutheran. While there was no change in the blasts from the wooden horn our slumber song was robbed of its poetry. Into the night the watchman called a few cold verses in which neither Saint nor Virgin had a part. Hardly had he thus boldly shown his departure from the traditions of the past, when a well-aimed stone struck his lantern and another one his head. He was stripped of his halberd, the symbol of his office, and left unconscious through many an hour, while the town remained unguarded against its invisible foes.
The next day, the Burgomaster was besieged by requests from the priest and many important citizens of the town to reinstate the Catholic watchman; but this he refused to do. The same night the watchman was guarded by theKisbiruntil past midnight, and was unmolested as, protected, he blew the hours. He did not blow the waking hour, for after his guard left him his Catholic enemies fell upon him again and he was too badly beaten to rise from the ground. That day he resigned his office and the Catholic watchman patrolled the streets. It was a great relief, even to a non-partisan Jew, to hear the skillful blast and the good-night song with all its saintly flourishes. I went to sleep at nine, but no one heard the ten o’clock horn. The watchman was beaten insensible by the Lutherans, who were practicing the Mosaic law—“an eye for an eye.” For many weeks the battle raged, until a compromise was made. The watchman was to sing his Catholic song only in front of the priest’s house, that of thePanyand a few other dignitaries. The Lutheran song was to be given before the Lutheran parsonage and such houses as he knew to be safely heretical. He was allowed full liberty in the Jewish part of the town. This worked fairly well the first and second nights, but the third night, many of the citizens met to celebrate the peace achieved, and the night watchman drank first with a Catholic and then with aProtestant and when he went out into the night he blew his blasts erratically; faintly at first, afterwards as if not quite sure of the number blown—then he began to sing—the full old version of his song—in front of the Lutheran pastor’s house. Recovering himself, he sang it in its abbreviated and rationalistic form, on the market-place and in front of thePany’shouse.
At nine o’clock he was surrounded by a crowd of loafers, who led him up and down the town, blowing his nine blasts, and after each one giving full swing to the old time song which now had become a battle-cry. At ten a larger crowd rescued him from amidst his co-religionists, and after each blast made him sing the Lutheran version; at eleven o’clock they still held him. At twelve the Magyar youths took him in hand and compelled him to sing a Magyar song. They kept him until two, when the combined Lutheran forces took possession of him and at four he was permitted to waken the already sleepless town. The next night the watchers and defenders of the faith heard the eight too hoos, but no song. Nine o’clock and again the ominous silence; at ten an awful howl arose, which came from Catholics, Lutherans, Magyars and Slavs. A fearful thing had happened—the Burgomaster had appointed a Jewish night watchman and before morning every window in every Jewish home was broken—a pious and gentle protest against this insult to Christendom.
The Jew threw away his horn and halberd and another took his place, but he had solved the problem. Night was never again officially announced by a song; all one heard was the eight doleful blasts and then silence until it was time to blow the other hours. That was the first time in my life that I thought seriously about the problems of Christian unity.
THE poor who lived in “The House” were few, for the Jewish home is rarely broken up, no matter how galling the poverty, and family ties bind and obligate its stronger members even through far removed cousinships. The permanent residents were:—Two old, scolding, toothless women, an epileptic boy—some one’s illegitimate offspring, a burden to himself more than to any one else, and the caretaker, who was also grave-digger, his wife and children. The House of the Poor was open day and night to those who wander up and down the land; unfortunates, wanderers, beggars, paupers, who keep Jewish benevolence active, often straining it to the breaking point.
TheSchnorer, as he is called, is a gentlemanly sort of beggar. He is rarely in rags, is tolerably clean, and every house in which a Jew lives is his; he enters it without knocking—never asks for alms, yet is always sure of a gift. He does not tell a hard luck story, but should he tell one, it would be an almost exact duplicate of that which anotherSchnorerhad told before him. It is a story which has as its key-note persecution;its minor details are: destruction of house by fire, blindness, consumption, and the begging of a dowry for a marriageable daughter. These are some of the ills of Judaism, which chronically afflicted those who passed through the House of the Poor. I heard them tell of the fires of hate, which destroyed straw-thatched cottages, business, virtue, old age and youth. I heard racking coughs, felt the groping touch of the blind, and listened to wise men trying to balance this world upon the needle points of rabbinic exegesis. I do not recall that I ever saw a cheerful face nor heard laughter, nor do I remember that any one wept. After all, misfortune was to many a business asset, even as pious learning was; and in this, the people in the House of the Poor proved that they were typical humans. I fear that I went there more than my mother wished me to go, and more perhaps than was good for me; but I went to listen to theSchnorers’tales. They knew Europe, from Hamburg to Constantinople; knew each wealthy Jew, how much he gave, and they measured his chances of Heaven by his gifts to them. They also knew the good places to stop over the Sabbath, and what seat to take in the synagogue in order to catch the eye of those benevolent worshippers who invitedSchnorersto share the Sabbath goose.
These were not the worst things with which I became acquainted. The poor indulged in gambling,they drankpalenka, and I saw and heard many things whose horror I felt but did not clearly understand. It was a great clinic in poverty, although doubtless I was too young to attend its classes.
The epileptic boy was my special friend; he was much older than I, as in fact were all my friends. His malady took peculiar forms. Before each attack he would wander off, and when he passed under the spell of the disease he had most wonderful hallucinations. He saw visions and declared them eloquently and poetically. Many a time I have seen him rise from the gutter and speak an hour to an ever-increasing crowd, which, although it did not understand him, was held by the spell of his eloquence.
One day aSchnorertold about the city of Hamburg through which he hadschnorred. He expatiated upon its rich and poor, its delicious fish, itsschnaps, and the great ships he had seen, full of passengers sailing for America. Then each of theSchnorerstold something of that far-away country, its fabled wealth and wonderful possibilities. Their stories fitted into my dissatisfied mood, and that evening, when the epileptic proposed our running away to America, I readily assented.
There is, I suppose, a natural restlessness which every lad feels at a certain age; it is the flitting instinct, the desire to leave the nest andtry one’s own wings; to me that feeling came often, and this time with irresistible force.
We made no elaborate plans—youth is so optimistic. My companion was a wanderer upon the face of the earth, and when he promised to see me safe and sound in America, I was as sure of it as if America had been the next village, a mile away.
Early in the morning I left my home and was joined on the highway by the epileptic. Before sunrise we were on the outskirts of the town. A hackman, driving to the nearest railroad station with an empty coach, took us as passengers, and I paid him all the ready cash in my possession, trusting that once at the station, Hamburg and America would be within easy reach.
I had some rolls in my pockets which made our dinner, and when night came we had reached the railroad and heard the buzzing telegraph wires and the puffing of a far-away engine. The third class waiting-room was full of its queer and crude mixture of humanity.
