The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe Seven-Branched Candlestick: The Schooldays of Young American JewThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: The Seven-Branched Candlestick: The Schooldays of Young American JewAuthor: Gilbert W. GabrielRelease date: September 22, 2010 [eBook #33793]Language: EnglishCredits: E-text prepared by Bethanne M. Simms, Barbara Kosker, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK: THE SCHOOLDAYS OF YOUNG AMERICAN JEW ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: The Seven-Branched Candlestick: The Schooldays of Young American JewAuthor: Gilbert W. GabrielRelease date: September 22, 2010 [eBook #33793]Language: EnglishCredits: E-text prepared by Bethanne M. Simms, Barbara Kosker, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
Title: The Seven-Branched Candlestick: The Schooldays of Young American Jew
Author: Gilbert W. Gabriel
Author: Gilbert W. Gabriel
Release date: September 22, 2010 [eBook #33793]
Language: English
Credits: E-text prepared by Bethanne M. Simms, Barbara Kosker, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SEVEN-BRANCHED CANDLESTICK: THE SCHOOLDAYS OF YOUNG AMERICAN JEW ***
E-text prepared by Bethanne M. Simms, Barbara Kosker,and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team(http://www.pgdp.net)
Publisher's Mark
I.BY WAY OF PROLOGUE5II.IN THE BEGINNING16III.FRIDAY NIGHT25IV.THE BOY AND THE SCHOOL34V.THE MILITARY ACADEMY42VI.MY STEERFORTH51VII.FRESHMAN YEAR61VIII.WITHIN THE GATES70IX.MY AUNT AND I79X.THE RULES OF THE GAME88XI.A MAN'S WORK98XII.THE HEART OF JUDEA107XIII.CHILD AND PARENT116XIV.AN UNGRATEFUL NEPHEW125XV.COLLEGE LIFE135XVI.THE HUN'S INVASION144XVII.MANY IMPULSES154XVIII.I STAND—BUT NOT ASIDE163XIX."BATTLE ROYAL"172XX.THE CANDLES ARE LIGHTED181
"Years of Plenty" was the name an Englishman recently gave to a book of his school days. My own years of secondary school and college were different from his, by far, but no less full.
I shall only say by way of preface that they numbered seven. There were two of them at high school, one at a military school on the Hudson, and four at our city's university.
Seven in all. Because they were not altogether happy, I have no right to think of them as lean years. For each one of them meant much to me—means as much now as I look back and am chastened and strengthened by their memory. Each is as a lighted candle in the dark of the past that I look back upon. And I like to imagine that, since there are seven of them, they are in the seven-branched candlestick which is so stately and so reverent a symbol of my Faith.
For it was my school days which gave me that Faith.
Born a Jew, I was not one. And this I can blame on no person excepting myself. Before my parents' death, they had urged me, pleaded with me to go to Sunday school at our reformed synagogue, to attend the Saturday morning services, to study the lore, that I might be confirmed into the religion of my fathers. That they did not absolutely insist upon it was because they wanted me to come to my God gratefully, voluntarily, considering his worship an exercise of love, of gladness, and not a task of impatient duty. I know that it must have grieved them—I know it now, even if I only half-guessed it then in that distorted but instinctive way that boys do guess things—and yet they said little to me of it.
Once or twice a year they took me with them to a Friday night service. I was too young, perhaps. I am willing to use my youth as an excuse for my falling asleep, or for my sitting uneasily, squirming, yawning, heavy-eyed, uninterested, unmoved ... hungry only to be out into the streets again, and back in my own room at home, with my copy of "Pilgrim's Progress," or "The Talisman," between my knees.
At best, I can excuse myself only because I lived in a neighborhood distinctly Christian. Itwas on one of those old, quiet streets of the Columbia Heights section of Brooklyn that our house stood. There was a priggish sedateness to it. There was much talk on either hand of "family": the Brooklyn people—of that neighborhood, anyhow—seem to set much stock by their early settling ancestors. Near our house was a preparatory school for girls and another for boys; they were hotbeds of snobbery and prejudice, these schools. The students who attended them had to pass down our block on their way home from school. Often, when they saw me playing there, some of them would stop and make fun of me and tease me with remarks about the Jews. I was a boy without much spirit. I always resented the taunts—but I always lacked the courage to call back ... and if my eyes did blaze involuntarily with anger, I usually turned away so that these bigger boys should not be able to see them.
