The House of Bondage

MARY ANTIN

I

MY mother ought to have been happy in her engagement. Everybody congratulated her on securing such a scholar, her parents loaded her with presents, and her friends envied her. It is true that the bridegroom’s family consisted entirely of poor relations; there was not one solid householder among them. From the worldly point of view, my mother made a mesalliance. But as one of my aunts put it, when my mother objected to the association with the undesirable cousins, she could take out the cow and set fire to the barn; meaning that she could rejoice in her husband and disregard his family.

My mother’s trousseau was all that a mother-in-law could wish. The best tailor in Polotzk was engaged to make the cloaks and gowns, and his shop was filled to bursting with ample lengths of velvet and satin and silk. The wedding gown alone cost every kopeck of fifty rubles, as the tailor’s wife reported all over Polotzk. The lingerie was of the best, and the seamstress was engaged on it for many weeks. Featherbeds, linen, household goods of every sort — everything was provided in abundance. My mother crocheted many yards of lace to trim the best sheets, and fine silk coverlets adorned the plump beds. Many a marriageable maiden who came to view the trousseau went home to prink and blush and watch for the marriage-broker.

The wedding was memorable for gayety and splendor. The guests included some of the finest people in Polotzk; for while my grandfather was not quite at the top of the social scale, he had business connections with those who were, and they all turned out for the wedding of his only daughter, the men in silk frockcoats, the women in all their jewelry.

The bridegroom’s aunts and cousins came in full force. Wedding messengers had been sent to every person who could possibly claim relationship with the groom. My mother’s parents were too generous to slight the lowliest. Instead of burning the barn, they did all they could to garnish it; one or two of the more important of the poor relations came to the wedding in gowns paid for by my rich grandfather. The rest came decked out in borrowed finery, or in undisguised shabbiness. Nobody thought of staying away.

After the feasting and dancing, which lasted a whole week, the wedding presents were locked up; the bride, with her hair discreetly covered, returned to her father’s store; and the groom, with his new praying shawl, repaired to the synagogue. This was all according to the marriage bargain, which implied that my father was to study and pray and fill the house with the spirit of piety, in return for board and lodging and the devotion of his wife and her entire family.

All the parties concerned had entered into this bargain in good faith, so far as they knew their own minds. But the eighteen-year-old bridegroom, before many months had passed, began to realize that he felt no such hunger for the word of the Law as he was supposed to feel. He felt, rather, a hunger for life that all his studying did not satisfy. He was not trained enough to analyze his own thoughts to any purpose; he was not experienced enough to understand where his thoughts were leading him. He only knew that he felt no call to pray and fast, that the Torah did not inspire him, and his days were blank. The life he was expected to lead grew distasteful to him, and yet he knew no other way to live. He became lax in his attendance at synagogue services, incurring the reproach of the family. It began to be rumored among the studious that Raphael the Russian’s sonin-law was not devoting himself to the sacred books with any degree of enthusiasm. It was well known that he had a good mind, but evidently the spirit was lacking. My grandparents went from surprise to indignation, from exhortation they passed to recrimination. Before my parents had been married half a year, my grandfather’s house was divided against itself, and my mother was torn between the two factions. For while she sympathized with her parents, and felt personally cheated by my father’s lack of piety, she thought it was her duty to take her husband’s part, even against her parents, in their own house. My mother was one of those women who always obey the highest law they know, even though it leads them to their doom.

How did it happen that my father, who from his early boyhood had been pointed out as a scholar in embryo, failed to live up to the expectations of his world? It happened as it happened that his hair curled over his high forehead. He was made that way. If people were disappointed, it was because they had based their expectations on a misconception of his character. For my father had never had any aspirations for extreme piety. Piety was imputed to him by his mother, by his rebbe, by his neighbors, when they saw that he rendered the sacred word more intelligently than his fellow-students. It was not his fault that his people confused scholarship with religious ardor. Having a good mind, he was glad to exercise it; and being given only one subject to study, he was bound to make rapid progress in that. If he had ever been offered a choice between a religious and a secular education, his friends would have found out early that he was not born to be a rav. But as he had no mental opening except through the rabbinical school, he went on from year to year winning new distinction in Hebrew scholarship; with the result that witnesses with preconceived ideas began to see the halo of piety playing around his head, and a wellto-do family was misled into making a match with him for the sake of the heavenly glory that he was to attain.

When it became evident that the son-in-law was not going to develop into a rav, my grandfather notified him that he would have to assume the support of his own family without delay. My father thereupon entered on a series of experiments with paying occupations, for none of which he was qualified, and in none of which he succeeded permanently.

My mother was with my father, as equal partner and laborer, in everything he attempted. They tried keeping a wayside inn, but had to give it up because the life was too rough for my mother, who expected her first baby. Returning to Polotzk, they went to storekeeping, but failed in this also, because my father was inexperienced, and my mother, now with the baby to nurse, was not able to give her best attention to business. Over two years passed in this experiment, and in the interval the second child was born, increasing my parents’ need of a home and a reliable income.

It was then decided that my father should seek elsewhere for a living. For several years he traveled and labored, with varying fortunes, in the east and south of Russia, until news reached him of the death of my grandfather, which left my mother heir to a good business. My father thereupon returned to Polotzk, and became a storekeeper once more.

As my mother had been trained to her business from childhood, while my father had had only a little irregular experience, she naturally remained the leader. She was as successful as her father before her. The people continued to call her Chane Chaye Raphael’s, and under that name she was greatly respected in the business world. Her eldest brother was now a merchant of importance, and my mother’s establishment was gradually enlarged; so that, altogether, our family had a solid position in Polotzk, and there were plenty to envy us.

We were hardly rich, even as Polotzk counted riches in those days. I suppose we were considered well-to-do. We moved into a larger house, where there was room for out-of-town customers to stay over night, and stabling for their horses. We lived as well as any people of our class, and perhaps better, because my father had brought home with him from his travels a taste for a more genial life than Polotzk usually asked for. My mother kept a cook and a nursemaid, and a dvornik or outdoor man, to take care of the horses, the cow, and the woodpile. All the year round we kept open house, as I remember. Cousins and aunts were always about, and on holidays friends of all degrees gathered in numbers. And coming and going in the wing set apart for business-guests were merchants, traders, country peddlers, peasants, soldiers, and minor government officials. It was a full house at all times, and especially so during fairs, and at the season of the military draft, when recruits by the hundred came in from the outlying districts, Polotzk being the county-seat.

In the family wing there was also enough going on. There were four of us children, besides father and mother and the parasitic cousins. Fetchke was the eldest; I was the second; the third was my only brother, named Joseph, for my father’s father; and the fourth was Edle Dvereh, named for my mother’s mother.

I suppose I ought to explain my own name also, expecially because I am going to emerge as the heroine by and by. Be it therefore known that I was named Maryashe, for a bygone aunt. I was never called by my right name, however. ‘Maryashe’ was too dignified. It was always Mash in ke, or else Mashke, by way of diminutive. A variety of nicknames, mostly suggested by my physical peculiarities, were bestowed on me from time to time by my fond or foolish relatives. My Uncle Berl, for example, gave me the name of Zukrochene Flum, which I am not going to translate, because it is uncomplimentary.

