Children of the Ghetto Part 32

"No; they had another pretext--one of the servant girls said I wanted to kiss her--lies and falsehood. I was kissing my finger after kissing the _Mezuzah_, and the stupid abomination thought I was kissing my hand to her. It sees itself that they don't kiss the _Mezuzahs_ often in that house--the impious crew. And what will be now? The stupid boy will go home to breakfast in a bazaar of costly presents, and he will make the stupid speech written by the fool of an Englishman, and the ladies will weep. But where will be the Judaism in all this? Who will vaccinate him against free-thinking as I would have done? Who will infuse into him the true patriotic fervor, the love of his race, the love of Zion, the land of his fathers?"

"Ah, you are verily a man after my own heart!" said Guedalyah, the greengrocer, overswept by a wave of admiration. "Why should you not come with me to my _Beth-Hamidrash_ to-night, to the meeting for the foundation of the Holy Land League? That cauliflower will be four-pence, mum."

"Ah, what is that?" said Pinchas.

"I have an idea; a score of us meet to-night to discuss it."

"Ah, yes! You have always ideas. You are a sage and a saint, Guedalyah.

The _Beth-Hamidrash_ which you have established is the only centre of real orthodoxy and Jewish literature in London. The ideas you expound in the Jewish papers for the amelioration of the lot of our poor brethren are most statesmanlike. But these donkey-head English rich people--what help can you expect from them? They do not even understand your plans.

They have only sympathy with needs of the stomach."

"You are right! You are right, Pinchas!" said Guedalyah, the greengrocer, eagerly. He was a tall, loosely-built man, with a pasty complexion capable of s.h.i.+ning with enthusiasm. He was dressed shabbily, and in the intervals of selling cabbages projected the regeneration of Judah.

"That is just what is beginning to dawn upon me, Pinchas," he went on.

"Our rich people give plenty away in charity; they have good hearts but not Jewish hearts. As the verse says,--A bundle of rhubarb and two pounds of Brussels sprouts and threepence halfpenny change. Thank you.

Much obliged.--Now I have bethought myself why should we not work out our own salvation? It is the poor, the oppressed, the persecuted, whose souls pant after the Land of Israel as the hart after the water-brooks.

Let us help ourselves. Let us put our hands in our own pockets. With our _Groschen_ let us rebuild Jerusalem and our Holy Temple. We will collect a fund slowly but surely--from all parts of the East End and the provinces the pious will give. With the first fruits we will send out a little party of persecuted Jews to Palestine; and then another; and another. The movement will grow like a sliding snow-ball that becomes an avalanche."

"Yes, then the rich will come to you," said Pinchas, intensely excited.

"Ah! it is a great idea, like all yours. Yes, I will come, I will make a mighty speech, for my lips, like Isaiah's, have been touched with the burning coal. I will inspire all hearts to start the movement at once. I will write its Ma.r.s.eillaise this very night, bedewing my couch with a poet's tears. We shall no longer be dumb--we shall roar like the lions of Lebanon. I shall be the trumpet to call the dispersed together from the four corners of the earth--yea, I shall be the Messiah himself,"

said Pinchas, rising on the wings of his own eloquence, and forgetting to puff at his cigar.

"I rejoice to see you so ardent; but mention not the word Messiah, for I fear some of our friends will take alarm and say that these are not Messianic times, that neither Elias, nor Gog, King of Magog, nor any of the portents have yet appeared. Kidneys or regents, my child?"

"Stupid people! Hillel said more wisely: 'If I help not myself who will help me?' Do they expect the Messiah to fall from heaven? Who knows but I am the Messiah? Was I not born on the ninth of Ab?"

"Hush, hus.h.!.+" said Guedalyah, the greengrocer. "Let us be practical. We are not yet ready for Ma.r.s.eillaises or Messiahs. The first step is to get funds enough to send one family to Palestine."

"Yes, yes," said Pinchas, drawing vigorously at his cigar to rekindle it. "But we must look ahead. Already I see it all. Palestine in the hands of the Jews--the Holy Temple rebuilt, a Jewish state, a President who is equally accomplished with the sword and the pen,--the whole campaign stretches before me. I see things like Napoleon, general and dictator alike."

"Truly we wish that," said the greengrocer cautiously. "But to-night it is only a question of a dozen men founding a collecting society."

