Children of the Ghetto | Page 5

into which
no missionary dared set foot, especially no apostate-apostle. Even in
modern days the new-fangled Jewish minister of the fashionable suburb,
rigged out, like the Christian clergyman, has been mistaken for such a
Meshumad, and pelted with gratuitous vegetables and eleemosynary
eggs. The Lane was always the great market-place, and every
insalubrious street and alley abutting on it was covered with the
overflowings of its commerce and its mud. Wentworth Street and
Goulston Street were the chief branches, and in festival times the latter
was a pandemonium of caged poultry, clucking and quacking and
cackling and screaming. Fowls and geese and ducks were bought alive,
and taken to have their throats cut for a fee by the official slaughterer.
At Purim a gaiety, as of the Roman carnival, enlivened the swampy
Wentworth Street, and brought a smile into the unwashed face of the
pavement. The confectioners' shops, crammed with "stuffed monkeys"
and "bolas," were besieged by hilarious crowds of handsome girls and
their young men, fat women and their children, all washing down the
luscious spicy compounds with cups of chocolate; temporarily erected

swinging cradles bore a vociferous many-colored burden to the skies;
cardboard noses, grotesque in their departure from truth, abounded. The
Purim Spiel or Purim play never took root in England, nor was Haman
ever burnt in the streets, but Shalachmonos, or gifts of the season,
passed between friend and friend, and masquerading parties burst into
neighbors' houses. But the Lane was lively enough on the ordinary
Friday and Sunday. The famous Sunday Fair was an event of
metropolitan importance, and thither came buyers of every sect. The
Friday Fair was more local, and confined mainly to edibles. The
Ante-Festival Fairs combined something of the other two, for Jews
desired to sport new hats and clothes for the holidays as well as to eat
extra luxuries, and took the opportunity of a well-marked epoch to
invest in new everythings from oil-cloth to cups and saucers. Especially
was this so at Passover, when for a week the poorest Jew must use a
supplementary set of crockery and kitchen utensils. A babel of sound,
audible for several streets around, denoted Market Day in Petticoat
Lane, and the pavements were blocked by serried crowds going both
ways at once.
It was only gradually that the community was Anglicized. Under the
sway of centrifugal impulses, the wealthier members began to form
new colonies, moulting their old feathers and replacing them by finer,
and flying ever further from the centre. Men of organizing ability
founded unrivalled philanthropic and educational institutions on British
lines; millionaires fought for political emancipation; brokers brazenly
foisted themselves on 'Change; ministers gave sermons in bad English;
an English journal was started; very slowly, the conventional Anglican
tradition was established; and on that human palimpsest which has
borne the inscriptions of all languages and all epochs, was writ large
the sign-manual of England. Judaea prostrated itself before the Dagon
of its hereditary foe, the Philistine, and respectability crept on to freeze
the blood of the Orient with its frigid finger, and to blur the vivid tints
of the East into the uniform gray of English middle-class life. In the
period within which our story moves, only vestiges of the old gaiety
and brotherhood remained; the full al fresco flavor was evaporated.
And to-day they are alt dead--the Takeefim with big hearts and bigger

purses, and the humorous Schnorrers, who accepted their gold, and the
cheerful pious peddlers who rose from one extreme to the other,
building up fabulous fortunes in marvellous ways. The young mothers,
who suckled their babes in the sun, have passed out of the sunshine;
yea, and the babes, too, have gone down with gray heads to the dust.
Dead are the fair fat women, with tender hearts, who waddled
benignantly through life, ever ready to shed the sympathetic tear, best
of wives, and cooks, and mothers; dead are the bald, ruddy old men,
who ambled about in faded carpet slippers, and passed the snuff-box of
peace: dead are the stout-hearted youths who sailed away to Tom
Tiddler's ground; and dead are the buxom maidens they led under the
wedding canopy when they returned. Even the great Dr. Sequira,
pompous in white stockings, physician extraordinary to the Prince
Regent of Portugal, lies vanquished by his life-long adversary and the
Baal Shem himself, King of Cabalists, could command no
countervailing miracle.
Where are the little girls in white pinafores with pink sashes who
brightened the Ghetto on high days and holidays? Where is the
beauteous Betsy of the Victoria Ballet? and where the jocund
synagogue dignitary who led off the cotillon with her at the annual
Rejoicing of the Law? Worms have long since picked the great
financier's brain, the embroidered waistcoats of the bucks have passed
even beyond