I wonder whether you ever struggled as I struggled, whether you suffered just as I suffered. There is no picture of you. I often wished that I could see your features and read in them the story of your inner life. Mother always looked more longingly into my face than into the faces of the other children. They said she spoiled me because I looked like you. Sometimes I think I feel you in me—some one—not quite myself—sometimes many who are not myself—is it you? Is it you, father, and all the passing generations? Is it a race? Is this the way we live on—in one another? Is this the way we bless or curse the world? I am much I do not wish to be. I do more I do not wish to do. How much am I just myself? How much you? How much this strong, pathetic race to which I belong, against whose ill I have striven, whose good I have not always understood, whose ignominy I have had to share? I tried to run away from that inheritance, father; I did not understand when I rode past your grave that morning in the omnibus—a little boy, packed in among Magyar, Slav, Lutheran and Catholic, who hated me because I was your son.
I have travelled in many an omnibus since. I have seen greater griefs than mine. I now laugh at that pathetic little boy in the omnibus; others will do the same—but although I laugh at that little boy I do not understand. I cannot understand.
One thing you have not left me. One thing which neither you nor your father nor your race nor any one has left me—is hate. If it was ever in me—lurking somewhere—she loved it out of me—your wife, my mother.
XXII
A BACKWARD LOOK
FROM some ancestor, perhaps from my race, I inherited an abnormal sensitiveness. Even as a child I felt instinctively the attitude of people towards me. Consequently, situated as I was in an atmosphere charged with race antagonism, I suffered constantly and often, of course, needlessly. Therefore my childhood seems blurred, as if I were looking at it through a dark cloud, or through eyes misty from tears. Yet there was a bright side to it which should be recalled now, if only in justice to the racial group that composed my close environment.
I never suffered from hunger or cold or from lack of all the affection that my love-hungry nature demanded. If our home had no pictures, my mother’s face was beautiful to look upon, and when her blue eyes sought mine I experienced emotions which I recalled vividly in later days, when looking into the face of Murillo’s St. Elizabeth. My mother’s was that type of maternal face, furrowed early by the pain of widowhood; the eyes were deeply set and overarched by heavy brows. She had a sensitive aquiline nose and such sweet, well-formed lips that even the loss of her teeth in later years could not disfigure them. She was not what we call an educated woman; for, in her day, girls were not taught anything outside the prayer-book; but she was so cultured that I often wondered where she got her wisdom. The two virtues which she constantly practiced were: contentment and charity. One of her favourite maxims which I remember was: “Never despise those beneath you and never envy those above you.”
Although she was brought up in the atmosphere of the Ghetto, when even that was no safe abiding place, and her parents had to bribe officials from week to week to live in peace, her nature had nothing false in it and nothing narrow. While she was a faithful Jewess, she early differentiated between the form of religion and its spirit, discarding many of the ceremonials which seemed to her useless and unethical.
She abhorred the hypocrite but pitied the wayward. She was so pure-minded that I never heard a vulgar word spoken in our family circle, in spite of the fact that we lived in a most realistic atmosphere, surrounded by many immoral men and women. She was a Puritan at heart, never allowing a playing card in the home and very rarely permitting us the use of wine, although it was always in the cellar. Yet with the increasing luxuries of life as they came to her in later years, she learned to enjoy the beautiful in many forms and yielded to the social demands of the time. She never gossiped or made purely formal calls. She was so busy from morning until night that she could not enjoy leisure when it came, voluntarily assuming the care of grandchildren. When finally her sight failed and she could do nothing, she grieved so because of her enforced idleness that it hastened her death.
My brothers were much older than I, and I did not know them as children. They never permitted me to forget that I was growing up without a father’s care, and that they were willing and able to provide all the harsher elements which such care is supposed to afford. No doubt I deserved all they gave me although I am sure I never enjoyed it. I suppose little brothers were made to be tyrannized over by the older ones, especially when the father is not living.
When I say that my older sister was just like my mother I give her ample praise, and when I say that my younger sister was like my brothers, I mean that it took time and better judgment than I had as a child, to appreciate her. Neither she nor her brothers understood their oversensitive relative.