The Rise of David Levinsky (12 page)

The name was buzzing all around me. The great emigration of Jews to the United States, which had received its first impulse two or three years before, was already in full swing. It may not be out of order to relate, briefly, how it had all come about.

An anti-Semitic riot broke out in a southern town named Elisabethgrad in the early spring of 1881. Occurrences of this kind were, in those days, quite rare in Russia, and when they did happen they did not extend beyond the town of their origin. But the circumstances that surrounded the Elisabethgrad outbreak were of a specific character. It took place one month after the assassination of the Czar, Alexander II. The actual size and influence of the “underground” revolutionary organization being an unknown quantity, St. Petersburg was full of the rumblings of a general uprising. The Elisabethgrad riot, however, was not of a revolutionary nature. Yet the police, so far from suppressing it, encouraged it. The example of the Elisabethgrad rabble was followed by the riffraff of other places. The epidemic quickly spread from city to city. Whereupon the scenes of lawlessness in the various cities were marked by the same method in the mob’s madness, by the same connivance on the part of the police, and by many other traits that clearly pointed to a common source of inspiration. It has long since become a well-established historical fact that the anti-Jewish disturbances were encouraged, even arranged, by the authorities as an outlet for the growing popular discontent with the Government.

Count von Plehve was then at the head of the Police Department in the Ministry of the Interior.

This bit of history repeated itself, on a larger scale, twenty-two years later, when Russia was in the paroxysm of a real revolution and when the ghastly massacres of Jews in Kishineff, Odessa, Kieff, and other cities were among the means employed in an effort to keep the masses “busy.”

Count von Plehve then held the office of Prime Minister.

To return to 1881 and 1882. Thousands of Jewish families were left homeless. Of still greater moment was the moral effect which the atrocities produced on the whole Jewish population of Russia. Over five million people were suddenly made to realize that their birthplace was not their home (a feeling which the great Russian revolution has suddenly changed) . Then it was that the cry “To America!” was raised. It spread like wild-fire, even over those parts of the Pale of Jewish Settlement which lay outside the riot zone.

This was the beginning of the great New Exodus that has been in progress for decades.

My native town and the entire section to which it belongs had been immune from the riots, yet it caught the general eontagion, and at the time I became one of Shiphrah’s wards hundreds of its inhabitants were going to America or planning to do so. Letters full of wonders from emigrants already there went the rounds of eager readers and listeners until they were worn to shreds in the process.

I succumbed to the spreading fever. It was one of these letters from America, in fact, which put the notion of emigrating to the New World definitely in my mind. An illiterate woman brought it to the synagogue to have it read to her, and I happened to be the one to whom she addressed her request. The concrete details of that letter gave New York tangible form in my imagination. It haunted me ever after.

The United States lured me not merely as a land of milk and honey, but also, and perhaps chiefly, as one of mystery, of fantastic experiences, of marvelous transformations. To leave my native place and to seek my fortune in that distant, weird world seemed to be just the kind of sensational adventure my heart was hankering for.

When I unburdened myself of my project to Reb Sender he was thunderstruck.

“To America!” he said. “Lord of the World! But one becomes a Gentile there.”

“Not at all,” I sought to reassure him. “There are lots of good Jews there, and they don’t neglect their Talmud, either.”

The amount that was necessary to take me to America loomed staggeringly large. Where was it to come from? I thought of approaching Shiphrah, but the idea of her helping me abandon my Talmud and go to live in a godless country seemed preposterous. So I began by saving the small allowance which I received from her and by selling some of the clothes and food she brought me. For the evening meal I usually received some rye bread and a small coin for cheese or herring, so I invariably added the coin to my little hoard, relishing the bread with thoughts of America.

While I was thus pinching and saving pennies I was continually casting about for some more effective way of raising the sum that would take me to New York.

I confided my plan to Naphtali.

“Not a bad idea,” he said, “but you will never raise the money. You are a master of dreams, David.”

