University of Virginia Library

1. I.

"SO this is America, and I am a Jewess no longer!" brooded Michalina, as she looked at the stretch of vegetable gardens across the road from the threshold where she sat. "They say farm-hands work shorter hours on Saturdays, yet God knows when Wincas will get home." Her slow, black eyes returned to the stocking and the big darning-needle in her hands.

She was yearning for her Gentile husband and their common birthplace, and she was yearning for her father's house and her Jewish past. Wincas kept buzzing in her ear that she was a Catholic, but he did not understand her. She was a meshumedeste — a convert Jewess, an apostate, a renegade, a traitoress, something beyond the vituperative resources of Gentile speech. The bonfires of the Inquisition had burned into her people a point of view to which Wincas was a stranger. Years of religious persecution and enforced clannishness had taught them to look upon the Jew who deserts his faith for that of his oppressors with a horror and a loathing which the Gentile brain could not conceive. Michalina's father had sat seven days shoeless on the ground, as for the dead, but death was what he naturally invoked upon the "defiled head," as the lesser of two evils. Atheism would have been a malady; shmad (conversion to a Gentile creed) was far worse than death. Michalina felt herself buried alive. She was a meshumedeste. She shuddered to think what the word meant.

At first she seemed anxious to realize the change she had undergone. "You are a Jewess no longer — you are a Gentile woman," she would say to herself. But the words were as painful as they were futile, and she turned herself adrift on the feeling that she was the same girl as of old, except that something terrible had befallen her. "God knows where it will all end," she would whisper. She had a foreboding that something far more terrible, a great crushing blow that was to smite her, was gathering force somewhere.

Hatred would rise in her heart at such moments — hatred for her "sorceress of a stepmother," whose cruel treatment of Michalina had driven her into the arms of the Gentile lad and to America. It was owing to her that Rivka (Rebecca) had become a Michalina, a meshumedeste.

The Long Island village (one of a dozen within half an hour's walk from one another)

MICHALINA.

was surrounded by farms which yielded the Polish peasants their livelihood. Their pay was about a dollar a day, but potatoes were the principal part of their food, and this they

"'BUT I AM MARRIED TO A GENTILE.'" (SEE PAGE 103.)

got from their American employers free. Nearly every peasant owned a fiddle or a banjo. A local politician had humorously dubbed the settlement Chego-Chegg (this was his phonetic summary of the Polish language), and the name clung.

Wincas and Michalina had been only a few days in the place, and although they spoke Polish as well as Lithuanian, they were shy of the other peasants and felt lonely. Michalina had not seen any of her former coreligionists since she and her husband had left the immigrant station, and she longed for them as one for the first time in mid-ocean longs for a sight of land. She had heard that there were two Jewish settlements near by. Often she would stand gazing at the horizon, wondering where they might be; whereupon her vague image of them at once allured and terrified her.

The sun shone dreamily, like an old man smiling at his own drowsiness. It was a little world of blue, green, gray, and gold, heavy with sleep. A spot of white and a spot of red came gleaming down the road. Rabbi Nehemiah was on his way home from Greyton, where he had dined with the "finest householder" and "said some law" to the little congregation at the afternoon service. For it was Sabbath, and that was why his unstarched shirt-collar was so fresh and his red bandana was tied around the waist of his long-skirted coat. Carrying things on the seventh day being prohibited, Rabbi Nehemiah wore his handkerchief.

The door of the general store (it was also the inn), overlooking the cross-roads from a raised platform, was wide open. A Polish peasant in American trousers and undershirt, but with a Warsaw pipe dangling from his mouth, sat on a porch, smoking quietly. A barefooted boy was fast asleep in the grass across the road, a soldier's cap by his side, like a corpse on the battle-field.

As Michalina glanced up the gray road to see if Wincas was not coming, her eye fell upon Rabbi Nehemiah. A thrill ran through her. She could tell by his figure, his huge white collar, and the handkerchief around his waist that he was a pious, learned Jew. As he drew near she saw that his face was overgrown with wisps of silken beard of a yellowish shade, and that he was a man of about twenty-seven.

As he walked along he gesticulated and murmured to himself. It was one of his bickerings with Satan.

"It's labor lost, Mr. Satan!" he said, with a withering smile. "You won't catch me again, if you burst. Go try your tricks on somebody else. If you hope to get me among your regular customers you are a very poor business man, I tell you that. Nehemiah is as clever as you, depend upon it. Go, mister, go!"

All this he said quite audibly, in his velvety, purring bass, which set one wondering where his voice came from.

As he came abreast of Michalina he stopped short in consternation.

"Woe is me, on the holy Sabbath!" he exclaimed in Yiddish, dropping his hands to his sides.

The color rushed to Michalina's face. She stole a glance at the Pole down the road. He seemed to be half asleep. She lowered her eyes and went on with her work.

"Will you not stop this, my daughter? Come, go indoors and dress in honor of the Sabbath," he purred on, with a troubled, appealing look.

"I don't understand what you say, sir," she answered, in Lithuanian, without raising her eyes.

The devout man started. "I thought she was a child of Israel!" he exclaimed, in his native tongue, as he hastily resumed his way. "Fie upon her! But what a pretty Gentile maiden! — just like a Jewess —" Suddenly he interrupted himself. "You are at it again, aren't you?" he burst out upon Satan. "Leave me alone, will you?"

Michalina's face was on fire. She was following the pious man with her glance. He was apparently going to one of those two Jewish villages. Every step he took gave her a pang, as if he were tied to her heart. As he disappeared on a side road behind some trees she hastily took her darning indoors and set out after him.