RUSSO-JEWISH EDUCATION
AMONG the Jews of Poland and Russia there was no learned estate, not because there were no scholars, but because the people itself was a nation of students. The ideal type for the Russian Jew was the Lamdan, the scholar. The highest ambition of the Russian Jew was that his sons, and if he had only daughters, that his sons-in-law should be Lomdim; and the greatest achievement of a man’s life was his ability to provide sufficiently for them, so that, relieved from economic cares, they might devote themselves unrestrictedly to Jewish learning. To be sure, this learning was one-sided. Yet it was both wide and deep, for it embraced the almost boundless domain of religious Hebrew literature, and involved the knowledge of one of the most complicated systems of law. The knowledge of the Hebrew prayers and the Five Books of Moses would not have been sufficient to save the Russian Jew from the most terrible opprobrium—that of being an Am-Haaretz, an ignoramus. The ability to understand a Talmudic text, which demands years of preparation, was the minimum requirement for one who wanted to be of any consequence in the community.
I. FRIEDLANDER, 1913.
PASSOVER IN OLD RUSSIA[33]
THE Passover season, when we celebrated our deliverance from the land of Egypt, and felt so glad and thankful as if it had only just happened, was the time our Gentile neighbours chose to remind us that Russia was another Egypt. It was not so bad within the Pale; but in Russian cities, and even more in the country districts, where Jewish families lived scattered by special permission of the police, who were always changing their minds about letting them stay, the Gentiles made the Passover a time of horror for the Jews. Somebody would start up that lie about murdering Christian children, and the stupid peasants would get mad about it, and fill themselves with vodka, and set out to kill the Jews. They attacked them with knives and clubs, and scythes and axes, killed them or tortured them, and burned their houses. This was called a ‘pogrom’. Jews who escaped the pogroms came with wounds on them, and horrible, horrible stories of little babies torn limb from limb before their mother’s eyes. Only to hear these things made one sob and sob and choke with pain. People who saw such things never smiled any more, no matter how long they lived; and sometimes their hair turned white in a day, and some people became insane on the spot.
MARY ANTIN, 1911.
THE POGROM
OCTOBER, 1905
IT had already lasted two days. But as nobody dined, nobody exchanged greetings, and nobody thought of winding up the clock for the night (for people slept dressed, anywhere, on lofts, in sheds, or in empty railway carriages), all notion of time had disappeared. People only heard the incessant jingling of broken glass-panes. At this terrible sound, the arms stiffened and the eyes became distended with fright.
Some distant houses were burning. Along the red-tinted street with the red pavement, there ran by a red man, whilst another red man stretched his arm, and from the tips of his fingers there broke forth quickly a sharp, snapping, cracking sound—and the running man dropped down.
A strange, sharp cry, ‘They are shoo-ooting!’ passed along the street.
Invisible and inexorable demons made their appearance. Houses and nurseries were broken in. Old men had their arms fractured; women’s white bosoms were trampled upon by heavy, dirty heels. Many were perishing by torture; others were burnt alive.
Two persons were hiding in a dark cellar; an old man with his son, a schoolboy. The old man went up and opened the outer door again, to make the place look deserted by the owners. A merchant had run in. He wept, not from fear but from feeling himself in security.
‘I have a son like you’, he said, tearfully.
He then breathed heavily and nervously, and added reflectively, ‘Like you, my boy, yes!’
The master of the house caught the merchant by his elbow, pulled him close to himself, and whispered into his ear:
‘Hush! They might hear us!’
There they stood, expectant. Now and then, a rustling; an even, sleepless breathing could be heard. The brain cannot familiarize itself with these sounds in the darkness and silence. Perhaps they were asleep, none could tell.
At night—it must have been late at night—another two stole in quietly.
‘Is it you?’ asked one of them, without seeing anybody, and the sudden sound of his voice seemed to light up the darkness for a moment.
‘Yes’, answered the schoolboy. ‘It’s all right!’
‘Hush! They might hear you’, said the owner of the cellar, catching each of them by the arm and pulling them down.
The new-comers placed themselves by the wall, while one of them was rubbing his forehead with his hand.
‘What is the matter?’ asked the schoolboy in a whisper.
‘It is blood.’
