Where other children find roses on their path, and the blue sky of golden youth is for ever smiling down upon them, I found nothing but thorns, privation, and misery. It soon became evident that our stepfather, as already mentioned, although a good-hearted man, possessed none of those qualities which everybody needs in the struggle of life; how much more, then, a man who has a whole family dependent upon him! The small capital which my mother had brought with her from St. Georghen soon dwindled away. Poverty entered the house and peace departed, and the children had to suffer much through the mother's ever-increasing despondency. The public-house had to be given up, and we tried a fresh departure, viz., the sale of leeches. This was a sort of family trade of the Fleischmanns in Duna Szerdahely, or rather a miserable sort of hawker's business. The brothers Fleischmann bought from the peasants the leeches found in abundance in the neighbouring swamps, and after sorting them they sold them to the apothecaries of Northern Hungary.
At a very early age I was initiated into the details of the trade. The leeches had to be sorted according to size, and put in linen bags about 40 centimeters long; they were bathed twice in the twenty-four hours, an operation at which the children assisted, but I had great difficulty in overcoming a feeling of repugnance when I had to separate the wretched creatures from the slimy substance. It happened sometimes that the leeches escaped in the night from the bag, if it had not been securely enough fastened, and crawled about in the room which served us all as bedroom. As we children had to sleep on the floor, for lack of a bedstead, sometimes the one, sometimes the other of us would wake with a sudden fright, for the hungry animals used to get hold of our toes, or some other member, and quietly begin to suck. Then, of course, there was a general commotion; the creatures had to be searched for with a light, and replaced in the bag. The tragi-comedy of these nocturnal scenes highly amused us children.
The weal and the woe of the family, which meanwhile had increased from four to six and seven, depended entirely upon the demand for, and the price of, leeches. In Hungary, bleeding was still in fashion, but as medical science in its steady growth began to prohibit all methods for reducing the blood, the demand for leeches necessarily became less; and as their value decreased, the poverty in our home increased. The rosy days of childhood were for me days of suffering and privation and want. Sometimes the pinch of poverty was terrible to bear, especially when my stepfather was on one of his hawking tours, which often took weeks. Then, when the money he had left behind had come to an end, we had to live on black bread, potatoes cooked in various ways, beans, peas, and lentils. Coffee and milk were luxuries, and meat we only had in very small portions on Saturdays and feast-days. Many a time we had not even bread, and I have a lively recollection of the queer manner in which we managed to get hold of some. Our house, a poor, dilapidated little place on a level with the ground, stood at the extreme end of the little town, on the borders of a willow-grove, and close to the large piece of waste ground where wandering gipsies used to set up their black tents. Thus at a very early age I became interested in gipsy life. I distinctly remember the camp of these brown children of the East. Some of them were almost naked, others dressed in rags, but never failed to display large silver buttons on their tattered garments. My first impressions of nomadic life I received through these people. They belonged to the tribe known in Hungary as the "Wallachian Gipsies," a remarkable people, wilder and more lawless than the half-civilised tribes. They lived by stealing, fortune-telling, and tinkering, and were so hardened that in the bitterest weather they would camp in the open. The next morning the children would be packed into a kind of feather-bed, which was slung over the horse's head, forming bags on either side; and so the journey was resumed, the mother generally sitting on the horse, the bigger boys and the men going on foot.
The road leading to the villages situated on the island Schütt, between Duna Szerdahely and Komorn, went past our house, and as on Fridays all the beggars of the neighbourhood were allowed to beg for alms of any description in the market-places, mendicants of all ages and both sexes might be seen on such days making their way past our house towards those places. The picture of the horrible, motley caravan of feigned and real cripples, blind, dumb, and lame folks, of lepers and paralytics, in their dirty, tattered garments, fills me with dismay even now. The phantoms of the past are ever before my eyes. And it was with these miserable, offensive creatures that I had to barter on Friday afternoons for the bread and other victuals they had collected during the day—money seldom came their way—in exchange for one or two bottles of brandy. It was indeed a bitter piece of bread, grudgingly bestowed by dirty, sickly hands. Nevertheless, it was welcome food to us in our starving condition. In my earliest youth I made the acquaintance of that terrible spectre, hunger, and even in subsequent stages of my life he has often been my companion; my battles with this monster were certainly not amongst the lightest I have had to fight.
In spite of everything I grew up strong and healthy, and, with the exception of one illness when I was three years old—and of which I have some remembrance, because my mother, in obedience to a superstition prevalent in Hungary, sold me for a few kreuzer to another woman, in the hope that God would ward off the impending danger, and be moved to clemency towards the possibly sinless new mother—I have not known a day's illness in the whole of my life. From early spring till late autumn I went about generally barefooted and scantily clothed. In the summer I slept by preference in the yard, under the overhanging roof of our house, instead of in the close bedroom, and I slept so soundly that not even a thunderstorm roused me until my naked feet were soaking wet with the pouring rain. My rosy, chubby cheeks, my bright, black eyes, and my curly hair found favour with the women folk; and whenever I came in the market-place the farmers' wives petted and fondled me, and always made the same remark, "Pity the little Jew is crooked." Personally, I did not trouble much about this bodily defect. With my crutch tucked under the left arm, I went about quite happily, and even tried to run races with my companions. But when I had to give up the race on account of my lame leg, and came home crying, my mother used to comfort me with the words: "My child, thou wilt do better than any of thy companions, but thou must have patience and perseverance."
