Nina Balatka | Page 5

have striven to teach;
and I have thought that it might best be done by representing to my
readers characters like themselves,--or to which they might liken
themselves. [1]
Given Trollope's philosophy, it is reasonable to believe that the actions
of his characters should speak louder than their words. If so, Trollope
might well have been holding up a mirror to his audience that they
might examine their own prejudices. Unfortunately, we shall never
know.
[1] Anthony Trollope. An Autobiography. Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 1950.
Joseph E. Loewenstein, M.D. Midland, 2003
Copyright (C) 2003 Joseph E. Loewenstein, M.D. This Introduction to
Nina Balatka is protected by copyright and/or other applicable law.
Any use of the work other than as authorized in "
The Legal Small Print
" section (found at the end of the book) is prohibited.

NINA BALATKA

VOLUME I
CHAPTER I

Nina Balatka was a maiden of Prague, born of Christian parents, and
herself a Christian--but she loved a Jew; and this is her story.
Nina Balatka was the daughter of one Josef Balatka, an old merchant of
Prague, who was living at the time of this story; but Nina's mother was
dead. Josef, in the course of his business, had become closely
connected with a certain Jew named Trendellsohn, who lived in a mean
house in the Jews' quarter in Prague--habitation in that one allotted
portion of the town having been the enforced custom with the Jews
then, as it still is now. In business with Trendellsohn, the father, there
was Anton, his son; and Anton Trendellsohn was the Jew whom Nina
Balatka loved. Now it had so happened that Josef Balatka, Nina's father,
had drifted out of a partnership with Karil Zamenoy, a wealthy
Christian merchant of Prague, and had drifted into a partnership with
Trendellsohn. How this had come to pass needs not to be told here, as it
had all occurred in years when Nina was an infant. But in these
shiftings Balatka became a ruined man, and at the time of which I write
he and his daughter were almost penniless. The reader must know that
Karil Zamenoy and Josef Balatka had married sisters. Josef's wife,
Nina's mother, had long been dead, having died--so said Sophie
Zamenoy, her sister--of a broken heart; of a heart that had broken itself
in grief, because her husband had joined his fortunes with those of a
Jew. Whether the disgrace of the alliance or its disastrous result may
have broken the lady's heart, or whether she may have died of a
pleurisy, as the doctors said, we need not inquire here. Her soul had
been long at rest, and her spirit, we may hope, had ceased to fret itself
in horror at contact with a Jew. But Sophie Zamenoy was alive and
strong, and could still hate a Jew as intensely as Jews ever were hated
in those earlier days in which hatred could satisfy itself with
persecution. In her time but little power was left to Madame Zamenoy
to persecute the Trendellsohns other than that which nature had given
to her in the bitterness of her tongue. She could revile them behind their
back, or, if opportunity offered, to their faces; and both she had done
often, telling the world of Prague that the Trendellsohns had killed her
sister, and robbed her foolish brother-in-law. But hitherto the full vial
of her wrath had not been emptied, as it came to be emptied afterwards;
for she had not yet learned the mad iniquity of her niece. But at the

moment of which I now speak, Nina herself knew her own iniquity,
hardly knowing, however, whether her love did or did not disgrace her.
But she did know that any thought as to that was too late. She loved the
man, and had told him so; and were he gipsy as well as Jew, it would
be required of her that she should go out with him into the wilderness.
And Nina Balatka was prepared to go out into the wilderness. Karil
Zamenoy and his wife were prosperous people, and lived in a
comfortable modern house in the New Town. It stood in a straight
street, and at the back of the house there ran another straight street. This
part of the city is very little like that old Prague, which may not be so
comfortable, but which, of all cities on the earth, is surely the most
picturesque. Here lived Sophie Zamenoy; and so far up in the world
had she mounted, that she had a coach of her own in which to be drawn
about the thoroughfares of Prague and its suburbs, and a stout little pair
of Bohemian horses--ponies they were called by those who wished to
detract somewhat from Madame Zamenoy's position. Madame
Zamenoy