Hard-faced and hard-fisted men, going to the city to work and seek their fortune; women, bent nearly double by the loads upon their backs, linen and embroideries for sale among the city folk; insolent young men surrounding young girls who bravely resisted the assaults upon their purity.
I have often seen that picture since andbreathed the same foul atmosphere; but never again has it been as terrible as it was that night. The mixed train for Vienna came, and when we tried to board it without tickets we were arrested as vagrants, and thrown into the town jail.
A jail at best is no place for a child, and this jail was never fit for any human beings. There were at least thirty people in a comparatively small room, and in that miscellaneous crowd there were half a dozen women. When we entered, the inmates had just begun to make ready for the night and were fighting among themselves for places nearest the stove, as it was a cool autumn evening. Animals are never fiercer than these men were. Oaths in a dozen languages and dialects filled the putrid air; races and classes united against each other; the Slavs cursed the Magyars, and they together beat the Jews and drove the Gypsies into a corner by themselves.
The women fought like tigers; they had to, for the men were assaulting them and there was no protection but their inborn sense of virtue, which is a mighty force in women, even in the lowest. One girl, who had the hardest fight, was a young Gypsy. She beat, scratched, kicked and drove off more than a score of men, who were awed as much by her indomitable courage as by her brute strength.
We came into the jail crying; at least, I remember that I cried, and both of us were shakingfrom the cold and sick from hunger. We remained unnoticed in the mêlée, but when our cries grew louder, an old hag, a bony, rough-looking creature, heard us. “Boshe muy!” she cried when she saw us. Then, realizing our condition, she fed us cold cabbage out of a black, earthen pot. The women quarrelled as to who should care for us during the night. I went to sleep with my head upon the old hag’s lap; she did not have room enough to lie down full length. I closed my eyes amid the subdued struggle and my unsubdued grief.
Early in the morning, before dawn, I was awakened by a tumult of voices. My epileptic companion was standing on top of the cold stove, speaking and wildly gesticulating. The men and women listened in amazement as his confused speech rose to a pitch of eloquence. I wish I could remember just what he said, but I know that I, in fact every one, felt as if the jail had grown larger and the air purer. We actually saw the pictures he drew.
One of them was a fire—yes, thePany’shouse was burning—theKisaszonka, his beautiful daughter, was behind the barred windows and the epileptic would save her. He strained his muscles and the veins of his thin arms swelled as the surging blood filled them.
“Here she was, in her raiment of white, like a twig of rosemary, fragrant and pure—he hadrescued her, and who had a right to marry her but he, her saviour?”
Then he drew for us a battle-field; bullets flew, the air was thick from powder smoke, the enemy was advancing, the general, a prince, was on his white charger leading his army to kill and drive back the invaders. “Behold! A swift riding Kozak. He rises in his stirrups and draws his sword. It hangs over the head of my beloved prince—it is ready to fall! I must save my prince! Ride on horse! On and on!”
He drew his imaginary sword, and swung it with all his might. “Ha! the Kozak sinks, cloven in twain!”
There stood the epileptic before us, more than half the watchers not understanding what he said; yet all hanging upon his words. Then, like a wounded soldier he sank upon a bench, and slipped to the floor. His pale face was covered by perspiration, he foamed at the mouth, he ground his teeth, and every muscle of his body seemed to be straining and struggling against its encircling tension.
It was now daylight, and the jailor called our names. I responded to both, and pushing through the crowd, saw my brother, who had come after me. Before he bought me my breakfast he gave me the severe beating which I so richly deserved.
The next night I was safe in my own quiet, clean, white bed, and mother was talking to me. Shetold me again the story of my birth and my babyhood, the pain I had caused, the little pleasure I had brought, and now she was going to send me away to school. Although I was desperately tired, I did not go to sleep, for it was the closing chapter of my boyhood’s life.
Years later, a great, gruff, German teacher, after telling us of the pains of motherhood, looked at us fiercely and cried: “You’re not worth it! Not a mother’s son of you!” And I felt sure that I was not.
EVERYBODY cried; even our servants and the neighbouring peasants, and indeed it must have been a pathetic sight, to see a lonely little boy, packed in among all sorts of people, venturing out into the far world by way of the omnibus.
It was very difficult, this going away to school. All our relatives had to be convinced that it was not a terrible tempting of providence. Many remained unconvinced, and their prophecies of dire consequences were not reassuring.
The fitting out was upon a generous scale. Seamstresses were busy and the tailor, a deaf mute, measured me in his rough way, making notches upon long, paper tape; for he couldn’t read even figures. Fortunately, clothes, so long as they were generously large, were regarded as satisfactory. What did not fit me then, might, another year. Feather-beds and pillows whose contents had been contributed by many generations of Sabbath geese, were packed, sewed into linen sheets; but what appealed to me most was a basketful of goodies. Poppy-seed cakes, cheese cakes, twisted Sabbath bread, a generous portionof roast goose, and with it all, many admonitions not to eat everything at once.
How hard it was for me to cry, how glad I was when it was all over, and what a sense of freedom possessed me—in spite of the fact that I was packed into the omnibus like a sardine, and that my fellow passengers had no special regard for a little Jewish boy.
I doubt that were I now to fly in an air-ship, I should feel such exaltation, and were I to be chief among the distinguished citizens who ride on some patriotic errand, would I feel anything akin to the pride which then filled me. The higher emotions wipe out the lower differences, and my racial and other enemies seemed like brothers during those last, fast fleeting moments of my boyhood’s life.
Good-bye, my brother by vaccination, now a shoemaker’s apprentice, passing the omnibus whistling. He stood there with puckered lips, silent for a second; then a smile passed over his dirty face, his brotherly instinct overcame all barriers, he jumped on to the step of the vehicle and shook my hand, saying: “Z’Boghem”—“with God.”
Good-bye, you son of thePany; you tried to humiliate me when I was king. I knew he, too, would have shaken hands with me; but one of his class has to be careful, and a French governess and social proprieties are higher barriersthan old scores. He nodded his head and smiled, and I thanked him for the smile.
Good-bye, you miller’s sons, looking like two huge, penny rolls, leaning against the walls of the mill.
True sons of their Teutonic father, they grasped my hands, leaving huge flour spots on my new suit.
My neighbour in the omnibus scolded, for she, too, had to brush her coat; but what are flour spots compared with warm, fraternal handshakes?
“Aufwiedersehn!” the miller’s sons called after me. That was what they carved on their sister’s tombstone, “Aufwiedersehn.”
Ah, Martha! My first, pure love! I shall never forget your kiss or your brother’s warm hand-shake.
Good-bye, all ye goose girls, geese and goslings. The earth seemed covered by them.
Good-bye, you Lutheran pastor, who once gave me a glimpse of a Christian’s heart and a Christian’s vision. He was tightly buttoned, and scarcely nodded his head. I understand it now; it was ministerial dignity.
