Chad Gadya!
Israel Zangwill
TRANSLATED FROM ENGLISH BY MATHILDE SALOMON
Chad Gadya! is the last in a series of studies published some years ago by Mr. Israel Zangwill under the title: Dreamers of the Ghetto.
Some of these dreamers did not confine themselves within the narrow limits of the Jewish circle. The world knows their name and their deeds: they are called Spinoza, Heinrich Heine, Lord Beaconsfield, Ferdinand Lassalle, to name only those.
In presenting certain features of their lives and characters, Mr. Zangwill did not wish to produce the work of a biographer or historian; what alone interests him, what he seeks to penetrate with profound emotion, is the Jewish soul, which he believes he sees and wishes to show us as identical with itself in the philosopher, the poet, the statesman, the revolutionary.
Chad Gadya! presents us with the modern Jew whose intelligence has been shaped by scientific education and Christian influence. He too is possessed by the same needs for truth, certainty, justice, summed up in a single word: God! And a poignant drama unfolds in his conscience between the data of his reason and the mysterious desires of his soul. Silence is the only answer to the enigmas that torment him. But the soft pillow of doubt cannot satisfy this heart hungering for justice, for visible, immediate justice, not future and chimerical.
A world not governed by justice does not seem to him a habitable world. If life is but a play of brutal, unconscious forces, the ideal is deliverance from life.
Mathilde Salomon
And it shall come to pass, when thy son asketh thee in time to come, saying: “What is this?” that thou shalt say unto him: “By strength of hand the Lord brought us out from Egypt, from the house of bondage; and… the Lord slew all the firstborn in the land of Egypt. But all the firstborn of my children I have redeemed.” Exodus, XIII, 14, 15.
Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya! One only kid of the goat!
The family service of Passover was drawing to its close. His father had begun the curious Chaldean recitative with which it ends:
One only kid, one only kid, that my father bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!
The young man had a slight smile at the strangeness of the old gentleman in evening dress, a director of the steamship company of modern Venice, speaking Chaldean, absolutely unconscious of this singularity, rolling the sonorous syllables with unction, leaning on the cushions prescribed by the rite.
And the cat came and devoured the kid, that my father had bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!
He was vaguely wondering what his father would say to him when the service was over. He had entered only during the second part, arriving from Vienna, unexpected as usual, and quite surprised that it happened to be the night of Passover, with the immemorial ceremony celebrated exactly as in the time of his childhood. The rarity of his visits to his old parents made this coincidence of having come upon them at this moment a strange one; and taking his place silently at the family table, without interrupting the prayers, he had a vivid and artistic perception of the possibilities of existence — the witty French novel that had so amused him on the train, making him feel that in furnishing the raw material for wit, human life had its joyous justification; the red gold of the setting sun upon the mountains; the descent by boat down the Grand Canal toward the house, in the moonlight; the well-known palaces as full of dream and mystery for him as if he had not been born in the city of the sea; the vivid reminiscences of Goldmark’s new opera heard the night before at the great theatre of Vienna haunted his ear as he mounted the grand staircase — and then, the abrupt transition to the Orient, to the dead centuries; Jehovah bringing forth his chosen people from Egypt, commanding them to celebrate with unleavened bread, through the generations, their precipitous journey into the desert!
His father no doubt suffered to see his son so indifferent to the traditions so dear to himself, though for a long time he had been convinced of this bitter truth, that his ways were not those of his son, that their thoughts were different. He knew his son to be a sinner in Israel, an “Epikouros,” a sceptic, an egotistical materialist, a lover of the feverish life of European capitals, disdainful of dietary rites, an adept of forbidden things; — the son regarded himself with his father’s eyes, and the slight smile that played upon his mobile lips grew more bitter. His long white fingers moved feverishly.
And yet he loved his father; he admired the perseverance that had led him to fortune, the generosity with which he spent that fortune, the fidelity that resisted temptation and made this Seder service, this family gathering, as simply pious as in the past, when the Ghetto Vecchio, and not this palace on the Grand Canal, had been the home. The cup of wine for the prophet Elijah waited there as naively as of old. His mother’s face beamed with love and good will. Brothers and sisters sat around the table, happy, each in his or her own way, satisfied with existence. An atmosphere of peace and serenity, of faith and piety, enveloped the whole room.
