Comrade Yetta

by Albert Edwards

Much of the gentle wisdom which her father preached to the little shopful of listeners Yetta did not fully understand. But for nine years, from the time she was six till she reached fifteen, it was the lullaby to which, every night, she fell asleep, perched on her high stool, her head on his shoulder. Much of it sank in.

This is to be the story of how little Yetta Rayefsky grew up into useful happiness. But her father's influence was the thing, more than all else, that differentiated her from thousands of other East Side girls. Without Benjamin's story, hers would be incomprehensible.

His father had been a man of means in the Russian town of Kovna. But Benjamin, the only son, had no talent for trade; he was of the type of Jews who dream. And he loved books. The library facilities of the Kovna Ghetto were limited, but he read everything on which he could lay hands. From his youth up he knew and loved the Psalms and the more poetic sections of the Prophets. The age-old beauty of the Hebrew literature was a never failing spring at which he refreshed his soul. He had also read the novels of Gogol, Korolenko, and Dostoiefsky, and the few books he could find on history and science.

A strange sort of cosmography had grown out of this ill-assorted reading. He took the Prophecies seriously and looked forward with abiding faith to the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth. Like most deeply religious people he was not strictly orthodox. He scrupulously observed the forms of Hebraic ritualism, but his real inspiration came from King David rather than from scribes who compiled the Talmud or the Rabbis who minutely interpreted the Torah. He had much sympathy with the Zionists, for they also had ardent faith in the Promises, but he took no interest in the geographical aspects of their aspirations. The Messiah, when he came, would establish His reign over all the earth. He also believed, as did the Zionists, that the Jews were the light-bearers of the human family, but he considered them a People chosen for special service—not for peculiar favors.

Added to this hoary mysticism was a very disjointed idea of world's history and a crude conception of Evolution. He believed that God's purpose with the Race was being worked out through the development of Democracy—which he understood to be another word for loving-kindness and brotherhood. He had never seen Democracy. He knew nothing of the crimes committed in its name; he had no conception of the modern Plutocracy, which is everywhere in a life-and-death struggle with Democracy—and as often as not seems to be winning the fight.

This vague idealization of Democracy was stimulated by the rare letters from his sister Martha in New York. While Benjamin was still a lad she had married David Goldstein, a ne'er-do-weel of the community, and with her dowry they had emigrated. The poor woman could hardly be blamed if she hid from her family the cruel realities of her life. She wrote what she thought would please them. As her imagination was limited, she borrowed her metaphors from the Scriptures and had milk and honey flowing down the Bowery. Benjamin often illuminated his talks on the Promised Land by references to the freedom and justice of America. It was not hard for him to believe in a Utopia. It did not seem too much to ask that all men should be as unselfish and gentle as himself.

Living thus in his dreams he grew to manhood. In the early twenties he married. His wife, fortunately, had common sense enough for two, and protected his patrimony from waste. The first child they named Benjamin, and a few years later Yetta was born.

The father held a privileged position in the Jewish community. His pure, unworldly life, his ever ready sympathy, his learning and homely wisdom, had earned him the rank of a saint. There were some, of course, who shook their heads over his dreamings. With so much money to start with, they said, he might have become rich—perhaps a "merchant of the first class." But every one loved him. The women came to him with their troubles, and even the busiest, most careworn men liked to sit for a while and hear him recite the sonorous prophecies and talk of the Kingdom which is to come.

It was in 1890 that Benjamin and his daughter were torn loose from their anchorage. The affair lacked the proportions of the later and more formal Jew-killings of Kishineff and Odessa. The cause of the outbreak was never explained, but we, who lynch negroes on so slight provocation, may not throw stones. Unexpectedly a mob—the scum of the Christian quarter—rushed into the Ghetto. At first they were intent on loot, but the hooligans had had to drink much vodka to generate sufficient courage to attack the defenceless Jews. Passions so stimulated cannot be controlled, and soon the mob was engaged in murder and rape. Benjamin went out on the street to reason with them. They left him for dead.

It was several weeks before he regained his consciousness. An ugly scar stretched from above his left eye to his ear. Many of his friends held that he never quite recovered from that wound, for as long as he lived he sometimes spoke of his wife and his son Benjamin as though they were still alive. But such lapses of memory happened rarely; generally he remembered that they had been buried while he was in the hospital. He had only Yetta left. He would surely have gone mad if he had lived on among the memories of Kovna. So he had emigrated to join his sister in the Happy Valley of America.