Читать книгу Against the Current: Simple Chapters from a Complex Life - Edward Alfred Steiner - Страница 8

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HE was expected in the omnibus, the one public conveyance of which the town boasted and which connected us with the still far-away railroad.

Long before the old omnibus was due, boys of my age, the first Jewish children to be taught by a teacher trained and employed by the government, were out on the highway to meet it. So eager were we to behold the new master of our educational destiny that we wandered a good many miles upon the wretched highway to the Oresco Hill, famed, because at its foot passengers had to dismount, and were lucky if they did not have to help push the ungainly vehicle to the summit.

It was spring time, and having since then experienced such spring days on that spot, I can now understand why the little man who was following the omnibus looked so long through his spectacles at the encircling Carpathians. Then his glance swept the exquisite blue of the sky with its fleecy clouds and at the top of the hill he stood silent; while the omnibus slid down the steep incline with its one other passenger, the teacher’s bride, whom he had brought from a far-away German city.

I did not understand the teacher when, with his eyes still fixed on our town in the distance, he said in beautiful German: “Boys, this is a wonderful scene.” I did understand that his wife was wonderfully lovely, and while I was the first one to see her, I was not the last to feel the warmth of her glance and the distinct pleasure which her smile brought to those who found favour in her eyes, and alas! they were many.

The first day in school, always an event in one’s life, was remarkable to those of us to whom it meant release from the one-sided, hard and harsh Jewish school, and a real entrance into life.

Imagine what it meant to children to decipher difficult Hebrew characters without vowel points, which were finally sounded by the lips and were in a large measure meaningless and unconnected with life. Imagine such children hearing a teacher speak and teach in German, soft and musical; having the day’s work open with a song, a really gladsome song about winds and flowers and blue skies and all the other things around them—things of which they had been as unconscious as if they had not existed.

There were charts with letters and pictures and at ten o’clock, before we had a chance to grow weary, a generous recess. Our teacher taught us games and simple gymnastics; he took us to the woods and on top of the hills, revealing to us the glory of the present, much to the chagrin of my uncle to whom the past alone was sacred. Chanting his psalms, my uncle climbed Mount Zion and rejoiced in the beauty of Lebanon, but never lifted his eyes to the beauty of the Oresco Hill, and never realized that the Carpathians also were God’s footstool.

The teacher had no easy time of it; neither in the school where not all his pedagogic methods were appreciated, nor out of it where they were neither appreciated nor approved. Our home was one in which his methods were both approved and appreciated, for our mother was a liberal spirit, far more cultured than learned; consequently the teacher was a frequent visitor in our home and a welcome guest at our table, sharing with us his petty trials and his great ones. His petty trials were those that every truth bringer must experience; his great trials were in his home and the first real tragedy which I experienced, I shared with him and felt as deeply in my way as he felt it in his.

In my boyhood the Jewish community was practically free from scandals arising from domestic infelicity. Although marriages were arranged by the parents with the aid of the Schadchen—marriage broker—the family life was regarded as sacred, and something as good as love, if not love itself, grew with the passing years. I knew of only one divorced couple and of no woman who had borne a child out of wedlock. Changes came, however, with changes in the character of the upper class. The town had an influx of Hungarian officials vastly out of proportion to its population. These officials were the children of a bankrupt, aristocratic, landowning class, who in this way were taken care of by the government at the expense of the people’s tax account and of their moral fibre.

Some sixty officials in a town of four or five thousand inhabitants could not find much to do, although the county court was located in our town. In fact, the type of officials sent us would not have done anything had there been anything to do. They brought the Hungarian gypsies with them, those purveyors of pleasure, par excellence; gambling was introduced and that which was much worse and which never comes into any community without polluting the guiltless and further polluting the guilty. The county judge was the greatest offender in all directions; every vice which could be originated he developed and those which he could not originate he imported. No woman was safe if he set his heart upon her and he used all the powers of a judge and all the artifices of a trained courtier to gain his ends. He had no difficult task with the teacher’s wife. Her husband was a small, wizened, near-sighted Jew; the judge was a Magyar of the finest physical type, and to those who know the type, that is sufficient. Moreover, the teacher gave him the opportunity and he took it. The teacher was one of the first of the Hungarian Jews to feel the charm of the larger life, and wherever he found it possible to break down the narrow walls of Jewish social life he made the most of it. For this purpose he planned a May day celebration, to be held in the near-by forest.