My sister Fetchke was always the good little girl, and when our troubles began she was an important member of the family. What sort of little girl I was will be written by and by. Joseph was the best Jewish boy that ever was born, but he hated to go to heder, so he had to be whipped, of course. Edle Dvereh was just a baby, and her principal characteristic was single-mindedness. If she had teething to attend to she thought of nothing else day or night, and communicated with the family on no other subject. If it was whooping cough, she whooped most heartily; if it was measles, she had them thick.

It was the normal thing in Polotzk, where the mothers worked as well as the fathers, for the children to be left in the hands of nursemaids and grandmothers. We were much of the time under our Grandma Rachel’s care. Grandma meant to be very strict with us, and accordingly she was prompt to discipline us; but we discovered early in our acquaintance with her that the child who got a spanking was sure to get a hot cookie, or the jam-pot to lick, so we did not stand in great awe of her punishments. Even if it came to a spanking it was only a farce. Grandma generally interposed a pillow between the palm of her hand and the area of moral stimulation.

The real disciplinarian in our family was my father. Was he present or absent, it was fear of his displeasure that kept us in the straight and narrow path. In the minds of us children he was as much represented, when away from home, by the strap hanging on the wall as by his portrait which stood on a parlor table, in a gorgeous frame adorned with little shells. Almost everybody’s father had a strap, but our father’s strap was more formidable than the ordinary. It was, for one thing, more painful to encounter personally, because it was not a simple strap, but a bunch of fine long strips, clinging as rubber. My father called it ‘noodles,’ and while his facetiousness was lost on us children, the superior sting of his instrument was entirely effective.

My father, in his leisure, found means of instructing us other than by the strap. He took us walking and driving, answered our questions, and taught us many little things that our playmates were not taught. From distant parts of the country he had imported little tricks of speech and conduct, which we learned readily enough, for we were always a teachable lot. Our pretty manners were very much admired, so that we became used to being held up as models to children less polite. Guests at our table praised our deportment, when, at the end of a meal, we kissed the hands of father and mother and thanked them for food. Envious mothers of rowdy children used to sneer: ' Those grandchildren of Raphael the Russian are quite the aristocrats.’

And yet, off the stage, we had our little tempests, especially I. I really and truly cannot remember a time when Fetchke was naughty, but I was oftener in trouble than out of it. I need not go into details. I only need to recall how often, on going to bed, I used to lie silently rehearsing the day’s misdeeds, my sister refraining from talk out of sympathy. As I always came to the conclusion that I wanted to reform, I emerged from my reflections with this solemn formula, ‘Fetchke— let us be good.’ And my generosity in including my sister in my plans for salvation was equaled by her magnanimity in assuming part of my degradation. She always replied, in aspiration as eager as mine, ‘Yes, Mashke, let us be good.'

On Friday afternoons my parents came home early, to wash and dress and remove from their persons every sign of labor. The great keys of the store were put away out of sight; the money-bag was hidden in the featherbeds. My father put on his best coat and silk skull-cap; my mother replaced the cotton kerchief by the well-brushed wig. We children bustled around our parents, asking favors in the name of the Sabbath: ‘ Mamma, let Fetchke and me wear our new shoes, in honor of Sabbath ’; or ‘ Papa, will you take us tomorrow across the bridge? You said you would, on Sabbath.’ And while we adorned ourselves in our best, my grandmother superintended the sealing of the oven, the maids washed the sweat from their faces, and the dvornik scraped his feet at the door.

My father and brother went to the synagogue, while we women and girls assembled in the living-room for candle prayer. The table gleamed with spotless linen and china. At my father’s place lay the Sabbath loaf, covered over with a crocheted doily; and beside it stood the wine flask and the kiddush cup of gold or silver. At the opposite end of the table was a long row of brass candlesticks, polished to perfection, with the heavy silver candlesticks in a shorter row in front. For my mother and grandmother were very pious, and each used a number of candles; while Fetchke and I and the maids had one apiece.

After candle prayer the women generally read in some book of devotion, while we children amused ourselves in the quietest manner, till the men returned from synagogue. ‘Good Sabbath!’ my father called, as he entered; and ‘Good Sabbath — good Sabbath!’ we wished him in return. If he brought with him a Sabbath guest from the synagogue, the stranger was welcomed and invited in, and placed in the seat of honor, next to my father.

We all stood around the table while kiddush, or the blessing over the wine, was said; and if a child whispered or nudged another, my father reproved him with a stern look, and began again from the beginning. But as soon as he had cut the consecrated loaf, and distributed the slices, we were at liberty to talk and ask questions; unless a guest was present, when we maintained a polite silence.

On Sabbath morning almost everybody went to synagogue, and those who did not, read their prayers and devotions at home. Dinner, at midday, was a pleasant and leisurely meal in our house. Between courses my father led us in singing our favorite songs, sometimes Hebrew, sometimes Yiddish, sometimes Russian, or some of the peculiar songs without words for which the religious enthusiasts of that time were famous. In the afternoon we went visiting, or else we took long walks out of town, where the fields sprouted and the orchards waited to bloom. If we stayed at home, we were not without company. Neighbors dropped in for a glass of tea. Uncles and cousins came, and perhaps my brother’s rebbe, to examine his pupil in the hearing of the family. And wherever we spent the day, the talk was pleasant, the faces were cheerful, the joy of Sabbath pervaded everything.

I suppose no little girls with whom we played had a more comfortable sense of being well off than Fetchke and I. ‘Raphael the Russian’s grandchildren,’ people called us, as if referring to the quarterings in our shield. It was very pleasant to wear fine clothes, to have kopecks to spend at the fruitstalls, to be pointed at admiringly. Some of the little girls we went with were richer than we; but after all, one’s mother can only wear one pair of earrings at a time, and our mother had beautiful gold ones that hung down on her neck.

As we grew older, my parents gave us more than physical comfort and social standing to rejoice in. They gave us, or set out to give us, education, which was less common than gold earrings in Polotzk. For the ideal of a modern education was the priceless ware that my father brought back with him from his travels in distant parts.

His travels, indeed, had been the making of my father. He had gone away from Polotzk, in the first place, as a man unfit for the life he led, out of harmony with his surroundings, at odds with his neighbors. Never heartily devoted to the religious ideals of the Hebrew scholar, he was more and more a dissenter as he matured, but he hardly knew what to embrace in place of the ideas he rejected. The rigid scheme of orthodox Jewish life in the Pale offered no opening to any other mode of life. But in the large cities in the east and south he discovered a new world, and found himself at home in it. The Jews among whom he lived in those parts were faithful to the essence of the religion, but they allowed themselves more latitude in practice and observance than people in Polotzk. Instead of bribing government officials to relax the law of compulsory education for boys, these people pushed in numbers at every open door of culture and enlightenment. Even the girls were given books in Odessa and Kherson, as the rock to build their lives on, and not as an ornament for idleness. My father’s mind was ready for the reception of such ideas, and he was inspired by the new view of the world which they afforded him.

When he returned to Polotzk he knew what had been wrong with his life before, and he proceeded to remedy it. He resolved to live, so far as the conditions of existence in Polotzk permitted, the life of a modern man. And he saw no better place to begin than with the education of the children. Outwardly he must conform to the ways of his neighbors, just as he must pay tribute to the policeman on the beat; for social ostracism could ruin his business as easily as police persecution. His children, if he started them right, would not have to bow to the yoke as low as he; his children’s children might even be free men. And education was the one means to salvation.

