Book: Children of the Ghetto

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CHILDREN OF THE GHETTO

A Study of a Peculiar People

BY

I. ZANGWILL

Author of "The Master," "The King of Schnorrers" "Dreamers of the
Ghetto," "Without Prejudice," etc.

1914






Preface to the Third Edition.


The issue of a one-volume edition gives me the opportunity of thanking
the public and the critics for their kindly reception of this chart of a
_terra incognita_, and of restoring the original sub-title, which is a
reply to some criticisms upon its artistic form. The book is intended as
a study, through typical figures, of a race whose persistence is the
most remarkable fact in the history of the world, the faith and morals
of which it has so largely moulded. At the request of numerous readers I
have reluctantly added a glossary of 'Yiddish' words and phrases, based
on one supplied to the American edition by another hand. I have omitted
only those words which occur but once and are then explained in the
text; and to each word I have added an indication of the language from
which it was drawn. This may please those who share Mr. Andrew Lang's
and Miss Rosa Dartle's desire for information. It will be seen that most
of these despised words are pure Hebrew; a language which never died off
the lips of men, and which is the medium in which books are written all
the world over even unto this day.

I.Z.

London, March, 1893.






CONTENTS.


BOOK I. THE CHILDREN OF THE GHETTO.

Proem
I. The Bread of Affliction
II. The Sweater
III. Malka
IV. The Redemption of the Son and the Daughter
V. The Pauper Alien
VI. "Reb" Shemuel
VII. The Neo-Hebrew Poet
VIII. Esther and her Children
IX. Dutch Debby
X. A Silent Family
XI. The Purim Ball
XII. The Sons of the Covenant
XIII. Sugarman's Barmitzvah Party
XIV. The Hope of the Family
XV. The Holy Land League
XVI. The Courtship of Shosshi Shmendrik
XVII. The Hyams's Honeymoon
XVIII. The Hebrew's Friday Night
XIX. With the Strikers
XX. The Hope Extinct
XXI. The Jargon Players
XXII. "For Auld Lang Syne, My Dear"
XXIII. The Dead Monkey
XXIV. The Shadow of Religion
XXV. Seder Night

BOOK II. THE GRANDCHILDREN OF THE GHETTO.

I. The Christmas Dinner
II. Raphael Leon
III. "The Flag of Judah"
IV. The Troubles of an Editor
V. A Woman's Growth
VI. Comedy or Tragedy?
VII. What the Years brought
VIII. The Ends of a Generation
IX. The "Flag" flutters
X. Esther defies the Universe
XI. Going Home
XII. A Sheaf of Sequels
XIII. The Dead Monkey again
XIV. Sidney settles down
XV. From Soul to Soul
XVI. Love's Temptation
XVII. The Prodigal Son
XVIII. Hopes and Dreams






PROEM.


Not here in our London Ghetto the gates and gaberdines of the olden
Ghetto of the Eternal City; yet no lack of signs external by which
one may know it, and those who dwell therein. Its narrow streets
have no specialty of architecture; its dirt is not picturesque. It
is no longer the stage for the high-buskined tragedy of massacre
and martyrdom; only for the obscurer, deeper tragedy that evolves
from the pressure of its own inward forces, and the long-drawn-out
tragi-comedy of sordid and shifty poverty. Natheless, this London
Ghetto of ours is a region where, amid uncleanness and squalor, the
rose of romance blows yet a little longer in the raw air of English
reality; a world which hides beneath its stony and unlovely surface
an inner world of dreams, fantastic and poetic as the mirage of the
Orient where they were woven, of superstitions grotesque as the
cathedral gargoyles of the Dark Ages in which they had birth. And
over all lie tenderly some streaks of celestial light shining from
the face of the great Lawgiver.

The folk who compose our pictures are children of the Ghetto; their
faults are bred of its hovering miasma of persecution, their
virtues straitened and intensified by the narrowness of its
horizon. And they who have won their way beyond its boundaries must
still play their parts in tragedies and comedies--tragedies of
spiritual struggle, comedies of material ambition--which are the
aftermath of its centuries of dominance, the sequel of that long
cruel night in Jewry which coincides with the Christian Era. If
they are not the Children, they are at least the Grandchildren of
the Ghetto.

The particular Ghetto that is the dark background upon which our
pictures will be cast, is of voluntary formation.