Good-bye, St. Florian, guarding your huts and stables against fire. You looked neglected, your halo was tarnished and the damp had spotted your saintly robes. Was it because a fire engine had been brought to town?
Good-bye, St. Peter, keeper of the gate of Heaven, with a smile upon your face as if it were all a joke, this locking and unlocking of the abode of bliss. You didn’t look as if you would keep a poor Jewish lad out of Heaven.
Good-bye, blessed Virgin Mary, standing upon a crescent moon and a pillar of cloud. You beautiful Jewish mother of the Son of God!
The women in the omnibus said: “Oh! Virgin Mary, intercede for us!” For some reason, the Virgin never appealed to me until in riper years I saw the Sistine in the Dresden gallery. I think I now understand why the women adore her.
Good-bye, faithful old priest; you always looked like a Sphinx to me. Your face was like that of a Cæsar and not of the Christ. You were a Roman and not a Jew. Yet they loved you and you were on your way to make some one’s dying easier. I never liked your acolytes—they were always cruel to me, and I ran whenever I saw one. They told me once when they were piled on top of me, that I crucified the Christ and that they beat me “for the love of God.”
What a black eye—the first black eye I ever had—I got for “the love of God”! It hurt, though, just as much as if I had got it because of their love for the devil.
Good-bye, you Jewish dead, who lie by the dusty road. My buoyant spirits flagged as Ipassed the thorn hedge, beyond which they lay in dire confusion.
Good-bye, old teacher, whom they drew out of the muddy river. They put you closest to the gate and your grave is level with the roadway. It was terrible to lose the love of your wife and have her unfaithful to you. I know now why you despaired. I have read Hosea since, and I understand your grief. It was not because the child was “Lo ami”—not my people—that you despaired; but because the people were harlots and did not understand your “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” It isn’t easy to have faith at such a time, old teacher, and yet Hosea, in his grief, said: “Come let us return unto the Lord. For He hath torn and He will heal us. He hath smitten and He will bind us up.” Too bad we couldn’t have read Hosea together.
Good-bye, Adèle, whose grief I shared. Love—I understand it now. Love and not wrath is a consuming fire. All those who love, suffer, especially when love tries to break the barriers of class or race.
Good-bye, old Jewish soldier, you three-quarters of a man, who showed me “Old Glory” and interpreted to me the riddle of the Stars and Stripes. Thanks, many thanks for the patron saint under whose care you put me—“Honest Abe!” The church calendar may not mark his name; but what is a church calendar comparedwith the record made by those whose chains he broke, or in whose hearts he inspired the hope that chainscan bebroken?
Good-bye, my father, whom my eyes never saw and my fingers never touched. I could not weep at your grave. How can we miss what we never had? Now, with children of my own, I understand how hard your dying was; how brave your life. Not because you fought for your country, most men are too cowardly to be cowards in time of war; but you went alone where “the pestilence walketh in darkness.” You were not afraid of the “terror by night.” You may even have been afraid of those guns—I fear them and my children after me. I do not believe you ever killed a Prussian. They may have called you coward, but you were not afraid of the cholera. You comforted the sick and buried the dead, when strong men fled and mere brute strength was unavailing.
I wonder whether you ever struggled as I struggled, whether you suffered just as I suffered. There is no picture of you. I often wished that I could see your features and read in them the story of your inner life. Mother always looked more longingly into my face than into the faces of the other children. They said she spoiled me because I looked like you. Sometimes I think I feel you in me—some one—not quite myself—sometimes many who are not myself—is it you? Is it you,father, and all the passing generations? Is it a race? Is this the way we live on—in one another? Is this the way we bless or curse the world? I am much I do not wish to be. I do more I do not wish to do. How much am I just myself? How much you? How much this strong, pathetic race to which I belong, against whose ill I have striven, whose good I have not always understood, whose ignominy I have had to share? I tried to run away from that inheritance, father; I did not understand when I rode past your grave that morning in the omnibus—a little boy, packed in among Magyar, Slav, Lutheran and Catholic, who hated me because I was your son.
I have travelled in many an omnibus since. I have seen greater griefs than mine. I now laugh at that pathetic little boy in the omnibus; others will do the same—but although I laugh at that little boy I do not understand. I cannot understand.
One thing you have not left me. One thing which neither you nor your father nor your race nor any one has left me—is hate. If it was ever in me—lurking somewhere—she loved it out of me—your wife, my mother.
FROM some ancestor, perhaps from my race, I inherited an abnormal sensitiveness. Even as a child I felt instinctively the attitude of people towards me. Consequently, situated as I was in an atmosphere charged with race antagonism, I suffered constantly and often, of course, needlessly. Therefore my childhood seems blurred, as if I were looking at it through a dark cloud, or through eyes misty from tears. Yet there was a bright side to it which should be recalled now, if only in justice to the racial group that composed my close environment.
I never suffered from hunger or cold or from lack of all the affection that my love-hungry nature demanded. If our home had no pictures, my mother’s face was beautiful to look upon, and when her blue eyes sought mine I experienced emotions which I recalled vividly in later days, when looking into the face of Murillo’s St. Elizabeth. My mother’s was that type of maternal face, furrowed early by the pain of widowhood; the eyes were deeply set and overarched by heavy brows. She had a sensitive aquiline noseand such sweet, well-formed lips that even the loss of her teeth in later years could not disfigure them. She was not what we call an educated woman; for, in her day, girls were not taught anything outside the prayer-book; but she was so cultured that I often wondered where she got her wisdom. The two virtues which she constantly practiced were: contentment and charity. One of her favourite maxims which I remember was: “Never despise those beneath you and never envy those above you.”
Although she was brought up in the atmosphere of the Ghetto, when even that was no safe abiding place, and her parents had to bribe officials from week to week to live in peace, her nature had nothing false in it and nothing narrow. While she was a faithful Jewess, she early differentiated between the form of religion and its spirit, discarding many of the ceremonials which seemed to her useless and unethical.
She abhorred the hypocrite but pitied the wayward. She was so pure-minded that I never heard a vulgar word spoken in our family circle, in spite of the fact that we lived in a most realistic atmosphere, surrounded by many immoral men and women. She was a Puritan at heart, never allowing a playing card in the home and very rarely permitting us the use of wine, although it was always in the cellar. Yet with the increasing luxuries of life as theycame to her in later years, she learned to enjoy the beautiful in many forms and yielded to the social demands of the time. She never gossiped or made purely formal calls. She was so busy from morning until night that she could not enjoy leisure when it came, voluntarily assuming the care of grandchildren. When finally her sight failed and she could do nothing, she grieved so because of her enforced idleness that it hastened her death.
My brothers were much older than I, and I did not know them as children. They never permitted me to forget that I was growing up without a father’s care, and that they were willing and able to provide all the harsher elements which such care is supposed to afford. No doubt I deserved all they gave me although I am sure I never enjoyed it. I suppose little brothers were made to be tyrannized over by the older ones, especially when the father is not living.