The Jewish young men to whom the teacher had come as a sort of liberator, although they were too old to go to school, were drawn into the plan, which included marching to the forest in the morning, a picnic dinner and exercises by the children, to which the dignitaries were to be invited. The festivities were to end in a dance for the invited guests who were all the young officials and the judge.

It was a great day, ushered in by a cloudless, fragrant May morning. The gypsy band led the procession, followed by the gaily-clad children and a wagon load of refreshments in charge of the beadle who had a great reputation for ministering to the palate and neglecting his work in the synagogue.

On reaching the pine forest we found a clearing decorated in the national colours, a band stand and long tables for the dinner. It was a new world, out-of-doors, which opened like Paradise to us Jewish children, shut in since our birth in a small, dusty town. We ate with ravenous appetites, went through the exercises to the satisfaction of our exacting teacher, the rabbi, the president of the congregation and the rest of the Jewish dignitaries—and as the Hungarian officials, headed by the judge, appeared, we sang the national anthem, baring our heads, a grievous offense in the eyes of the conservative Jews. Our teacher made a great speech; I still remember certain eloquent words which I then heard for the first time: “Patriotism, Fraternity, Humanity.”

It was a speech that fired one’s blood. He closed by calling for three cheers for the judge, after which he received the congratulations of everybody, including my orthodox uncle. Wine was passed and the judge proposed a toast to the king, another to the rabbi, one to the teacher and one to our great country; toasts enough to shake the temperate Jews somewhat out of their sober atmosphere and to carry the teacher quite off his feet. He embraced everybody, drank more and more and when the dance began it was he who led his young wife to the judge for the first waltz.

I do not know how long into the night the dance lasted; it ended scandalously. The Magyar officials taunted the Jewish youths, made the gypsies play anti-Semitic songs and finally remained victors in the field, consuming the fat kosher geese, the no less kosher wine, and did not scruple to kiss the kosher maidens who were still half children and delighted in the attention they received.

The next day was a gloomy one at school. The teacher whipped us; he even whipped me, his favourite, until my back was blue. At recess he did not play with us; in fact, he never played with us again.

Many months after, as I was going to school, I found my way blocked by a great crowd in front of the judge’s house; Jews and Gentiles alike pressed around the entrance gate in front of which stood the teacher with a bundle of pillows in his arms. His cries of anguish and the terrible curses, which he called down upon the judge, rang in my ears for weeks afterwards. He pulled the bell at the gate until he broke the wire; he beat upon the iron bars with the handle of the gate which he had wrenched from it; he broke all the windows of the house within reach, with the stones he threw, and when no one from within responded, he laid his bundle on the step and left it there.

I knew nothing then of the mystery of life, but felt the awe of it while scarcely understanding what it meant; at least I could not have explained it to any one.

I had known for some time that the teacher was in deep trouble; in fact, I had caught a sentence here and there from my elders which hinted at a terrible disaster.

Here, then, was the tragedy. “This is your brat, yours, yours! Keep it and may it grow up to curse you and damn you as it already has cursed and damned me!”

Those were the last words I heard him speak. There was no school that day or the next or the next. Fishermen found his body upon the shores of the river where it had been washed up by the waves.

They buried him in an obscure corner of the God’s Acre, with his head as near the highroad as possible. There was no public funeral for he was a suicide and there is no stone to mark his grave. Yet he is not forgotten; because he was the first man who opened for me a window into this beautiful world and who showed me the rivers and the mountains. Through him I received my first uplift towards “Patriotism, Fraternity and Humanity,” and learned that those of us who believe in them must pay the price.