Fetchke and I were started with a rebbe, in the orthodox way, but we were taught to translate as well as read Hebrew, and we had a secular teacher besides. We were both very diligent pupils, and my father took great satisfaction in our progress and built great plans for our higher education.

My brother, who was five years old when he entered heder, hated to be shut up all day over a printed page that meant nothing at all to him. He cried and protested, but my father was determined that he should not grow up ignorant, so he used the strap freely to hasten the truant’s steps to school. The heder was the only beginning allowable for a boy in Polotzk, and to heder Joseph must go. So the poor boy’s life was made a nightmare, and the horror was not lifted until he was ten years old, when he went to a modern school where intelligible things were taught, and it proved that it was not the book he hated, but the blindness of the heder.

For a number of peaceful years after my father’s return from ‘far Russia,’ we led a wholesome life of comfort, content, and faith in to-morrow. Everything prospered, and we children grew in the sun. My mother was one with my father in all his plans for us. Although she had spent her young years in the pursuit of the ruble, it was more to her that our teacher praised us than that she had made a good bargain with a tea merchant. Fetchke and Joseph and I, and Edle Dvereh, when she grew up, had some prospects even in Polotzk, with our parents’ hearts set on the highest things. But we were destined to seek our fortunes in a world which even my father did not dream of, when he settled down to business in Polotzk.

Just when he felt himself safe and strong, a long series of troubles set in to harass us, and in a few years’ time we were reduced to a state of helpless poverty, in which there was no room to think of anything but bread. My father became seriously ill, and spent large sums on cures that did not cure him. While he was still an invalid, my mother also became ill, and kept her bed for the better part of two years. When she got up, it was only to lapse again. Some of us children also fell ill, so that at one period the house was a hospital. And while my parents were incapacitated, the business was ruined through bad management, until a day came when there was not enough money in the cash-drawer to pay the doctor’s bills.

For some years after they got to their feet, my parents struggled to regain their place in the business world, but failed to do so. My father had another period of experimenting with this or that business, like his earlier experience. But everything went wrong, till at last he made a great resolve to begin life all over again. And the way to do that was to start on a new soil. My father determined to emigrate to America.

I have now told who I am, what my people were, how I began life, and why I was brought to a new home. Up to this point I have borrowed the recollections of my parents, to piece out my own fragmentary reminiscences. But from now on I propose to be my own pilot across the seas of memory; and if I lose myself in the mists of uncertainty, or run aground on the reefs of speculation, I still hope to make port at last, and I shall look for welcoming faces on the shore. For the ship I sail in is history, and facts will kindle my beacon fires.

II

My father and mother could tell me so much that I have forgotten, or that I never was aware of; but I want to reconstruct my childhood from those broken recollections only, which, recurring to me in after years, filled me with the pain and wonder of remembrance. I want to string together those glimpses of my earliest days that dangle in my mind, like little lanterns in the crooked alleys of the past, and show me an elusive little figure that is myself, and yet so much a stranger to me, that I often ask, Can this be I?

I have not much faith in the reality of my first recollection, which dates from the time I was four years old, but I can never go back over the past without bringing up at last at this sombre little scene, as at a door beyond which I cannot pass. I see, then, an empty, darkened room. In the middle, on the floor, lies a long shape, covered with some black stuff. There are candles at the head of the shape. Dim figures are seated low, against the walls, swaying to and fro. There is no sound in the room, except a moan or a sigh from the shadowy figures. But a child is walking softly round and round the shape on the floor, in quiet curiosity.

The shape is the body of my grandfather laid out for burial. The child is myself — myself asking questions of Death.

The abode of our childhood, if not revisited in later years, is apt to loom in our imagination as a vast edifice with immense chambers in which our little self seems lost. Somehow, I have failed of this illusion. My grandfather’s house, where I was born, stands, in my memory, a low, one-story wooden building, whose chimneys touch the sky at the same level as do its neighbors’ chimneys. Such as it was, the house stood even with the sidewalk, but the yard was screened from the street by a board fence, outside which I am sure that there was a bench.

Of the interior of the house I remember only one room, and not so much the room as the window, which had a blue sash-curtain, and beyond the curtain a view of a narrow, walled garden, where deep red dahlias grew. The garden belonged to the house adjoining my grandfather’s, where lived the Gentile girl who was kind to me.

Behind my grandfather’s house was a low hill, which I do not remember as a mountain. Perhaps it was only a hump in the ground. This eminence, of whatever stature, was a part of the Vall, a longer and higher ridge, on the top of which was a promenade, and which was said to be the burying ground of Napoleonic soldiers. This historic rumor meant very little to me, for I had no idea what Napoleon was.

It was not my way to accept unchallenged every superstition that came to my ears. Among the wild flowers that grew on the grassy slopes of the Vall, there was a small daisy, popularly called ‘blind flower,’ because it was supposed to cause blindness in rash children who picked it. I was rash, if I was awake; and I picked ‘blind flowers’ behind the house, handfuls of them, and enjoyed my eyesight unimpaired.

If my faith in nursery lore was shaken by this experience, I kept my discovery to myself, and did not undertake to enlighten my playmates. Is it possible that in my childish reflections I recognized the fact that ours was a secretive atmosphere, where knowledge was for the few, and wisdom was sometimes a capital offense?

It was not far from the limits of Polotzk to the fields and woods. My father was fond of taking us children for a long walk on a Sabbath afternoon. I have little pictures in my mind of places where we went, though I doubt if they could be found from my descriptions.

I try in vain to conjure up a panoramic view of the neighborhood. Even if I stood on the apex of the Vall, and saw the level country spread in all directions, my inexperienced eyes failed to give me the picture of the whole. I saw the houses in the streets below, all going to market. The highroads wandered out into the country, and disappeared in the sunny distance, where the edge of the earth and the edge of the sky fitted together, like a jewelbox with the lid ajar. In these things I saw what a child always sees: the unrelated fragments of a vast, mysterious world.

A favorite way out of town was by the bridge across the Polota. I recall more than one excursion in that direction. Sometimes we made a large party, annexing a few cousins and aunts for the day. At this moment I feel a movement of affection for these relations who shared our country adventures. I had forgotten what virtue there was in our family; I do like people who can walk.

The Dvina River swallows the Polota many times a day, yet the lesser stream flooded the universe on one occasion. On the hither bank of the Polota, as you go from Polotzk, I should plant a flowering bush, a lilac or a rose, in memory of the life that bloomed in me one day that I was there.

Leisurely we had strolled out of the peaceful town. It was early spring, and the sky and the earth were two warm palms in which all live things nestled. Little green leaves trembled on the trees, and the green, green grass sparkled. We sat us down to rest a little above the bridge; and life flowed in and out of us fully, freely, as the river flowed and parted about the bridge piles.