When I say that my older sister was just like my mother I give her ample praise, and when I say that my younger sister was like my brothers, I mean that it took time and better judgment than I had as a child, to appreciate her. Neither she nor her brothers understood their oversensitive relative.
Of none of my kinsfolk and of few among the Jews I knew, had I cause to be ashamed. All my mother’s relatives lived in Vienna, whichwas our legal home. They were intelligent, industrious people, gentle natures, most of them; too honest to grow very rich and too provident to grow poor. I have already spoken of my father’s brother and my grandmother, and fear that I have done them scant justice. From my father’s side comes the strong religious strain in us; an almost fanatical sense of righteousness, a great deal of hot, uncontrollable temper, and with it unusual fluency of expression.
The grandmother I referred to I knew only as a bedridden old woman, crippled by rheumatism. She outlived her husband, who left her with four sons, all but one of them dying before she was called to her well-earned rest. She favoured my uncle’s children and bequeathed them all her earthly possessions. I have never felt envious; for after all, the things that are worth inheriting from our forefathers cannot be taken from us by will or testament.
Among all the Jews I knew, there were just three whom I should now regard as bad men—they were swindlers and usurers; they committed or were capable of committing perjuries; but every one of them, and their children also, have suffered the consequences. The vast majority were hard-working, honest and scarcely well-to-do people, with a small fringe of very poor and paupers at the social edge; enough to teach the rest the virtueof charity. Their children, my contemporaries, I meet all the way from Chicago to Constantinople. All of them are good citizens, and some of them occupy large places of usefulness.
As a whole I should say that the Jewish community stood, intellectually, far above the other racial and religious groups; that in the personal virtues, such as chastity and charity, they surpassed them, and that in striking a just balance they certainly were not morally inferior to them.
The unfortunate thing was and still is, that the Gentiles had no understanding of the fine qualities of the Jews and that the Jews never properly appraised the real value of their Gentile neighbours. From my present vantage ground I can see many sinners among all of them, and some saints in each group. Humanly, all of them are so much alike that I can see no difference.
This is what I suppose I felt in my race unconscious days, and when I woke to consciousness, I rebelled against the artificial barriers, suffering much and no doubt causing others to suffer. I was eager to leave home because I supposed that in the larger world there was a larger view of life, and when the driver told us all to get out and walk up the Oresco Hill, I climbed it with joy; for I thought it led to those heights.
“BEYOND the hill there are also people” is a German proverb whose meaning is obvious, yet the people “beyond the hill” are strangers and foreigners; here home ends and the world begins. From the hilltop the whole valley lay in panoramic view—the town, the clinging villages, the winding river and the encircling mountains—this was home. I knew each path and roadway; knew, by the sound of the bell, the village and church from which it came; sheep and cattle were of a certain breed; horses were harnessed in a peculiar way; the peasants of each village had their own picturesque style of garment and I knew at a glance each man’s habitat. Nobody or nothing was strange to me. The whole valley was home and I felt the gripping sense of homesickness as I viewed it for the last time. I could have embraced it all—yet in only a small spot of that small valley had I moved with any sense of freedom.
Our street was plainly visible from the hilltop. The “Porte” or “Forte” as it became corrupted—was a gorge-like, bottle-shaped street, the narrowend of which was the gate of the Jews, now the toll-gate over which theKisbirpresides. Through it came my ancestor, Reb Abraham Bolsover, with a bundle on his back containing sacred books and worldly goods. In the one was hislife, in the other hisliving, and between barter and the study of God’s law his life moved, never without a struggle. When they carried him out of that same street to the God’s Acre, they said of him that he died poor in possessions but rich in good works.
Through that gate my father went out at the call of his Fatherland, and when they carried him to his resting-place they made great lamentation. He left to his widow five children—one yet unborn, money enough to keep them from want and a name which always stood for self-sacrifice and devotion.
These ancestors of whom I know, harmed no man and must have done some good; yet they were regarded as aliens and could not move freely beyond a certain boundary. ThePortewas our home and this diminutive Ghetto shut us in—or shut us out. In later days I discovered that it did both.
I have looked down from many a hilltop since that morning; from the ruins of Athens, the hills of Rome, the mountains round about Jerusalem, the sky-scrapers of the New World metropolis, and I have discovered that one’s world, no matterhow large or how small, is full of compartments. Everywhere people shut themselves in and shut others out; they are moved by what they call class-feeling, race-prejudice, religious intolerance; but it is all of a kind, only labelled differently according to the circumstances. The main lines of our divisions were visible from the little hilltop in that little corner of the world and were plowed into the consciousness of the people through hundreds and thousands of years of conflict—and alas! they bore sacred symbols.
The synagogue, with its oriental minarets, was crowded in among the encroaching houses of the Ghetto; the Roman Catholic church, with its severe buttresses, bulbous steeple and shining cross, occupied the centre of the town, dominating the landscape; the Protestant church, with its ugly, square tower, over which a rooster weather-vane indicated the shifting winds, stood at the edge of the town, close to green fields and pastures.
Once my brother by vaccination, wishing to ingratiate himself, told me he believed the Jews were the trunk of the tree, the Catholics were the branches, and the Protestants were the leaves which the wind shook and carried away and scattered. That was good news to me and I rewarded him with a big piece of bread and butter. After it was safe in his grasp he said: “Yes, the Jews are the trunk, but it is old anddecayed, and the Lord has grafted a new tree upon another trunk.” Then he ran away as fast as he could, and I hoped that kind Providence would let him stumble and fall; but Providence seemed to be on his side. Nevertheless, that was good news to me—news which no doubt he had heard some time in church. It was a truth which expressed relationship, but it was one of which the synagogue seemed quite unconscious.
Our rabbi’s chief function seemed to be, to determine for the housewives whether a pot in which meat had been cooked might still be used if a drop of milk fell into it; whether a goose whose fat leg showed a bruise must be sold to the Gentiles or whether it waskosherfor the Sabbath meal, and how the rigid rabbinic laws could be circumvented without transgression.
Thus, our Sabbath law forbade all manner of work for us and our servants; but the Gentile servants did light our fires, cook our meals, and sweep our rooms. “Of course,” the rabbi said, “the servants have to live—they do it for themselves and not for us—we just eat with them.”
On the Sabbath no burden must be carried; but one must have a handkerchief. “Then bind it about your loins and it is part of your apparel.”
“Two thousand yards is the distance one may walk on the Sabbath, but if I have to walk four thousand—what then?” “Stop at the two-thousand yard line, put a piece of bread on theground and say: ‘This is where I live,’ then walk two thousand yards more.”
Such was the casuistry with which our rabbi’s mind was filled. Poor man! he had to spend his time with “annis and cummin,” he had to glorify trifles and so minimize the real glory. He had so much to say about rabbi this and rabbi that, and so little of what God said to the seers and prophets.
