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A short story by Isaac Loeb Peretz |
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The Outcast |
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Title: The Outcast Author: Isaac Loeb Peretz [More Titles by Peretz] May had been cold and wet from beginning to end. People began to feel as if summer would never come, as if it would go on freezing and raining forever. At last, the day before Pentecost, the sun shone out. "Torah is light!" said my father, with proud satisfaction, and began to look for the Tikun[109] for the night of Pentecost.
"I am going to bake Gelle Challeh!"[110] she called to us.
My younger sister Hannah took no part in what was going forward. She sat by the window over a book, but she read nothing, and her eyes stared anxiously out into the street. Our mother called on her several times for help, but Hannah did not even answer.... The pale face wears a scornful smile ... the delicate lips open, she is about to speak! But she remains silent, and fastens her eyes upon her book. "Lazy thing!" grumbles our mother, "always poring over books! Working-day or holiday, it's all the same to her!" Our father, who rarely interferes in household matters, having found the book and dusted it, lies down to sleep before bathing, to prepare for being up at night. Our mother stops complaining, lest she should wake him. She calls me quietly to her, gives me a few pennies, and tells me to go down-stairs and buy a bit of green, and some colored paper with which to festoon the windows. Heaven knows, I am unwilling enough to leave the room wherein stands a bowl of sweet cream, another of sugared cheese, and where packets of currants and raisins lie all about. At the same time, going to buy, to bargain over, and to pay for greenery and paper, was still more seductive, and away I run. And it turned out to be such a dreadful Pentecost! * * * * * Hannah, my sister, ran away! We had gone to prayers, and my mother had lain down to rest before blessing the lights.... It was then they gave a signal--my mother remembered afterwards hearing a terrible whistle in her sleep. And she left us, and went over to our enemies! And the time she chose was Pentecost, the season of the giving of our Law!... It was then she left us. * * * * * Everything passes away, joy and sorrow, good and evil, and still we go forward on our way to the land where all things are forgotten--or remembered anew. Everything we have lived through lies beneath our feet like stones in a beaten track, like gravestones under which we have buried our friends, good and bad. But I cannot forget Hannah! * * * * * The life she had sought so eagerly spurned her from it, the vision of happiness faded into thin air, the flowers turned to sharp thorns in her grasp! There was no return possible. In her way stood the Law and two graves: her father's grave and her mother's. Where is she? Once every year, on the eve of Pentecost, she shows herself to me again. She appears in the street, she stands outside at the window, as if she were afraid, as if she had not the power to enter a Jewish home. She gazes with staring eyes into the room, and sees me there alone. She looks at me with dismay, supplication, and anger. I understand her. "Where are they?" she asks in dismay. "Have pity on me!" she says, imploring. And then, in anger, she lays the whole blame of the disaster on us: * * * * * "What could I know of your bitter feud with them? You knew, you learned all about it in school, my books told me nothing, not a word! "Living in the same house with you, I led a separate life. My story-books were like mirrors filled with the bright reflection of other women's lives, and, as I read, my own appeared there in all its dreariness! "I have betrayed something? "I have been false? To what? "I only exchanged saffron cakes for cakes of another sort, the tales in Mother's books of legends for others far more vivid and entrancing--a bit of green in the window for the free, fresh green of the woods and fields--litanies for romances--the narrow, stifling routine of my daily life for sunshine and flowers, for gladness and love! I never betrayed you--I never knew you! "I knew nothing of your sorrow, you never spoke to me of yourselves. Why did you not tell me of your love, of the love which is your very being, why did you not tell me of your beauty--of the terrible, blood-stained beauty of Israel? "The beautiful, the precious, the exalted in our religion, you hid it in yourselves, you men, you kept it from me, you kept it from us. "Of me, of us, with our flesh and blood, with the strength of our youth struggling and crying out for life--of us you asked only butter-cake and Gelle Challeh! "You cast us out!" * * * * * He who is high above all peoples, who alone can see clearly through their tangled web of prejudice and hatred--He shall judge her. [The end] GO TO TOP OF SCREEN |