Ghetto Comedies - Israel Zangwill (great novels of all time txt) 📗

absorbed in the service. His glossy high hat bespoke an immaculate orthodoxy, his long black beard had a Rabbinic religiousness, his devotion was a rebuke to his gossiping neighbours.

A wave of uneasiness passed over the synagogue. Had he been the victim of a jealous libel? Even those whose own eyes had seen him behind his counter when he should have been consecrating the Sabbath-wine at his supper-table, wondered if they had been the dupe of some hallucination.

When, in accordance with hospitable etiquette, the new-comer was summoned canorously to the reading of the Law—'Shall stand Simeon, the son of Nehemiah'—and he arose and solemnly mounted the central platform, his familiarity with the due obeisances and osculations and benedictions seemed a withering reply to the libel. When he descended, and the Parnass proffered his presidential hand in pious congratulation upon the holy privilege, all the congregants who found themselves upon his line of return shot forth their arms with remorseful eagerness, and thus was Simeon Samuels switched on to the brotherhood of Sudminsterian Israel. Yet as his now trusting co-religionists passed his shop on their homeward walk—and many a pair of legs went considerably out of its way to do so—their eyes became again saucers of horror and amaze. The broad plate-glass glittered nakedly, unveiled by a single shutter; the waxen dummy of the sailor hitched devil-may-care breeches; the gold lace, ticketed with layers of erased figures, boasted brazenly of its cheapness; the procession of customers came and went, and the pavement, splashed with sunshine, remained imperturbably, perturbingly acquiescent.

II

On the Sunday night Solomon Barzinsky and Ephraim Mendel in pious black velvet caps, and their stout spouses in gold chains and diamond earrings, found themselves playing solo whist in the Parnass's parlour, and their religious grievance weighed upon the game. The Parnass, though at heart as outraged as they by the new departure, felt it always incumbent upon him to display his presidential impartiality and his dry humour. His authority, mainly based on his being the only retired shopkeeper in the community, was greatly strengthened by his slow manner of taking snuff at a crisis. 'My dear Mendel,' observed the wizened senior, flicking away the spilth with a blue handkerchief, 'Simeon Samuels has already paid his annual subscription—and you haven't!'

'My money is good,' Mendel replied, reddening.

'No wonder he can pay so quickly!' said Solomon Barzinsky, shuffling the cards savagely.

'How he makes his money is not the question,' said the Parnass weightily. 'He has paid it, and therefore if I were to expel him, as you suggest, he might go to Law.'

'Law!' retorted Solomon. 'Can't we prove he has broken the Law of Moses?'

'And suppose?' said the Parnass, picking up his cards placidly. 'Do we want to wash our dirty Talysim (praying-shawls) in public?'

'He is right, Solomon,' said Mrs. Barzinsky. 'We should become a laughing-stock among the heathen.'

'I don't believe he'd drag us to the Christian courts,' the little man persisted. 'I pass.'

The rubber continued cheerlessly. 'A man who keeps his shop open on Sabbath is capable of anything,' said the lanky Mendel, gloomily sweeping in his winnings.

The Parnass took snuff judicially. 'Besides, he may have a Christian partner who keeps all the Saturday profits,' he suggested.

'That would be just as forbidden,' said Barzinsky, as he dealt the cards.

'But your cousin David,' his wife reminded him, 'sells his groceries to a Christian at Passover.'

'That is permitted. It would not be reasonable to destroy hundreds of pounds of leaven. But Sabbath partnerships are not permitted.'

'Perhaps the question has never been raised,' said the Parnass.

'I am enough of a Lamdan (pundit) to answer it,' retorted Barzinsky.

'I prefer going to a specialist,' rejoined the Parnass.

Barzinsky threw down his cards. 'You can go to the devil!' he cried.

'For shame, Solomon!' said his wife. 'Don't disturb the game.'

'To Gehenna with the game! The shame is on a Parnass to talk like an Epikouros (Epicurean).'

