Of none of my kinsfolk and of few among the Jews I knew, had I cause to be ashamed. All my mother’s relatives lived in Vienna, which was our legal home. They were intelligent, industrious people, gentle natures, most of them; too honest to grow very rich and too provident to grow poor. I have already spoken of my father’s brother and my grandmother, and fear that I have done them scant justice. From my father’s side comes the strong religious strain in us; an almost fanatical sense of righteousness, a great deal of hot, uncontrollable temper, and with it unusual fluency of expression.
The grandmother I referred to I knew only as a bedridden old woman, crippled by rheumatism. She outlived her husband, who left her with four sons, all but one of them dying before she was called to her well-earned rest. She favoured my uncle’s children and bequeathed them all her earthly possessions. I have never felt envious; for after all, the things that are worth inheriting from our forefathers cannot be taken from us by will or testament.
Among all the Jews I knew, there were just three whom I should now regard as bad men—they were swindlers and usurers; they committed or were capable of committing perjuries; but every one of them, and their children also, have suffered the consequences. The vast majority were hard-working, honest and scarcely well-to-do people, with a small fringe of very poor and paupers at the social edge; enough to teach the rest the virtue of charity. Their children, my contemporaries, I meet all the way from Chicago to Constantinople. All of them are good citizens, and some of them occupy large places of usefulness.
As a whole I should say that the Jewish community stood, intellectually, far above the other racial and religious groups; that in the personal virtues, such as chastity and charity, they surpassed them, and that in striking a just balance they certainly were not morally inferior to them.
The unfortunate thing was and still is, that the Gentiles had no understanding of the fine qualities of the Jews and that the Jews never properly appraised the real value of their Gentile neighbours. From my present vantage ground I can see many sinners among all of them, and some saints in each group. Humanly, all of them are so much alike that I can see no difference.
This is what I suppose I felt in my race unconscious days, and when I woke to consciousness, I rebelled against the artificial barriers, suffering much and no doubt causing others to suffer. I was eager to leave home because I supposed that in the larger world there was a larger view of life, and when the driver told us all to get out and walk up the Oresco Hill, I climbed it with joy; for I thought it led to those heights.
XXIII
THE SYNAGOGUE
“BEYOND the hill there are also people” is a German proverb whose meaning is obvious, yet the people “beyond the hill” are strangers and foreigners; here home ends and the world begins. From the hilltop the whole valley lay in panoramic view—the town, the clinging villages, the winding river and the encircling mountains—this was home. I knew each path and roadway; knew, by the sound of the bell, the village and church from which it came; sheep and cattle were of a certain breed; horses were harnessed in a peculiar way; the peasants of each village had their own picturesque style of garment and I knew at a glance each man’s habitat. Nobody or nothing was strange to me. The whole valley was home and I felt the gripping sense of homesickness as I viewed it for the last time. I could have embraced it all—yet in only a small spot of that small valley had I moved with any sense of freedom.
Our street was plainly visible from the hilltop. The “Porte” or “Forte” as it became corrupted—was a gorge-like, bottle-shaped street, the narrow end of which was the gate of the Jews, now the toll-gate over which the Kisbir presides. Through it came my ancestor, Reb Abraham Bolsover, with a bundle on his back containing sacred books and worldly goods. In the one was his life, in the other his living, and between barter and the study of God’s law his life moved, never without a struggle. When they carried him out of that same street to the God’s Acre, they said of him that he died poor in possessions but rich in good works.
Through that gate my father went out at the call of his Fatherland, and when they carried him to his resting-place they made great lamentation. He left to his widow five children—one yet unborn, money enough to keep them from want and a name which always stood for self-sacrifice and devotion.