“Oh, I would have you spanked,” the little doctor snarled smilingly. Whereupon several of the bystanders also smiled.
“Hold on, doctor. I spanked myself. Well, the Gentile was not hard to persuade, though when we got at my place he was rather hard to please. He kept me plucking caps from the ceiling until the very pole in my hand got tired of the job. At last he was suited. I thought he would ask how much. He didn’t. He did say something, but that was about anti-Jewish riots. ‘This cap will do,’ he then said, ‘Good-bye old man,’ and made for the door. And when I rushed after him and asked for the money he turned on me and stuck the biggest fig[D] you ever saw into my face. Since then when I see the good looks of a Gentile spoiled by a horrid old cap I try not to take it to heart.”
The doctor laughed. “And you let him go without paying?” he asked.
“I should say I did. I was glad he didn’t ask for the change.”
Another man confessed to having had an experience of this kind, a customer having exacted from him change from a ruble which he had never paid him.
“He was a tough looking customer, and he made a rumpus, so I thought to myself, ‘Is this the first time I have been out of some cash? Let him go hang himself.’ And the scoundrel, he gave me a laugh, called me accursed Jew into the bargain and went his way.”
“Did you ask him to call again?” the cap-maker demanded, and noticing Clara’s father by his side, he added: “This is not the way Rabbi Rachmiel’s wife does business, is it? She would make him pay her the dollar and the change, too.”
The doctor burst into laughter, the others echoing it noisily. Only Vladimir’s face wore a look of restless gravity. It was the restlessness of a man who is trying to nerve himself up to a first public speech. His heart was full of something which he was aching to say to these people, to unburden himself of, but his courage failed him to take the word. Presently a man too timid to seek information in the centre of the assembly addressed a whispered inquiry to Vladimir and Vladimir’s answer attracted the attention of two or three bystanders. Gradually a little colony branched off from the main body. He was telling them what he knew from the newspapers about the latest anti-Jewish outbreaks in various towns; and speaking in a very low voice and in the simplest conversational accents, he gradually passed to what weighed on his heart. He knew Yiddish very well indeed, yet he had considerable difficulty in speaking it, his chief impediment lying in his inability to render the cultured language in which he thought into primitive speech. His Yiddish was full of Russian and German therefore, but some of his listeners understood it all, while the rest missed but an occasional phrase.
“People like myself—those who have studied at the gymnasia and universities”—he went on in a brooding, plaintive undertone, “feel the misery of it all the more keenly because we have been foolish enough to imagine ourselves Russians, and to keep aloof from our own people. Many of us feel like apologising to every poor suffering Jew in Russia, to beg his forgiveness, to implore him to take us back. We were ashamed to speak Yiddish. We thought we were Russians. We speak the language of the Gentiles, and we love it so dearly; we have adopted their ways and customs; we love their literature; everything Russian is so dear to us; why should it not be? Is not this our birthplace? But the more we love it, the more we try to be like Russians, the more they hate us. My uncle, Rabbi Rachmiel, says it is too late to do penance. Well, I do feel like a man who comes to confess his sins and to do penance. It is the blood and the tears of our brothers and sisters that are calling to us to return to our people. And now we see how vain our efforts are to be Russians. There was a great Jew whose name was Heinrich Heine.” (Two of the men manifested their acquaintance with the name by a nod.) “He was a great writer of poetry. So he once wrote about his mother—how he had abandoned her and sought the love of other women. But he failed to find love anywhere, until ultimately he came to the conclusion that the only woman in whom he was sure of love was his own dear mother. This is the way I feel now. I scarcely ever saw the inside of a synagogue before, but now I, like the doctor, belong here. It is not a question of religion. I am not religious and cannot be. But I am a Jew and we all belong together. And when a synagogue happens to stand on a site like this——”