The Promised Land | Page 7

seven or eight--snatched from their mothers' laps. They
were carried to distant villages, where their friends could never trace
them, and turned over to some dirty, brutal peasant, who used them like
slaves and kept them with the pigs. No two were ever left together; and
they were given false names, so that they were entirely cut off from
their own world. And then the lonely child was turned over to the
priests, and he was flogged and starved and terrified--a little helpless
boy who cried for his mother; but still he refused to be baptized. The
priests promised him good things to eat, and fine clothes, and freedom
from labor; but the boy turned away, and said his prayers secretly--the
Hebrew prayers.

As he grew older, severer tortures were invented for him; still he
refused baptism. By this time he had forgotten his mother's face, and of
his prayers perhaps only the "Shema" remained in his memory; but he
was a Jew, and nothing would make him change. After he entered the
army, he was bribed with promises of promotions and honors. He
remained a private, and endured the cruellest discipline. When he was
discharged, at the age of forty, he was a broken man, without a home,
without a clue to his origin, and he spent the rest of his life wandering
among Jewish settlements, searching for his family; hiding the scars of
torture under his rags, begging his way from door to door. If he were
one who had broken down under the cruel torments, and allowed
himself to be baptized, for the sake of a respite, the Church never let
him go again, no matter how loudly he protested that he was still a Jew.
If he was caught practicing Jewish rites, he was subjected to the
severest punishment.
My father knew of one who was taken as a small boy, who never
yielded to the priests under the most hideous tortures. As he was a very
bright boy, the priests were particularly eager to convert him. They
tried him with bribes that would appeal to his ambition. They promised
to make a great man of him--a general, a noble. The boy turned away
and said his prayers. Then they tortured him, and threw him into a cell;
and when he lay asleep from exhaustion, the priest came and baptized
him. When he awoke, they told him he was a Christian, and brought
him the crucifix to kiss. He protested, threw the crucifix from him, but
they held him to it that he was a baptized Jew, and belonged to the
Church; and the rest of his life he spent between the prison and the
hospital, always clinging to his faith, saying the Hebrew prayers in
defiance of his tormentors, and paying for it with his flesh.
There were men in Polotzk whose faces made you old in a minute.
They had served Nicholas I, and come back unbaptized. The white
church in the square--how did it look to them? I knew. I cursed the
church in my heart every time I had to pass it; and I was afraid--afraid.
On market days, when the peasants came to church, and the bells kept
ringing by the hour, my heart was heavy in me, and I could find no rest.

Even in my father's house I did not feel safe. The church bell boomed
over the roofs of the houses, calling, calling, calling. I closed my eyes,
and saw the people passing into the church: peasant women with bright
embroidered aprons and glass beads; barefoot little girls with colored
kerchiefs on their heads; boys with caps pulled too far down over their
flaxen hair; rough men with plaited bast sandals, and a rope around the
waist,--crowds of them, moving slowly up the steps, crossing
themselves again and again, till they were swallowed by the black
doorway, and only the beggars were left squatting on the steps. Boom,
boom! What are the people doing in the dark, with the waxen images
and the horrid crucifixes? Boom, boom, boom! They are ringing the bell
for me. Is it in the church they will torture me, when I refuse to kiss the
cross?
They ought not to have told me those dreadful stories. They were long
past; we were living under the blessed "New Régime." Alexander III
was no friend of the Jews; still he did not order little boys to be taken
from their mothers, to be made into soldiers and Christians. Every man
had to serve in the army for four years, and a Jewish recruit was likely
to be treated with severity, no matter if his behavior were perfect; but
that was little compared to the dreadful conditions of the old régime.
The thing that really mattered was the