It cannot be far amiss to put into this paper a picturesque
Sicilian woman who has grown old in years but is still a child in
spirit. She loves a fairy story as much as she did sixty years
ago, and listens with the same breathless credulity. One night
about twilight as I sat on the front steps with her and several
little Italian children, listening to her tales of the old home
country, there came a silence in our little group. Suddenly Angel
Licavoli asked, "Teacher, what is God like?" With a feeling that
our friend of riper experience could give us more satisfaction, I
repeated the question to her. Her sweet old face surrounded by
the white curls was a study in simple faith as she assured us,
"Maybe She is like the holy pictures."
When I approach the subject of the Russian Jew, I do it with a
great humbleness and fear lest I do not do it justice. So much
have they had to overcome, and such tenacity and perseverance
have they shown in overcoming it! Straight from the Pales of
Kief, Ketchinoff, and Odessa they come to settle in the nearest
to a pale we have to offer. Great has been their poverty; a
long-standing terror with them, and along with it in many cases,
persecution, starvation, and social ostracism. Poverty in all
but spirit and mind. The great leveler to them is education, and
it is no uncommon thing for the Jewish father to sacrifice
himself in order to better his son, to take upon himself that
greatest of sacrifices, daily grind and deprivation. Not only
this generation, but the one before and the one before that. They
cannot keep up such a white-hot search for learning without
sooner or later finding out what is wisdom--real wisdom. Stripped
of all but bare necessities, they come to possess a sense of
value that is remarkably true. We come into contact then with the
offspring of such conditions, simple and direct in manner and
having a passionate impersonal curiosity. Always asking,
searching for the real things, eager for that which will render
them impervious to their sordid surroundings, they have thrown
aside all superfluous mannerisms and get easily to the heart of
things. Accustomed to the greatest repression, and exclusion from
all schools and institutions of the sort, the free access to so
many books is an endless joy to them. They browse among the
shelves lovingly, and instinctively read the best we have to
offer. Tales from the ancient Hebrews, history, travel --these
are the books they take. But what they read most gladly is
biography. It is just as difficult to find a life of Lincoln on
the shelves as it is to find an Altsheler--and of comparisons is
that not the strongest? Heroes of all sorts attract the Jewish
child, heroes in battles, statesmen and leaders in adventure,
conquest, business. If a hero is also a martyr, their delight
knows no bounds.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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