People who have been living in a Ghetto for a couple of centuries, are
not able to step outside merely because the gates are thrown down, nor
to efface the brands on their souls by putting off the yellow badges.
The isolation imposed from without will have come to seem the law of
their being. But a minority will pass, by units, into the larger, freer,
stranger life amid the execrations of an ever-dwindling majority. For
better or for worse, or for both, the Ghetto will be gradually
abandoned, till at last it becomes only a swarming place for the poor
and the ignorant, huddling together for social warmth. Such people are
their own Ghetto gates; when they migrate they carry them across the sea
to lands where they are not. Into the heart of East London there poured
from Russia, from Poland, from Germany, from Holland, streams of Jewish
exiles, refugees, settlers, few as well-to-do as the Jew of the proverb,
but all rich in their cheerfulness, their industry, and their
cleverness. The majority bore with them nothing but their phylacteries
and praying shawls, and a good-natured contempt for Christians and
Christianity. For the Jew has rarely been embittered by persecution. He
knows that he is in _Goluth_, in exile, and that the days of the Messiah
are not yet, and he looks upon the persecutor merely as the stupid
instrument of an all-wise Providence. So that these poor Jews were rich
in all the virtues, devout yet tolerant, and strong in their reliance on
Faith, Hope, and more especially Charity.

In the early days of the nineteenth century, all Israel were brethren.
Even the pioneer colony of wealthy Sephardim--descendants of the Spanish
crypto-Jews who had reached England _via_ Holland--had modified its
boycott of the poor Ashkenazic immigrants, now they were become an
overwhelming majority. There was a superior stratum of Anglo-German Jews
who had had time to get on, but all the Ashkenazic tribes lived very
much like a happy family, the poor not stand-offish towards the rich,
but anxious to afford them opportunities for well-doing. The _Schnorrer_
felt no false shame in his begging. He knew it was the rich man's duty
to give him unleavened bread at Passover, and coals in the winter, and
odd half-crowns at all seasons; and he regarded himself as the Jacob's
ladder by which the rich man mounted to Paradise. But, like all genuine
philanthropists, he did not look for gratitude. He felt that virtue was
its own reward, especially when he sat in Sabbath vesture at the head of
his table on Friday nights, and thanked God in an operatic aria for the
white cotton table-cloth and the fried sprats. He sought personal
interviews with the most majestic magnates, and had humorous repartees
for their lumbering censure.

As for the rich, they gave charity unscrupulously--in the same Oriental,
unscientific, informal spirit in which the _Dayanim_, those cadis of the
East End, administered justice. The _Takif_, or man of substance, was as
accustomed to the palm of the mendicant outside the Great Synagogue as
to the rattling pyx within. They lived in Bury Street, and Prescott
Street, and Finsbury--these aristocrats of the Ghetto--in mansions that
are now but congeries of "apartments." Few relations had they with
Belgravia, but many with Petticoat Lane and the Great _Shool_, the
stately old synagogue which has always been illuminated by candles and
still refuses all modern light. The Spanish Jews had a more ancient
_snoga_, but it was within a stone's throw of the "Duke's Place"
edifice. Decorum was not a feature of synagogue worship in those days,
nor was the Almighty yet conceived as the holder of formal receptions
once a week. Worshippers did not pray with bated breath, as if afraid
that the deity would overhear them. They were at ease in Zion. They
passed the snuff-boxes and remarks about the weather. The opportunities
of skipping afforded by a too exuberant liturgy promoted conversation,
and even stocks were discussed in the terrible _longueurs_ induced by
the meaningless ministerial repetition of prayers already said by the
congregation, or by the official recitations of catalogues of purchased
benedictions. Sometimes, of course, this announcement of the offertory
was interesting, especially when there was sensational competition. The
great people bade in guineas for the privilege of rolling up the Scroll
of the Law or drawing the Curtain of the Ark, or saying a particular
_Kaddish_ if they were mourners, and then thrills of reverence went
round the congregation. The social hierarchy was to some extent
graduated by synagogal contributions, and whoever could afford only a
little offering had it announced as a "gift"--a vague term which might
equally be the covering of a reticent munificence.