And the dog came and bit the cat that had devoured the kid that my father had bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!
And all at once the contrast of this serenity with his own agitated life struck him like a great wave of despair. His eyes filled with bitter tears. He would never sit at his own table perpetuating the chain of piety that unites the generations one to another; never would his soul rest in that atmosphere of peaceful trust; no woman’s love would be his portion, no child would place its little hand in his; he would pass through life like a shadow, gazing at the warm hearths with hopeless eyes and continuing on his way, a Wandering Jew of the world of the soul. How he had suffered, he, the modern of moderns, the dreamer, the constructor of problems! Vanitas vanitatum! omnia vanitas! — Modern of moderns! But it was an ancient Jew who said that, and another Jew said: “Better is the day of a man’s death than the day of his birth.” — Truly here is an ironic proof of the wise man’s maxim: There is nothing new under the sun. And he recalled the great words:
“Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher; vanity of vanities; all is vanity.”
“One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for ever. All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.”
“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”
“That which is crooked cannot be made straight; and that which is wanting cannot be numbered.”
“For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”
Yes, all that is true, absolutely true. How the Jewish genius has entered into the heart of things, so well that the people who hate it have found comfort in its psalms! No sense of form; the end of Ecclesiastes is nothing but confused and feeble repetitions, like the last convulsive spasms of a prophetic ecstasy; no care for art, nothing but reality. And he had once believed he preferred the Greeks; he had sighed since childhood for the forbidden Gods, intoxicated by that solitary marble Virgin, gazing at the Ghetto from a neighbouring wall.
Yes, he had brought his adorations to the Altar of Beauty; he had extolled the Renaissance. He had written — with that faculty of multiple adaptation peculiar to his race — French poems of Hellenic inspiration, lyric love-poems, half felt, half imagined, delicately chiselled. Now he understood it suddenly: never had he expressed his true personality in art, save perhaps in that brutal Italian novel, written under the influence of Zola, and so sharply decried by a world that saw neither the love nor the tears beneath that implacable revelation of life.
And a stick came that struck the dog that had bitten the cat, that had devoured the kid that my father had bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!
Yes, he was Jewish at heart. His childhood in the Ghetto, the long heredity, had chained him in emotions, in impulses, as with phylacteries. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya! That very melody awakened innumerable associations of ideas. He saw again in a rapid panorama the intense inner life of a child with curly hair, strolling in the narrow enclosure of the Ghetto among the tall picturesque houses. A reflection of his ancient childish joys during the feast days shone in his soul. How charming was that antique succession of Passover and Pentecost, New Year and Tabernacles, that survival of the ancient Orient in modern Europe, that life within the souls of the ancestors, as during Tabernacles one lived in their dwellings! A sudden desire seized him to sing with his father, to wrap himself in a fringed scarf, to sway in the passionate rhythm of prayer, to prostrate himself in the synagogue. Why had his brethren ever sought to leave the joyous slavery of the Ghetto? His imagination showed it to him as it was before his birth: a camp bordered by arcades of shops, the Hebrew merchants with black beards in their long robes, the iron gates closed at midnight, the guards rowing around the free part of the canal. — The yellow cap? The yellow O on the breast? — Signs of honour, for it is nobler to be persecuted than persecutor. Why had they ever wished for emancipation? Their life was concentrated in themselves, complete in themselves. But no, they were restless, condemned to wander. He pictured the first currents flooding into Venice, at the beginning of the thirteenth century — the German merchants, the Levantines helping to build the commercial capital of the fifteenth century. He saw the last arrivals, the refugees from the Peninsula fleeing the Inquisition, the shelter under the wing of the Lion, negotiated by their coreligionist Daniel Rodrigues, consul of the Republic in Dalmatia. His mind paused for a moment on this Daniel Rodrigues, a great figure. He thought of the endless expedients of the Jews to escape the too-harsh prescriptions, their subtle passive refusal to live at Mestre, their final relegation to the Ghetto. What springs of energy bubbled in those extraordinary ancestors, who united the calm of the Orient with the fever of the Occident, those idealists occupied solely with practical things, those lovers of the idea, those princes of abstraction, dominating their surroundings because they took account only of ideas represented by concrete realities. Reality! Reality!