My fear was behind it all. I was afraid to fight back. And, being ashamed of my cowardice, I grew quickly ashamed of that which had proved it. I grew ashamed of being a Jew.
Terribly, bitterly ashamed. So mortified, indeed, that it was more than I could do to speak of it to my father. And, usually, I could talk of anything to him. Once he himself mentioned it to me: asked me whether I was not proud ofmy race, whether I could not look with true contempt and easy forgiveness upon those rowdies who had taunted me. I tried to take that attitude ... but I was not big and strong enough for it. I tried it only once—and then one of the big bullies of that fashionable preparatory school, on his way down the block, grew angry at my lordly unconcern towards his teasing, and hit me with his fist, and cut my lip open. I kicked him in the shins, I remember, and ran swiftly away.
That didn't help matters. I was as much a weakling as ever. When I went to public school, I used to cry with a snivelling vexation because the toughs of my class made fun of me. One of them had a little sister in the class below us, and I was very fond of her. I remember how, on St. Valentine's day, I stole into her class room at lunch time and, while she was absent, stuck a lacy, gaudy and beribboned missive in her desk. I didn't understand, then, why the teacher tittered so nervously when I asked her permission to do it. But, when my own lunch was done, and I was back at my desk, I lifted the lid of it only to find that same valentine rammed into one corner, crushed and torn almost in half, and scrawled with the word, "Sheeny!"
Nor did the little romantic flight end there. For the next day, after sister and brother hadbeen comparing notes, the former marched straight up to me, pulled my nose, and warned me to keep away, once and for all, from the true American daughter of a true American family, and to confine my sentiments to "some little Jew girl!"
I knew none of that sort. What few boys and girls of my own race I had met at playtime or at Sunday school, I purposely shunned. I thought, if I went in their company, I should be inviting persecution. I thought my only way to escape this was to escape all Jewish comrades ... to deny my religion, if possible. I was so utterly ashamed of it!
Thus I went, with all of a child's fear and a child's cowardice, into those days which were to mean so much to me. Had I had the pride, the devotion to my religion which is a Jewish heritage, those days would have meant less. Less in sorrow and bewilderment, that is, and infinitely more in the building up of my character.
There are those who go stolidly, brusquely through life without ever needing the comfort of religion. And there are those, like me, who lack the self-reliance ... who cannot be content with a confessed agnosticism, but who must take faith and strength from those rites and codes which satisfy their sense of the mystically sublime. Now that I am grown to man's estateI can know these things of myself—but how could I know it then? How could a romping, light-hearted boy who cared more for baseball and "Ivanhoe" than for anything else in the world recognize, then, his own needs and cravings?
It was only after those few black, frightful days were over that I realized that something was lacking in my life. But even then I did not know what it was. I only felt the sharply personal loss, the inevitable loneliness and helplessness ... and had not learned in what direction to lift my eyes, to reach up my arms to ask for spiritual succor.
Those days were the ones in which my parents left me. My father was killed in a railroad accident. My mother, about to give birth to another child, was in bed at the time when the news was brought to her. She never rose again. The shock killed her.
I remember that the funeral services were conducted by the rabbi of our synagogue. They were according to the Jewish ritual, and I thought them dull and unmeaning. They expressed for me none of the sorrow that I felt. The Hebrew that was in them was mockery and gibberish to me. I am afraid I was glad when it was over, and I was alone with my aunt with whom I was to live.
This aunt, Selina Haberman, was a widow. Her husband had been a devout Jew of the most orthodox type. She used to tell me with great amusement how he would say his prayers each morning with his shawl and phylacteries upon him, with his head bowed and a look of joyous devotion on his face. She said she never could understand how a man, as educated and broadminded as he was, could have had so simple and unquestioning a loyalty to these worn old costumes of the past. But she said wistfully that she thought he had died a much happier man because of his religion ... and that was what was hardest of all for her to understand.
