The White Terror and the Red by Abraham Cahan

Author:Abraham Cahan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620136010
Publisher: Duke Classics

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Alexander, or Sender, Vigdoroff, Vladimir's father, was known among his co-religionists as Sender the Arbitrator. His chief source of income was petition-writing and sundry legal business, but the Jews of Miroslav often submitted their differences to him. These he settled by the force of an imperturbable and magnetic disposition rather than through any special gift of judgment and insight. He was full of anecdotes and inaggressive humour. It was said of him that people who came to his house obdurate and bitter "melted like wax" in his sunny presence. As a rule, indeed, it was the contending parties themselves who then found a way to an amicable solution of the point at issue, but the credit for it was invariably given to Sender the Arbitrator, and his reputation for wisdom brought him some Gentile patrons in addition to his Jewish clientele. His iron safe always contained large sums in cash or valuables entrusted to him by others. When a young couple were engaged to be married the girl's marriage-portion was usually deposited with Sender the Arbitrator. When security was agreed upon in connection with some contract the sum was placed in the hands of Sender the Arbitrator.

His stalwart figure, blond, curling locks and toothless smile; his frilled shirt-front, everlasting brown frock-coat and huge meerschaum cigar-holder—all this was as familiar to the Jews of Miroslav as the public buildings of their town. The business of petition-writing was gradually passing into the hands of younger and better educated men, graduated lawyers regularly admitted to the bar, and his income was dwindling. "I could arbitrate any misunderstanding under the sun except the one between Luck and myself," he used to say, smiling toothlessly. Still, he made a comfortable income, and money was spent freely not only on his household but on all sorts of hangers-on. Vladimir's education cost him more than his means warranted. Besides keeping him at the gymnasium and then at the university he had hired him private teachers of French, German and music. "There are a thousand Gentiles to every Jew," was one of his sayings. "That's why every Jew should possess as much intelligence as a thousand Gentiles. Else we shall be crushed." He was something like a connecting link between the old world and the new. He had a large library, mostly made up of German and Hebrew books. His house was the haunt of "men of wisdom," that is, people who wrote or thought upon modern topics in the language of Isaiah and Jeremiah, free-thinkers whose source of inspiration were atheistic ideas expounded in the Holy Tongue; yet on Saturday nights his neighbours would gather in his drawing room to discuss foreign politics and to chant psalms in the dark. He had the head of an agnostic and the heart of an orthodox Jew.

It was late in the afternoon when Vladimir reached home. His father was in the library, which was also his office, conversing with his copyist—a dapper little man whom his employer described as "an artistic penman and an artistic fool.

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