Then they grew silent. The injured man applied a handkerchief to his wound, and became quiet. There followed again a thick silence, untroubled by time. Again a sleepless breathing!
On the top, underneath the ceiling, a very faint whiteness appeared. The schoolboy was asleep, but the other four raised their heads and looked up. They looked long, for about half an hour, so that their muscles were aching through the protracted craning of their necks. At last it became clear thatit was a tiny little window through which dawn peeped in.
Then hasty, frightened steps were heard, and there appeared a tall, coatless man, followed by a woman with a baby in her arms. The dawn was advancing, and one could read the expression of wild fear that stamped itself upon their faces.
‘This way! This way!’ whispered the man.
‘They are running after us, they are looking out for us’, said the woman. Her shoes were put on her bare feet, and her young body displayed strange, white, malignant spots, reminding one of a corpse.
‘They won’t find us; but, for God’s sake, be quiet!’
‘They are close by in the courtyard. Oh! be quiet, be quiet....’
The wounded man got hold of the merchant and the owner by the hand, while the merchant seized the man who had no coat. There they stood, forming a live chain, looking on at the mother with her baby.
All of a sudden there broke out a strange though familiar sound, so close and doomful. What doom it foreboded they felt at once, but their brains were loath to believe it.
The sound was repeated. It was the cry of the infant. The merchant made a kindly face and said: ‘Baby is crying....’
‘Lull him, my dear’, said he, rushing to the mother. ‘You will cause the death of us all.’
Everybody’s chest and throat gasped with faintness. The mother marched up and down the cellar lulling and coaxing.
‘You must not cry; sleep, my golden one ... It is I, your mother ... my heart....’
But the child cried on obstinately, wildly. There must have been something in the mother’s face that was not calculated to produce a tranquilizing effect.
And now, in this warm and strange underground atmosphere, the woman’s brain wrenched out a wild, mad, idea. It seemed to her that she had read it in the eyes, in the suffering silence of these unknown people. And these unhappy, frightened men understood that she was thinking of them. They understood it by the unutterably mournful tenderness with which she chanted, while drinking in the infant’s eyes with her own.
‘He will soon fall asleep. I know. It is always like that; he cries for a moment, then he falls asleep at once. He is a very quiet boy.’ She addressed the tall man with a painful, insinuating smile. From outside there broke in a distant noise. Then came a thud, and a crack, shaking the air.
‘They are searching’, whispered the schoolboy.
But the infant went on crying hopelessly.
‘He will undo us all’, blurted out the tall man.
‘I shall not give him away ... no, never!’ ejaculated the distracted mother.
‘O God’, whispered the merchant, and covered his face with his hands. His hair was unkempt after a sleepless night. The tall man stared at the infant with fixed, protruding eyes....
‘I don’t know you’, the woman uttered, low and crossly, on catching that fixed look. ‘Who are you? What do you want of me?’
She rushed to the other men, but everybody drew back from her with fear. The infant was crying on, piercing the brain with its shouting.
‘Give it to me’, said the merchant, his right eyebrow trembling. ‘Children like me.’
All of a sudden it grew dark in the cellar; somebody had approached the little window and was listening. At this shadow, breaking in so suddenly, they all grew quiet. They felt that it was coming, it was near, and that not another second must be lost.
The mother turned round. She stood up on her toes, and with high, uplifted arms she handed over her child to the merchant. It seemed to her that by this gesture she was committing a terrible crime ... that hissing voices were cursing her, rejecting her from heaven for ever and ever....
Strange to say, finding itself in the thick, clumsy, but loving hands of the merchant, the child grew silent.
But the mother interpreted this silence differently. In sight of everybody the woman grew grey in a single moment, as if they had poured some acid over her hair. And as soon as the child’s cry died away, there resounded another cry, more awful, more shattering and heart-rending.
The mother rose up on her toes; and grey, terrible, like the goddess of justice herself, she howled in a desperate, inhuman voice that brought destruction with it.... Nobody had expected that sudden madness. The schoolboy fell in a swoon.
Afterwards, the newspapers reported details of the killing of six men and an infant by the mob; for none had dared to touch the mad old woman of twenty-six.
OSSIP DYMOV, 1906.