A market garden lay on the opposite slope, yellow-green with first growth. In the long black furrows yet unsown a peasant pushed his plough. I watched him go up and down, leaving a new black line on the bank for every turn. Suddenly he began to sing, a rude ploughman’s song. Only the melody reached me, but the meaning sprang up in my heart to fit it — a song of the earth and the hopes of the earth. I sat a long time listening, looking, tense with attention. I felt myself discovering things. Something in me gasped for life, and lay still. I was but a little body, and Life Universal had suddenly burst upon me. For a moment I had my little hand on the Great Pulse, but my fingers slipped, empty. For the space of a wild heartheat I knew, and then I was again a simple child, looking to my earthly senses for life. But the sky had stretched for me, the earth had expanded; a greater life had dawned in me.

We are not born all at once, but by bits. The body first, and the spirit later; and the birth and growth of the spirit, in those who are attentive to their own inner life, are slow and exceedingly painful. Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth. Our souls are scarred with the struggles of successive births, and the process is recorded also by the wrinkles in our brains, by the lines in our faces. Look at me, and you will see that I have been born many times. And my first self-birth happened, as I have told, that spring day of my early springs. Therefore would I plant a rose on the green bank of the Polota, there to bloom in token of eternal life.

Eternal, divine life. This is a tale of immortal life. Should I be sitting here, chattering of my infantile adventures, if I did not know that I was speaking for thousands? Would you be sitting there, attending to my chatter, while the world’s work waits, if you did not know that I spoke also for you? I might say ‘you’ or ‘he’ instead of ’I.' Or I might be silent, while you spoke for me and the rest, but for the accident that I was born with a pen in my hand, and you without. We love to read the lives of the great, yet what a broken history of mankind they give, unless supplemented by the lives of the humble! But while the great can speak for themselves, or by the tongues of their admirers, the humble are apt to live inarticulate and die unheard. It is well that now and then one is born among the simple with a taste for selfrevelation. The man or woman thus endowed must speak, will speak, though there are only the grasses in the field to hear, and none but the wind to carry the tale.

It is pleasant to recall how we went bathing in the Polota. On Friday afternoons in summer, when the week’s work was done, and the houses of the good housewives stood shining with cleanliness, ready for the Sabbath, parties of women and girls went chattering and laughing down to the river bank. There was a particular spot which belonged to the women. I do not know where the men bathed, but our part of the river was just above Bonderoff’s grist-mill. I can see the green bank sloping to the water, and the still water sliding down to the sudden swirl and spray of the mill-race.

The woods on the bank screened the bathers. Bathing costumes were simply absent, which caused the mermaids no embarrassment, for they were accustomed to see each other naked in the public hot baths. They had little fear of intrusion, for the spot was sacred to them. They splashed about and laughed and played tricks, with streaming hair and free gestures. I do not know when I saw the girls play as they did in the water. It was a pretty picture, but the bathers would have been shocked beyond your understanding if you had suggested that naked women might be put into a picture. If it happened, as it did at least once for me to remember, that their privacy was outraged, the bathers were thrown into a panic as if their very lives were threatened. Screaming they huddled together, low in the water, some hiding their eyes in their hands, with the instinct of the ostrich. Some ran for their clothes on the bank, and stood shrinking behind some inadequate rag. The more spirited of the naiads threw pebbles at the cowardly intruders, who, safe behind the leafy cover that was meant to shield modesty, threw jeers and mockery in return. But the Gentile boys ran away soon, or ran away punished. A chemise and a petticoat turned a frightened woman into an Amazon in such circumstances; and woe to the impudent wretch who lingered after the avengers plunged into the thicket. Slaps and cuffs at close range were his portion, and curses pursued him in retreat.

Among the liveliest of my memories are those of eating and drinking; and I would sooner give up some of my delightful remembered walks, green trees, cool skies, and all, than to lose my images of suppers eaten on Sabbath evenings at the end of those walks. I recall the feel and flavor of the cheesecake my grandmother used to make. Should you attempt to imitate it, from my analysis, you would fail. You have nothing in your kitchen cupboard to give the pastry its notable flavor. It takes history to make such a cake. First you must eat it as a ravenous child, in memorable twilights, before the lighting of the week-day lamp. Then you must have yourself removed from the house of your feast, across the oceans, to a land where your cherished pastry is unknown even by name; and where daylight and twilight, work-day and fête-day, for years rush by you in the unbroken tide of a strange, new, overfull life. You must abstain from the inimitable morsel for a period of years — I think fifteen is the magic number — and then suddenly, one day, rub the Aladdin’s lamp of memory, and have the renowned tidbit whisked upon your platter, garnished with a hundred sweet herbs of past association.

My winters, while I was a very little girl, were passed in comparative confinement. On account of my delicate health, my grandmother and aunts deemed it wise to keep me indoors; or if I went out, I was so heavily coated and mittened and shawled that the frost scarcely got a chance at the tip of my nose. I never skated or coasted or built snow-houses. If I had any experience of snowballs, it was with those thrown at me by the Gentile boys. The way I dodge a snowball to this day makes me certain that I learned the act in my fearful childhood days, when I learned so many cowardly tricks of bending to a blow. I know that I was proud of myself, not many years ago, when I found I was not afraid to stand up and catch a flying baseball, but the fear of the snowball I have not conquered. When I turn a corner in snowball days, the boys with bulging pockets see a head held high and a step unquickened, but I know whether I shrink inwardly; and this private mortification I set down against old Polotzk, in my long score of grievances and shames. Fear is a devil hard to cast out.

At certain — I mean uncertain — intervals, we were bundled up and marched to the public baths. This was so great an undertaking, consuming half a day or so, and involving, in winter, such risk of catching cold, that it is no wonder the ceremony was not practiced oftener.

The public baths were situated on the river bank. I always stopped a while outside, to visit the poor patient horse in the treadmill by means of which the water was pumped into the baths. But we had a great task before us, so my mother always hurried me inside.

We undress in a room leading directly from the entry, and furnished only with benches around the walls. There is no screen or other protection against the draughts rushing in every time the door is opened. When we enter the bathing-room we are met by a babel of sounds — shrill voices of women, hoarse voices of attendants, wailing and yelping of children, and rushing of water. At the same time we are smitten by the heat of the room, and nearly suffocated by clouds of steam. We find an empty bench, and surround ourselves with a semicircle of wooden pails, collected from all over the room. Sometimes two women seeking pails lay hold of the same pail at the same moment, and a wrangle ensues, in the course of which each disputant reminds the other of all her failings, nicknames, and undesirable connections, living, dead, and unborn; until an attendant interferes, with more muscle than argument, punctuating the sentence of justice with newly-coined expletives suggested by the occasion. The centre of the room, where the bathers fill their pails at the faucets, is a field of endless battle, especially on a crowded day. The peaceable women who are seated within earshot stop their violent scrubbing, to the relief of unwilling children, while they attend to the liveliest of the quarrels.

I like to watch the poll, that place of torture and heroic endurance. It is a series of steps rising to the ceiling, affording a gradually mounting temperature. The bather who wants to enjoy a violent sweating rests full length for a few minutes on each step, while an attendant administers several hearty strokes with a stinging besom. Sometimes a woman climbs too far, and is brought down in a faint. On the poll, also, the cupping is done. The back of the patient, with the cups in even rows, looks to me like a muffin pan. Of course I never go on the poll: I am not robust enough. My spankings I take at home.