This was my early quarrel with the synagogue, although at that time I could not express myself. First, it made the traditional ceremonials and observances a law of God. Secondly, it was intolerantly exclusive against those outside its own pale and those within, who saw the larger light. Yet memories crowd upon me whenever I see the synagogue from this hilltop.
The synagogue was at its best on the eve of the Sabbath. Through the rusty iron gate came its Israel, the fathers and sons; the women being busy with the evening meal, the best of the week. Israel looked outwardly renewed. The Sabbath scrubbing was a religious duty; each boy showed its effects in his clean and glowing face, and he was clothed in his best garments.
How unconventionally Israel approaches its God, and how democratically! There is a ceremonial rigidly adhered to, but each man follows it as he pleases, without regard to harmony or order. There are noise and confusion; noblepsalms are mumbled, pious petitions are repeated mechanically and only the Sabbath hymn has melody. It is sung by the reader, but his is no easy task with such an individualistic congregation. Some one cuts short his crescendo, another checks his flight as he approaches the high C, and when he imagines himself near Heaven’s gate, a third pulls him to earth by a threefold Amen, five minutes ahead of schedule time.
No one thinks it out of place to discuss the affairs of the day, especially the affairs of some neighbour. Strangers who happen in are weighed in the balance and their moral avoirdupois discussed, as is their fashionable or unfashionable clothing. Business is transacted on Sabbath eve; but this, of course,sub rosa.
Our pew adjoined that of a grain dealer. Hardly had he thrashed his way through the Ninety-fifth Psalm—“Come let us sing unto the Lord”—than he said to his neighbour, who was just catching breath for the Ninety-sixth Psalm: “Nu, how was the grain market in Hodowin?” “God’s enemies shall have grain to sell now!”—was the pious answer (business is never unqualifiedly good, to the Jew). Then both hastened through the Ninety-sixth Psalm, a few seconds behind the rest, yet setting a pace to bring them out far ahead, the grain dealer skipping the last lines.
“Will you sell?” he asked. “Sell on the Sabbath?” and then through the Ninety-seventh and Ninety-eighth Psalms without interruption. Here the Twenty-ninth Psalm is repeated. How did I know, howcouldI know, that this is a Psalm in which some great soul saw the glory of Jehovah in nature?
“The voice of Jehovah is upon the waters: the God of Glory thundereth: the Lordisupon many waters.
The voice of the Lord is powerful; the voice of the Lord is full of majesty.
The voice of the Lord breaketh the cedars; yea, the Lord breaketh the cedars of Lebanon.
He maketh them also to skip like a calf; Lebanon and Sirion like a young unicorn.
The voice of the Lord divideth the flames of fire.
The voice of the Lord shaketh the wilderness; the Lord shaketh the wilderness of Kadesh.
The voice of the Lord maketh the hinds to calve, and discovereth the forests; and in His temple doth every one speak of His glory.”
Not a word did I understand. It went over their lips like grain through a threshing-machine, and it was all straw to me. Far more interesting was the fact that, after the Sabbath hymn, six loads of grain changed hands, while the congregation repeated this injunction:
“And the children of Israel shall keep theSabbath throughout their generations, as an everlasting covenant. Between Me and the children of Israel is a sign forever; for in six days Jehovah made Heaven and Earth, and on the seventh day He rested and was refreshed.”
The weary service ended, there was no time for gossip; each man and especially the boys hurried home to the Sabbath meal, which, more than its religion, keeps so many faithful to Israel.
Our best room was at its best; the whitest linen covered the table, the brass candlesticks were burnished, mother had blessed the candles and lighted them, and with her cheery face shining brighter than they shone, she put her hands upon my head, blessing me.
“God make thee like Ephraim and Manasseh;” and while I did not know just why, “like Ephraim and Manasseh,” it was a blessing just to feel her hands upon my head. Then with true unction, this High Priestess of Jehovah repeated:
“May the Lord bless thee and keep thee,
May He cause His face to shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee,
May the Lord lift up His countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.”
Still more sweetly she led us in saying: “For He will give His angels charge over thee, to guard thee in all thy ways. He will guard thy going out and thy coming in, from now and forevermore.”
The thirty-first chapter of Proverbs, which then follows, she never repeated nor permitted us to read, for it is the praise of the virtuous woman by her husband, “who praiseth her in the gates.”Herhusband no doubt praisedherin the Eternal City.
To have given the world the Sabbath is no small achievement for a race, and the Israel I knew kept its rigorous laws and was rewarded by its rich blessings.
ThePortewas solemnly quiet on Sabbath morning. Every store was closed, although in later days many a merchant could not resist receiving the Gentiles’ money over his counter, and quiet business was done behind closed doors. The service of the day began at nine, and the women’s gallery was crowded, while a constant chatter was kept up, much to the annoyance of the men, who were glad to be able to blame some one for the disorder.
I remember how indignantly the grain dealer looked up to the gallery and tried to hush the women into silence, on the very morning after he had bought six loads of grain between the repetitions of the Ninety-fifth Psalm and the commandment to keep the Sabbath holy.
The younger men found the encircling gallery very attractive. From it the young girls looked down upon them; eyes met and there were sweet smiles and blushes. There the bride stood, thefirst Sabbath after the wedding, and if the bridegroom had brought her from abroad, she was viewed and criticized from all angles; the size of her dowry was commented upon, her looks, her family and her dress; although a large dowry “covered a multitude of sins.”
From the gallery mothers watched their restless youngsters, and I can imagine my mother’s dear face looking down upon me, often reprovingly. From here they looked with pride upon their sons, called for the first time to read the law, on their thirteenth birthday. This gallery was the Jewish Women’s Club; here they discussed in small or large groups the blessings and pains of motherhood, their own and others’ griefs; here they pitied the orphan and the widow and comforted one another.
The younger boys were admitted to this gallery during the reading of the law, which seemed very uninteresting to them, for it was all in Hebrew and chanted in a most monotonous way. But that which preceded it was very absorbing indeed; it was the sale, practically an auction, of the privilege of carrying theTorah, of “undressing” it, reading small portions of the law, redressing it and returning it to the Ark. These privileges were bought and presented to visitors or any one whom one wished to honour. It was as exciting as any auction sale, only it was all done without a word’s being spoken.
Upon a board with movable letters and figures was announced the peculiar part of the ceremony for sale. The price advanced at the raising of a hand or the nodding of a head, and when some rivalry entered into the sale, the whole congregation watched the proceedings with ill-suppressed excitement.
The rabbi, the reader and the dignitaries of the congregation approached the Ark, and that was the one, great, solemn moment. The rich, velvet curtain was drawn aside; the Ark was opened, and the scrolls of the law carried in solemn procession around the synagogue. We children left our pews and crowded close, to kiss the passing scroll.
