Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [69]
“It would be unfair to deprive Nathan of yeshiva,” his mother argued.
“And it would be criminal to deprive Mordechai,” Yehuda retorted.
“So Nathan is not by any means a genius, he is still our oldest.”
“What am I? The Baron Rothschild? Sophie, we’d not only be sending the wrong head to learn, but we’d be losing a ruble a week that Nathan earns. We are elastic, but elastic also breaks. Since the Lord singled me out for personal abuse, it is reality that we cannot put two boys through yeshiva at the same time. It takes no rabbinical court to tell which son is which.”
“And Matthias, and one day, Reuben?”
“So, by the time they are ready for yeshiva, Nathan will be a shohet with a full salary.”
Sophie rushed in to argue the injustice of it but her case was as thin as the wall.
“Besides,” Yehuda said as an afterthought, “it is sometimes beyond difficult to be nice to that boy. Nathan is bitter. If only he didn’t wear a face like rhubarb.”
Nathan heard it all. He clenched the sheet in his little fists and wept on the pillow. I’ll show them! I’ll run away from home! I can make two rubles a week peddling to the army camp.
Yehuda became more interested in his wife. Their lovemaking had fascinated Nathan at first, the way he was fascinated by watching his father kill chickens. Over a period of time their grunting and slobbering had grown grotesque. He had overheard Momma speaking among the women. She really didn’t like doing it. Her insides were bad from having so many children and it caused her great pain. Yet she could not deny her husband. Nathan covered his ears. His father was sounding like an animal.
LIKE MOST CHILDREN, Nathan was of the belief that his mother and father were either ignorant or naïve about what was happening in the world around them. Yehuda Zadok had long mastered the art of contemplation while he prepared chickens for kosher. He was aware that certain past and present realities dictated future realities.
Yehuda was a boy of six when the pogroms of the early 1880s flared up throughout the Jewish Pale of Settlement. His hometown, Kiev, had a particularly odious history of persecution. Forever seared into his young mind was a horrendous night when the Cossacks stampeded the Jewish quarters and bashed in skulls, burned down synagogues, and looted and raped in an unrestrained frenzy of Jew hating—behavior encouraged and supported by the church and the czarist government.
Yehuda tried to get to the synagogue to rescue his father, who had entered the burning building to save the sacred Torah scrolls. The boy was caught by a pair of drunken Cossacks, severely beaten, and left for dead.
His body eventually healed but his brain had sealed in, and was condemned to perpetually replay, the sight of his father’s smoking corpse.
WHEN ISLAM came to power in the Arab lands in the seventh century, the main Jewish population of Europe was centered in the Rhineland where they lived a precarious existence and were continually victimized by Papal-inspired scourges.
During the Crusades of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, legions of rabble were recruited in the Rhineland for the fight to regain the Holy Land. Maniacal monks, supported by a perverse church, whipped up an ignorant peasantry into blood orgies against the Jews, then marched off under the banners of Jesus Christ on their sacred mission to save Jerusalem from those other heathens, the Moslems.
In a desperation to escape, hundreds of thousands of Jews fled eastward into the feudal serfdoms of Poland and Russia. Most came at the invitation of the nobility, who needed Jewish skills to establish a middle class of merchants, craftsmen, bankers, physicians, and men of commerce, all areas where Jews excelled.
Jewish history in Eastern Europe was to be enveloped in an eternal pall of gray. When the Russians of the north halted the