Ghetto Comedies Part 61

'Miserable Monarchists!' he sneered. 'We Jews will have no peace till the Republicans----'

'A Republic without Socialism!' interrupted a girl with a laundry basket. 'What good's that? Wait till the N.S.'s----'

'The D.R.'s are the only----' interrupted a phylactery-pedlar.

'And who but the Labour group promises equal rights to all nationalities?' interrupted a girl in spectacles. 'Trust the _Trudowaja_----'

'To the devil with the Labour Parties!' said an old-clo' man. 'Look how the Bundists have betrayed us. First they were bone of our bone; now it is they who by their recklessness provoke the _pogroms_.'

The blacksmith brought his hammer down upon the stall. 'There is only one party to trust, and that's the C.D.'s,' he repeated.

'Bourgeois!' simultaneously hissed the Republican youth and the Socialist la.s.s.

'My children!' It was the bland voice of Moses the _Shamash_ (beadle).

'Violence leads to naught. Even the Viborg Manifesto was a mistake. As a member of the Party of Peaceful Regeneration----'

'Peaceful Regeneration?' shouted the blacksmith. 'A Jew ally himself with the Reactionary Right, with the----!'

A Cossack galloped recklessly among the serried stalls. The Jews scattered before him like dogs. The member of the P.P.R. crawled under a barrow. Even the blacksmith froze up. David drew the moral when the Cossack had disappeared.

'Peaceful Regeneration!' he cried. 'There will be no Regeneration for you till you have the courage to leave Russian politics alone and to fight for yourselves.'

'Ah, you're a Maximalist,' said the beadle.

'No, I am only a Minimalist. I merely want the minimum--that we save our own lives.'

It was asking too little. The poor Russian Jews, like the rich Russian Jews, were largely occupied in saving the world, or, at least, Holy Russia. Crushed by such an excess of Christianity, David wandered round the market-place, looking into the bordering houses. In one of the darkest and dingiest sat a cobbler tapping at shoes, surrounded by sprawling children.

'Peace be to you,' called David.

'Peace have I always,' rejoined the cobbler cheerily.

David looked at the happy dirty children; he had seen their like torn limb from limb. 'But have you thought of the danger of a _pogrom_?' he said.

'I have heard whispers of it,' said the cobbler. 'But we _Cha.s.sidim_ have no fear. Our wonder-rabbi, who has power over all the spheres, will utter a word, and----'

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Jews scattered before him like dogs.]

'A _Tsaddik_ (wonder-rabbi) was killed in the last _pogrom_,' said David brutally. 'You must join a Self-Defence band.'

The cobbler ceased to tap. 'What! Go for a soldier! When the _Rebbe_ caused me to draw a high number!'

'Our soldiering is not for Russia, but to save us from Russia. We must all join together!'

'Me join the _Misnagdim!_' cried the cobbler in horror. 'Never will I join with those who deny the Master-of-the-Name.'

David sighed. Suddenly he perceived a stalwart Jew lounging at a neighbouring door. He moved towards him, and broached the subject afresh. The lounger shook his head. 'You may persuade that foolish _Cha.s.sid_,' said he, 'but you cannot expect the rest of us to join with these heretics, these G.o.dless, dancing dervishes, who are capable even of saying the afternoon prayer in the evening!'

In the next house lived a _Maskil_ (Intellectual), who looked up from his Hebrew newspaper to ask how he could be a.s.sociated with a squad of young ignoramuses. His neighbour was a Karaite, drifted here from another community. The Karaite pointed out that Self-Defence was unnecessary in his case, as his sect was scarcely regarded by the authorities as Jewish. There were other motley Jews living round the market-place--a Lithuanian, who refused to co-operate with the Polish 'sweet-tooths,' and who was in turn stigmatized by a Pole as 'peel-barley,' in scarification of his reputedly stingy diet. A man from Odessa dismissed them both as 'cross-heads.' It was impossible to unite such mutually superior elements. Again weary and heart-sick, he returned towards the inn.

