§ 1
“Oh, mother, can’t you use a fork?” exclaimed Rachel as Mrs. Ravinsky took the shell of the baked potato in her fingers and raised it to her watering mouth.
“Here, teacherin mine, you want to learn me in my old age how to put the bite in my mouth?” The mother dropped the potato back into her plate, too wounded to eat. Wiping her hands on her blue-checked apron, she turned her glance to her husband, at the opposite side of the table.
“Yankev,” she said bitterly, “stick your bone on a fork. Our teacherin said you dassn’t touch no eatings with the hands.”
“All my teachers died already in the old country,” retorted the old man. “I ain’t going to learn nothing new no more from my American daughter.” He continued to suck the marrow out of the bone with that noisy relish that was so exasperating to Rachel.
“It’s no use,” stormed the girl, jumping up from the table in disgust; “I’ll never be able to stand it here with you people.”
“‘You people’? What do you mean by ‘you people’?” shouted the old man, lashed into fury by his daughter’s words. “You think you got a different skin from us because you went to college?”
“It drives me wild to hear you crunching bones like savages. If you people won’t change, I shall have to move and live by myself.”
Yankev Ravinsky threw the half-gnawed bone upon the table with such vehemence that a plate broke into fragments.
“You witch you!” he cried in a hoarse voice tense with rage. “Move by yourself! We lived without you while you was away in college, and we can get on without you further. God ain’t going to turn his nose on us because we ain’t got table manners from America. A hell she made from this house since she got home.”
“Shah! Yankev leben,” pleaded the mother, “the neighbours are opening the windows to listen to our hollering. Let us have a little quiet for a while till the eating is over.”
But the accumulated hurts and insults that the old man had borne in the one week since his daughter’s return from college had reached the breaking-point. His face was convulsed, his eyes flashed, and his lips were flecked with froth as he burst out in a volley of scorn:
“You think you can put our necks in a chain and learn us new tricks? You think you can make us over for Americans? We got through till fifty years of our lives eating in our own old way——”
“Woe is me, Yankev leben!” entreated his wife. “Why can’t we choke ourselves with our troubles? Why must the whole world know how we are tearing ourselves by the heads? In all Essex Street, in all New York, there ain’t such fights like by us.”
Her pleadings were in vain. There was no stopping Yankev Ravinsky once his wrath was roused. His daughter’s insistence upon the use of a knife and fork spelled apostasy, anti-Semitism, and the aping of the gentiles.
Like a prophet of old condemning unrighteousness, he ran the gamut of denunciation, rising to heights of fury that were sublime and godlike, and sinking from sheer exhaustion to abusive bitterness.
“Pfui on all your American colleges! Pfui on the morals of America! No respect for old age. No fear for God. Stepping with your feet on all the laws of the holy Torah. A fire should burn out the whole new generation. They should sink into the earth, like Korah.”
“Look at him cursing and burning! Just because I insist on their changing their terrible table manners. One would think I was killing them.”
“Do you got to use a gun to kill?” cried the old man, little red threads darting out of the whites of his eyes.
“Who is doing the killing? Aren’t you choking the life out of me? Aren’t you dragging me by the hair to the darkness of past ages every minute of the day? I’d die of shame if one of my college friends should open the door while you people are eating.”
“You—you——”
The old man was on the point of striking his daughter when his wife seized the hand he raised.
“Mincha! Yankev, you forgot Mincha!”
This reminder was a flash of inspiration on Mrs. Ravinsky’s part, the only thing that could have ended the quarrelling instantly. Mincha was the prayer just before sunset of the orthodox Jews. This religious rite was so automatic with the old man that at his wife’s mention of Mincha everything was immediately shut out, and Yankev Ravinsky rushed off to a corner of the room to pray.
“Ashrai Yoishwai Waisahuh!
“Happy are they who dwell in Thy house. Ever shall I praise Thee. Selah! Great is the Lord, and exceedingly to be praised; and His greatness is unsearchable. On the majesty and glory of Thy splendour, and on Thy marvellous deeds, will I meditate.”
The shelter from the storms of life that the artist finds in his art, Yankev Ravinsky found in his prescribed communion with God. All the despair caused by his daughter’s apostasy, the insults and disappointments he suffered, were in his sobbing voice. But as he entered into the spirit of his prayer, he felt the man of flesh drop away in the outflow of God around him. His voice mellowed, the rigid wrinkles of his face softened, the hard glitter of anger and condemnation in his eyes was transmuted into the light of love as he went on:
“The Lord is gracious and merciful; slow to anger and of great loving-kindness. To all that call upon Him in truth He will hear their cry and save them.”
Oblivious to the passing and repassing of his wife as she warmed anew the unfinished dinner, he continued:
“Put not your trust in princes, in the son of man in whom there is no help.” Here Reb Ravinsky paused long enough to make a silent confession for the sin of having placed his hope on his daughter instead of on God. His whole body bowed with the sense of guilt. Then in a moment his humility was transfigured into exaltation. Sorrow for sin dissolved in joy as he became more deeply aware of God’s unfailing protection.