Cleansed, red-skinned, and steaming, we return at last to the dressingroom, to shiver, as we dress, in the cold draughts from the entry door; and then muffled up to the eyes, we plunge into the refreshing outer air, and hurry home, looking like so many big bundles running away with smaller bundles. If we meet acquaintances on the way we are greeted with ‘zu refueh ’ (to your good health). If the first man we meet is a Gentile, the women who have been to the mikweh (ritual bath) have to return and repeat the ceremony of purification. To prevent such a calamity, the kerchief is worn hooded over the eyes, so as to exclude unholy sights. At home we are indulged with extra pieces of cake for tea, and otherwise treated like heroes returned from victory. We narrate anecdotes of our expedition, and my mother complains that my little brother is getting too old to be taken to the women’s bath. He will go hereafter with the men.

The winter days drew themselves out too long sometimes, so that I sat at the window thinking what should happen next. No dolls, no books, no games, and at times no companions. My grandmother taught me knitting, but I never got to the heel of my stocking, because if I discovered a dropped stitch I insisted on unraveling all my work till I picked it. up; and grandmother, instead of encouraging me in my love for perfection, lost patience and took away my knitting-needles. I still maintain that she was in the wrong, but I have forgiven her, since I have worn many pairs of stockings with dropped stitches, and been grateful for them. And speaking of such everyday things reminds me of my friends, among whom also I find an impressive number with a stitch dropped somewhere in the pattern of their souls. I love these friends so dearly that I begin to think I am at last shedding my intolerance; for I remember the day when I could not love less than perfection. I and my imperfect friends together aspire to cast our blemishes, and I am happier so.

For the long winter evenings there was plenty of quiet occupation. I liked to sit with the women at the long bare table, picking feathers for new featherbeds. It was pleasant to poke my hand into the soft-heaped mass and set it all in motion. I pretended that I could pick out the feathers of particular hens, formerly my pets. I reflected that they had fed me with eggs and broth, and now were going to make my bed so soft; while I had done nothing for them but throw them a handful of oats now and then, or chase them about, or spoil their nests. I was not ashamed of my part; I knew that if I were a hen I should do as a hen does. I just liked to think about things in my idle way.

Itke, the housemaid, was always the one to break in upon my reflections. She was sure to have a fit of sneezing just when the heap on the table was highest, sending clouds of feathers into the air, like a home-made snowstorm. After that the evening was finished by our picking the feathers from each other’s hair.

And I remember my playmates.

There was always a crowd of us girls. We were a mixed set,— rich little girls, well-to-do little girls, and poor little girls,— but not because we were so democratic. Rather it came about, if my sister and I are considered the centre of the ring, because we had suffered the several grades of fortune. In our best days no little girls had to stoop to us; in our humbler days we were not so proud that we had to condescend to our chance neighbors. The granddaughters

of Raphael the Russian, in retaining their breeding and manners, retained a few of their more exalted friends, and became a link between them and those whom they later adopted through force of propinquity.

We were human little girls, so our amusements mimicked the life about us. We played house, we played soldiers, we played Gentiles, we celebrated weddings and funerals. We copied the life about us realistically. We had not been to a Froebel kindergarten and learned to impersonate butterflies and stones. Our elders would have laughed at us for such nonsense. I remember once standing on the river bank with a little boy, when a quantity of lumber was floating down on its way to the distant saw-mill. A log and a board crowded each other near where we stood. The board slipped by first, but presently it swerved, and swung partly around. Then it righted itself with the stream and kept straight on, the lazy log following behind. Said Zalmen to me, interpreting, ‘The board looks back and says, “Log, log, you will not go with me? Then I will go on by myself.” ’ That boy was called simple, on account of such speeches as this. I wonder in what language he is writing poetry now.

I was very fond of playing Gentiles. I am afraid I liked everything that was a little risky. I particularly enjoyed being the corpse in a Gentile funeral. I was laid across two chairs, and my playmates, in borrowed shawls and long calicoes, with their hair loose and with candlesticks in their hands, marched around me, singing unearthly melodies, and groaning till they scared themselves. As I lay there, covered over with a black cloth, I felt as dead as dead could be; and my playmates were the unholy priests in gorgeous robes of velvet and silk and gold. Their candlesticks were the crosiers of the Christian funeral processions, and their chantings were hideous incantations to the arch enemy, the Christian god of horrible images. As I imagined the bareheaded crowds making way for my funeral to pass, my flesh crept, not because I was about to be buried, but because the people crossed themselves. But our procession stopped outside the church, because we did not dare to carry even our make-believe across that unholy threshold. Besides, none of us had ever been inside — God forbid! — so we did not know what did happen next.²

When I arose from my funeral, I was indeed a ghost. I felt unreal and lost and hateful. I don’t think we girls liked each other much after playing funeral. Anyway, we never played any more on the same day; or if we did, we soon quarreled. Such was the hold which our hereditary terrors and hatreds had upon our childish minds, that if we only mocked a Christian procession in our play, we suffered a mutual revulsion of feeling, as if we had led each other into sin.

We gathered oftener at our house than anywhere else. On Sabbath days we refrained, of course, from soldiering and the like, but we had just as good a time, going off to promenade, two and two, in our very best dresses, whispering secrets and telling stories. We had a few stories in the circle — I do not know how they came to us — and these were told over and over. Gutke, the accepted leader of our set, knew the best story of all. She told the tale of Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, and told it well. It was her story, and nobody else ever attempted it, though I, for one, soon had it by heart. Gutke’s version of the famous tale was unlike any I have since read, but it was essentially the story of Aladdin, so that I was able to identify it later when I found it in a book. Names, incidents, and ‘local color’ were slightly Hebraized, but the supernatural wonders of treasure-caves, jeweled gardens, genii, princesses, and all, were not in the least marred or diminished. Gutke would spin the story out for a long afternoon, and we all listened entranced, even at the hundredth rehearsal. We had a few other fairy stories, — I later identified them with the stories of Grimm or of Andersen, — but for the most part the tales we were told were sombre and unimaginative; tales our nurses used to tell to frighten us into good behavior.

Although I always joined the crowd when any fun was on foot, I think I had the best times by myself. My sister was fond of housework, but I — I was fond of idleness. While Fetchke pottered in the kitchen beside the maid or trotted all about the house after my grandmother, I wasted time in some window-corner, or studied the habits of the cow and the chickens in the yard. I always found something to do that was of no use to anybody.

Idle child though I was, the day was not long enough sometimes for my idleness. More than once in the pleasant summer I stole out of bed when even the cow was still drowsing, and went barefoot through the dripping grass and stood at the gate, awaiting the morning. I found a sense of adventure in being conscious when all other people were asleep.

There was not much of a prospect from the gateway, but at that early hour everything looked new and large to me, even the little houses that yesterday had been so familiar. The houses, when creatures went in and out of them, were merely conventional objects; in the soft gray morning they were themselves creatures. Some stood up straight, and some leaned, and some looked as if they saw me. And then over the dewy gardens rose the sun, and the light spread and grew over everything, till it shone on my bare feet. And in my heart grew a great wonder, and I was ready to cry, my world was so strange and sweet about me. In those moments I could have loved somebody dearly — somebody who cared to get up secretly, and stand and see the sun come up.