That is the note of Jewish genius, which has at least this affinity with Greek genius. And he, although the true world of his father was for him a shadow, had kept this instinctive hatred of cloud-weavers, of word-jugglers. His ideal demanded a solid substance for its foundation.
Perhaps if he had been persecuted, or even poor, if his father had not facilitated his entry into a literary career not without distinction, perhaps he would have escaped that feeling that haunted him, of the emptiness and futility of existence. He too would have found a joy in outwitting the Christian persecutor in subtlety, in piling ducat upon ducat.
Yes, even now he laughed at the thought of those strozzaroli, those forced dealers in second-hand goods, who had ended by buying up all the faded purple draperies of Venetian glory!
He recalled the results of an ancient census: Men, women, children, monks, nuns — and Jews! — Well, the Doges had lived and gone; Venice was a melancholy ruin, and the Jew — the Jew lived sumptuously in the palaces of those proud patricians. He looked at the vast and magnificent dining-room, with its carpets, its paintings, its frescoes, its palms, remembered the ancient coat of arms above the stone portal — a rampant lion with a flying angel — and thought of that old Latin law forbidding Jews to keep schools of any kind in Venice, or to teach anything whatsoever in the city, under penalty of fifty ducats’ fine and six months’ imprisonment. Well, the Jews, after all, had taught the Venetians something — that the only lasting wealth is human energy. All the other nations had had their time of prosperity and died out.
But Israel pursues his way with unvanquished vigour and courage. It is extraordinary, or rather, is it not miraculous? Perhaps indeed there is a “mission of Israel”? Perhaps he is truly “the chosen people of God”? The Venetians built and painted marvels; they are dead, leaving them to the contemplation of tourists. The Jews have created nothing for centuries, save a few poems and a few melancholy melodies for the synagogue, and there they are, strong and solid, a creation of flesh and blood more marvellous and more enduring than those of stone and bronze. And what is the secret of this persistence, of this vigour? What can it be if not spiritual? What can it be if not the intimate certainty of God, the absolute trust in Him, who would send his Messiah to rebuild the Temple, to raise the Jews to sovereignty over the peoples. How typical his own father — chanting Chaldean with serenity — a modern among moderns outside — a scholar and a saint at home! Ah! if only he too could lean upon that solid faith! Yes, his soul sympathizes with the melancholy, the immutable Orient, with the mysticism of the cabbalists, with the intoxication of the ascetics, the fantastic and frenzied ecstasy of the dervishes he had seen dancing in the Turkish mosques. He understood the soothing power of a satisfying explanation of things, a unity in the essence of life. Men had doubtless sought it in the ancient mysteries of Eleusis; the Mahatmas of India had perhaps found it; the tradition had perpetuated itself through the ages, unrecognized by the Western races, and for want of possessing it, he would often have dashed his head against the baffling mystery of life, as against a wall. Ah! it is infernal! His soul is of the Orient, his brain is of the Occident. His intelligence has been nourished at the breasts of Science, which classifies everything and explains nothing. To explain — how futile a word! Things are. To explain them is to state A in terms of B, and B in terms of A. Who will explain the explanation?
Perhaps only through ecstasy can one comprehend what lies behind phenomena. But even so, the essence can only be judged by its manifestations, and the manifestations are often absurd, unjust, and devoid of any meaning. No, he cannot believe. His intelligence is without remorse. What does it matter that Israel has been preserved? Why was the empire of Venice destroyed?
And there came a fire, that burned the stick, that had struck the dog, that had bitten the cat, that had devoured the kid, that my father had bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!
He thought of the energy spent in building this astonishing city, of the piles of wood driven deep into the sea, of the inexhaustible treasures of art, churches, paintings, sculptures, fruit of obscure human talent, though some of these dead have left names. What measureless energy petrified in those palaces! The paintings of Carpaccio floated before his eyes, and those of Tintoretto, memories of past generations; then, by the link of dimension, those larger ones — in gouache — by Vermoyen, of ancient combats, with bow, lance, arquebus; of ancient naval battles, on galleys with grappling-irons intertwined. He saw again the galley-slaves chained to their benches — the sweat, the blood that had stained history. “So I returned, and considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun: and behold the tears of such as were oppressed, and they had no comforter.”
He recalled a modern painting representing a beautiful nude woman: that painting had cost a family its happiness; today the artist was dead and immortal; the woman, once rich and elegant, now walked the streets. The futility of everything! Love, glory, immortality! All roads lead — nowhere. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he hath done under the sun?