Aunt Selina herself was a Christian. She put as little stock in Christian Science, though, as in Judaism. It was a fad for her, and an escape from the hindrances which connection with the Jewish faith would have entailed. I think she had an idea that people would forget she had ever been a Jewess and would accept her for a Christian without her having to go through the extremer forms of proselytism. Like me, she lacked spirit for either one thing or the other. Like me, she dreaded to be classed among her own people. But in this we were unlike: that her dread amounted to a vindictive and brutal antagonism towards whatever andwhoever smacked of Jewry. I think she even objected to adopting me for a while, because my name was a distinctly Jewish one, and because it would leave no doubt in her neighbor's eyes as to my race—and hence, no doubt as to hers.
Aunt Selina lived on Central Park West in the City. She was full of social ambitions. She had a good many friends from among the intellectuals of Washington square: Christians, of course, most of them. Her closest companion was a Mrs. Fleming-Cohen, who claimed to be a Theosophist. Born with the name of Cohen, she had married a Mr. Fleming who had made necessary, by his conduct, an early divorce. My aunt, Mrs. Haberman, and Mrs. Fleming-Cohen lunched together very often, and I suspect they had a tacit but inviolable agreement never to mention to each other that bond of race and religion which, stronger than their professed tastes, drew them instinctively together.
My life in Aunt Selina's apartment was a lonely one. She was hardly the sort of woman to whom young folks would go for sympathy. She did not mistreat me, of course, but left me entirely to my own devious ways. For the ways of a boy of fourteen—especially of an orphan of somewhat shy and melancholic disposition—are bound to be devious.
I had much to fight out with myself. I lackedany help from the outside—and though I won over my impulses, my doubts and inner conflicts, the struggle left me a weak, shy, shunning boy.
For the first year of my life with Aunt Selina I went to a nearby public school. There were a good many Jewish boys in my class—many more than there had been in the whole Brooklyn school—but I kept away from them as a matter of course. I made a few friends among the Gentiles—not many, because they were hard to make, and I could always feel, in my supersensitive fashion, that they were fashioning a sort of favor out of conferring their friendship upon me.
"It will be different when I am in high school," I told myself. "It will be different because I myself shall be different. The boys will be older there, will be more sensible and broadminded, and I shall be less nervous about the difference between us!"
The difference ... I did not know what it was, but I felt it all the time. I tried to hide it, to disregard it—but I knew that it was there, in my blood, in my face, in my name ... and it held me apart from my class as if it had been a shame and a lasting disgrace.
So it was that I looked forward more and more eagerly for the change and liberation which I thought high school would bring me. Half ayear, two months, a month ... then only a few days ... and then it was over. My public schools days were past. I had graduated into high school with high honors and with an equally high hatred of whatever was Jewish.
If Aunt Selina had been different ... but no, I am not going to blame it on anyone excepting myself.
The summer after I graduated from public school I went with Aunt Selina and her friend, Mrs. Fleming-Cohen, to a hotel in the White Mountains. It was one of those hotels where Jews are not welcome. The management, if I am not mistaken, had not been able to impress Aunt Selina with that fact. They were constantly raising the price of our rooms, but the two ladies seemed content to keep on paying what was asked for the rare privilege of dwelling in forbidden places.
It was certainly not a pleasant summer. The other guests snubbed us continually, left us to our own devices. I used to have to go walking every morning and sit on the porch every afternoon in the company of the two ladies ... because there was no one else for me to go with. For even among the children there was a rigorous boycotting—and I was the sufferer for it. It made me very melancholy; not indignant, of course, because at that time I lacked entirelythe spirit to be indignant—just melancholy, and hateful to myself, spiteful to my aunt, ashamed of the things I should have gloried in, hating the things I should have worshiped.
Well, I told myself, it would all be different in the fall: it would all be different when I was at high school. For then I was to begin those seven years which were to be my real education. So far it had been naught but childhood's prologue. And what a shabby little part I had played in it!
