The Rise of David Levinsky Read Online Free PDF Page B

old when he died, so my mother would carry me to the synagogue in her arms to have somebody say the Prayer for the Dead with me. I was unable fully to realize the meaning of the ceremony, of course, but its solemnity and pathos were not altogether lost upon me. There is a streak of sadness in the blood of my race. Very likely it is of Oriental origin. If it is, it has been amply nourished by many centuries of persecution.
    Left to her own resources, my mother strove to support herself and me by peddling pea mush or doing odds and ends of jobs. She had to struggle hard for our scanty livelihood and her trials and loneliness came home to me at an early period.
    I was her all in all, though she never poured over me those torrents of senseless rhapsody which I heard other Jewish mothers shower over their children. The only words of endearment I often heard from her were, “My little bean,” and, “My comfort.” Sometimes, when she seemed to be crushed by the miseries of her life, she would call me, “My poor little orphan.” Otherwise it was, “Come here, my comfort,” “Are you hungry, my little bean?” or, “You are a silly little dear, my comfort.” These words of hers and the sonorous contralto in which they were uttered are ever alive in my heart, like the Flame Everlasting in a synagogue.
    “Mamma, why do you never beat me like other mammas do?” I once asked her.
    She laughed, kissed me, and said, “Because God has punished you hard enough as it is, poor orphan mine.”
    I scarcely remembered my father, yet I missed him keenly. I was ever awake to the fact that other little boys had fathers and that I was a melancholy exception; that most married women had husbands, while my mother had to bear her burden unaided. In my dim childish way I knew that there was a great blank in our family nest, that it was a widow’s nest; and the feeling of it seemed to color all my other feelings.
    When I was a little older and would no longer sleep with my mother, a rusty old coat of my deceased father’s served me as a quilt. At night, before falling asleep, I would pull it over my head, shut my eyes tight, and evoke a flow of fantastic shapes, bright, beautifully tinted, and incessantly changing form and color. While the play of these figures and hues was going on before me I would see all sorts of bizarre visions, which at times seemed to have something to do with my father’s spirit.
    “Is papa in heaven now? Is he through with hell?” I once inquired of my mother.
    Some things or ideas would assume queer forms in my mind. God, for example, appealed to me as a beardless man wearing a quilted silk cap; holiness was something burning, forbidding, something connected with fire while a day had the form of an oblong box.
    I was a great dreamer of day dreams. One of my pastimes was to imagine a host of tiny soldiers each the size of my little finger, “but alive and real.” These I would drill as I saw officers do their men in front of the barracks some distance from our home. Or else I would take to marching up and down the room with mother’s rolling-pin for a rifle, grunting, ferociously, in Russian: “Left one! Left one! Left one!” in the double capacity of a Russian soldier and of David fighting Goliath.
    Often, while bent upon her housework, my mother would hum some of the songs of the famous wedding bard, Eliakim Zunzer, who later emigrated to America. I distinctly remember her singing his “There is a flower on the road, decaying in the dust, Passers-by treading upon it,” his “Summer and Winter,” and his “Rachael is bemoaning her children.” I vividly recall these brooding airs as she used to sing them, for I have inherited her musical memory and her passionate love for melody, though not her voice. I cannot sing myself, but some tunes give me thrills of pleasure, keen and terrible as the edge of a sword. Some haunt me like ghosts. But then this is a common trait among our people.
    She was a wiry