No, all is but the flood that passes, nothing but the flood. He rambled on. The wisest have always seen it. It is the cat that devours the kid, and the dog that bites the cat, and the stick that strikes the dog, and the fire that burns the stick, and so on eternally. Do not the commentators say that this is the meaning of this very parable — the succession of the ancient empires, Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Greece, Rome? The commentators, what singular folk! In what lost desert of dialectic the Jewish mind has wandered for centuries! The infinite volumes of the Talmud and its parasites! The countless codes, now abolished, over which extinct eyes have grown dim: as much patience and ingenuity as to create artistic Venice, and fewer results. The chosen people, indeed!
Was it then so strong, so healthy! A beautiful thought in its brain — ah yes! It is exhausted by this great effort of centuries, this long self-education, so many epochs of persecution, so many adapted customs and languages, so many assumed nationalities. Its soul must resemble a palimpsest, with traces of nation upon nation. It is against nature, this clinging to life. A nation should be willing to die. And in him perhaps that will was born. — He foresaw the despair of this people, the Israel of future days, always driven to extremes, which, having been the first in faith, is also the first in scepticism, the quickest to penetrate to the empty heart of things, like a lost wind, moaning around the vanished lands of the universe. To know that all is illusion, deception, that one belongs to the most deceived race in the universe, prestigiously drawn toward a career of sacrifice and contempt! If it could still keep the hope that set a halo around its sufferings! But now it is a viper — not a divine hope — that it nurses in its bosom! He felt so alone; a great expanse of blackness, a desolate pool, a bare cliff above a sea of ice, a pine on a mountain. Let it all be over, the sighs and the sobs and the tears, the faintings of heart, the painful days that drag on and the nights of anguish. How many times he had turned his face to the wall, calling for death!
Perhaps it was the stones of the dead city, and the sea, that acted thus upon his spirit. Turgenev is right: it is the young alone who should come here, not those who, like Virgil, have seen the tears of things. And he recalled the verses of Catullus, the sad and majestic classical lament, like the contained sob of a strong man:
Soles occidere et redire possunt Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux Nox est perpetuo una dormienda.
Then he thought again of Virgil evoking a Tuscan landscape where the poet is revealed — and rows of majestic cypresses, like hexameters. He saw the terrace of an ancient palace, the fantastic animals carved on the balustrade, the green shimmer of lizards on the wall of the sleeping garden and the cool green reflection of the cypress grove with its delicious movement of shadow. An invisible nightingale sang above his head. He followed the long promenade beneath the stone eyes of the sculpted gods, and, contemplating the burning landscape, rested under the ardent blue sky — near the green sunlit hills, the white villas nestled in the verdure, the grey olive trees. Who had trodden these terraces with their slender columns? Medieval princesses, disdainful and passionate, advancing delicately with their silken trains and light perfumes. He would make a poem of it. Oh! the exquisite charm of life! What was that poet singing in the dear and sweet Venetian dialect:
Bellissimo xe el mondo perché l’é molto vario ni omo che xe profondo che dir possa il contrario.
Yes, the world is very beautiful, very varied. Terence speaks true: the comedy and the pity of it all, that is enough. We are a sufficient spectacle to one another. — A warmth rose in him; for a moment he regained confidence in life, and the innumerable bonds of things spread out to envelop him.
And a water came that quenched the fire, that had burned the stick, that had struck the dog, that had bitten the cat, that had devoured the kid, that my father had bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!