"Of course, of course, that I understand. You're right--people about here say Guedalyah the greengrocer is always right. I will come beforehand to supper with you to talk it over, and you shall see what I will write for the _Mizpeh_ and the _Arbeiter-freund_. You know all these papers jump at me--their readers are the cla.s.s to which you appeal--in them will I write my burning verses and leaders advocating the cause. I shall be your Tyrtaeus, your Mazzini, your Napoleon. How blessed that I came to England just now. I have lived in the Holy Land--the genius of the soil is blent with mine. I can describe its beauties as none other can. I am the very man at the very hour. And yet I will not go rashly--slow and sure--my plan is to collect small amounts from the poor to start by sending one family at a time to Palestine.

That is how we must do it. How does that strike you, Guedalyah. You agree?"

"Yes, yes. That is also my opinion."

"You see I am not a Napoleon only in great ideas. I understand detail, though as a poet I abhor it. Ah, the Jew is king of the world. He alone conceives great ideas and executes them by petty means. The heathen are so stupid, so stupid! Yes, you shall see at supper how practically I will draw up the scheme. And then I will show you, too, what I have written about Gideon, M.P., the dog of a stockbroker--a satirical poem have I written about him, in Hebrew--an acrostic, with his name for the mockery of posterity. Stocks and shares have I translated into Hebrew, with new words which will at once be accepted by the Hebraists of the world and added to the vocabulary of modern Hebrew. Oh! I am terrible in satire. I sting like the hornet; witty as Immanuel, but mordant as his friend Dante. It will appear in the _Mizpeh_ to-morrow. I will show this Anglo-Jewish community that I am a man to be reckoned with. I will crush it--not it me."

"But they don't see the _Mizpeh_ and couldn't read it if they did."

"No matter. I send it abroad--I have friends, great Rabbis, great scholars, everywhere, who send me their learned ma.n.u.scripts, their commentaries, their ideas, for revision and improvement. Let the Anglo-Jewish community hug itself in its stupid prosperity--but I will make it the laughing-stock of Europe and Asia. Then some day it will find out its mistake; it will not have ministers like the Rev. Elkan Benjamin, who keeps four mistresses, it will depose the lump of flesh who reigns over it and it will seize the hem of my coat and beseech me to be its Rabbi."

"We should have a more orthodox Chief Rabbi, certainly," admitted Guedalyah.

"Orthodox? Then and only then shall we have true Judaism in London and a burst of literary splendor far exceeding that of the much overpraised Spanish School, none of whom had that true lyrical gift which is like the carol of the bird in the pairing season. O why have I not the bird's privileges as well as its gift of song? Why can I not pair at will? Oh the stupid Rabbis who forbade polygamy. Verily as the verse says: The Law of Moses is perfect, enlightening the eyes--marriage, divorce, all is regulated with the height of wisdom. Why must we adopt the stupid customs of the heathen? At present I have not even one mate--but I love--ah Guedalyah! I love! The women are so beautiful. You love the women, hey?"

"I love my Rivkah," said Guedalyah. "A penny on each ginger-beer bottle."

"Yes, but why haven't _I_ got a wife? Eh?" demanded the little poet fiercely, his black eyes glittering. "I am a fine tall well-built good-looking man. In Palestine and on the Continent all the girls would go about sighing and casting sheep's eyes at me, for there the Jews love poetry and literature. But here! I can go into a room with a maiden in it and she makes herself unconscious of my presence. There is Reb Shemuel's daughter--a fine beautiful virgin. I kiss her hand--and it is ice to my lips. Ah, if I only had money! And money I should have, if these English Jews were not so stupid and if they elected me Chief Rabbi. Then I would marry--one, two, three maidens."

"Talk not such foolishness," said Guedalyah, laughing, for he thought the poet jested. Pinchas saw his enthusiasm had carried him too far, but his tongue was the most reckless of organs and often slipped into the truth. He was a real poet with an extraordinary faculty for language and a gift of unerring rhythm. He wrote after the mediaeval model--with a profusion of acrostics and double rhyming--not with the bald duplications of primitive Hebrew poetry. Intellectually he divined things like a woman--with marvellous rapidity, shrewdness and inaccuracy. He saw into people's souls through a dark refracting suspiciousness. The same bent of mind, the same individuality of distorted insight made him overflow with ingenious explanations of the Bible and the Talmud, with new views and new lights on history, philology, medicine--anything, everything. And he believed in his ideas because they were his and in himself because of his ideas. To himself his stature sometimes seemed to expand till his head touched the sun--but that was mostly after wine--and his brain retained a permanent glow from the contact.