VIII

But his way was blocked by a turbulent stream of Jewish boys pouring out of the primary school. They seemed to range in years between eight and twelve, but even the youngest face wore a stamp of age, and though the air vibrated with the multiplex chatter which accompanies the exodus of cramped and muted pupils, the normal elements of joyousness, of horse-play, of individual freakishness, were absent. It was a common agitation that loosed all these little tongues and set all these little ears listening to the pa.s.sionate harangues of ringleaders. Instead of hurrying home, the schoolboys lingered in knots round their favourite orators. A premature gravity furrowed all the childish foreheads.

With one of these orators David dimly felt familiar, and after listening for a few minutes to the lad's tirade against the 'autocracy of the school director' and the 'bureaucratic methods of the inspector,' it dawned upon him that the little demagogue was his own landlord's son.

'Hullo, Kalman!' he cried in surprise.

'Hullo, comrade!' replied the boy graciously.

'So you're a revolutionary, eh?' said David, smiling.

'All my cla.s.s belongs to the Junior Bund,' replied the boy gravely.

'Then you're not so peaceful as papa!'

The lad's aplomb and dignity deserted him. He blushed furiously, and hung his head in shame of his Moderate parent.

'Never mind, Comrade Kalman,' said another boy, slapping his shoulder consolingly. 'We've all got some shady relative or another.'

A shrill burst of applause relieved the painful situation. Turning his head, David found all the childish eyes converged upon a single figure, a bulging-headed lad who had sprung into a sudden position of eminence--upon an egg-box. He was clothed in the blue blouse of Radicalism and irreligion, and the faint down upon his upper lip suggested that he must be nearing fifteen.

'Comrades!' he was crying. 'In my youth I myself was head boy at this school of yours, but even in those old days there was the same brutal autocracy. Your only remedy is a general strike. You must join the Syndical Anarchists.'

More shrill cheers greeted this fiery counsel. The members of the Junior Bund waved their satchels frenziedly. Only the landlord's son stood mute and frowning.

'You don't agree with him,' said David.

'No,' answered the little Bundist gravely. 'I follow Comrade Berl. But this fellow is popular because he was expelled from the Warsaw gymnasium as a suspect.'

'You must strike!' repeated the juvenile agitator. 'A strike is the only way of impressing the proletarian psychology. You must all swear to attend school no more till your demands are granted.'

'We swear!' came from all sides in a childish treble. But the frown on the brow of the landlord's son grew darker.

'It is well, comrades,' said the orator. 'Your success will be a lesson to your elders, too. Only by applying the Marxian philosophy of history can we upset the bourgeois _Weltanschauung_.'

The landlord's son reached the roof of the egg-box with one angry bound and stood beside the agitator. 'Marx is an old fogey!' he shouted. 'What's the good of a pa.s.sive strike? Let us make a demonstration against the director; let us----'

'Who told you that?' sneered the orator. 'Comrade Berl or Comrade Schmerl?'

The boy missed the sarcasm of the rhyme. 'You know Schmerl's a mere milk-blooded "Attainer,"' he said angrily.

'Believe me,' was the soothing reply, 'even beyond the Five Freedoms the boycott is a better "Attainer" than the bomb.'

'Traitor! Bourgeois!' And a third boy jumped upon the egg-box. He had red hair and flaming eyes. 'If Russia is to be saved,' he shrieked, 'it will be neither by the Fivefold Formula of Freedom nor by the Fourfold Suffrage, but by the Integralists, who alone maintain the purity of the Social Revolutionary programme, as it was before the party degenerated into Maximalists and Mini----'

Here the egg-box collapsed under the weight of the three orators, and they sprawled in equal ignominy. But the storm was now launched. A score of the schoolboys burst into pa.s.sionate abstract discussion. The unity necessary to the school strike was shattered into fragments.