1 The author’s paper in the October number amply explained her fear of the CROSS.—THE EDITORS.

Was there not somebody who got up before the sun? Was there not Mishka the shepherd? Aye, that was an early riser, but I knew he was no sun-worshiper. Before the chickens stirred, before the lazy maid let the cow out of the barn, I heard his rousing horn, its distant notes harmonious with the morning. Barn-doors creaked in response to Mishka’s call, and soft-eyed cattle went willingly out to meet him, and stood in groups in the empty square, licking and nosing each other; till Mishka’s little drove was all assembled, and he tramped out of town behind them, in a cloud of dust.

III

The survival in Russia of mediæval injustice to Jews was responsible for the narrowness of educational standards in the Polotzk of my time. Jewish scholarship was confined to a knowledge of the Hebrew language and literature; and even these limited stores of learning were not equally divided between men and women. In the mediæval position of the women of Polotzk education really had no place. A girl was ‘finished’ when she could read her prayers in Hebrew, following the meaning by the aid of the Yiddish translation especially prepared for women. If she could sign her name in Russian, do a little figuring, and write a letter in Yiddish to the parents of her betrothed, she was called wohl gelehrent — well educated.

Fortunately for me, my parents’ ideals soared beyond all this. My mother, who had not stirred out of Polotzk, readily adopted the notion of a liberal education imported by my father from cities beyond the Pale. She heartily supported my father in all his plans for us girls. Fetchke and I were to learn to translate as well as pronounce Hebrew, the same as our brother. We were to study Russian, and German, and arithmetic. We were to go to the best pension and receive a thorough secular education. My father’s ambition, after several years’ sojourn in enlightened circles, reached even beyond the pension; but that was flying further than Polotzk could follow him with the naked eye.

I do not remember our first teacher. When our second teacher came we were already advanced to continuous reading. Reb’ Lebe was no great scholar. Great scholars would not waste their learning on mere girls. Reb’ Lebe knew enough to teach girls Hebrew. Tall and lean was the rebbe, with a lean, pointed face, and a thin, pointed beard. The beard became pointed from much stroking and pulling downwards. The hands of Reb’ Lebe were large, and his beard was not half a handful. The fingers of the rebbe were long, and the nails, I am afraid, were not very clean. The coat of Reb’ Lebe was rusty, and so was his skull cap. Remember, Reb’ Lebe was only a girls’ teacher, and nobody would pay much for teaching girls. But lean and rusty as he was, the rebbe’s pupils regarded him with entire respect, and followed his pointer with earnest eyes across the limp page of the alphabet, or the thumbed page of the prayer-book.

When we left off reading by rote and Reb’ Lebe began to reveal the mysteries to us, I was so eager to know all that was in my book that the lesson was always too short. I continued reading by the hour, after the rebbe was gone, though I understood about one word in ten. My favorite Hebrew reading was the Psalms. Verse after verse I chanted to the monotonous tune taught by Reb’ Lebe, rocking to the rhythm of the chant, just like the rebbe. And so ran the songs of David, and so ran the hours by, while I sat by the low window, the world erased from my consciousness.

When we began to study the Pentateuch I had the great advantage of a complete translation in Yiddish. I faithfully studied the portion assigned in Hebrew, but I need no longer wait for the next lesson to know how the story ends. I could read while daylight lasted, if I chose, in the Yiddish. Well I remember that Pentateuch, a middling thick octavo volume, in a crumbly sort of leather cover; and how the book opened of itself at certain places, where there were pictures.

It was inevitable, as we came to Genesis, that I should ask questions.

Rebbe,translating: ‘In the beginning God created the earth.’

Pupil, repeating: ‘In the beginning — Rebbe, when was the beginning?’

Rebbe, losing the place in amazement: '’S gehert a kasse? [Ever hear such a question?] The beginning was — the beginning — the beginning was in the beginning, of course! Nu, nu! Go on.’

Pupil, resuming: ‘In the beginning God made the earth. — Rebbe, what did He make it out of?’

Rebbe, dropping his pointer in astonishment: ‘What did — ? What sort of a girl is this, that asks questions? Go on, go on!'

The lesson continues to the end. The book is closed, the pointer put away. The rebbe exchanges his skull cap for his street cap, is about to go.

Pupil, timidly, but determinedly, detaining him: ‘Reb’ Lebe, who made God ? ’

The rebbe stares at the pupil in amazement mixed with anxiety. His emotion is beyond speech. He turns and leaves the room. In his perturbation he even forgets to kiss the mezuzah³ on the door-post. The pupil feels reproved and yet somehow in the right. Who did make God? But if the rebbe will not tell — will not tell? Or perhaps he does not know? The rebbe—?

IV

Two little girls dressed in their best, shining from their curls to their shoes. One little girl has rosy cheeks, the other has staring eyes. Rosy-Cheeks carries a carpet-bag. Big-Eyes carries a new slate. Hand in hand they go into the summer morning, so happy and pretty a pair that it is no wonder people look after them, from window and door, and that other little girls, not dressed in their best, and carrying no carpetbags, stand in the street gaping after them.

Let the folks stare; no harm can come to the little sisters. Did not grandmother tie pepper and salt into the corners of their pockets, to ward off the evil eye? The little maids see nothing but the road ahead, so eager are they upon their errand. Carpetbag and slate proclaim that errand: Rosy-Cheeks and Big-Eyes are going to school.

I have no words to describe the pride with which my sister and I crossed the threshold of Isaiah the Scribe. Hitherto we had been to heder, to a rebbe; now we were to study with a lehrer, a secular teacher. There was all the difference in the world between the two. The one taught you Hebrew only, which every girl learned; the other could teach Yiddish and Russian and, some said, even German; and how to write a letter, and how to do sums without a counting-frame, just on a piece of paper; accomplishments which were extremely rare among girls in Polotzk. But nothing was too high for the grandchildren of Raphael the Russian; they had ‘ good heads,’ everybody knew. So we were sent to Reb’ Isaiah.

My first school, where I was so proud to be received, was a hovel on the edge of a swamp. The schoolroom was gray, within and without. The door was so low that Reb’ Isaiah had to stoop in passing. The little windows were murky. The walls were bare, but the low ceiling was decorated with bundles of goose-quills stuck in under the rafters. A rough table stood in the middle of the room, with a long bench on either side.

That was the schoolroom complete. In my eyes, on that first morning, it shone with a wonderful light, a strange glory that penetrated every corner, and made the stained logs fair as tinted marble; and the windows were not too small to afford me a view of a large new world.

Room was made for the new pupils on the bench, beside the teacher. We found our ink-wells, which were simply hollows scooped out in the thick tabletop. Reb’ Isaiah made us very serviceable pens by tying the pen-points securely to little twigs; though some of the pupils used quills. The teacher also ruled our paper for us, into little squares, like a surveyor’s note-book. Then he set us a copy, and we copied, one letter in each square, all the way down the page. All the little girls, and the middlesized girls, and the pretty big girls, copied letters in little squares, just so. There were so few of us, that Reb’ Isaiah could see everybody’s page, by just leaning over. And if some of our cramped fingers were clumsy, and did not form the loops and curves accurately, all he had to do was to stretch out his hand and rap with his ruler on our respective knuckles. It was all very cosy, with the ink-wells that could not be upset, and the pens that grew in the woods, or strutted in the dooryard, and the teacher in the closest touch with his pupils, as I have just told. And as he labored with us, and the hours drew themselves out, he was comforted by the smell of his dinner cooking in some little hole adjoining the schoolroom, and by the sound of his good Leah or Rachel or Deborah (I don’t remember her name) keeping order among his little ones. She kept very good order, too, so that most of the time you could hear the scratching of the laborious pens, accompanied by the croaking of the frogs in the swamp.

