And Thomas Jones answered: “Isaac, I promise.”
A look of infinite content and gratitude lit up Isaac’s face. Then, rising slightly on his side, he recited in Hebrew, in a clear though feeble voice, the words of the Jewish ritual for the dying: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Blessed be the glorious name of Thy kingdom for ever and ever. Into Thy hands I deliver my spirit. Thou hast redeemed me, O Lord, God of truth.” And so he passed away.
Every year, on the anniversary of Isaac’s death, Alice, now a maiden ripening into womanhood, visits Isaac’s grave in the Jewish cemetery in Boston in which he rests; and if sincere tears and true sorrow are acceptable in the sight of God, then is her offering indeed acceptable and holy.
THE SCISSORS-GRINDER
“Scissors to grind! Knives, axes, or saws to sharpen! Everything made as sharp as new!” This is the cry, uttered in a clear and cheerful voice, which is frequently heard in the alleys and back yards as well as the streets and avenues of that vast and densely populated section of the American metropolis known as the great East Side. The man who utters it is an unusually agreeable, as well as active and energetic, representative of the classic trade of scissors-grinding. He is a pleasant-faced, good-humored young fellow, with light-brown hair and rounded, open countenance, from which a pair of bright blue eyes gaze at you with a frank and sympathetic expression. His shabby clothes hang most gracefully on his lithe and erect, not over tall figure; his motions have a sort of trained elegance about them, and when he stands before you with his grinding machine on his back, he seems not so much an humble sharpener of domestic utensils, but rather some strange sort of soldier, and the machine upon his back some peculiar and unusual engine of warfare. He is very well liked in the entire district, and his popularity brings in sufficient trade to insure him a very fair living. When his clear and musical cry is heard anywhere in the neighborhood, the customers pour forth from the many-storied tenements, the cellar dwellings (I had almost written cave dwellings, which term would hardly have rendered me liable to a suit for libel if I had used it), and the little shops and stalls which abound everywhere in the vicinity. Soon he is surrounded by a motley throng—Jews, Italians, Poles, Bohemians, men, women, and children, all sorts and conditions of mankind—who bring him a miscellaneous collection of invalid table knives, dilapidated carving knives, superannuated scissors, and antediluvian saws, all of which he is expected to heal and to restore to their pristine brightness and sharpness.
THE SCISSORS GRINDER
Page [186]
But, though our friend is well known and popular in the district, he is nevertheless unknown. By this paradoxical statement is meant that, although the scissors-grinder is personally a familiar and well-esteemed figure, nothing is known by the vast bulk of his constituents and customers of his connections, his history, or his antecedents. This is nothing strange or unusual in that section. People are not, as a rule, curious concerning each other on the East Side. The inhabitants are mostly not native to the soil, but are a chance aggregation from all the countries of the civilized world, driven from their native habitats by the storm and stress of harsh experiences and brought together in the New World by the glittering attractions of the Golden Land. It is not always advisable under such circumstances to be over-inquisitive concerning the past history of one’s neighbors and friends, and therefore the dwellers on the East Side are discreetly devoid of curiosity, and are quite content if the people with whom they associate are, in their present stage of life, decent and well behaved. That is why no one knows (or knew until recently) anything about the scissors-grinder—his history, his family, or even his name. Nevertheless his story came out some time ago, and it proved to be, what no one would have anticipated from the scissors-grinder’s blithe and pleasant appearance, a real moral tragedy, a tale of blind, mediæval oppression, of high ambition suddenly blasted, of strange and sublime heroism. It came out through Mendel Greenberger.
Mendel, who keeps a little optician shop in Orchard Street near Grand, is considerable of a character himself, and, unlike the majority of the denizens of the region, is gifted with a lively curiosity concerning the persons with whom he comes in contact. Mendel has travelled pretty much all over the world, and has acquired in the course of his wanderings the knowledge of a dozen or more languages and of at least three trades. But what he most prides himself on is his menschenkenntniss, that is, his ability to recognize at a glance the origin of strangers whom he sees for the first time, and to classify them according to the racial, religious, and social elements or subdivisions thereof to which they belong. This he infers from the appearance, conduct, and speech of the individuals concerned, and, in particularly interesting cases, he manages to have them reveal their names and other personal details of interest, but without asking direct questions, which he thinks impertinent.
When the scissors-grinder began to come into the neighborhood and Mendel began to give him employment in his vocation, he at once recognized that here was an interesting and extremely puzzling personality. It was a real problem of the kind Mendel Greenberger loved to solve, but it defied his powers of analysis and classification. For the life of him he could not make out who or what the handsome, pleasant-spoken young man, with the lowly trade apparently so unsuited for him, was. His type was absolutely non-distinctive. As far as appearance went there was no telling whether he was Jew or Gentile, and no reason to assign him to any one European nation rather than another. His conduct and manner were just as little guide, for, though polite and manifestly well-bred, he had no mannerisms of any kind. Baffled by his inability to “locate” his new acquaintance by these usually infallible indications, Mendel resorted to the expedient of addressing him in various languages. But here Mendel “tripped up,” so to speak, even more emphatically than before. The scissors-grinder spoke, with one exception, every European language which Mendel did, but with superior accent and correcter grammar. His English was that of one to the manner born, though devoid of either Cockney accent or Yankee twang; his French would have done credit to any boulevardier; his German was as faultlessly exact in construction and pronunciation as that of any compatriot of Goethe or Schiller; and as for Italian, Spanish, Russian, Polish, and Hungarian, to say nothing of the minor tongues, Bohemian, Roumanian, Servian, Greek, Turkish, he spoke them all with perfect ease and fluency. It mattered not in what tongue the puzzled Mendel addressed him, the scissors-grinder always answered in the same, but without betraying any surprise and as though it were the natural and to-be-expected thing to speak any and every idiom in existence. But, as already stated, there was one exception to the polyglot ability of the scissors-grinder. He did not know Yiddish, for when Mendel addressed him in that tongue, he did not understand him well and answered in German, the tongue most nearly related to the dialect of the Jews of the Slavonic lands, and without using any Hebrew words or phrases with which even the German Jews habitually interlard their speech. Mendel had to confess to himself that the scissors-grinder was an enigma, which even he, with his great knowledge of human beings, could not solve. Of two things, however, he felt certain: first, that the scissors-grinder was originally of far higher social station than his humble vocation would suggest, for his manners and bearing, and, above all, his extraordinary linguistic attainments, were only explainable on the ground of refined surroundings and the best of education; secondly, that he was no Jew, for his ignorance of Yiddish and Hebrew and his manifest unfamiliarity with Jewish ideas and usages showed conclusively that he had had no Jewish bringing up nor had ever associated intimately with Jewish circles.