The white-bearded rabbi looked like one of the priests of old, and I could easily imagine myself in the Temple on Mount Moriah. This solemnity was but momentary; those who had the honour of performing the various ceremonies were called; they pronounced the blessing, quickly and mechanically a portion of the law was read, and then the readers made offerings for various charitable purposes. There is no religious or social function in Israel at which an offering is not made, and gratitude to Jehovah always expresses itself in gifts.
The sermon followed immediately and while old men listened to the expounding of the weighty things of the law, women gossiped,children in the yard played rather boisterously, and the young men talked about theiraffaires d’amour, much to the hurt of those of us who were old enough to listen and too young to fully understand.
The Sabbath dinner had a peculiar fragrance, and lingers in one’s memory more, I fear, than the teachings of the synagogue. The meal was prepared on Friday, and consisted ofScholeth. Pork and beans is, to the New England Puritan, whatScholethwas to his Jewish prototype.
In huge, black pots, the combination of beans and goose was carried to the communal bake-oven, where for eighteen hours it slowly simmered and baked, and was ready, piping hot, when the morning service was over. The pots were nearly all alike, the owner’s name or number being marked in chalk. Once at least it happened that we got the rabbi’sScholeth. His wife was reputed a poor housekeeper, and theScholethproved the fact. When we returned it to its owner we found, much to our dismay, the rabbinic family getting to the bottom of our own.
In the afternoon, mother and I went visiting, usually among the poor and sick, and one of the heritages of those visits is a deep sympathy with human suffering. As I grew older, my uncle took me with him to the weekly discussions of the law, which were held in an anteroom of the synagogue.
I remember two questions which I asked on different occasions. One was, why we were permitted to drink the beer brewed by Gentiles and not the wine which they pressed. The rabbi’s reply was, that we were not permitted to drink the wine, because wine is used for social occasions and there would be danger of contact with the Gentiles. When I replied that beer was used for the same purpose, I was told that beer was not brewed in Talmudic times, and consequently could not be forbidden.
In a German translation of the prophets, I had read the first chapter of Isaiah. I felt its vigorous denunciation, I caught its first glimpse of true religion, and when I asked why the rabbi commanded and approved what Isaiah condemned, he told me that the prophetic writings were beneath the law, and that he who kept all the points of the law was greater than they. I never enjoyed these discussions, but now I wish I would have had the patience to sit through them, if only to fasten fully upon my mind one such discussion.
I do remember the stuffy room, for since that time I have sat in it with the new rabbi, who has studied theology in Germany and knows more and preaches less than he believes.
The old rabbi was genuinely orthodox; his Sabbath cap and velvet gown were full of lint and dust; his head was unkempt, for to comb itwould have been labour. He sat in a dilapidated grandfather’s chair and before him lay the old Talmud; huge, forbidding looking volumes, a mixture of truth and superstition; a Magna Charta, bills of sale into slavery; wings and chains, the sublime and the ridiculous; but to him every sentence was sacred, every letter inspired of God. Around him sat the pious men of the town and such of their sons as were inclining or being inclined towards the study of the law.
“What did rabbi so and so reply to rabbi this and that?”
Back and forth went questions and answers, like the flying shuttle through woof and warp. It seemed trivial, much of this; but after all, to them those things were vital—more vital certainly than the occupation of their impious neighbours, who spent the Sabbath in idle gossip. Certainly it was more elevating than the way most of their Gentile brethren spent their Sabbaths. They danced, drank, fought and staggered home to beat their wives, or do worse, if they were not married. After all, Israel’s Sabbath was Israel’s salvation. It ennobled him, kept alive the spiritual, and prevented him from utterly falling a victim to Mammon.
I have no quarrel with the synagogue except this:—that it never revealed to me therichesof Judaism. It showed me its beggarly edge, itsvulnerable trivialities, its pathetic pharisaism and its absurd worship of the letter. That Israel had a mission to the world I never knew; that Moses and the prophets were names of which the world took cognizance I never heard; that the Catholic and the Protestant were feeding from the same spiritual sources which fed us was hidden from me, and that we all had “one Father” was never revealed to me.
I surmised all this in my boyish way and I searched for that very thing—through many painful years; but when I discovered it, I had left the synagogue behind me and there is no way back.
THE cross dominated the landscape; crowning the hilltop stood one, black, austere, forbidding ... a suffering, emaciated Christ hanging on the tree. Cut out of white limestone, another shone against the dark forest guarding its sylvan mysteries. The cross rose above the river, from the centre pier of the bridge where it vibrated to each shock of the swift rushing stream; at every turn of the road, on the dividing line of orchard and meadow, marking the boundaries of fields and villages, stood the sacred emblem of The Church, itself surmounted by this Roman gallows of beaten gold, proud symbol and sign of victory!
No one ever told me its meaning, yet I soon learned that it was something ominous ... terrible; and that because of Him who hung upon itwesuffered and were persecuted.
This I learned by painful experience; for I felt many a lump on my head raised by the benevolent fists of Gentile youth because I would not look at the cross and kiss it. On the other hand, my ears were pulled much too often by my guardian because Ididlook at it. Once I was allbut choked to death because I would not make the sign of the cross, and again was threatened by punishment temporal and eternal, because I carried in my pocket a little crucifix given me by the goose girl in my race-unconscious days. At that time I regarded it as a toy. It never repelled me, although as I now analyze my feelings it was to me a symbol of unforgiveness, something which was angry with me, that I should like to make up with, yet did not dare approach. It was unpleasant to me, not because I suffered bodily harm through it, but because it stood aloof and kept me from enjoying all for which my life hungered. It seemed to say: “This is a Catholic mountain; this is a Christian river, and these fields and meadows, these birds and wild flowers are not for you.”
Whenever I passed a cross I seemed to hear the Christ saying: “Get out of here, you little Jewish boy, you crucified Me!” I heard Him say that, because every Catholic I met seemed to be especially angry with me if we met before a crucifix or shrine. Even now when walking along those highways I have the same feeling.
During my childhood I named most of these holy places after some bodily punishment that I received there. Not long ago I sat in the shadow of an acacia grove and saw the crucifix of the “bloody nose,” as I called it. I know some beech trees overshadowing a shrine, which Icalled the shrine “Zur Ohrfeige” a peculiar form of punishment which my countrymen will readily recognize.
Once, when I shared in Christmas exercises, taking the part of Moorish King, as I have already told, and was hurled from my high estate, I received presents and a kiss from the sister of thePany, a woman as saintly as he was wicked. She carried a rosary with an ivory crucifix to church with her and the cross lost much of its terror for me because she was associated with it. Twice, I think, after I took the part of Wise Man, she sent me at Christmas time a present of russet apples; and while she never spoke to me again she smiled at me always when in passing I doffed my cap to her.
There was also a hatter in our town who, it was rumoured, had studied for the priesthood; he too had a share in reconciling me to the crucifix. He was the priest’s right hand man, assuming all sorts of parish burdens. OnCorpus Christihe carried the large crucifix at the head of the procession. This holy day was a peculiarly trying one to the Jewish community, for the Catholic population was enraged when a Jew refused to bare his head as the crucifix passed.
