Aaron the Jew: A NovelFarjeon, B. L. (Benjamin Leopold)
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Aaron the Jew: A Novel
Farjeon, B. L. (Benjamin Leopold)
Adopted children -- Fiction; Jews -- England -- Fiction
A younger woman, in her springtime, with life's fairest pages spread
before her. Darker than Rachel is she, with darker hair and eyes and
complexion, slim, graceful, and beautiful. It is impossible that she
should not have felt the influence of the home in which she has been
reared, and that she should not be the better for it, for it is a home
in which the domestic affections unceasingly display themselves in
their tenderest aspect, in which the purest and most ennobling lessons
of life are inculcated by precept and practice; but a profound student
of human nature, whose keen insight would enable him to plumb the
depths of passion, to detect what lay beneath the surface, to trace
the probable course of the psychological inheritance which all parents
transmit to their children, would have come to the conclusion that in
this fair young creature were instincts and promptings which were
likely one day to give forth a discordant note in this abode of peace
and love, and to break into rebellion. There is no outward indication
of such possible rebellion. To the friends and acquaintances of the
household she is a lovely and gracious Jewish maiden, who shall in
time become a mother in Judah. This is Ruth Cohen, in the eyes of all
the world the daughter of Aaron and Rachel.
A young man, Ruth's junior by a year, with his father's strength of
character and his mother's sweetness of disposition. He is as yet too
young for the full development of this rare combination of qualities,
the outcome of which is to be made manifest in the future, but he is
not too young to win love and respect. His love for his parents is
ardent, his faith in them indestructible. To him his mother is a
saint, his father a man without blemish. Were he asked, to express his
most earnest wishes, he would have answered, "When I am my father's
age may I be honoured as he is: when I marry may my wife be as my
mother is." This is Joseph Cohen, the one other child of Aaron and
Rachel.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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