The taste of honey : $b The note book of a linguistUnderwood, Edna Worthley
History
The taste of honey : $b The note book of a linguist
Underwood, Edna Worthley
Literature -- History and criticism
After lunch he starts for a walk, wearing a tall hat, coquettishly
tip-tilted over his nose. On one of his home-comings I met him. He
told me he had been to the grave of his wife, that during the twenty
years since her death he had seldom missed a day. He told me this in
such dignified tone, and one withal sad, earnest, that his shriveled
figure took on the importance, the size of a hero.
Who but member of the race, with indelible blood of centuries of
persecution in its veins, would be capable of such devotion! To the
Jew, family, home, mean more than to the Gentile. (But free, easy,
get-rich-quick America is not good for him. It is breeding out,
rapidly, the fine qualities of the race.) The Jew has been helpful,
in various ways, to America. He has helped destroy provincialism. He
makes for enlightened cosmopolitanism, because the cultivation of the
world has touched the race-mind.
This old man regaled me with stories of youth spent in Austria,
Bavaria. He was a beau, he declared, in old Bavarian days. But of all
the women he saw, Viennese are the prettiest, most spirited. They
have figures of sylphs. They are never twice alike.
In childhood, he explained, I lived in sight of Munich. A beautiful
city! I remember when Mad Louis was King. He tried to make it another
Athens, center of art. The dream was delusive. As delusive as the
name he chose for his fairy palace, _Wahnfried_.
But he taught Germans music. He was patron of Wagner.
When summer comes to the plains, air is hot, dry, and I can not
breathe comfortably, nor sleep, I dream of the air I used to smell
in Bavaria, as it blew across snowy Alps, sweet with spruce, with
fir. I like America! It has been good to my people. My old friend is
like March weather; upon the surface snow, chill, while underneath,
unseen, the warmth of spring.
Members of the old man’s race have stood at head of art, letters and
every science. In the Middle Age, at dawn of the Renaissance, it was
Jewish wanderers, traveling from country to country on multifarious
business errands, whose linguistic nimbleness formed links between
Greece and Rome, between Spaniard and Moor, between Occident and
Orient. They had no little to do in dissemination of Greek culture, a
culture which in its essence is antagonistic to them.
They were translators for the ancient world. They were numbered among
scholars of mediæval days. It was they who helped unlock treasures of
Moorish culture for the ungrateful Spaniard.
In the realm of medicine their sway was undisputed. In this
profession they held positions of honor in Italian, in Spanish
Courts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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