Comrade Yetta Part 1

Comrade Yetta.

by Albert Edwards.

BOOK I

CHAPTER I

BENJAMIN'S BOOK-STORE

The girlhood of Yetta Rayefsky was pa.s.sed in her father's second-hand book-store on East Broadway. In the late nineties the fame of his kindly philosophy had attracted a circle of followers, and the store became almost prosperous.

It was in a bas.e.m.e.nt--four steps down from the sidewalk. The close-packed cases around the walls were filled with the wildest a.s.sortment of second-hand English books. You were likely to find a novel of Laura Jean Libby cheek by jowl with "The Book of Mormon," between two volumes of "Browning's Poems." The tables in the centre were piled chaotically with books and periodicals in Russian and Hebrew.

Every night in the week you would have found Benjamin Rayefsky and his little daughter Yetta perched on high stools back of the desk to the left of the door. He would have greeted you with his sad, wistful smile, and would have gotten down to shake hands with you. It would have surprised and hurt him if you had asked at once for a book, paid for it, and gone out. It was customary to take plenty of time and to make quite sure that he did not have in stock some book you would prefer to the one you had come after.

When he had succeeded in making you feel at home, he would have returned to his desk, and Yetta would have gone on reading aloud to him. Very likely you would have wanted to laugh at the discussions they had over how various English words should be p.r.o.nounced. When they could not agree, Benjamin would write down the word on a slip of paper for Yetta to take to school in the morning and submit to the teacher. You would have wondered with amus.e.m.e.nt how much the little la.s.sie understood of the ponderous tomes she read in her high-pitched uncertain voice.

But you would not have wanted to laugh at the memory you carried away of the couple. More than one Gentile who had dropped into the store by chance went away racking their brains to recall the Holy Picture the Rayefskys suggested. It was what the psychologists call "inverse a.s.sociation." The Father and Daughter inevitably called to mind the Mother and Son.

Benjamin resembled--except for an ugly scar on his forehead--Guido Reni's "Christ." There was the same poignant sadness about his mouth, the same soft beard and sensitive nose; there was the same otherworldly kindliness in his eyes and his every gesture. And little Yetta was very like the Child Mary in t.i.tian's "Presentation."

Towards nine o'clock the little shop began to fill up. First of the regulars was a consumptive lad whose attention had been caught by an advertis.e.m.e.nt a.s.serting that a certain encyclopaedia was worth a university education. Lacking money to go to college or to acquire so large a set of books, he was reading one of these compendiums in Rayefsky's Book-store. He had reached the letter "R," and considered himself a junior. There were others who came for regular reading, but more came to talk--and to listen to Benjamin. At ten he would close Yetta's book and, putting his arm about her shoulders, begin his evening discourse. Generally his text was some phrase from his reading which had impressed him during the day. Before long the little girl's eyes would close and her head fall over on her father's shoulder.

But one night he kept her awake. There was a wedding in progress across the street. It was his custom to talk directly to some one person of his audience, and this night he addressed himself to Yetta. With poetic imagination he paraphrased the idyll of Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz, making of the story an interpretation of marriage for his daughter's guidance.

Some time in the years to come a Man would claim her, and against that time he taught her the vow that Ruth made to Naomi.

"Whither thou goest, I will go; where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy G.o.d my G.o.d: where thou diest will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me."

He made her repeat the vow over and over again in Hebrew until she knew it by heart.

"It is with these words, my daughter," he said, "that you must greet the Bridegroom."

Much of the gentle wisdom which her father preached to the little shopful of listeners Yetta did not fully understand. But for nine years, from the time she was six till she reached fifteen, it was the lullaby to which, every night, she fell asleep, perched on her high stool, her head on his shoulder. Much of it sank in.

This is to be the story of how little Yetta Rayefsky grew up into useful happiness. But her father's influence was the thing, more than all else, that differentiated her from thousands of other East Side girls. Without Benjamin's story, hers would be incomprehensible.

His father had been a man of means in the Russian town of Kovna. But Benjamin, the only son, had no talent for trade; he was of the type of Jews who dream. And he loved books. The library facilities of the Kovna Ghetto were limited, but he read everything on which he could lay hands.

From his youth up he knew and loved the Psalms and the more poetic sections of the Prophets. The age-old beauty of the Hebrew literature was a never failing spring at which he refreshed his soul. He had also read the novels of Gogol, Korolenko, and Dostoiefsky, and the few books he could find on history and science.

