Read Ebook: The Grandchildren of the Ghetto by Zangwill Israel

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Ebook has 975 lines and 84862 words, and 20 pages

'I wonder the Chief Rabbi doesn't stop it,' said Mrs. Montagu Samuels.

'My dear, how can he?' inquired her husband. 'He has no control over the publishing trade.'

'He ought to talk to the man,' persisted Mrs. Samuels.

'Oh, if he's a Jew you may be sure it isn't his real name,' laughed Sidney. It was characteristic of him that he never spared a shot, even when himself hurt by the kick of the gun. Percy coloured slightly, unmollified by being in the same boat with the satirist.

'I have never seen the name in the subscription lists,' said the hostess with ready tact.

'There is an Armitage who subscribes two guineas a year to the Board of Guardians,' said Mrs. Montagu Samuels. 'But his Christian name is George.'

'"Christian" name is distinctly good for "George,"' murmured Sidney.

'There was an Armitage who sent a cheque to the Russian Fund,' said Mr. Henry Goldsmith; 'but that can't be an author: it was quite a large cheque!'

'I am sure I have seen Armitage among the Births, Marriages, and Deaths,' said Miss Cissy Levine.

'How well read they all are in the national literature!' Sidney murmured to Addie.

Indeed, the sectarian advertisements served to knit the race together, counteracting the unravelling induced by the fashionable dispersion of Israel, and waxing the more important as the other links, the old traditional jokes, bywords, ceremonies, card-games, prejudices, and tunes, which are more important than laws and more cementatory than ideals, were disappearing before the over-zealousness of a parvenu refinement that had not yet attained to self-confidence. The Anglo-Saxon stolidity of the West-End synagogue service, on week days entirely given over to paid praying-men, was a typical expression of the universal tendency to exchange the picturesque primitiveness of the Orient for the sobrieties of fashionable civilisation. When Jeshurun waxed fat, he did not always kick, but he yearned to approximate as much as possible to John Bull without merging in him; to sink himself and yet not be absorbed--not to be, and yet to be. The attempt to realise the asymptote in human mathematics was not quite successful, too near an approach to John Bull generally assimilating Jeshurun away. For such is the nature of Jeshurun. Enfranchise him, give him his own way, and you make a new man of him; persecute him, and he is himself again.

'But if nobody has read the man's book,' Raphael Leon ventured to interrupt at last, 'is it quite fair to assume his book isn't fit to read?'

The shy dark little girl he had taken down to dinner darted an appreciative glance at her neighbour. It was in accordance with Raphael's usual anxiety to give the devil his due that he should be unwilling to condemn even the writer of an anti-Semitic novel unheard. But, then, it was an open secret in the family that Raphael was mad. They did their best to hush it up, but among themselves they pitied him behind his back. Even Sidney considered his cousin Raphael pushed a dubious virtue too far, in treating people's very prejudices with the deference due to earnest, reasoned opinions.

'But we know enough of the book to know we are badly treated,' protested the hostess.

'We have always been badly treated in literature,' said Raphael. 'We are made either angels or devils. On the one hand, Lessing and George Eliot; on the other, the stock dramatist and novelist, with their low-comedy villain.'

'Oh!' said Mrs. Goldsmith doubtfully, for she could not quite think Raphael had become infected by his cousin's propensity for paradox. 'Do you think George Eliot and Lessing didn't understand the Jewish character?'

'They are the only writers who have ever understood it,' affirmed Miss Cissy Levine emphatically.

A little scornful smile played for a second about the mouth of the dark little girl.

'Oh, Sidney, what are you saying?' murmured Addie.

'It's all right, little girl. You don't understand Greek.'

'It's not Greek,' put in Raphael. 'In Greek art beauty of soul and beauty of form are one. It's French you are talking, though the ignorant ateliers where you picked it up flatter themselves it's Greek.'

'It's Greek to Addie, anyhow,' laughed Sidney. 'But that's what makes the anti-Semitic chapters so unsatisfactory.'

'We all felt their unsatisfactoriness, if we could not analyse it so cleverly,' said the hostess.

'We all felt it,' said Mrs. Montagu Samuels.