Alas! there were not many lessons for Fetchke and me. Long before we had exhausted Reb’ Isaiah’s learning, we had to give up our teacher, because the family fortunes began to decline, and luxuries, such as schooling, had to be cut off. My father’s plans fell to the ground, on account of the protracted illness of both my parents. All his hopes of leading his children beyond the intellectual limits of Polotzk were trampled down by the monster poverty, who showed his evil visage just as my sister and I were fairly started on a broader path.

Think of a little girl who wanted to know all things, but had no teacher who could answer questions, and no book save the Bible and her mother’s prayer-books. What could such a child do but try and find out for herself what all her oracles refused to divulge? Grown-up people said a great many things that were false. All grandmothers were pious, and yet they said that ‘blind flowers’ caused blindness, which was not true. They talked a great deal about right and wrong, about being holy, about God. How could a young philosopher be sure that they were not mistaken? The most inquisitive little girl in Polotzk was driven to put to the test all things for which a test could be devised, until at last she hit upon an impious plan to put God Himself to the proof!

One Sabbath afternoon, when all the house was taking its after-dinner nap, she went out into the yard, and stopped at the gate. She took out her pocket handkerchief. She looked at it. Yes, that would do for the experiment. She put it back into her pocket. She did not have to rehearse mentally the sacred admonition not to labor on the Sabbath day. She knew it as she knew that she was alive. She knew that to carry anything in her pocket when she passed the boundary of her home was to break this Sabbath law. And with her handkerchief in her pocket the audacious child stepped into the street!

She stood a moment, her heart beating so that it pained. Nothing happened. She walked quite across the street. The Sabbath peace still lay on everything. She felt again of the burden in her pocket. Yes, she certainly was committing a sin. With an access of impious boldness, the sinner walked — she ran as far as the corner, and stood still, fearfully expectant.

What form would the punishment take? She stood breathing painfully for an eternity. How still everything was — how close and still the air! Would it be a storm? would a sudden bolt strike her? She stood and waited. She could not bring her hand to her pocket again, but she felt that it bulged monstrously. She stood with no thought of moving again. Where were the thunders of Jehovah? No sacred word of all her long prayers came to her tongue — not even ‘Hear, O Israel.’ She felt that she was in direct communication with God —awful thought! — and He would read her mind and would send His answer.

An age passed in blank expectancy. Nothing happened! Where was the wrath of God? Where was God?

When she went back into the house, she gazed with a new curiosity at her mother, at her grandmother, dozing in their chairs. They looked different. When they awoke and stretched themselves and adjusted wig and cap, they looked very strange. As she went to get her grandmother her Bible, and dropped it accidentally, she kissed it by way of atonement, just as a proper child should.

The child who questioned sacred authorities and dared to challenge God Himself was famous for her devotion to the Psalms, and for faithful observance of all rites and ceremonies prescribed for the pious. Was this child, then, a fraud? To return to the honest first person, I was something of a fraud, in the puzzling matters of prescribed religion. The days when I believed everything I was told did not run much beyond my teething time. I soon began to question if fire was really hot, if the cat would really scratch. Presently I had to question God. And in those days my religion depended on my mood. I could believe anything I wanted to believe. I was certain, in all my moods, that there was a God who had made the world, in some fashion unexplained, and who knew about me and my doings; for there was the world all about me, and somebody must have made it. And it was inconceivable that a being powerful enough to do such work could be aware of my actions at all times, and yet continue to me invisible.

The question remained, what did He think of my conduct? Was He really angry when I broke the Sabbath, or pleased when I fasted on the Day of Atonement? My belief as to these matters wavered. When I swung the sacrifice around my head on Atonement Eve, repeating, ‘ Be thou my sacrifice,’ I certainly believed that I was bargaining with the Almighty for pardon, and that He was interested in the matter. But next day, when the fast was over, and I enjoyed all of my chicken that I could eat, I believed as certainly that God could not be party to such a foolish transaction, in which He got nothing but words, while I got both the feast and the pardon. The sacrifice of money, to be spent for the poor, seemed to me a more reliable insurance against damnation. The well-to-do pious offered up both living sacrifice and money for the poor box, but it was a sign of poverty to offer money only. Even a lean rooster, to be killed, roasted, and garnished for the devotee’s own table at the breaking of the fast, seemed to be considered a more respectable sacrifice than a groschen to increase the charity fund. All this was so illogical that it unsettled my faith in minor points of doctrine, and on these points I was quite happy to believe to-day one thing, to-morrow another.

As unwaveringly as I believed that we Jews had a God who was powerful and wise, I believed that the God of my Christian neighbors was impotent, cruel, and foolish. I understood that the god of the Gentiles was no better than a toy, to be dressed up in gaudy stuffs and carried in processions. I saw it often enough, and turned away in contempt. While the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — my God — enjoined on me honesty and kindness, the god of Vanka, the Gentile boy, bade him beat me and spit on me whenever he caught me alone. And what a foolish god was that who taught the stupid Gentiles that we drank the blood of a murdered child at our Passover feast! Why, I, who was only a child, knew better. And so I hated and feared and avoided the great white church in the square, and hated every sign and symbol of that monstrous god who was kept there, and hated my own person when, in our play of a Christian funeral, I imagined my body to be the corpse, over which was carried the hideous cross.

Not long after that sinful experiment with the handkerchief I discovered, by accident , that I was not the only doubter in Polotzk. One Friday night I lay wakeful in my little bed, staring from the dark into the lighted room adjoining mine. I saw the Sabbath candles sputter and go out, one by one, — it was late, — but the lamp hanging from the ceiling still burned high. Everybody had gone to bed. The lamp would go out before morning, if there was little oil; or else it would burn till Natasha, the Gentile chore-woman, came in the morning to put it out, and remove the candlesticks from the table, and unseal the oven, and do the dozen little tasks which no Jew could perform on the Sabbath. The simple prohibition against labor on the Sabbath day had been construed by zealous commentators to mean much more. One must not even touch any instrument of labor or commerce, as an axe or a coin. It was forbidden to light a fire, or to touch anything that contained fire, or had contained fire, — even a cold candlestick or a burned match. Therefore the lamp at which I was staring must burn till the Gentile woman came to put it out.

The light did not annoy me in the least; I was not thinking about it. But apparently it troubled somebody else. I saw my father come from his room, which also adjoined the living-room. What was he going to do? What was this he was doing? Could I believe my eyes? My father touched the lighted lamp! yes, he shook it, as if to see how much oil there was left!

I was petrified in my place. I could neither move nor make a sound. It seemed to me he must feel my eyes bulging at him out of the dark. But he did not know that I was looking; he thought everybody was asleep. He turned down the light a very little, and waited. I did not take my eyes from him. He lowered the flame a little more, and waited again. I watched. By the slightest degrees he turned the light, down. I understood. In case any one were awake, it would appear as if the lamp were going out of itself. I was the only one who lay so as to be able to see him, and I had gone to bed so early that he could not suppose I was awake. The light annoyed him, he wanted to put it out, but he would not risk having it known.