A strange sort of cosmography had grown out of this ill-a.s.sorted reading. He took the Prophecies seriously and looked forward with abiding faith to the coming of the Kingdom of G.o.d on earth. Like most deeply religious people he was not strictly orthodox. He scrupulously observed the forms of Hebraic ritualism, but his real inspiration came from King David rather than from scribes who compiled the Talmud or the Rabbis who minutely interpreted the Torah. He had much sympathy with the Zionists, for they also had ardent faith in the Promises, but he took no interest in the geographical aspects of their aspirations. The Messiah, when he came, would establish His reign over all the earth. He also believed, as did the Zionists, that the Jews were the light-bearers of the human family, but he considered them a People chosen for special service--not for peculiar favors.

Added to this h.o.a.ry mysticism was a very disjointed idea of world's history and a crude conception of Evolution. He believed that G.o.d's purpose with the Race was being worked out through the development of Democracy--which he understood to be another word for loving-kindness and brotherhood. He had never seen Democracy. He knew nothing of the crimes committed in its name; he had no conception of the modern Plutocracy, which is everywhere in a life-and-death struggle with Democracy--and as often as not seems to be winning the fight.

This vague idealization of Democracy was stimulated by the rare letters from his sister Martha in New York. While Benjamin was still a lad she had married David Goldstein, a ne'er-do-weel of the community, and with her dowry they had emigrated. The poor woman could hardly be blamed if she hid from her family the cruel realities of her life. She wrote what she thought would please them. As her imagination was limited, she borrowed her metaphors from the Scriptures and had milk and honey flowing down the Bowery. Benjamin often illuminated his talks on the Promised Land by references to the freedom and justice of America. It was not hard for him to believe in a Utopia. It did not seem too much to ask that all men should be as unselfish and gentle as himself.

Living thus in his dreams he grew to manhood. In the early twenties he married. His wife, fortunately, had common sense enough for two, and protected his patrimony from waste. The first child they named Benjamin, and a few years later Yetta was born.

The father held a privileged position in the Jewish community. His pure, unworldly life, his ever ready sympathy, his learning and homely wisdom, had earned him the rank of a saint. There were some, of course, who shook their heads over his dreamings. With so much money to start with, they said, he might have become rich--perhaps a "merchant of the first cla.s.s." But every one loved him. The women came to him with their troubles, and even the busiest, most careworn men liked to sit for a while and hear him recite the sonorous prophecies and talk of the Kingdom which is to come.

It was in 1890 that Benjamin and his daughter were torn loose from their anchorage. The affair lacked the proportions of the later and more formal Jew-killings of Kis.h.i.+neff and Odessa. The cause of the outbreak was never explained, but we, who lynch negroes on so slight provocation, may not throw stones. Unexpectedly a mob--the sc.u.m of the Christian quarter--rushed into the Ghetto. At first they were intent on loot, but the hooligans had had to drink much vodka to generate sufficient courage to attack the defenceless Jews. Pa.s.sions so stimulated cannot be controlled, and soon the mob was engaged in murder and rape. Benjamin went out on the street to reason with them. They left him for dead.

It was several weeks before he regained his consciousness. An ugly scar stretched from above his left eye to his ear. Many of his friends held that he never quite recovered from that wound, for as long as he lived he sometimes spoke of his wife and his son Benjamin as though they were still alive. But such lapses of memory happened rarely; generally he remembered that they had been buried while he was in the hospital. He had only Yetta left. He would surely have gone mad if he had lived on among the memories of Kovna. So he had emigrated to join his sister in the Happy Valley of America.

There was wonderful vitality to Benjamin's dreams. Even the tangible realities of Orchard Street could not obliterate them.

Many hideous things which he saw he did not understand. Among such phenomena was his brother-in-law. In the social organization of the Kovna Ghetto, David Goldstein had found no place. The opportunities for viciousness were too limited for him; he had been only a s.h.i.+ftless misfit. But on the East Side of New York his distorted talents found a market. He had sold them to Tammany Hall. His wife's money had been wasted in a legitimate business enterprise for which he had no fitness.

A defalcation had caused his arrest, the District Leader had saved him from jail, and David found the niche into which he fitted. He was nominal owner of The Sioux Hotel--a saloon of the worst repute. The profits of vice are large, but those "higher up" always claim the lion's share. And as David had taken to drink--a rare vice among the Jews--his wife and her three children were having a very miserable time of it.

Perhaps it was the wound across his forehead which made it difficult for Benjamin to see clearly. About all he seemed to realize was that his sister could not afford to live comfortably. He had brought with him a few thousand dollars, the wreck of his father's fortune, and, by offering to pay liberally for a room and board, he enabled his sister to move into a better flat and so dulled the edge of her poverty. Some instinctive wisdom made him resist David's impa.s.sioned appeals to invest his money in The Sioux Hotel.

But he was no more of a business man than his brother-in-law, and before long, seduced by his pa.s.sion for reading, he was persuaded to buy the second-hand book-store.