But the warmth died out. He became sad and despairing again. For now he knew what he lacked. Paganism was not enough. He wanted God, he hungered for God, the God of his fathers. He could not cast off the three thousand years of faith. It was atavism that gave him those sudden and strange intuitions of God, at the perfume of a rose, at the laugh of a child, at the sight of a sleeping city, that warmed his heart and brought tears to his eyes, with a sense of infinite beauty, of the holiness of life. But he could not possess Him, the God of his fathers. And his own God was distant and doubtful: nothing that modern science had taught him had yet penetrated into his organism. Could he even transmit it to his descendants? What is it Weismann says about acquired characteristics? No, certain races propagate certain beliefs, and until you have killed the race, you have not killed the beliefs. Oh! the cruel tragedy of this Western culture grafted upon the Oriental stock, falsifying the chords of life, separating heart from brain! But nature is cruel by essence. He thought of last year’s grape harvest, ruined by a storm, of the frightful misery of the peasants under the yoke of the landowners. And he had a vision of a captured cod that he had seen gasping, almost with a human breath, upon the sands of the Lido. That spectacle had spoiled for him the sublimity of that desolate expanse of earth and water, and the strange charm of the white sails that seem to glide along the stones of the great reef. His soul demanded justice for the shapeless cod. He did not understand how one could live in a spiritual world, concentrated upon itself, from which the greater part of creation was excluded. If suffering purifies, what purification is that of horses loaded to death, or of starving cats! The miracle of creation, how does it exist for the little dogs drowned at birth? No, man has imposed morality upon an unmoral world, making everything in his own image, transporting into the great unconscious mechanism the ideal that governs the conduct of man toward man. Religion, like art, makes of man, an accidental product of no importance, the centre of the universe; it is bad science changed into art.
And it is his own race that has created and propagated this illusion. Abraham said to God: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” — Before that, God had meant power; but the soul of man had come to sigh for Justice. From the chaos of human existence, man extracted the idea of Good, made it a God; then, turning against this God, demanded of Him why He permits Evil — without which the idea of Good would never have arisen. And because God is the Good, He is Unity; he recalled Kuenen’s penetrating analysis. No, the moral law is no more the fundamental secret of the Universe than colour or music. Religion has been created for man, not man for Religion. Even Justice is, in the last analysis, a meaningless conception. What is, is. To see the world as an artist, that is the truth; the artist believes in everything and believes in nothing. Religions deform all things. In itself, life is simple enough: a biological phenomenon that has its development, its maturity, its decline. Death is not a mystery; pain is not a punishment; sin is nothing but the survival of inferior attributes, remnants of a more remote phase of evolution, or often enough the protest of the natural self against the artificial morality of societies. It is beliefs that have torn from things their primordial simplicity. — But for him, the old desire persisted. This alone would be satisfying: God! God! — he was drunk with God, without the calm of Spinoza, without the certainty of Spinoza. Justice, Pity, Love, a Being who hears! He knew well that blind heredity alone prevented him from enjoying life — ah! what irony! — and that if he could lose this sense of emptiness, his existence would be beautiful. The wheels of fortune had favoured him. But his soul rejected all the solutions and the personal equations of his friends, the all-sufficiency of science, of art, of pleasure, of the spectacle of humanity; it pierced with inexorable vision the phantasmagoric optimism, refused to blind itself with Platonism, Hegelianism, refused the conclusions of the aesthetes, the artists, the self-satisfied German scholars, as well as those of the conventional preachers; it demanded justice for the individual, down to the sparrows sold two for a farthing at the market; it wanted a meaning, a purpose to the secular march of destiny, and knew, nevertheless, that a purpose is as anthropomorphic a conception of the essence of things as Justice or Goodness. — But the world without God is like an admirable woman without heart, cold, who has no sympathy. He craved the illumination of the soul. He had experimented with nature, colour, form, mystery — what had he not experimented with? He had loved nature, had almost found peace in the passion of the earth, the intoxicating perfume of herbs and flowers, the smell and sound of the sea, the joy of plunging into the cold salt waves that leap up green and foaming: delights one would not exchange for a heaven!
But those passions died out, and the devouring need of God returned. — He had found a temporary peace with the God of Spinoza, the eternal Being with infinite faces, of whom all the starry infinities are but a poor expression, and whose love does not imply being loved in return. To raise oneself by the adoration of that splendour — that is beautiful; but that splendour grows cold, and the ardent need of God returns. What he needed was that the eternal Being should be conscious of his existence; better still, that He should let him know that He was not a metaphysical fiction. — Otherwise he would have caught himself repeating what Voltaire puts into Spinoza’s mouth: “I suspect, between ourselves, that you do not exist.” Obedience? Worship? He would have prostrated himself for hours upon stone floors, he would have worn out his knees in prayer! O Luther, O Galileo, enemies of the human race! How wise the Church was to burn the infidels who sought to quench the hearth-fire — the warm hearth-fire of tenderness, treasure of the generations! O Napoleon, archangel of evil, who by opening the ghettos where the Jews crowded in their narrow joys, around the sabbath hearths, had let fall upon them the weight of the universe!