The Parnass blew his nose elaborately. 'It stands in the Talmud: "For vain swearing noxious beasts came into the world." And if——'

'It stands in the Psalmist,' Barzinsky interrupted: '"The Law of Thy mouth is better to me than thousands of gold and silver."'

'It stands in the Perek,' the Parnass rejoined severely, 'that the wise man does not break in upon the speech of his fellow.'

'It stands in the Shulchan Aruch,' Barzinsky shrieked, 'that for the sanctification of the Sabbath——'

'It stands in the Talmud,' interposed Mendel, with unwonted animation in his long figure, 'that one must not even offer a nut to allure customers. From light to heavy, therefore, it may be deduced that——'

A still small voice broke in upon the storm. 'But Simeon Samuels hasn't a Christian partner,' said Mrs. Mendel.

There was an embarrassed pause.

'He has only his wife to help him,' she went on. 'I know, because I went to the shop Friday morning on pretence of asking for a cuckoo-clock.'

'But a marine-dealer doesn't sell clocks,' put in the Parnass's wife timidly. It was her first contribution to the conversation, for she was overpowered by her husband's greatness.

'Don't be silly, Hannah!' said the Parnass. 'That was just why Mrs. Mendel asked for it.'

'Yes, but unfortunately Simeon Samuels did have one,' Mrs. Mendel confessed; 'and I couldn't get out of buying it.'

There was a general laugh.

'Cut-throat competition, I call it,' snarled Solomon Barzinsky, recovering from his merriment.

'But you don't sell clocks,' said the Parnass.

'That's just it; he gets hold of our customers on pretence of selling them something else. The Talmudical prohibition cited by Mendel applies to that too.'

'So I wasn't so silly,' put in the Parnass's wife, feeling vaguely vindicated.

'Well, you saw his wife,' said the Parnass to Mendel's wife, disregarding his own. 'More than I've done, for she wasn't in synagogue. Perhaps she is the Christian partner.' His suggestion brought a new and holier horror over the card-table.

'No, no,' replied Mrs. Mendel reassuringly. 'I caught sight of her frying fish in the kitchen.'

This proof of her Jewishness passed unquestioned, and the new-born horror subsided.

'But in spite of the fish,' said Mr. Mendel, 'she served in the shop while he was at synagogue.'

'Yes,' hissed Barzinsky; 'and in spite of the synagogue he served in the shop. A greater mockery was never known!'

'Not at all, not at all,' said the Parnass judicially. 'If a man breaks one commandment, that's no reason he should break two.'

'But he does break two,' Solomon thundered, smiting the green cloth with his fist; 'for he steals my custom by opening when I'm closed.'

'Take care—you will break my plates,' said the Parnass. 'Take a sandwich.'

'Thank you—you've taken away my appetite.'

'I'm sorry—but the sandwiches would have done the same. I really can't expel a respectable seat-holder before I know that he is truly a sinner in Israel. As it is written, "Thou shalt inquire and make search and ask diligently." He may have only opened this once by way of a send-off. Every dog is allowed one bite.'

'At that rate, it would be permitted to eat a ham-sandwich—just for once,' said Solomon scathingly.

'Don't say I called you a dog,' the Parnass laughed.

'A mezaire!' announced the hostess hurriedly. 'After all, it's the Almighty's business, not ours.'

'No, it's our business,' Solomon insisted.

'Yes,' agreed the Parnass drily; 'it is your business.'

III

The week went by, with no lull in the storm, though the plate-glass window was unshaken by the gusts. It maintained its flaunting seductiveness, assisted, people observed, by Simeon Samuels' habit of lounging at his shop-door and sucking in the hesitating spectator. And it did not shutter itself on the Sabbath that succeeded.