To keep one’s head covered and stand erect in the synagogue was regarded by us children as a protest against the Christian faith and practice;while to share in the Christian worship even by the removal of one’s cap, would have been regarded as a most sinful and humiliating act.
The Jews usually drew the shutters, locked the doors and kept out of sight while the procession passed; but I was lured by the music, the gaily coloured banners and by all that in a procession appeals to a boy. I was pushed far to the front and when the head of the procession approached I stood there erect with covered head and immediately became the target for well-aimed blows, which sent my cap flying and threw me violently to the ground. I might have been crushed beneath the feet of the mob had it not been for the hatter, who, shifting the heavy crucifix to one hand and supporting it against his body, stooped, lifted me, led me half around the church and through its open portal; while the bells rang, pious worshippers sang and priests chanted. The good hatter and the crucifix thus became closely identified.
That was the first time I had seen the interior of the church on a festal day. Candles blazed on the altars, banners waved, the organ was reinforced by blaring trombones and huge brass horns; priests and acolytes wore their most splendid vestments, and clouds of incense trailed upward to the loft where pigeons cooed and ventured many a flight around the awestruck congregation.
I am sure that I worshipped; at least I was uplifted; the crude and discordant in my nature seemed to leave me and I felt buoyant as if floating on the air. It was a moment akin to that when, on her death-bed, the miller’s daughter passed her wasted fingers through my hair and kissed my hot temples.
Why should I not remember that first, conscious sharing in Christian worship? It brought swift punishment. The acolytes beat me unmercifully and the Jewish lads who saw me going into the church, beside calling me “Goy” Christian, told on me, and the consequences may be imagined. Yet I remember the punishment less than the fact that it was my first conscious worship; a real attempt to commune with the Unseen. The mysterious in my own nature had touched the eternal mystery, and the cross had lost much of its aloofness; I had entered its domain.
I do not know what I felt when I saw the golden cross that day from the omnibus; but I was conscious of a reconciliation and perhaps something more. “We are not such strangers after all,” I suppose I said to myself. “I don’t hate you although I don’t quite understand you—but some day I shall.”
Perhaps it was merely a youth’s resolve to taste the forbidden thing as soon as he escaped his environment—perhaps I have magnified myfeeling, recalling it now in the light of my later experiences. I am fairly positive, however, that I felt a premonition that some day I should enter into whatever experiences the cross held for a human soul. The life which awaited me was favourable to this, and in looking back I can plainly see the guidance of a good Providence.
Far beyond our cross-crowned hill and many another, my new life began. My teachers were Jesuit fathers, the schoolroom was an anteroom to the church and the crucifix was everywhere. The fathers looked very much like the Christ I remembered, painted upon the crosses that dotted our highways; austere and forbidding. They were skilled teachers and splendid disciplinarians. Even my untrained mind was forced into a groove.
There were pages and pages of Latin, curious problems in mathematics and such history as they deigned to give us; but the curriculum consisted largely of Latin, and there are not many questions which the soul can ask when the mind is being drilled in Latin grammar. Living itself began to be a task in which the higher and lower curiously blended; although the unrestrained lower nature threatened ascendency.
Being a Jew, I had to live among my own people, and of course chose so to live. I have slept on harder beds and have eaten coarser fare since then; but I have never felt contrasts morekeenly than when I exchanged home for that boarding-place. It was kept by people who had “seen better days”—a fate they shared with boarding-house keepers the world over.
I had little or no time for social life. The town was totally Slavic and the Jews who lived there were strangers; so I was left much to myself. Most of the students were living with the Fathers, wore clerical attire and were destined for the priesthood. Their pleasures were few. For exercise they walked by classes or in pairs; what they thought or how they lived, I never knew, although I went into the same class-room with many of them. The larger world into which I had entered had even more compartments and smaller ones than the world I had left, and for a good many years I was in a compartment by myself, with no one to share my confidences or to exchange thoughts with me.
My social nature was almost starved, and because those who lived on my level did not take me in, I sought the companionship of those morally and intellectually beneath me and found them ready enough to receive me. What they offered and what I shared I never fully enjoyed. I know that it lowered me and while I never reached the nethermost depths, I went low enough to know something of the humiliation of meeting one’s higher nature when one emerges from the abyss.
In such a mood I strolled into a church during my last year in the gymnasium. I had long outgrown my boyhood and was a man in my thoughts, feelings and desires; although less than the man I wished to be. The preacher spoke about sin. I do not remember either the text or the sermon, but I know it was the first time that I felt myself reproved, as if by God. I seemed to see my own soul—a puny, struggling, mean thing and not what I desired it to be. I began to loathe it and myself, and when the preacher offered peace, renewal and pardon to all who would confess and repent, I was sure that my soul’s hour had come, that I must set it free and let it grow Godward no matter what the cost to me.
When the congregation knelt, I knelt too and prayed—my own prayer—which had no words, which was just an aspiration Christward. My eyes sought the crucifix in faith, and I was ready to claim its power whatever it was, if it could cleanse me and renew me. I looked at the priest who held it up before the kneeling congregation and saw something strangely familiar in that homely face lighted by the fervour of his faith. It led me back to the village of Deephole. It was Sabbath afternoon; an old man lay voiceless and motionless upon his hard bed because his son was an apostate. Then I could feel the hand of my mother leading me out of that stricken home,along the fields where poppies and bachelor’s buttons grew. How she restrained me from plucking them because it was the Sabbath! I felt as if she were touching my hand as I knelt. She led me past the lighted altar, out of the throng of kneeling worshippers and she seemed to say: “No, not while I am living, my son.”
THE synagogue and the church with the cross seemed quite unconscious of any change in wind or weather; although our world moved with those trade winds on the sea of time, which the Germans call theZeitgeist.
Not so the church with the gray tower, on whose pinnacle its symbol from the barnyard turned and twisted, but always bravely faced the fiercest winds. To judge from its early history, this lean, long-legged bird was afightingcock. From the time that it was lifted to its exalted position till now, the men above whose temple it “watched for the morning,” were fighting men who worshipped in a fighting mood.
On Sunday morning I watched from our doorway the churchgoers who came from many a surrounding mile; Catholics and Protestants, Magyars and Slavs, filling the gray, monotonous street with a riot of colour.
The Magyar peasants wore broad, white linen trousers, shaggy, sheepskin coats and small, rakish hats, always decorated by a sprig of rosemary, placed there by wife and sweetheart, who,heavy-booted, walked beside them, their full, starched skirts claiming a large part of the sidewalk.
The Slavs were by far more picturesque in their attire. The men wore tight-fitting, blue trousers, braided and embroidered from the knee up to the abbreviated, gorgeous waistcoat, which was always unbuttoned, to allow the still more splendid shirt—the show garment of the Slav—room to display itself. Whether the hat was broad or narrow, chenille braid richly ornamented it to the top, from which hung defiantly, graceful, varicoloured feathers.
