“Aye! Aye!” the townspeople said. “Who would have thought that one of us should come from America!”
That same day the brass-bound trunk was brought to our house, for mother took pity on the homeless man and told him to stay with us. She hoped to keep him from drinking palenka and eating pork. The latter was not difficult, but the palenka—that was impossible.
“The brass-bound trunk no doubt holds his treasures,” the neighbours said. Treasures indeed! His discharge from the army, which was framed and hung over his bed, a second suit of blue, a huge flag—the Stars and Stripes—a history of the Civil War in German, a book called “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and the picture of a sad-faced man.
Every day I heard about the land of freedom from one who had been there, the German book I soon knew by heart, the flag I learned to love, and Abraham Lincoln, the sad-faced man, took the place of our patriarch Abraham in my heart and imagination.
“How is it,” I asked the old soldier, “that this man, who was a Christian, was called Abraham?”
“My boy,” he said, “he was a Christian; but he was as good a Jew as the patriarch Abraham. The great lawgiver, Moses, led his own people out of bondage; this man led a strange, African race out of slavery.” Then he read and translated to me “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and I have never forgotten a single incident in that vivid story. So thoroughly was I imbued by its spirit, that I gathered a group of boys to whom I preached my first revolutionary sermon. I pictured to them the sufferings of our poor and the harshness of our government as typified by the vicious judge and the cruel and venal police. I tried to exact an oath from the boys to help me free these peasant slaves and, if necessary, fight the judge and the police.
Fortunately for the government, my classmates would not enthuse; instead, they told the teacher, who tried to whip my revolutionary ideas out of me, and when I reached home almost too sore to walk, I found great comfort in looking into the sad face of Abraham Lincoln, my patron saint and the inspirer of my passion for the common people.
“Uncle Joe,” as the old soldier wished to be called, drank palenka heavily and almost constantly; the three-quarters of a man wasted away until he was scarcely half a man, and we knew and he knew that the end was not far away. I was in his room one Saturday afternoon; my mother sat beside him holding his thin, bony hand and he was quite sober, as I believe he had not often been since coming to us.
“You think I am a bad man,” he said to my mother. “I drink, I smoke on the Sabbath, I do not lay the phylacteries. I am a bad man; but I have fought, I have suffered cold and hunger and I have fallen into bad habits.
“I think God will forgive me. I know He will if He is anything like Abraham Lincoln. He forgave me once. I was about to be shot,” he whispered hoarsely. “He forgave me, and when I come before Jehovah I shall call for Abraham Lincoln. He spoke a good word for me once—he will do it again.”