It was a dark bas.e.m.e.nt. There were only a few hours a day when one could read, even in the front, without a lamp. But it was Yetta's home. To be sure, she and her father slept at the Goldstein's flat and had breakfast there. But by seven they were in the book-store. For lunch they had tea and buns from the coffee-house upstairs, and at six o'clock Yetta brought their dinner from her aunt's in a pail. At first the place had seemed to Yetta very large, and the darkness in the back limitless and fearsome. Once, when her father had gone back there and she could not see him, she had become frightened and called him. He, laughing at her timidity, had taken her in his arms and they had explored all the dark corners by candle-light. She always remembered the sense of relief which had come to her when she realized how small it was.

Benjamin was thirty-four when this change in his life took place. With his scholarly turn of mind, it did not take him long to learn to read English fluently. But in his store on East Broadway he had little chance to speak the new language. Few of his customers spoke anything but Russian or Yiddish. Yetta always found it hard not to p.r.o.nounce "book"

"buk." This was the first word her father taught her. He was an insistent teacher. He realized his own inability to become an active unit in the seething, incomprehensible life about him. His explorations of the new world were meagre. He was tied to the store except on Sat.u.r.day afternoons, and he could not desecrate the Sabbath by trolley rides. The poverty and misery which he could not ignore, he thought of as local. The unhappy lot of his people was due to their ignorance, their inability to understand the new language, their age-old habits of semiserfdom. But with Yetta it was to be different! She was to be fitted for full partic.i.p.ation in the rich life of perfect freedom. He put especial emphasis on the language.

There were few things which made him outspokenly angry. The princ.i.p.al ones were the Jewish papers. Yiddish was to him the language of the Kovna Ghetto, the language of persecutions and pogroms. The pure Hebrew of the Scriptures--Yes!--he would have every child of the Race know that. He taught it to Yetta. It was the reservoir of all the rich traditions and richer promises. But Yiddish was a b.a.s.t.a.r.d jargon which his people had learned in captivity. It held no treasures of the past, no future hope. Let his people supplement the language of their forefathers by one of freedom. Let them learn the speech of the land of Refuge. His contempt for Yiddish, of course, isolated him from everything vital in the life of the East Side, and drove him back farther into his dreams and to Yetta.

As soon as she was old enough she went to the closely packed public school near by. While she was away, he read hungrily. He had cleared a shelf in the darkest corner of the store, and there he put by all the books which pleased him--those he wanted her to read when she grew old enough. They were not for sale. Yetta got very little play during her childhood. Back in the store, after school hours, she perched up on a high stool beside her father and went over her lessons with him.

At the end of the first year Benjamin's bank account had decreased by five hundred dollars. It had been a rare month when the total sales had equalled the month's rent and living expenses. But he was not depressed.

A customer asked him one time about his business.

"Although I do not sell many books," Benjamin replied, "I have much time to read."

The second year would have been worse except for the lucky chance which secured him the agency for some Russian newspapers and considerably increased his income. If he had not so stubbornly refused to have anything to do with Yiddish, the store might have become prosperous, for he gradually learned the business and grew to use some judgment in replenis.h.i.+ng his stock. His quaint philosophy attracted a little group of admirers. Even if they did not entirely accept his dreams, they liked to hear him talk about them.

In this environment Yetta grew into girlhood. Every day when her school work was finished she read aloud to her father from the books he had placed on the reserved shelf. It was a planless mixture--a History of the Jews, Motley and Prescott, Shakespeare and d.i.c.kens and Emerson.

The last thing she read to him was a three-volume edition of _Les Miserables_. She was fifteen then, and her reading was frequently interrupted by his coughs. Perhaps he had caught it from the lad who was racing with death to graduate from the Encyclopedia. Benjamin's friends shook their heads mournfully. But he expected to recover soon; was he not taking his "patent medicine" regularly? And so to the wonderful symphony of Hugo's masterpiece Benjamin coughed out his life. The third volume was read, not in the little store, but in their bedroom in the Goldstein's flat. It was the last book Yetta read for several years.

When it was finished, she had begun to be afraid; she did not have the courage to begin a new book. He was too sick to listen.

CHAPTER II

YETTA'S GIRLHOOD

The death of her father was a greater catastrophe to Yetta than she realized. She felt only the personal loss. Her uncle took care of the financial matters, sold the book-store, and so forth. When the funeral expenses were paid, he said there was nothing left. Coming back from the cemetery, her aunt, in as kindly a manner as was possible to so woe-begone and soured a woman, tried to explain to her what it meant to be penniless. Leave school? Go to work? She hardly listened. Her sorrow was too real, too wild and incoherent.