Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [7]
“If God wants us to do something, we do it,” I said, hearing myself speak as though I were some wise sage instead of a slender boy with freckles, one slightly drooping eye, and legs so full of life that they would not stop quaking the more excited I became in our discussions.
“The pagan philosophers say that we have a choice.”
“Do I have a choice this moment to speak or not speak?”
“You do.”
“But if I don’t, you will tell my father and he will be quite angry with me.”
“The choice remains.”
“Bad student or dutiful student?”
“Bad or good.”
“Our Hebrew God says what?”
“Nothing on the subject of free will. Obey and please Him, d-d-disobey and he will be quite angry.”
“Angry, but will He punish me?”
“Sometimes He does, sometimes He doesn’t.”
“An odd master,” I said, wise before my time—or by mere momentary accident.
“Y-yes,” my tutor said. “A quixotic plight we have, we Jews. Only the Christians have it worse.”
“They do?”
“Many of them believe their wills are bound to either evil or good. With no choice for them.”
“Like slaves to their God?”
“They bend their wills to His.”
“And we don’t?”
“We don’t bend. We choose.”
“Choose to give up our will? And is that freedom?”
My tutor shook his head.
“Let me consider this.”
But I pursued it further just then.
“When our republic broke from the British Crown, we chose to do so. And gained our freedom. Therefore freedom was not bending our wills to the throne but breaking away from it.”
“Bravo, young Nathaniel,” my tutor said. “You have made a good point, sir. A good point.”
The day I asked him about whether or not he thought my pretty talking parrot Jacobus had a soul, he was also quite pleased. We spoke a little while of that, and then swerved back to his favorite topic, leaving me to ponder the question of the bird soul in my private thoughts.
“We have no literature here in this country of ours,” he said. “The ground is seeded, but it has not yet bloomed. We have no time, as in history. And how can you have a story without history for it to blossom in? Read Shakespeare. We have not yet spawned our own.”
“This doesn’t sound good,” I said.
“It is neither good nor bad,” he said. “Think of it in this manner. We Jews do not yet have our savior, but one day the savior will come.”
Though there was one American book he put forward. Which is how eventually I came into possession of a volume that I took to like a fish to water—the autobiography of our great Benjamin Franklin. Some boys worship their fathers, some worship themselves. I gave all my admiration to young Ben and hoped to live a life like his and emulate his rise from nothing to something.
Such thoughts inspired me that fateful early morning some time after my formal tutoring had ended, and I threw myself out of the bed, dressed, and descended, carrying my bags, to the street level kitchen as quietly as I could for fear of waking my Aunt Isabelle, my late mother’s sister, who had become as much of a mother to me as any woman not my mother could.
Red-head Marzy, our gimpy Old New York Dutch maid from a penniless family, was, of course, already awake and greeted me in the kitchen with the porridge.
“I hope you have a good journey, sir,” she said, her narrow eyes downcast. I thought it was perhaps because of her feeling some illness, or some guilt at having missed a chore. Lord knows how little she was paid, but I knew how much she had to do!
“Thank you, Marzy,” I said.
“Oh, sir!” she said, and burst into a thunderstorm of tears and nose-blowing.
“Oh, sir! Oh, sir!”
This screech of a voice belonged to Jacobus, whom my father had brought home to me from the Indies in the time after my mother died. (My immediate progenitor had been born there, to parents who had emigrated from Holland to make a fortune on the island of Curaçao, and when he reached his majority, after marrying my mother, another Antilles Jew, had emigrated to New York City. His half-brother, of whom much more in a moment or so, had felt a similar inclination to settle in our Promised Land but sailed up only as far north as Charleston, which