Ghetto Tragedies by Israel Zangwill

Author:Israel Zangwill
Language: eng
Format: epub

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VIII

SATAN MEKATRIG

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VIII

SATAN MEKATRIG

"Suffer not the evil imagination to have dominion over us ... deliver me from the destructive Satan."--Morning Prayer.

Without, the air was hot, heavy and oppressive; squadrons of dark clouds had rolled up rapidly from the rim of the horizon, and threatened each instant to shake heaven and earth with their artillery. But within the little synagogue of the "Congregation of Love and Mercy," though it was crowded to suffocation, not a window was open. The worshippers, arrayed in their Sabbath finery, were too intent on following the quaint monotonous sing-song of the Cantor reading the Law to have much attention left for physical discomfort. They thought of their perspiring brows and their moist undergarments just about as little as they thought of the meaning of the Hebrew words the reader was droning. Though the language was perfectly intelligible to them, yet their consciousness was chiefly and agreeably occupied with its musical accentuation, their piety being so interwoven with these beloved and familiar material elements as hardly to be separable therefrom. Perspiration, too, had come to seem almost an ingredient of piety on great synagogal occasions. Frequent experience had linked the two, as the poor opera-goer associates Patti with crushes. And the present was a great occasion. It was only an ordinary Sabbath afternoon service, but there was a feast of intellectual good things to follow. The great Rav Rotchinsky from Brody was to deliver a sermon; and so the swarthy, eager-eyed, curly-haired, shrewd-visaged cobblers, tailors, cigar-makers, peddlers, and beggars, who made up the congregation, had assembled in their fifties to enjoy the dialectical subtleties, the theological witticisms and the Talmudical anecdotes which the reputation of the Galician Maggid foreshadowed. And not only did they come themselves; many brought their wives, who sat in their wigs and earrings behind a curtain which cut them off from the view of the men. The general ungainliness of their figures and the unattractiveness of their low-browed, high-cheekboned, and heavy-jawed faces would have made this pious precaution appear somewhat superfluous to an outsider. The women, whose section of the large room thus converted into a place of worship was much smaller than the men's, were even more closely packed on their narrow benches. Little wonder, therefore, that just as a member of the congregation was intoning from the central platform the blessing which closes the reading of the Law, a woman disturbed her neighbours by fainting. She was carried out into the open air, though not without a good deal of bustle, which invoked indignant remonstrances in the Juedisch-Deutsch jargon, of "Hush, little women!" from the male worshippers, unconscious of the cause. The beadle went behind the curtain, and, fearing new disturbances, tried to open the window at the back of the little room, to let in some air from the back-yard on which it abutted. The sash was, however, too inert from a long season of

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