But I did not know that, then!
Immediately upon our return from the mountains I entered high school. My aunt did her duty by accompanying me to the office of the principal and assuring him that I was an honest and upright boy, aged fourteen.
It had been her ambition to have me attend one of the fashionable boarding schools in Connecticut. I do not think she had me much in mind when she made the attempt to enroll me at the St. Gregory Episcopalian Institute. She told so many of her friends of this intention—and told them it with such an evident pride—that I fear she was more concerned with her own social prestige than with my education. And when St. Gregory, through a personal visit from its headmaster, discovered that Mrs. Haberman had no right to aspire to the exquisite preference which God accords Episcopalians, and later sent us a polite but cursory letter of regret that its roster's capacity was full for the year, she bore it as a direct insult upon her ancestors. (Though, of course, even so sharp a hurt to herpride would not let her admit openly that all of those ancestors were Jews.)
At any rate, I went to the high school as a sort of a last resort. My aunt dreaded the company I might have to keep there—all the public riffraff, she called it. That was really why she accompanied me, that first day, to assure herself that I was going to be placed among a "perfectly horrid set of rude ruffians—ghetto boys, and the like!" and to have something tangible and definite to worry about during the next few years.
The principal, busy with the hundred details of school's opening, gave us as much time and courtesy as he could afford. As I look back upon it, I think he was remarkably patient with my aunt.
She told him her fears in a fretful, supercilious way; it was in exactly the same tone that she ordered things from the butcher and grocer each morning over the telephone. The principal heard her through—in fact, prompted her whenever she faltered, nodded appreciatively when something she said was most flagrantly out of place. When she was finished, he turned to look very steadily at me.
"If you have such objections to the class of boys in a public high school, why do you send your nephew here?" he asked.
"Because it—it is convenient," she stammered.
"I must confess, I wanted him to go to a boarding-school."
"Which one?"
"St. Gregory Episcopalian Institute."
The principal's mouth quivered with the smile he could hardly suppress:
"Episcopalian? The boy is a Jew, is he not?"
Mrs. Haberman sat up very straight. "His parents had Jewish affiliations, I believe. They are both dead."
"I see." And I am sure he really did see! For a moment later he put a deft end to the interview.
"Madam," he said, "this boy must take his chances like any other boy in the school. He must make his own friends from among his own sort. He must fight his own adversaries among those who are unlike him. That is the law of life as well as of every school. If he is attracted to the undesirable element, he would find it and mingle with it at St. Gregory's as quickly as he would here. I have a fine lot of youths here. I am proud of them—even of those who fail to come up to the standards. I won't try to talk to you about the splendid spirit of democracy—because you evidently don't want the boy to be democratic. You don't want him to stand on his own merits as a Jew. If he did that, he would be putting up an honest, spirited battle. I onlyknow that all men and all boys like an honest stand and a fair fight for the things worth protecting. I know that if I were a Jew, I should never—well, that's your business, not mine." He took out of his desk a little leather-covered book. "It may interest you to know that this high school is ranked very high scholastically." He turned the pages. "Also that the St. Gregory Institution is ranked among the most unsuccessful schools in the country in the matter of scholarship." He showed her a table of figures, then closed the book and put it away, smiling. "Also," he finished, "that I am an Episcopalian, and that I should rather send a son or a nephew of mine to prison than to so harmful a place as St. Gregory."
His remarks did not altogether convince my aunt, of course; and he said no more, except to assure her that he would follow my course in his school with much interest, and would do all in his power to make me manly. To Mrs. Haberman, the promise to make a man of me meant little.
She left me at the school door, stepping gingerly across the pavement into her limousine in order to escape the contamination of a group of young Italians who were coming up the steps. As she slammed the machine door and was driven away, I felt somewhat bewildered—very muchalone in a hallway of hundreds of boys whom I did not know, but who jostled me, went by me, up and down the stairs with a great hollow stamping of feet, an echoing laughter, a loud excitement of regathering after the summer's recess. None of them paid the slightest attention to me.