"Well, peace be with you!" said Pinchas. "I will leave you to your customers, who besiege you as I have been besieged by the maidens. But what you have just told me has gladdened my heart. I always had an affection for you, but now I love you like a woman. We will found this Holy Land League, you and I. You shall be President--I waive all claims in your favor--and I will be Treasurer. Hey?"

"We shall see; we shall see," said Guedalyah the greengrocer.

"No, we cannot leave it to the mob, we must settle it beforehand. Shall we say done?"

He laid his finger cajolingly to the side of his nose.

"We shall see," repeated Guedalyah the greengrocer, impatiently.

"No, say! I love you like a brother. Grant me this favor and I will never ask anything of you so long as I live."

"Well, if the others--" began Guedalyah feebly.

"Ah! You are a Prince in Israel," Pinchas cried enthusiastically. "If I could only show you my heart, how it loves you."

He capered off at a sprightly trot, his head haloed by huge volumes of smoke. Guedalyah the greengrocer bent over a bin of potatoes. Looking up suddenly he was startled to see the head fixed in the open front of the shop window. It was a narrow dark bearded face distorted with an insinuative smile. A dirty-nailed forefinger was laid on the right of the nose.

"You won't forget," said the head coaxingly.

"Of course I won't forget," cried the greengrocer querulously.

The meeting took place at ten that night at the Beth Hamidrash founded by Guedalyah, a large unswept room rudely fitted up as a synagogue and approached by reeking staircases, unsavory as the neighborhood. On one of the black benches a shabby youth with very long hair and lank fleshless limbs shook his body violently to and fro while he vociferated the sentences of the Mishnah in the traditional argumentative singsong.

Near the central raised platform was a group of enthusiasts, among whom Froom Karlkammer, with his thin ascetic body and the ma.s.s of red hair that crowned his head like the light of a pharos, was a conspicuous figure.

"Peace be to you, Karlkammer!" said Pinchas to him in Hebrew.

"To you be peace, Pinchas!" replied Karlkammer.

"Ah!" went on Pinchas. "Sweeter than honey it is to me, yea than fine honey, to talk to a man in the Holy Tongue. Woe, the speakers are few in these latter days. I and thou, Karlkammer, are the only two people who can speak the Holy Tongue grammatically on this isle of the sea. Lo, it is a great thing we are met to do this night--I see Zion laughing on her mountains and her fig-trees skipping for joy. I will be the treasurer of the fund, Karlkammer--do thou vote for me, for so our society shall flourish as the green bay tree."

Karlkammer grunted vaguely, not having humor enough to recall the usual a.s.sociations of the simile, and Pinchas pa.s.sed on to salute Hamburg. To Gabriel Hamburg, Pinchas was occasion for half-respectful amus.e.m.e.nt. He could not but reverence the poet's genius even while he laughed at his pretensions to omniscience, and at the daring and unscientific guesses which the poet offered as plain prose. For when in their arguments Pinchas came upon Jewish ground, he was in presence of a man who knew every inch of it.

"Blessed art thou who arrivest," he said when he perceived Pinchas.

Then dropping into German he continued--"I did not know you would join in the rebuilding of Zion."

"Why not?" inquired Pinchas.

"Because you have written so many poems thereupon."

"Be not so foolish," said Pinchas, annoyed. "Did not King David fight the Philistines as well as write the Psalms?"

"Did he write the Psalms?" said Hamburg quietly, with a smile.

"No--not so loud! Of course he didn't! The Psalms were written by Judas Maccabaeus, as I proved in the last issue of the Stuttgard _Zeitschrift_. But that only makes my a.n.a.logy more forcible. You shall see how I will gird on sword and armor, and I shall yet see even you in the forefront of the battle. I will be treasurer, you shall vote for me, Hamburg, for I and you are the only two people who know the Holy Tongue grammatically, and we must work shoulder to shoulder and see that the balance sheets are drawn up in the language of our fathers."