Читать книгу Dreamers of the Ghetto - Israel Zangwill - Страница 27

And all on account of the pertinacious ambition of a Portuguese king to rule Spain through an alliance with a Spanish princess—an ambition as pertinaciously foiled by the irony of history. No, they were not without excuse, those ancestors of his who had been left behind clinging to the Church. Could they have been genuine converts, these Marranos, or New Christians? he asked himself. Well, whatever his great-grandfathers had felt, his father's faith had been ardent enough, of that he could not doubt. He recalled the long years of ritual; childish memories of paternal pieties. No, the secret conspiracy had not embraced the Da Costa household. And he would fain believe that his more distant progenitors, too, had not been hypocrites; for aught he knew they had gone over to the Church even before the Expulsion; at any rate he was glad to have no evidence for an ancestry of deceit. None of the Da Costas had been cowards, thank Heaven! And he—he was no coward, he told himself.