A deep-voiced gong sounded through the hall and up the wide stair-well. It was the signal to disperse to our classrooms.
I had a card in my hand, assigning me to room 7 on the third floor. I climbed the stairs fearfully, my heart beating faster than usual, my knees trembling a little. I was entering a strange and mystic land that I had dreamed of, yet had never seen.
Room 7, third floor. It was a big, bare room, void of almost everything excepting sunshine. There were desks, low and set decently apart. Along the wall, behind gleaming glass, were cases of seashells and botanical specimens. The teacher's desk, at the further end, was on a small, shabby dais. Only a few of the boys had arrived, and the big room rang with the echo of unfilled space.
I heard them telling each other what they had been doing over the summer. One of them, brown and sturdy, was telling of Maine and the camp he had attended there. Another, in ragged clothes, and of a thin, pale face, spoke of theheated city during July and August, and of how he had been swimming when he could get away from his summer job—swimming in the East River. It shocked me to hear that. I had a picture of the East River as I had seen it from the Brooklyn Bridge, a brown, littered flood, choked with scurrying tugboats and the floating trails of refuse. I hated that boy for a long while after I heard his story. But he had a sharp, kindly face, and I wondered to see how popular he was with those who knew him.
Coming, as I did, from a distant grammar school, it chanced that there were no boys of my acquaintance in the classroom. I was absolutely alone—a stranger to them all.
The teacher, on his dais, tapped with thin, white knuckles against the side of his desk. He was a little, timid man with one of the saddest faces I have ever seen. Mr. Levi, he said his name was.
The boy next to me stirred in his seat. "A Jew for a teacher! What do you think of that!" he said to me. "A Jew for—" Then he stopped short and looked at me. "Oh, gee! You're one yourself, ain't you?"
I felt my face grow very hot. I thought of the words which the principal had only just spoken.... Could I stand up and fight like a man?
I wanted to—I really do believe that I wanted to. But somehow the impulse that came to me to face this seatmate squarely and to tell him that—yes, I was a Jew, too—and proud of it—dwindled away into a gulp and a whimper and a sickly smile.
This other boy was red-headed, freckled. He was very tall, but I saw a crutch at his side. Later on, when he rose, I could see that he was very lame; also that around his neck (for he wore no collar) was a little leather thong and tab. I did not know then—and I did not learn for many months—that it was the scapular of a Roman Catholic.
He looked at me surlily, but laughing.
"Youarea Jew, ain't you?" he demanded.
I hung my head, wondering how to evade the directness of the question. The lame boy seemed to be waiting for my reply.
"Well, no—not exactly." I stuttered. But I could feel my face flushing again.
"What d'yer mean, not exactly? What's yer mom and pop?"
"My mother and father? They are dead."
That did not seem to check him. "Well, if you ain't a Jew, you look like one. You look more like one than the teacher does." Whereupon, much to my relief, he branched off the subject. "He don't seem to be such a bad fellow, evenwith a name like Levi. Oi, oi, oi, Levi!" And he chuckled with delight at the thought of how he would annoy and tease this teacher at some future date.
There are some boys of whom we can know at a glance that they are bullies and mischief makers. This boy, whose name was Geoghen, was one of them. He used his very lameness as an excuse to boss and bully his classmates. He was very strong, though as I was to learn only too soon—and his size made him an undisputed leader.
There were no lessons this first day. There were only a speech of welcome from the teacher, and an assignment of home work for the next morning.
But when we were dismissed and had started for the door, Geoghen limped up to me.
"So you ain't a Jew, eh?" he chuckled, looking hard into my face.
So as to avoid the retort, I fled from him, down the stairs into the main hall. I was just about to gain the street when the principal, coming out of his office, saw me.
"What's this?" he said in his deep likable voice. "Running away so soon?"
"Yes, sir. We're dismissed for today."
"Oh, I see. Well, I suppose you've already begun to fight like a man, haven't you? I hope so."
"Oh, yes, sir!"
But, as I went, I knew in my heart that it was not true. The whole first day had been false.