Very few persons, "called up" to the reading of the Law, escaped at the
cost they had intended, for one is easily led on by an insinuative
official incapable of taking low views of the donor's generosity and a
little deaf. The moment prior to the declaration of the amount was quite
exciting for the audience. On Sabbaths and festivals the authorities
could not write down these sums, for writing is work and work is
forbidden; even to write them in the book and volume of their brain
would have been to charge their memories with an illegitimate if not an
impossible burden. Parchment books on a peculiar system with holes in
the pages and laces to go through the holes solved the problem of
bookkeeping without pen and ink. It is possible that many of the
worshippers were tempted to give beyond their means for fear of losing
the esteem of the _Shammos_ or Beadle, a potent personage only next in
influence to the President whose overcoat he obsequiously removed on the
greater man's annual visit to the synagogue. The Beadle's eye was all
over the _Shool_ at once, and he could settle an altercation about seats
without missing a single response. His automatic amens resounded
magnificently through the synagogue, at once a stimulus and a rebuke. It
was probably as a concession to him that poor men, who were neither
seat-holders nor wearers of chimney-pot hats, were penned within an iron
enclosure near the door of the building and ranged on backless benches,
and it says much for the authority of the _Shammos_ that not even the
_Schnorrer_ contested it. Prayers were shouted rapidly by the
congregation, and elaborately sung by the _Chazan_. The minister was
_Vox et praeterea nihil_. He was the only musical instrument permitted,
and on him devolved the whole onus of making the service attractive. He
succeeded. He was helped by the sociability of the gathering--for the
Synagogue was virtually a Jewish Club, the focus of the sectarian life.

Hard times and bitter had some of the fathers of the Ghetto, but they
ate their dry bread with the salt of humor, loved their wives, and
praised God for His mercies. Unwitting of the genealogies that would be
found for them by their prosperous grandchildren, old clo' men plied
their trade in ambitious content. They were meek and timorous outside
the Ghetto, walking warily for fear of the Christian. Sufferance was
still the badge of all their tribe. Yet that there were Jews who held
their heads high, let the following legend tell: Few men could shuffle
along more inoffensively or cry "Old Clo'" with a meeker twitter than
Sleepy Sol. The old man crawled one day, bowed with humility and
clo'-bag, into a military mews and uttered his tremulous chirp. To him
came one of the hostlers with insolent beetling brow.

"Any gold lace?" faltered Sleepy Sol.

"Get out!" roared the hostler.

"I'll give you de best prices," pleaded Sleepy Sol.

"Get out!" repeated the hostler and hustled the old man into the street.
"If I catch you 'ere again, I'll break your neck." Sleepy Sol loved his
neck, but the profit on gold lace torn from old uniforms was high. Next
week he crept into the mews again, trusting to meet another hostler.

"Clo'! Clo'!" he chirped faintly.

Alas! the brawny bully was to the fore again and recognized him.

"You dirty old Jew," he cried. "Take that, and that! The next time I
sees you, you'll go 'ome on a shutter."

The old man took that, and that, and went on his way. The next day he
came again.

"Clo'! Clo'!" he whimpered.

"What!" said the ruffian, his coarse cheeks flooded with angry blood.
"Ev yer forgotten what I promised yer?" He seized Sleepy Sol by the
scruff of the neck.

"I say, why can't you leave the old man alone?"

The hostler stared at the protester, whose presence he had not noticed
in the pleasurable excitement of the moment. It was a Jewish young man,
indifferently attired in a pepper-and-salt suit. The muscular hostler
measured him scornfully with his eye.

"What's to do with you?" he said, with studied contempt.

"Nothing," admitted the intruder. "And what harm is he doing you?"

"That's my bizness," answered the hostler, and tightened his clutch of
Sleepy Sol's nape.

"Well, you'd better not mind it," answered the young man calmly. "Let
go."'

The hostler's thick lips emitted a disdainful laugh.

"Let go, d'you hear?" repeated the young man.

"I'll let go at your nose," said the hostler, clenching his knobby fist.

"Very well," said the young man. "Then I'll pull yours."

"Oho!" said the hostler, his scowl growing fiercer. "Yer means bizness,
does yer?" With that he sent Sleepy Sol staggering along the road and
rolled up his shirt-sleeves. His coat was already off.

The young man did not remove his; he quietly assumed the defensive. The
hostler sparred up to him with grim earnestness, and launched a terrible
blow at his most characteristic feature. The young man blandly put it on
one side, and planted a return blow on the hostler's ear. Enraged, his
opponent sprang upon him. The young Jew paralyzed him by putting his
left hand negligently into his pocket. With his remaining hand he closed
the hostler's right eye, and sent the flesh about it into mourning. Then
he carelessly tapped a little blood from the hostler's nose, gave him a
few thumps on the chest as if to test the strength of his lungs, and
laid him sprawling in the courtyard. A brother hostler ran out from the
stables and gave a cry of astonishment.

"You'd better wipe his face," said the young man curtly.

The newcomer hurried back towards the stables.

"Vait a moment," said Sleepy Sol "I can sell you a sponge sheap; I've
got a beauty in my bag."

There were plenty of sponges about, but the newcomer bought the
second-hand sponge.

"Do you want any more?" the young man affably inquired of his prostrate
adversary.