I heard my father find his bed in the dark before I dared to draw a full breath. The thing he had done was a monstrous sin. If his mother had seen him do it, it would have broken her heart — his mother who fasted half the days of the year, when he was a boy, to save his teacher’s fee; his mother who walked almost barefoot in the cruel snow, to carry him on her shoulders to school when she had no shoes for him; his mother who made it her pious pride to raise up a learned son, that most precious offering in the eyes of the great God, from the hand of a poor struggling woman. If my mother had seen it, it would have grieved her no less — my mother who was given to him, with her youth and good name and her dowry, in exchange for his learning and piety; my mother who was taken from her play to bear him children and feed them and keep them, while he sat on the benches of the scholars and repaid her labors with the fame of his learning. I did not put it to myself just so, but I understood that learning and piety were the things most valued in our family, that my father was a scholar, and that piety was the fruit of sacred learning. And yet my father had deliberately violated the Sabbath.

His act was not to be compared with my carrying the handkerchief. The sins were of the same kind, but the sinners and their motives were different. I was a child, a girt at that, not yet of the age of moral responsibility. He was a man full grown, passing for one of God’s elect, and accepting the reverence of the world as due tribute to his scholarly merits. I had by no means satisfied myself, by my secret experiment, that it was not sinful to carry on the Sabbath day. If God did not punish me on the spot, perhaps it was because of my youth, — I knew I could not be accounted fully responsible,— or perhaps it was because of my motive.

I puzzled long over my father’s strange conduct, and came to the conclusion that, as he was too learned to have any doubts on the question, and too good to do wrong knowingly, he did not account it a sin to put out a lamp on Sabbath night. Then why his secrecy? That was easily explained. Had I not myself instinctively adopted secret methods in my little investigations? Let my father publish his heretical opinions, and he and his family would have no place in Polotzk. In our world it was dangerous to be wise. If you did not think as other people did, it was best not to let it be suspected, even by your own family.

The discovery of my father’s position on the Sabbath question served to shake me further in my faith. I wish I had somebody to blame for my weakness in morals also. I recall with sorrow how I stole a piece of sugar. It was long ago — almost as long ago as anything that I remember. We were still living in my grandfather’s house when this dreadful thing happened, and I was only four or five years old when we moved from there. Before my mother figured this out for me I scarcely had the courage to confess my sin.

And it was thus: —

In a corner of a front room, by a window, stood a high chest of drawers. On top of the chest stood a tin box, decorated with figures of queer people with queer flat parasols; a Chinese teabox, in a word. The box had a lid. The lid was shut tight. But I knew what was in that gorgeous box, and I coveted it. I was very little — I never could reach anything. There stood a chair suggestively near the chest. I pushed the chair a little and mounted it. By standing on tiptoe I could now reach the box. I opened it and took out an irregular lump of sparkling sugar. I stood on the chair admiring it. I stood too long. My grandmother came in — or was it Itke, the housemaid? — and found me with the stolen morsel.

I saw that I was fairly caught. How could I hope to escape my captor, when I was obliged to turn on my stomach in order to descend safely, thus presenting my jailer with the most tempting opportunity for immediate chastisement? I took in the situation before my grandmother had found her voice for horror. Did I rub my eyes with my knuckles and whimper? I. wish I could report that I was thus quickly struck with a sense of my guilt. I was impressed only with the absolute certainty of my impending doom, and I promptly seized on a measure of compensation. While my captor — I really think it was a grandmother — rehearsed her entire vocabulary of reproach, from a distance sufficient to enable her to hurl her voice at me with the best effect, I stuffed the lump of sugar into my mouth and munched it as fast as I could. And I had eaten it all, and had licked my sticky lips, before the avenging rod came down.

I remember no similar lapses from righteousness, but I sinned in lesser ways more times than there are years in my life. I sinned, and more than once I escaped punishment by some trick or sly speech. I do not mean that I lied outright, though that also I did, sometimes; but I would twist my naughty speech, if forced to repeat it, in such an artful manner, or give such a ludicrous explanation of my naughty act, that justice was overcome by laughter, and threw me, as often as not, a handful of raisins instead of a knotted strap. If by such successes I was encouraged to cultivate my natural slyness and duplicity, I throw the blame on my unwise preceptors, and am glad to be rid of the burden for once.

I have said that I used to lie. I recall no particular occasion when a lie was the cause of my disgrace; but I know that it was always my habit, when I had some trifling adventure to report, to garnish it up with so much detail and circumstance that nobody who had witnessed my small affair could have recognized it as the same, had I not insisted on my version with such fervid conviction. The truth is that everything that happened to me really loomed great and shone splendid in my eyes, and I could not, except by conscious effort, reduce my experiences to their actual shapes and colors. If I saw a pair of geese leading about a lazy goose-girl, it seemed to me there was a lively flock of them in charge of a distracted guardian. If I met poor Blind Munye with a frown on his face, I thought that a cloud of wrath overspread his countenance; and I ran home to relate, panting, how narrowly I had escaped his fury. I will not pretend that I was absolutely unconscious of my exaggerations; but if you insist, I will say that things as I reported them might have been so, and would have been more interesting had they been so.

The noble reader who never told a lie, or never confessed one, will be shocked at these revelations of my childish depravity. What proof has he, he will cry, that I am not lying on every page of this chronicle, if, by my own confession, my childhood was spent in a maze of lies and dreams? I shall say to the saint, when I am challenged, that the proof of my conversion to veracity is engraven in his own soul. Do you not remember, you spot less one, how you used to steal and lie and cheat and rob? Oh, not with your own hand, of course! It was your remote ancestor who lived by plunder, and was honored for the blood upon his hairy hands. By and by he discovered that cunning was more effective than violence, and less troublesome. Still later he became convinced that the greatest cunning was virtue, and made him a moral code, and subdued the world. Then, when you came along, stumbling through the wilderness of cast-off errors, your wise ancestor gave you a thrust that landed you in the clearing of modernity, at the same time bellowing into your ear, ‘Now be good! It pays!’

This is the whole history of your saintliness. But all people do not take up life at the same point of human development. Some are backward at birth, and have to make up, in the brief space of their individual history, the stages they missed on their way out of the black past. With me, for example, it actually comes to this: that I have to recapitulate in my own experience all the slow steps of the progress of the race. I seem to learn nothing except by the prick of life on my own skin. I am saved from living in ignorance and dying in darkness only by the sensitiveness of my skin. Some men learn through borrowed experience. Shut them up in a glass tower, with an unobstructed view of the world, and they will go through every adventure of life by proxy, and be able to furnish you with a complete philosophy of life, so true that you may safely bring up your children by it. But I am not of that godlike organization. I am a thinking animal. Things are as important to me as ideas. I imbibe wisdom through every pore of my body. There are times, indeed, when the doctor in his study is less intelligible to me than a cricket far off in the field. The earth was my mother, the earth is my teacher. I am a dutiful pupil: I listen ever with my ear close to her lips. It seems to me I do not know a single thing that I did not learn, more or less directly, through one of the corporal senses. As long as I have my body, I need not despair of salvation.

[In December, Mary Antin will continue her autobiography with a description of her emigration to ‘The Promised Land.’ — THE EDITORS.]