Other soldier songs begin with a detailed farewell to parents, brothers, sisters, and friends, after which follows a recital of the many privations to which the Jewish soldier will be subjected; in all of these, the forced absence from wife or bride is regarded as the greatest evil.
The cup of bitterness has never been empty for the Jews that inhabit the present Russian Empire; they had been persecuted by Poland, massacred by the Cossacks, and are now exiled from the central provinces of Russia. Each massacre, each 'pogrom,' has given rise to several poems, in which God is invoked to save them from their cruel tormentors, or in which there are given graphic descriptions of the atrocities perpetrated on the unwary. Like the soldier songs, they vary in form from the chronicle in rhymes to the metrical lyric of modern times. The oldest recorded rhymed chronicle of this kind is the one that tells of the blood bath instituted in the Ukraine in the middle of last century. The simple, unadorned recital of inhumanities concocted by the fertile imagination of a Gonto, a Silo, a Maxim Zhelezniak, produces a more awful effect than any studied poem could do.[43]
It is no wonder, then, that the Jew takes a gloomy view of life, and that whenever he rises to any generalizations, he gives utterance to the blackest pessimism. One such poem depicts the vanities of human life, into which one is born as into a prison, from which one is freed at best at the Biblical age of three score and ten, to leave all the gold and silver to the surviving orphans. There is but one consolation in life, and that is, that Tōre, 'learning,' will do one as much good in the other world as it does in this. And yet, under all these distressing circumstances, the Jew finds pleasure in whole-hearted laughter. His comical ditties may be divided into two classes,—those in which he laughs at his own weaknesses, and those in which he ridicules the weaknesses of the Khassidim, the fanatical sect, among whom the Rabbis are worshipped as saints and are supposed to work miracles. This sect is very numerous in Poland and South Russia, is very ignorant, and has opposed progress longer than the Misnagdim, to which sect the other German Jews in Russia belong. As an example of the first class may serve a poem in which poverty is made light of:
Ferd' hāb' ich vun Paris:
Drei ohn' Köpp', zwēi ohn' Füss'.
Ladrizem bam, ladrizem bam.
A Rock hāb' ich vun guten Tuch,
Ich hāb' vun ihm kein Bröckel Duch.
Ladrizem, etc.
Stiewel hāb' ich vun guten Leder,
Ich hāb' vun see kein Bröckel Feder.
Ladrizem, etc.
Kinder hāb' ich a drei Tuz',
Ich hāb' vun see kein Bröckel Nutz.
Ladrizem, etc.
Jetzt hāb' ich sich arumgetracht
Un' hāb' vun see a Barg Asch' gemacht.
Ladrizem bam, ladrizem bam.
Horses I have from Paris, three without heads, and two without feet,—ladrizem bam, etc.—A coat I have of good cloth,—I have not a trace left of it.—Boots I have of good leather, not a feather's weight have I left of them.—Children I have some three dozen,—I get no good out of them.—So I fell a-thinking and made a heap of ashes of them.
The sensuality, intemperance, and profound ignorance and superstition of the Rebe, or Rabbi, of the Khassidim, and the credulity and lightheartedness of his followers, form, perhaps, the subject of the most poems in the Judeo-German language, as they also form the main subject of attack in the written literature of the last forty years.