Those first days at high school seemed terrible in the intensity of new experiences. Had I but had my parents to encourage me, perhaps I should not have felt so bitterly the loneliness of this new turn in the road.
I do not care how manly and resolute he is, a boy will always need the kind words, the clasp and kiss which only his parents can give him. And I was not half so resolute then, nor half so hardened to battle as I am now.
I worried a good deal about my standing in the class room. It seemed to me that I could not possibly pass each day's recitations creditably. And yet I did, as I remember. It was only that I so sorely lacked self-confidence.
My aunt, Mrs. Haberman, did her duty in taking me to a nerve specialist. He charged her a pretty price to examine me and to assure her that, physically, there was nothing wrong with me.
"Mentally, he is a little too active," was his sentence upon me. "And that is what makeshim melancholy. Let him study, let him get out and meet boys of his own age.... Let him find something to be proud of, to be interested in."
My aunt gave this last a few pettish, impatient moments of thought. After the doctor was gone, and she and I sat opposite each other at the table, where the glass and silver made so ostentatious a showing, she did her best to be practical about it.
"Now, dear, let's see," she pondered, her long white fingers stroking the table cloth, "I'm sure we can find something to interest and amuse you, dear. How about basket weaving? or coloring photographs or something artistic like that?"
I wasn't very polite in my refusals. I declined basket weaving and coloring photographs and even balked at the idea of installing a billiard table in our apartment—which seemed to relieve Mrs. Haberman immensely, since she considered billiards a brutal and vulgar game.
All her suggestions came to naught. Once she spoke of religion, but her eyes fluttered and she changed the subject quickly, as if she had accidently hit upon the truth and found it unpleasant. It was enough to put an idea into my head.
I did not know then, but I do now, that thething I needed was Faith. A boy needs it—needs it as much as he needs his parents—and I had neither one nor the other.
The days retreating into a gloomy background of autumn chills and fogs, left me thoroughly weakened in spirit. Oftentimes—I could not guess why—I came home from high school so exhausted that I could only throw myself upon my bed, behind a locked door, and sob and sigh and shiver as if with the ague. Everything that had happened during the day would come pouring back into my memory with a distorted clarity, tinctured with despair, hopelessly sombred with a boy's sense of wrong and persecution.
I did actually have enough to contend with at high school. I had begun to feel the racial distinctions, the thoughtless slurs and boycottings which Jewish lads must everywhere encounter. I tried to tell myself that it didn't matter—that these were only rough, ill-bred boys to whom I ought not lower myself to pay attention. But a boy of fourteen finds it hard to argue himself into bravery, and I failed miserably, ridiculously at the task. Years later, I was to learn that it was all natural—that I was passing, as every boy must pass, through the difficult period of adolescence. It was mostly that I was lonely, balked by the unappreciativeattitude of my aunt, without guidance or curb.
If in all this personal recital I am harsh to the memory of my aunt, you will perhaps see that I have the right. I am grateful, truly grateful, for all that she attempted to do for me, but I know that all her care was misdirected. It was, besides, cruelly lacking in all of the finer things which should have been mine; things which my parents would have given me, things that, in my aggravated state, I needed.
Once I was asked by some other Jewish boys at high school to join a little club which they were forming. I hesitated about it. They were jolly, healthy boys—most of them from the poorer sections of the city—who went up to Van Cortlandt Park on Saturday afternoons and Sundays to play ball or to skate. It would have done me good to be one of them, to join their sports and laughter—and yet....
Well, my aunt did not approve. I knew she wouldn't, long before I asked her. If I was the least bit undecided before, she gave me clearly to understand that companionship with Jewish boys would not be right for me; that I must avoid this stigma of Judaism as I would avoid a crime. She said it was for myowngood—but I cannot believe it very heartily. She was trying at that time to make me join a dancing class of Gentile boys and girls. She told me shethought their company would counteract the effect of having to endure a high school's rabble.