My bodily affliction, however, was a grievous thorn in my mother's eye. Her vanity was wounded, and her one aim and object was to rid me of the evil. What has she not done to effect this? The ways and means by which she endeavoured to cure me pass all description. The most out-of-the-way remedies and magic cures were resorted to. I was not only bathed in various kinds of herbs, rubbed with all possible and imaginable salves and greases, but the strangest magic charms were tried at my expense. And when everything failed I was placed at midnight at the crossing of the road, to fall under the spell of passing old gipsy women. But worst of all were the experiments of miracle-mongers or quacks. At one time one such appeared in the shape of a Catholic priest, in the village of Rudnó, in North Hungary, and no sooner had my mother heard of him than she left the family in charge of her relatives, and undertook the long, laborious journey to find him. As there were no railways, we travelled on foot, a charitable farmer sometimes giving us a lift on his loaded cart. And so we trudged on for many weary days, until the wretched little village was reached. My poor destitute mother had to slip a fee into the hand of the landlady of this clerical charlatan before we could be admitted, but the gentleman of the black cowl did not waste many words with his patients. He casually looked at my crooked leg, wrote a prescription—the apothecary being partner in this holy business—and I was dismissed with the promise of a speedy recovery. Even to this day I marvel how my mother, a thoroughly clever, capable woman—although she could neither read nor write—was so desperately entangled in the meshes of superstition, and that no amount of disillusion could save her from falling into the same error again.
The uselessness of the Rudnó prescription was still fresh in our minds, when the fame of a new Wonder-doctor in the village of Gròb, in the Neutraer county, was spread abroad, and my mother at once set out again. The miraculous cure-worker this time was not a priest, but an ordinary, ignorant peasant who could neither read nor write. We went to see him at his farm, and when he heard that there was good wine to be had in Duna Szerdahely, he at once offered to go home with us to effect the cure. A cure indeed! So barbarously cruel and drastic was the remedy, that no man with any proper feeling would have subjected an animal to it. For five days running my leg had to be held over hot vapours every morning for a certain length of time to soften the sinews and fibres, as the peasant-doctor explained. Then on the sixth day the great operation took place. My mother was sent out of the house, and I was made to lie down on the floor, two strong gipsies acting as assistants, holding me tight, the one by the shoulders, the other by the feet. Then the peasant threw himself with all his weight upon the crippled knee, which formed almost a right angle. A terrible crash—and I knew no more. When I came to myself again, my poor weeping mother was on her knees beside me. She caressed me and gave me something to drink. The injured leg was now put between rough wooden splints and tightly bandaged. Curative measures of this kind were in vogue in Hungary in 1836, and they are so still, not only in Hungary, but in other countries of civilised Europe! Of course the operation was without success. When the splints were removed, and I could go about again, the old mischief returned, the crutch had again to be resorted to, and I have gone through life limping, not altogether to my disadvantage, as the subsequent pages will show.
Apart from this bodily defect I enjoyed good health as a child, notwithstanding the chary and very primitive nourishment I received, and in spite of the many miseries to which I was exposed on account of insufficient clothing. Sometimes I was inclined to envy the better lot of my schoolfellows and companions, and was unhappy in consequence, but this early hardening process was the very best training I could have had for my later career. The sufferings and privations I had later to bear as Mohammedan mendicant friar seemed to me not much harder nor more trying than what I had to go through in my youth.
This much as regards my physical bringing up. As for my intellectual accomplishments, the reader must first be made acquainted with the literary demands which, to the Orthodox Jew of those days, were inseparable from a righteous and God-fearing life. Just as the Mohammedan understands by learning merely religious knowledge, by erudition merely a thorough acquaintance with the Koran and ritualistic observances, and sees the ideal of education only in theological accomplishments, so also the Jew regards a knowledge of the Holy Scriptures as the only essential thing, and the study of the Talmud is his chief accomplishment. Young lads, therefore, are first of all taught to read Hebrew, and when they have become familiar with the letters of the foreign tongue, they proceed to translate the Hebrew text according to a very primitive method. They are told a few words here and there, and have to make out the sense as best they can. Then, as a third stage, they come to the grammar, the actual study of the language. Schools in general were conducted much on the same primitive principle. Any Jew with a sufficient knowledge of the Holy Scriptures was authorised to set up an educational establishment, and the success of the school depended in most cases upon the greatest number of successful pupils and on the smallness of the school fees. The pedagogic talent of the teacher also carried some weight, i.e., whether he made much or little use of the birch rod; for the schools where stripes and swollen cheeks were not so frequent were naturally favoured by soft-hearted mothers. I received my elementary education in a third-rate school; but an inborn brightness of intellect and good memory enabled me soon to rise above my schoolfellows, and I was qualified to enter the best-known school of the place at a much reduced fee. I learned with pleasure and facility, and had a special liking for learning by heart. I had but to read a Hebrew text two or three times to be able to say it off by heart without much prompting. The teacher had noticed this, and of course my mother knew it, for she used to say, "His father was a great scholar, he is bound to have plenty of brains."
Nevertheless she kept me rigorously at my lessons, and when I went to bed I had to put my books, often big folios, under my pillow, "for," said my mother, "knowledge will get into thine head over night, right through the bolster," which I believed literally. Yes, my mother was a remarkable woman. Blind superstition and rare common sense alternated in her. She had a most extraordinary energy, and was a type of the Jewess of the Middle Ages, full of ancient principles and maxims, sometimes showing themselves in a tenacious clinging to the old faith, sometimes conforming to existing circumstances. If there was a thunderstorm in the night she would quickly make a light, open the Bible at the Creation story, and exclaim, "Behold, O God, Thou hast created the world, destroy not Thine own handiwork." Her memory was marvellous. She could remember the smallest details of her early childhood, and told me often what her mother had said to her about the Frenchmen after the battle of Austerlitz. How they overran the country in the neighbourhood of Lundenburg, and how the grenadiers forced their way into the houses, crying for "Café! Café, sacré nom de Dieu!" I think I must have inherited my memory from my mother.