“Oh, this kind of talk is really enough to drive one mad. The whole country is choking for breath, and here you are worrying over the Jewish question. But then—since when have you been interested in the Jews and their ‘question?’”
“Whether I have or not, I never helped to aggravate it as those ‘heroes’ of yours do. If there are some few rights which the Jew still enjoys, they, too, will be taken away from him on account of that new-fangled heroism which has turned your head.”
“Nobody has any ‘rights.’ Everybody is trampled upon, everybody. That’s what those ‘scamps’ are struggling to do away with.”
“Everybody has to die for that matter, yet who cares to die an unnatural death? If the Jews were oppressed like all others and no more, it would be another matter, but they are not. Theirs is an unnatural oppression.”
“Well, that’s what those ‘scamps’ are struggling for: to do away with every sort of oppression. Would you have the Jews keep out of that struggle? Would you have them take care of their own precious skins, and later on, when life becomes possible in Russia, to come in for a share of the fruit of a terrible fight that they carefully stayed away from?”
“Those are dreams, Clara. Dreams and phrases, phrases and dreams. That’s all you have learned of your new friends. Do you deny the existence of a Jewish question?”
She scrutinised his face in the grey half-tones of the gathering dawn and said calmly:
“Look here, Volodia, you know you are seizing at this ‘Jewish question’ as a drowning man does at a straw. You know you have no more interest in it than I have.”
“I am certainly not delighted to see it exist, if that’s what you mean.”
“May I be frank with you, Volodia? All the Jews of the world might cease to exist, for all you care.”