There came a night, after a day of niggardly discouragements, when the strange moroseness seemed too heavy to bear. I told my aunt that I did not want any supper—a fact which did not worry her too much, since she was in a hurry to dress and go off to a studio party of some silly sort. And when she was gone and I was alone in the apartment, I could not read or rest or do anything. I tried to study my next day's lessons, but had to give them up.
And at last I put on my hat and coat and went down to the street. The air was bracing, but I was not used to the streets at night—and a white, wraith-like fog was beginning to seep up from the pavements and cluster in misty, yellow patches around the lamp-lights.
Shivering, I went on. I did not know where I was bound. The old, savage loneliness—here in the open, where the dampness brought the scent of withered grass and lean, bare trees—was sharper, more embittering than ever.
I went across the street and into the nearest entrance of Central Park. The quietness of everything there frightened me, called up every foolish, childhood fear and superstition. I went through dark lanes that were branched overwith creaking branches. I saw the lake, black, cold, with the stippled reflections of shore lights shining up from its edges. I felt the moist, chilly wind that came across the big lawns and struck my face and chest and shoulders. I felt—I could not help but feel that I must go on, go on and on—in search of I know not what.
I came at length to the Fifth Avenue side of the park. The huge white stone and marble houses that flanked the street beyond were half lost in the mist. The automobiles that went up and down the pavements, which were wet and shining like the backs of seals, made no noise—went silently, mystically, sweeping blurred trails of light upon the sidewalks as they passed.
Against that white, low horizon of houses I saw one thing that loomed dark and gropingly conspicuous.
I did not know what it was. Not then. But it held my attention: the darkness, the gray curve of it against the sky. There was something about it that was forbidding, deep, sombre. The lower front of it seemed to be arched and pillared—and under each arch the shadows were impenetrably black.
There were automobiles waiting in front of it, at the sidewalk's edge. A long string of them, too, as if many persons were within upon some mysterious business.
Then, softly, as if from far distant recesses, there came from within the soft, resonant voice of an organ—playing.
Was it a church?
Then I remembered that it was Friday night—and I knew that this was a synagogue—a temple of the Jewish Faith.
At first realization, I moved a little away from it, down the street. A synagogue—and all that it brought to my mind was the memory of my parents. In former years they had been wont to take me with them when they went on Friday nights. And those had been dull, wearisome nights for me—but I had spent them at my parent's side. So that now, in the shadow of God's house, my loneliness for them came back to me in wild deluge, breaking the dam of reserve and doubts and petty limitations.
The music of the organ swelled louder, richer, blending all the majesty of its bass notes with the triumph and fancy of its treble. Louder, richer, louder—and I, who stood outside in the choking fog, felt my heart give way to its pain and my eyes to the solace of their tears.
Until the service was ended, and the organ had ceased to play I stayed there. Once or twice I heard the voice of the cantor at his solemn chantings—and this too brought me a distinct memory of the cantor in our Brooklynsynagogue, and of how I had listened to him with my hands locked in my mother's.
Outside it was all so dark, so clammy with mist—and in there they—my own sort of people—were worshipping God—my God. And when, soon thereafter, the doors swung open in the black of the arches and bathed the steps below with a great, glad, golden light, I ran forward, almost involuntarily, to gaze within.
I caught a glimpse of rich things, bright and gleaming—of carpets glowing, walls resplendent—of golden tracery and colors. And then people began coming through the doors down the steps, blackening and obscuring my view of the interior.
I saw some of their faces. They were Jewish people, of course—and I heard a man among them talking rather loudly and laughingly. He talked with an accent.
For me the spell was broken. All the old, petty prejudice which circumstance had nurtured in me sprang up anew. A sense of anti-climax, of disgust came over me: yes, these—such as these were my people—and I hated them.
And I turned and ran away, back through the park, and home.
I did not ever tell my aunt where I had been, nor anything else of the adventure. I knew she would not have understood it.But I did. And, boy as I was, I knew now that I needed some Faith, some link to the company and comfort of God—and that, sooner or later, as Jew or Christian, I must seek and find that link.
But I knew, too, that my antipathy to my own people had become deep-seated—had grown to be part of my whole life's code.