He pressed his fist nervously to his mouth, a trick he had when excited.
'Tell me, David, why you don’t sing it.'
David’s eyes fixed themselves in a look of hopeless longing. He answered in a whisper, his pale face slowly reddening.
'My fathers didn’t die here. How can I sing such a lie?'
Miss Ralston’s impulse was to hug the child, but she was afraid of startling him. The attention she had lavished on the boy was rewarded at this moment, when her understanding of his nature inspired the answer to his troubled question. She saw how his mind worked. She realized, what a less sympathetic witness might have failed to realize, that behind the moral scruple expressed in his words, there was a sense of irreparable loss derived from the knowledge that he had no share in the national past. The other children could shout the American hymn in all the pride of proprietorship, but to him the words did not apply. It was a flaw in his citizenship, which he was so jealous to establish.
The teacher’s words were the very essence of tact and sympathy. In her voice were mingled the yearning of a mother and the faith of a comrade.
'David Rudinsky, you have as much a right to those words as I or anybody else in America. Your ancestors did not die on our battlefields, but they would have if they’d had a chance. You used to spend all your time reading the Hebrew books, in Russia. Don’t you know how your people—your ancestors, perhaps!—fought the Roman tyrants? Don’t you remember the Maccabean brothers, and Bar Kochba, and—oh, you know about them more than I! I’m ashamed to tell you that I haven’t read much Jewish history, but I’m sure if we begin to look it up, we’ll find that people of your race—people like your father, David—took part in the fight for freedom, wherever they were allowed. And even in this country—David, I’m going to find out for you how many Jews there were in the armies of the Revolution. We don’t think about it here, you see, because we don’t ask what a man’s religion is, as long as he is brave and good.'
David’s eyes slowly lost their look of distress as his teacher talked. His tense little face, upturned to hers, reminded her of a withered blossom that revives in the rain. She went on with increasing earnestness, herself interested in the discoveries she was making, in her need.
'I tell you the truth, David, I never thought of these things before, but I do believe that the Pilgrim Fathers didn’t all come here before the Revolution. Isn’t your father just like them? Think of it, dear, how he left his home, and came to a strange land, where he couldn’t even speak the language. That was a great trouble, you know; something like the fear of the Indians in the old days. And wasn’t he looking for the very same things? He wanted freedom for himself and his family, and a chance for his children to grow up wise and brave. You know your father cares more for such things than he does for money or anything. It’s the same story over again. Every ship that brings your people from Russia and other countries where they are ill-treated is a Mayflower. If I were a Jewish child like you, I would sing "America" louder than anybody else!'
David’s adoring eyes gave her the thanks which his tongue would not venture to utter. Never since that moment, soon after his arrival from Russia, when his father showed him his citizenship papers, saying, 'Look, my son, this makes you an American,' had he felt so secure in his place in the world.