“Happy is he who hath the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the Lord his God. He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds.”
A healing balm filled his soul as he returned to the table, where the steaming hot food awaited him. Rachel sat near the window pretending to read a book. Her mother did not urge her to join them at the table, fearing another outbreak, and the meal continued in silence.
The girl’s thoughts surged hotly as she glanced from her father to her mother. A chasm of four centuries could not have separated her more completely from them than her four years at Cornell.
“To think that I was born of these creatures! It’s an insult to my soul. What kinship have I with these two lumps of ignorance and superstition? They’re ugly and gross and stupid. I’m all sensitive nerves. They want to wallow in dirt.”
She closed her eyes to shut out the sight of her parents as they silently ate together, unmindful of the dirt and confusion.
“How is it possible that I lived with them and like them only four years ago? What is it in me that so quickly gets accustomed to the best? Beauty and cleanliness are as natural to me as if I’d been born on Fifth Avenue instead of in the dirt of Essex Street.”
A vision of Frank Baker passed before her. Her last long talk with him out under the trees in college still lingered in her heart. She felt that she had only to be with him again to carry forward the beautiful friendship that had sprung up between them. He had promised to come shortly to New York. How could she possibly introduce such a born and bred American to her low, ignorant, dirty parents?
“I might as well tear the thought of Frank Baker out of my heart,” she told herself. “If he just once sees the pigsty of a home I come from, if he just sees the table manners of my father and mother, he’ll fly through the ceiling.”
Timidly, Mrs. Ravinsky turned to her daughter.
“Ain’t you going to give a taste the eating?”
No answer.
“I fried the lotkes special for you——”
“I can’t stand your fried, greasy stuff.”
“Ain’t even my cooking good no more neither?” Her gnarled, hard-worked hands clutched at her breast. “God from the world, for what do I need yet any more my life? Nothing I do for my child is no use no more.”
Her head sank; her whole body seemed to shrivel and grow old with the sense of her own futility.
“How I was hurrying to run by the butcher before everybody else, so as to pick out the grandest, fattest piece of brust!” she wailed, tears streaming down her face. “And I put my hand away from my heart and put a whole fresh egg into the lotkes, and I stuffed the stove full of coal like a millionaire so as to get the lotkes fried so nice and brown; and now you give a kick on everything I done——”
“Fool woman,” shouted her husband, “stop laying yourself on the ground for your daughter to step on you! What more can you expect from a child raised up in America? What more can you expect but that she should spit in your face and make dirt from you?” His eyes, hot and dry under their lids, flashed from his wife to his daughter. “The old Jewish eating is poison to her; she must have treifah ham—only forbidden food.”
Bitter laughter shook him.
“Woman, how you patted yourself with pride before all the neighbours, boasting of our great American daughter coming home from college! This is our daughter, our pride, our hope, our pillow for our old age that we were dreaming about. This is our American teacherin! A Jew-hater, an anti-Semite we brought into the world, a betrayer of our race who hates her own father and mother like the Russian Tsar once hated a Jew. She makes herself so refined, she can’t stand it when we use the knife or fork the wrong way; but her heart is that of a brutal Cossack, and she spills her own father’s and mother’s blood like water.”
Every word he uttered seared Rachel’s soul like burning acid. She felt herself becoming a witch, a she-devil, under the spell of his accusations.
“You want me to love you yet?” She turned upon her father like an avenging fury. “If there’s any evil hatred in my soul, you have roused it with your cursed preaching.”
“Oi-i-i! Highest One! pity Yourself on us!” Mrs. Ravinsky wrung her hands. “Rachel, Yankev, let there be an end to this knife-stabbing! Gottuniu! my flesh is torn to pieces!”
Unheeding her mother’s pleading, Rachel rushed to the closet where she kept her things.
“I was a crazy idiot to think that I could live with you people under one roof.” She flung on her hat and coat and bolted for the door.
Mrs. Ravinsky seized Rachel’s arm in passionate entreaty.
“My child, my heart, my life, what do you mean? Where are you going?”
“I mean to get out of this hell of a home this very minute,” she said, tearing loose from her mother’s clutching hands.
“Woe is me! My child! We’ll be to shame and to laughter by the whole world. What will people say?”
“Let them say! My life is my own; I’ll live as I please.” She slammed the door in her mother’s face.
“They want me to love them yet,” ran the mad thoughts in Rachel’s brain as she hurried through the streets, not knowing where she was going, not caring. “Vampires, bloodsuckers fastened on my flesh! Black shadow blighting every ray of light that ever came my way! Other parents scheme and plan and wear themselves out to give their child a chance, but they put dead stones in front of every chance I made for myself.”
With the cruelty of youth to everything not youth, Rachel reasoned:
“They have no rights, no claims over me, like other parents who do things for their children. It was my own brains, my own courage, my own iron will that forced my way out of the sweatshop to my present position in the public schools. I owe them nothing, nothing, nothing.”