“I’ll get the money, and, what is more, when I am in America I shall bring you over there, too.”

“May your words pass from your lips into the ear of God.”

“I thought you did not believe in God.”

“How long will
you
believe in Him after you get to America?”

BOOK IV

MATILDA

I
COULD scarcely think of anything but America. I read every letter from there that I could obtain. I was constantly seeking information about the country and the opportunities it held out to a man of my type, and cudgelmg my brains for some way of scraping together the formidable sum. I was restless, sleepless, and finally, when I caught a slight cold, my health broke down so completely that I had to be taken to the hospital. Shiphrah visited me every day, calling me poor orphan boy and quarreling with the superintendent over me. One afternoon, after I had been discharged, when she saw me at the synagogue, feeble and emaciated, she gasped.

“You’re a cruel, heartless man,” she flared up, addressing herself to the beadle. “The poor boy needs a good soft bed, fine chicken soup, and real care. Why didn’t you let me know at once? Come on, David!”

“Where to?” I inquired, timidly.

“None of your business. Come on. I’m not going to take you to the woods, you may be sure of that. I want you to stay in my house until you are well rested and strong enough to study. Don’t you like it?” she added, with a wink to the beadle.

It appeared that her husband was away on one of his prolonged business excursions. Otherwise installing in her “modern” home an old-fashioned, ridiculous young creature like a Talmud student would have been out of the question.

I followed her with fast-beating heart. I knew that her family was “modern,” that her children’ spoke Russian and “behaved like Gentiles,” that there was a grown young woman among them and that her name was Matilda.

The case of this young woman had been the talk of the town the year before. She had been persuaded to marry a man for whom she did not care, and shortly after the

wedding and after a sensational passage at arms between his people and hers, she made her father pay him a small fortune for divorcing her.

Matilda’s family being one of the “upper ten” in our town, its members were frequently the subject of envious gossip, and so I had known a good deal about them even before Shiphrah befriended me. I had heard, for example, that Matilda had received her early education in a boarding-school in Germany (in accordance with a custom that had been in existence among people of her father’s class until recently) ; that she had subsequently studied Russian and other subjects under Russian tutors at home; and that her two brothers, who were younger than she, were at the local Russian gymnasium, or high school. I had heard, also, that Matilda was very pretty. That she was well dressed went without saying.

All this both fascinated and cowed me.

Suddenly Shiphrah paused, as though bethinking herself of something. “Wait. Don’t stir, she said, rushing back. Ten or fifteen minutes later she returned, saying: ”I was not long, was I? I just went to get the beadle’s forgiveness. Had insulted him for nothing. But he’s a dummy, all the same. Come on, David.”

Arrived at her house, she introduced me to her old servant, in the kitchen.

“He’ll stay a week with us, perhaps more,” she explained. “I want you to build him up. Fatten him up like a Passover goose. Do you hear?”

The servant, a tall, spare woman, with an extremely dark face tinged with blue, began by darting hostile glances at me.

“Look at the way she is staring at him!” Shiphrah growled. “He is the son of the woman who was murdered at the Horse-market.”

The old servant started. “Is he?” she said, aghast.

“Are you pleased now? Will you take good care of him?”

“May the Uppermost give him a good appetite.”

As Shiphrah led me from the kitchen into another room she said: “She took a fancy to you. It will be all right.”

She towed me into a vast sitting-room, so crowded with new furniture that it had the appearance of a furniture-store. There were many rooms in the apartment and they all produced a similar impression. I subsequently learned that the superabundance of sofas, chests of drawers, chairs, or bric-a-brac-stands was due to Shiphrah’s passion for bargains, a weakness which made her the fair game of tradespeople and artisans. Several of her wardrobes and bureaus were packed full of all sorts of things for which she had no earthly use and many of which she had smuggled in when her husband and the children were out.