The hostler gave a groan. He was shamed before a friend whom he had
early convinced of his fistic superiority.

"No, I reckon he don't," said his friend, with a knowing grin at the
conqueror.

"Then I will wish you a good day," said the young man. "Come along,
father."

"Yes, ma son-in-law," said Sleepy Sol.

"Do you know who that was, Joe?" said his friend, as he sponged away the
blood.

Joe shook his head.

"That was Dutch Sam," said his friend in an awe-struck whisper.

All Joe's body vibrated with surprise and respect. Dutch Sam was the
champion bruiser of his time; in private life an eminent dandy and a
prime favorite of His Majesty George IV., and Sleepy Sol had a beautiful
daughter and was perhaps prepossessing himself when washed for the
Sabbath.

"Dutch Sam!" Joe repeated.

"Dutch Sam! Why, we've got his picter hanging up inside, only he's naked
to the waist."

"Well, strike me lucky! What a fool I was not to rekkernize 'im!" His
battered face brightened up. "No wonder he licked me!"

Except for the comparative infrequency of the more bestial types of men
and women, Judaea has always been a cosmos in little, and its
prize-fighters and scientists, its philosophers and "fences," its
gymnasts and money-lenders, its scholars and stockbrokers, its
musicians, chess-players, poets, comic singers, lunatics, saints,
publicans, politicians, warriors, poltroons, mathematicians, actors,
foreign correspondents, have always been in the first rank. _Nihil
alienum a se Judaeus putat_.

Joe and his friend fell to recalling Dutch Sam's great feats. Each
out-vied the other in admiration for the supreme pugilist.

Next day Sleepy Sol came rampaging down the courtyard. He walked at the
rate of five miles to the hour, and despite the weight of his bag his
head pointed to the zenith.

"Clo'!" he shrieked. "Clo'!"

Joe the hostler came out. His head was bandaged, and in his hand was
gold lace. It was something even to do business with a hero's
father-in-law.

But it is given to few men to marry their daughters to champion boxers:
and as Dutch Sam was not a Don Quixote, the average peddler or huckster
never enjoyed the luxury of prancing gait and cock-a-hoop business cry.
The primitive fathers of the Ghetto might have borne themselves more
jauntily had they foreseen that they were to be the ancestors of mayors
and aldermen descended from Castilian hidalgos and Polish kings, and
that an unborn historian would conclude that the Ghetto of their day was
peopled by princes in disguise. They would have been as surprised to
learn who they were as to be informed that they were orthodox. The great
Reform split did not occur till well on towards the middle of the
century, and the Jews of those days were unable to conceive that a man
could be a Jew without eating _kosher_ meat, and they would have looked
upon the modern distinctions between racial and religious Jews as the
sophistries of the convert or the missionary. If their religious life
converged to the Great _Shool_, their social life focussed on Petticoat
Lane, a long, narrow thoroughfare which, as late as Strype's day, was
lined with beautiful trees: vastly more pleasant they must have been
than the faded barrows and beggars of after days. The Lane--such was its
affectionate sobriquet--was the stronghold of hard-shell Judaism, the
Alsatia of "infidelity" into which no missionary dared set foot,
especially no apostate-apostle. Even in modern days the new-fangled
Jewish minister of the fashionable suburb, rigged out, like the
Christian clergyman, has been mistaken for such a _Meshumad_, and pelted
with gratuitous vegetables and eleemosynary eggs. The Lane was always
the great market-place, and every insalubrious street and alley abutting
on it was covered with the overflowings of its commerce and its mud.
Wentworth Street and Goulston Street were the chief branches, and in
festival times the latter was a pandemonium of caged poultry, clucking
and quacking and cackling and screaming. Fowls and geese and ducks were
bought alive, and taken to have their throats cut for a fee by the
official slaughterer. At Purim a gaiety, as of the Roman carnival,
enlivened the swampy Wentworth Street, and brought a smile into the
unwashed face of the pavement. The confectioners' shops, crammed with
"stuffed monkeys" and "bolas," were besieged by hilarious crowds of
handsome girls and their young men, fat women and their children, all
washing down the luscious spicy compounds with cups of chocolate;
temporarily erected swinging cradles bore a vociferous many-colored
burden to the skies; cardboard noses, grotesque in their departure from
truth, abounded. The Purim _Spiel_ or Purim play never took root in
England, nor was Haman ever burnt in the streets, but _Shalachmonos_, or
gifts of the season, passed between friend and friend, and masquerading
parties burst into neighbors' houses. But the Lane was lively enough on
the ordinary Friday and Sunday. The famous Sunday Fair was an event of
metropolitan importance, and thither came buyers of every sect. The
Friday Fair was more local, and confined mainly to edibles. The
Ante-Festival Fairs combined something of the other two, for Jews
desired to sport new hats and clothes for the holidays as well as to eat
extra luxuries, and took the opportunity of a well-marked epoch to
invest in new everythings from oil-cloth to cups and saucers. Especially
was this so at Passover, when for a week the poorest Jew must use a
supplementary set of crockery and kitchen utensils. A babel of sound,
audible for several streets around, denoted Market Day in Petticoat
Lane, and the pavements were blocked by serried crowds going both ways
at once.