'Yes, that's it,' said Sidney blandly. 'I could have forgiven the rose-colour of the picture if it had been more artistically painted.'

'Rose-colour!' gasped Mrs. Henry Goldsmith.

Rose-colour indeed! Not even Sidney's authority could persuade the table into that.

Poor rich Jews! The upper middle classes had every excuse for being angry. They knew they were excellent persons, well educated and well travelled, interested in charities , people's concerts, district-visiting, new novels, magazines, reading circles, operas, symphonies, politics, volunteer regiments, Show Sunday and Corporation banquets; that they had sons at Rugby and Oxford, and daughters who played and painted and sang, and homes that were bright oases of optimism in a jaded society; that they were good Liberals and Tories, supplementing their duties as Englishmen with a solicitude for the best interests of Judaism; that they left no stone unturned to emancipate themselves from the secular thraldom of prejudice; and they felt it very hard that a little vulgar section should always be chosen by their own novelists, and their efforts to raise the tone of Jewish society passed by.

'For instance,' said he, 'a gentleman said to me the other day--I was much touched by the expression--"I believe with my father's heart."'

'It is a good epigram,' said Sidney, impressed. 'But what is to be said of a rich community which recruits its clergy from the lowest classes? The method of election by competitive performance--common as it is, among poor Dissenters--emphasises the subjection of the shepherd to his flock. You catch your ministers young--when they are saturated with suppressed scepticism--and bribe them with small salaries that seem affluence to the sons of poor immigrants. That the ministry is not an honourable profession may be seen from the anxiety of the minister to raise his children in the social scale by bringing them up to some other line of business.'

'That is true,' said Raphael gravely. 'Our wealthy families must be induced to devote a son each to the synagogue.'

His wife hastened to obliterate the unrefined expression.

'Mr. Strelitski is a wonderfully eloquent young man, so quiet and reserved in society, but like an ancient prophet in the pulpit.'

'Yes, we were very lucky to get him,' said Mr. Henry Goldsmith.

The little dark girl shuddered.

'What is the matter?' asked Raphael softly.

'I don't know. I don't like the Rev. Joseph Strelitski. He is eloquent, but his dogmatism irritates me. I don't believe he is sincere. He doesn't like me either.'

'Oh, you're both wrong,' he said in concern.

'Strelitski is a draw, I admit,' said Mr. Montagu Samuels, who was the President of a rival synagogue. 'But Rosenbaum is a good pull-down on the other side, eh?'

Mr. Henry Goldsmith groaned. The second minister of the Kensington synagogue was the scandal of the community. He wasn't expected to preach, and he didn't practise.

'I've heard of that man,' said Sidney, laughing. 'He's a bit of a gambler and a spendthrift, isn't he? Why do you keep him on?'

'He has a fine voice, you see,' said Mr. Goldsmith. 'That makes a Rosenbaum faction at once. Then he has a wife and family; that makes another.'

'Strelitski isn't married, is he?' asked Sidney.

'No,' said Mr. Goldsmith; 'not yet. The congregation expect him to, though. I don't care to give him the hint myself, he is a little queer sometimes.'

'He owes it to his position,' said Miss Cissy Levine.

'That is what we think,' said Mrs. Henry Goldsmith, with the majestic manner that suited her opulent beauty.

'I wish we had him in our synagogue,' said Raphael. 'Michaels is a well-meaning, worthy man, but he is dreadfully dull.'

'Poor Raphael!' said Sidney. 'Why did you abolish the old style of minister who had to slaughter the sheep? Now the minister reserves all his powers of destruction for his own flock.'

'I have given him endless hints to preach only once a month,' said Mr. Montagu Samuels dolefully. 'But every Saturday our hearts sink as we see him walk to the pulpit.'

'You see, Addie, how a sense of duty makes a man criminal,' said Sidney. 'Isn't Michaels the minister who defends orthodoxy in a way that makes the orthodox rage over his unconscious heresies, while the heterodox enjoy themselves by looking out for his historical and grammatical blunders?'

'Poor man! he works hard,' said Raphael gently. 'Let him be.'

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