The women’s clothing outshone the men’s, and to even catalogue their elaborately trimmed garments would require a sartorial vocabulary which, unfortunately, I do not possess.
On the whole it was a pageant worth seeing, and I watch it with the same interest from the same doorway whenever I have the good fortune to be at home again.
Besides the riot of colour which attracted me, I very early began my ethnographic studies; for there were variations in dress, which denoted the mountaineer, the man from the valley, the peasant and the mechanic. Each locality had some style of its own, each race, occupation and faith was marked.
Those who went to the church of the weather-vanewere the most soberly attired. Theological divisions were accentuated by the presence or absence of colour, braid and buttons; for there were Puritans among those worshippers. Their forefathers swore fealty to the faith of Calvin rather than that of Luther, and while all of them worshipped in the same church, the historic division was manifested in clothes, if often in nothing else.
Had not clothes marked the churchgoers, I could easily have detected the difference between faiths by facial expression, posture and gait.
The Catholics walked to church rather more reverently than the others. Rosaries hung from the folded hands of the women, who looked neither to the right nor the left, reserving all abandonment to the passions of youth and life until after the services were over.
The Protestants marched like soldiers, their heavy psalm-books clasped to their breasts. Thus fortified, as if by gun or bayonet, they went to the house of God, erect and defiant. Although the generation that I knew never fought for its right to worship according to the dictates of its conscience, its forefathers fought, killed and were killed; while the weather-vane turned on its rusty hinges to face the storms that raged.
The Reformation came with its good and ill to the Carpathians as it came to the Alps, andit seems strange that the Teutonic Tyrolese submitted to being forcibly rebaptized into the Mother Church, while the more sluggish Slavs fought and retained their faith.
Church historians have taken scant if any notice of these Slavic Protestants, who were as brave as the Huguenots and suffered as much.
There were bishops who forsook mitre and crozier, becoming one with the peasants in suffering imprisonment and martyrdom.
There were priests who followed their example, and, for preaching the new faith, were chained to the block. A group of twenty was sentenced to the galleys and perished miserably at the cruel task.
There were nobles, both men and women, who jeopardized their titles and their lands.
There were peasants innumerable who were wakened out of an age-long slumber and refused to relinquish their freedom in the faith.
The old chronicles of this parish, which but recently fell into my hands, justify my early proclivities for these Protestants. The Chronicle narrates: “The Roman Catholic Bishop, George Barsony, bringing with him a company of Croatians, began forcibly to baptize our members. At the communion, when he placed the wafer on the tongue of the peasant, Stefan Pilarek, the same bit the finger of the Bishop to the bone, and not until the Croatians hit him over the head didhe relinquish his hold. The other members who were about to receive the communion refused to take it; they began to fight; the Croatians opened fire at them, and two were killed. Protestants came from the neighbouring villages and surrounded the house of the priest, where the Bishop lodged. They got hold of him and gave him such a beating that he died from its effects.” The Chronicle does not say that they murdered him.
Two regiments of Croatians appeared the next week; the preacher, teacher and sexton were hanged in proper order, while the peasants were broken over the wheel, impaled or quartered. The Chronicle concludes this part of the narrative: “From that time the free exercise of religion ceased in this parish.”
Besides their fighting mood and the struggle for liberty which drew me to the Protestants, their sober house of prayer as well as the simplicity and order of their worship, appealed to the Puritan within me, and did not offend my aesthetic feelings.
From the bell-tower I could look down upon the congregation (having bought this privilege from themendic). On the straight-backed benches sat these stiff Puritans, praying with heads erect, singing hymns which had in them the ring of battle. There were no images to offend a mind trained to see in them an insult to Jehovah; nodark corners or dimly lighted altars to suggest mystery; no incense to artificially arouse the desire for worship. Green fields and acres of swaying poppies and bearded barley were visible from the windows, and when the people sang it seemed to me as if all nature were in tune with their psalmody.
That of which I am now most conscious as having appealed to me was, that I understood every word of the service which floated up to me; and even those broken and stolen snatches were to me the first bits of religion rationally interpreted.
There were certain texts which remained in my memory, and when later in life great social questions pressed for solution, the words that had been so eagerly listened to by the little Jewish boy, hidden in the belfry, came back to the struggling man with promises of hope.
When, finally, on this side the Atlantic, I united with the Protestant Church, no struggle preceded it, no reaction was necessary; mind and soul were merely coming home.
In reality, I have found in the church of the Puritans the best that my race has bequeathed to the world. The prophets and seers are more at home, I think, in the meeting-house than in the synagogue or the cathedral. To me at least, the really great, vital notes of religion which they have struck were not revealed by the rabbi or thepriest; but by the great Puritans, who spoke to me out of English literature and here and there from pulpit and platform.
I cared but little, if at all, for the salvation which Christianity promised or the theology over which it quarrelled.
When Protestantism becomes rabbinical, and when it holds or withholds the keys of Heaven, I shall feel myself as much a stranger to it as I felt to the synagogue or the cathedral. In its cry for righteousness and personal purity, in its emphasis upon a Christian democracy, in its demand for rational self-sacrifice to achieve great, social ends, it appeals to me and claims my allegiance.
Its creeds, even the most historic, leave me untouched; its sectarian quarrels I cannot comprehend and its dogmatism repels me. When it proclaims the supreme value of the human soul, and demands for it a right to seek its God, unhindered; when it pleads for protection of the child and the woman, and labours for the day when they shall not need protection from a rapacious society; when it struggles to bring to earth the Kingdom of Heaven, I am one with it and am among mine own. Then I hear the voices of my Fathers speaking as they were moved to speak by the Holy Spirit.
I do not wish to imply that I hold lightly the salvation which Christianity offers to the individual.It is a goal and a prize worth striving for; but for some reason I have lost the sense of self, at least in these higher reaches of the soul.
When I “got religion,” to use a well-worn phrase, I did not want the isolation of a “chosen people,” even if, to be a Jew, had meant the plaudits of the world instead of its derision. I did not consider the security of my soul from the pains of Purgatory or the torments of Hell, promised by an infallible church. What I wanted and am fairly confident that I have obtained, was: a fellowship with a God whose chief attributes are social; who, when He revealed Himself to man, made the revelation through His Son, who came to save a world.
Out of all the many confusing interpretations of Christ’s teachings, this is clear to me: That He meant to bring together the alienated, to harmonize the discordant, to heal the ancient wounds caused by the mere struggle for self, and that into the world’s disorder He intended to bring a new order, which He called: The Kingdom of Heaven.
The most valuable possession which Christianity holds for me is this conviction: That the task is unfinished, that the conflict is still on and that it is my business to invest my life in such a way as to make true the dream of the Son of Man.