Ensconced in a corner of an enormous green sofa in the big crowded sitting-room, with a book in her lap, we found a young woman with curly brown hair and sparkling brown eyes set in a small oval face. She looked no more than twenty, but when her mother addressed her as Matilda I knew that I was facing the heroine of the sensational divorce. She was singularly interesting, but pretty she certainly was not. Her Gentile name had a world of charm for my ear.

One of the trifles that clung to my memory is the fact that upon seeing her I felt something like amazement at her girlish appearance. I had had a notion that a married woman, no matter how young, must have a married face, something quite distinct from the countenance of a maiden, while this married woman did not begin to look married.

Matilda got up, cast a frowning side-glance at her mother, and walked over to one of the four immense windows illuminating the room. Less than a minute later she turned around and crossed over to her mother’s side.

She was small, but well made, and her movements were brisk, firm, elastic.

“Come on, mother, there’s something I want to tell you,” she said, a jerk of her curly head indicating the adjoining room.

“I have no secrets,” Shiphrah growled. “What do you want?”

A snappish whispered conference ensued, the trend of which was at once betrayed in an acrimonious retort by Shiphrah:

“Just keep your foolish nose out of my affairs, will you? When I say he is going to stay here for some time I mean it. Don’t you mind her, David.”

“Mother! Mother! Mother!” Matilda trilled with a gesture of disgust, and flounced out of the room.

I felt my face turning all colors, and at the same time her “Mother! Mother! Mother!” (instead of “Mamma! Mamma! Mamma!”) was echoing in my brain enchantingly.

Presently a fair-complexioned youth of eighteen or nineteen came in, apparently attracted by his mother’s angry voice. He wore a blue coat with silver lace and silver buttons, the uniform of a Russian high school, which sent a flutter of mixed envy and awe through me. He threw a frowning glance at me, and withdrew. Two smaller children, a uniformed boy and a little girl, made their appearance, talking in Russian noisily. At sight of me they fell silent, looked me over, from my side-locks to the edge of my long-skirted coat, and then took to whispering and giggling.

“Clear out, you devils!” Shiphrah shouted, stamping her foot. “Shoo!”

A young chambermaid passed through the room, and Shiphrah stopped her long enough to introduce me and to command her to look after me as if I were one of the family —“even better.”

T
HE spacious sitting-room was used as a breakfast-room as well. It was in this room, on the enormous green sofa, that -ny bed was made for the night. It was by far the most comfortable bed I had ever slept in.

Early the next morning, after I finished my long prayer and had put away my phylacteries, the young chambermaid removed the bedding and the swarthy old servant served me my breakfast.

“Go wash your hands and eat in good health. Eat hearty, and may it well agree with you,” she said, with a compound of deep commiseration, reverence, and disdain. I went to the kitchen, where I washed my hands, and, while wiping them, muttered the brief prayer which one offers before eating. As I returned to the sitting-room I found Matilda there. She was seated at some distance from the table upon which my breakfast was spread. She wore a sort of white kimono. One did not have to stand on ceremony with a fellow who did not even wear a stiff collar and a necktie. Nor did I know enough to resent her costume. She did not order anything to eat for herself, not even a glass of tea. It seemed as though she had come in for the express purpose of eying me out of countenance. If she had, she succeeded but too well. Her silent glances fell on me like splashes of hot water. I was so disconcerted I could not swallow my food. There were centuries of difference between her and myself, not to speak of the economic chasm that separated us. To me she was an aristocrat, while I was a poor, wretched “day” eater, a cross between a beggar and a recluse. I dared not even look at her. Talmud students were expected to be the shyest creatures under the sun. On this occasion I certainly was.

The other children entered the room. They were dressing themselves, eating and studying their Gentile lessons all at once. Matilda had a mild altercation with Yeffim, her eighteen-year-old brother, ordered breakfast for herself, and seemed to have forgotten my existence. Her mother came in and took to cloying me with food.