It was only gradually that the community was Anglicized. Under the sway
of centrifugal impulses, the wealthier members began to form new
colonies, moulting their old feathers and replacing them by finer, and
flying ever further from the centre. Men of organizing ability founded
unrivalled philanthropic and educational institutions on British lines;
millionaires fought for political emancipation; brokers brazenly foisted
themselves on 'Change; ministers gave sermons in bad English; an English
journal was started; very slowly, the conventional Anglican tradition
was established; and on that human palimpsest which has borne the
inscriptions of all languages and all epochs, was writ large the
sign-manual of England. Judaea prostrated itself before the Dagon of its
hereditary foe, the Philistine, and respectability crept on to freeze
the blood of the Orient with its frigid finger, and to blur the vivid
tints of the East into the uniform gray of English middle-class life. In
the period within which our story moves, only vestiges of the old gaiety
and brotherhood remained; the full _al fresco_ flavor was evaporated.

And to-day they are alt dead--the _Takeefim_ with big hearts and bigger
purses, and the humorous _Schnorrers_, who accepted their gold, and the
cheerful pious peddlers who rose from one extreme to the other, building
up fabulous fortunes in marvellous ways. The young mothers, who suckled
their babes in the sun, have passed out of the sunshine; yea, and the
babes, too, have gone down with gray heads to the dust. Dead are the
fair fat women, with tender hearts, who waddled benignantly through
life, ever ready to shed the sympathetic tear, best of wives, and cooks,
and mothers; dead are the bald, ruddy old men, who ambled about in faded
carpet slippers, and passed the snuff-box of peace: dead are the
stout-hearted youths who sailed away to Tom Tiddler's ground; and dead
are the buxom maidens they led under the wedding canopy when they
returned. Even the great Dr. Sequira, pompous in white stockings,
physician extraordinary to the Prince Regent of Portugal, lies
vanquished by his life-long adversary and the Baal Shem himself, King of
Cabalists, could command no countervailing miracle.

Where are the little girls in white pinafores with pink sashes who
brightened the Ghetto on high days and holidays? Where is the beauteous
Betsy of the Victoria Ballet? and where the jocund synagogue dignitary
who led off the cotillon with her at the annual Rejoicing of the Law?
Worms have long since picked the great financier's brain, the
embroidered waistcoats of the bucks have passed even beyond the stage of
adorning sweeps on May Day, and Dutch Sam's fist is bonier than ever.
The same mould covers them all--those who donated guineas and those who
donated "gifts," the rogues and the hypocrites, and the wedding-drolls,
the observant and the lax, the purse-proud and the lowly, the coarse and
the genteel, the wonderful chapmen and the luckless _Schlemihls_, Rabbi
and _Dayan_ and _Shochet_, the scribes who wrote the sacred scroll and
the cantors who trolled it off mellifluous tongues, and the betting-men
who never listened to it; the grimy Russians of the capotes and the
earlocks, and the blue-blooded Dons, "the gentlemen of the Mahamad," who
ruffled it with swords and knee-breeches in the best Christian society.
Those who kneaded the toothsome "bolas" lie with those who ate them; and
the marriage-brokers repose with those they mated. The olives and the
cucumbers grow green and fat as of yore, but their lovers are mixed with
a soil that is barren of them. The restless, bustling crowds that
jostled laughingly in Rag Fair are at rest in the "House of Life;" the
pageant of their strenuous generation is vanished as a dream. They died
with the declaration of God's unity on their stiffening lips, and the
certainty of resurrection in their pulseless hearts, and a faded Hebrew
inscription on a tomb, or an unread entry on a synagogue brass is their
only record. And yet, perhaps, their generation is not all dust.
Perchance, here and there, some decrepit centenarian rubs his purblind
eyes with the ointment of memory, and sees these pictures of the past,
hallowed by the consecration of time, and finds his shrivelled cheek wet
with the pathos sanctifying the joys that have been.

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