The horror was tinged with consternation. The strange apathy of the pavement and the sky, the remissness of the volcanic fires and the celestial thunderbolts in face of this staring profanity, lent the cosmos an air almost of accessory after the fact. Never had the congregation seen Heaven so openly defied, and the consequences did not at all correspond with their deep if undefined forebodings. It is true a horse and carriage dashed into Peleg, the pawnbroker's, window down the street, frightened, Peleg maintained, by the oilskins fluttering outside Simeon Samuels' shop; but as the suffering was entirely limited to the nerves of Mrs. Peleg, who was pious, and to the innocent nose of the horse, this catastrophe was not quite what was expected. Solomon Barzinsky made himself the spokesman of the general dissatisfaction, and his remarks to the minister after the Sabbath service almost insinuated that the reverend gentleman had connived at a breach of contract.

The Rev. Elkan Gabriel quoted Scripture. 'The Lord is merciful and long-suffering, and will not at once awaken all His wrath.'

'But meantime the sinner makes a pretty penny!' quoth Solomon, unappeased. 'Saturday is pay-day, and the heathen haven't patience to wait till the three stars are out and our shops can open. It is your duty, Mr. Gabriel, to put a stop to this profanation.'

The minister hummed and ha'd. He was middle-aged, and shabby, with a German diploma and accent and a large family. It was the first time in his five years of office that one of his congregants had suggested such authoritativeness on his part. Elected by their vote, he was treated as their servant, his duties rigidly prescribed, his religious ideas curbed and corrected by theirs. What wonder if he could not suddenly rise to dictatorship? Even at home Mrs. Gabriel was a congregation in herself. But as the week went by he found Barzinsky was not the only man to egg him on to prophetic denunciation; the congregation at large treated him as responsible for the scandal, and if the seven marine-dealers were the bitterest, the pawnbrokers and the linen-drapers were none the less outraged.

'It is a profanation of the Name,' they said unanimously, 'and such a bad example to our poor!'

'He would not listen to me,' the poor minister would protest. 'You had much better talk to him yourself.'

'Me!' the button-holer would ejaculate. 'I would not lower myself. He'd think I was jealous of his success.'

Simeon Samuels seemed, indeed, a formidable person to tackle. Bland and aloof, he pursued his own affairs, meeting the congregation only in synagogue, and then more bland and aloof than ever.

At last the Minister received a presidential command to preach upon the subject forthwith.

'But there's no text suitable just yet,' he pleaded. 'We are still in Genesis.'

'Bah!' replied the Parnass impatiently, 'any text can be twisted to point any moral. You must preach next Sabbath.'

'But we are reading the Sedrah (weekly portion) about Joseph. How are you going to work Sabbath-keeping into that?'

'It is not my profession. I am a mere man-of-the-earth. But what's the use of a preacher if he can't make any text mean something else?'

'Well, of course, every text usually does,' said the preacher defensively. 'There is the hidden meaning and the plain meaning. But Joseph is merely historical narrative. The Sabbath, although mentioned in Genesis, chapter two, wasn't even formally ordained yet.'

'And what about Potiphar's wife?'

'That's the Seventh Commandment, not the Fourth.'

'Thank you for the information. Do you mean to say you can't jump from one Commandment to another?'

'Oh, well——' The minister meditated.

IV

'And Joseph was a goodly person, and well favoured. And it came to pass that his master's wife cast her eyes upon Joseph....'

The congregation looked startled. Really this was not a text which they wished their pastor to enlarge upon. There were things in the Bible that should be left in the obscurity of the Hebrew, especially when one's womenkind were within earshot. Uneasily their eyes lifted towards the bonnets behind the balcony-grating.

'But Joseph refused.'

Solomon Barzinsky coughed. Peleg the pawnbroker blew his nose like a protesting trumpet. The congregation's eyes returned from the balcony and converged upon the Parnass. He was taking snuff as usual.

'My brethren,' began the preacher impressively, 'temptation comes to us all——'

A sniff of indignant repudiation proceeded from many nostrils. A blush overspread many cheeks.

'But not always in the