And an ox came, that drank the water, that had quenched the fire, that had burned the stick, that had struck the dog, that had bitten the cat, that had devoured the kid, that my father had bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!
In Vienna, where he had passed through, an Israelite was dreaming the old dream of a Jewish State — a modern State, incarnation of all the great principles acquired by the labour of the centuries. This chameleon of races would have a specific colour: a Jewish art, a Jewish architecture would arise; who knows? — But he, who had worked with Mazzini, who had seen his hero arrive at the greatest of defeats — victory — he knew. He knew what would result, in the event of success. He understood the fate of Christ, of all idealists condemned to see themselves worshipped, and their ideas relegated to a religion or a State, like a national monument to perpetuate their defeat. But the Jewish State would not even be formed. Yesterday he had seen his Viennese coreligionists — in the Leopoldstrasse, with the long greasy garments and the curls over the ear from Galicia; — at the Prater, flaunting with arrogance in brilliant equipages, with footmen of perfect correctness — strange race, that knew how to build cities for others, never for itself, that professed to be at once a religion and a nationality, and was often neither the one nor the other!
How grotesque history is! Moses, Sinai, Palestine, Isaiah, Ezra, the Temple, Christ, the Exile, the Ghetto, the Martyrdoms — all that, to furnish the comic Austrian papers with jokes about second-hand dealers whose noses are long enough to carry opera-glasses without holding them. — And suppose that yet another miraculous link were added to this marvellous chain, the happier Jews of the new State would be born into it like the children of a newly rich man, unconscious of the struggles, accepting the well-being, grown thick of body and narrow of soul.
Would the Temple be rebuilt? And then what? The architect would send in his bill. People would dine out, would slap each other on the belly, telling old smoking-room stories.
There would be fashionable dressmakers. The synagogue would persecute everything that surpassed it; the priests would exalt the spiritual world before an approving animal world; the press would serve the interests of capitalists and politicians; the small writers would be full of hatred for those who did not call them great; the managers of national theatres would try to get the leading parts given to their mistresses. Yes, the ox will come and drink the water, and Jeshurun, grown fat, will kick. “For that which is crooked cannot be made straight.” The Book of Proverbs is as new as this morning’s newspaper.
No, he cannot dream. Let young races dream; the old ones know better. The race that first dreamed the beautiful dream of the Millennium was the first to reject it. Was it even a beautiful dream? Every man under his fig tree, indeed! Obese and somnolent, the mind disintegrated! Omnia vanitas, this too is vanity.
And the butcher came and slew the ox that had drunk the water, that had quenched the fire, that had burned the stick, that had struck the dog, that had bitten the cat, that had devoured the kid, that my father had bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!
Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya! Never had he asked himself the meaning of these words, always associated with the end of the ceremony. All is finished, all is finished, they seemed to moan, and the strange old music gave a sense of infinite disillusion, of infinite repose: an end, a conclusion, things terminated and left there, a fever fallen, a task accomplished, a clamour stilled, a farewell toll of a bell, hands crossed for sleep.
Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya! It was a lamentation over the struggle for existence, the purposeless succession of centuries, the passing of the ancient empires — according to the commentators — and of the modern empires that would rejoin them in the past, until the earth itself, scientists assure us, should end in its turn, in cold and darkness. Ebb and flow! Fire and water, water and fire! He thought of the motionless skeletons still awaiting exhumation at Pompeii; of the swaddled mummies of the Pharaohs, of the ashes of forgotten lovers in old Etruscan tombs. He had the sudden sense of the great procession of the Middle Ages — popes, kings, crusaders, mendicant friars, peasants, flagellants, students; of modern life varied to infinity, in Paris, Vienna, Rome, London, Berlin, New York, Chicago: the brilliance of the fashionable quarters, the jargon of the bohemians, the poor in their garrets, the sick on their beds of pain, the soldiers, the prostitutes, the proletarians in their hovels, the criminals, the madmen; the enormous Russian hordes, life swarming in the teeming boats on the rivers of China, the joyous butterfly existence of Japan; the unknown savages of central Africa, with their fetishes and their war dances; the Oriental tribes sleeping under tents, or dragging themselves wearily upon the burning terraces of their houses; the development of the negro races, become so terrible a problem for the United States — and each of these peoples, nay, each individual regarding himself as the centre and the concern of the universe; the destiny of races as obscure as that of individuals, and the whole immense expanse of history being nothing but a convulsion of life upon the most miserable of an obscure group of worlds, lost in an infinity of vaster constellations! Oh! the world is too vast! He could not look upon the face of his God and live! Without the inveterate illusions of his father, he could not continue to exist. His point of view was desperately cosmic. Everything is equally great and mysterious? Yes, but everything is equally small and commonplace. The starry Infinite of Kant, outside? Bah! A few lumps of mud spinning in a top-dance and getting warm by the exercise, nothing more than the rotation of specks in a drop of dirty water. Extent is nothing in itself. There are in a heap of mud mountains and seas picturesque enough for microscopic tourists. A billion billions of heaps of mud are no more imposing than a single one. Geology, chemistry, astronomy, all that is to be found in the splashings of a passing carriage. Everywhere one single law, one single insignificance. The human race? Strange sea-monsters crawling upon the bed of an ocean of air, incapable of rising into that air, bizarrely disguised in skins stolen from other creatures, as absurd, looked at impartially, as the baroque beings adapted to the curious environment of an aquarium. The moral law within, of Kant? Dissoluble by a cholera germ, a little blue thread under the microscope, rather like a map of Venice. Yes, cosmic and comic are synonymous.
Why let oneself be terrified by the terrible splendour of Spinoza? Perhaps Heine — that other Jew — has seen more truly, and the last word of man on this universe into which he has been cast without being asked might be a mockery of him who has mocked him, a laughter mingled with tears.
And he pictured the future of all races, as well as of his own race. All will continue to struggle until they become conscious; then, like children come of age, the scales falling from their eyes, they will suddenly ask themselves what it all means, and understanding that they were driven by blind forces to labour, to effort, to struggle, they too will pass away. The gross new races will sweep them away like dust, nature causing ever-renewing energies to spring from her inexhaustible source. For strength lies in the unconscious, and when a nation stops to ask what its right to empire is, that empire is already no more. The ancient Hebrew Palestine, sacrificing sheep to Yahweh — what a granite figure, compared to him, so subtle, so mobile! For a century or two the modern world will take pleasure in seeing itself reflected in literature and in art by the most decadent minds, vibrating to the pathetic and the picturesque of all the periods of the mysterious human existence upon this strange little globe, while the old geometric morality clings oddly to the changed cosmogony, but all that will die out — and then, the Deluge!
From outside came the sounds of joyous music. He rose, went noiselessly to the window, looking out into the night. The full moon shone in the sky, perpendicular and low, seeming a terrestrial object compared to the stars scattered above and giving him the impression, in that luminous Italian night, of belonging to their radiant company, whirling through the infinite void on innumerable spheres. A great patch of moonlight, of silvery green, spread over the black water, sparkling like a chain of gold coins in motion. Below, on the canal, the black gondolas pressed around a boat lit by lanterns of vivid colours, from which the music came. Funiculi, Funicula — it seemed to dance with the very spirit of joy. He saw a young couple holding hands; they were English, of that strange, happy, solid, victorious race. Something vibrated within him. His thought dwelt upon the betrothed, on youth, on strength, but it resembled the hollow echo of a distant regret, some vague golden sunrise, on hills of dream. Then a magnificent tenor voice sang Schubert’s Serenade, which seemed the voice of passion itself, the aspiration of the moth toward the star, of man toward God. — Death, death at any price, to have done with sinisterly crawling through the confines of life! Life itself an instant more, life without God, seemed intolerable. He would find peace in that black water. He would slip down the staircase without a word.
And the angel of death came and slew the butcher, who had slain the ox, that had drunk the water, that had quenched the fire, that had burned the stick, that had struck the dog, that had bitten the cat, that had devoured the kid that my father had bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!
When they found him drowned by accident — for how would the world understand, this world always so quick to judge him — that a man having youth, health, wealth, some celebrity, had put an end to his life, his parents would perhaps think that it was a phantom that had taken a place at the Seder table, silent and still. And indeed, was it not a phantom? One need not die in order to hover outside the animated circle of life, arms outstretched.
A phantom? He had always been a phantom. Since childhood, singularly robust people had come, had spoken to him, had walked with him, and he had glided among them, a spirit without reality to whom they attributed motives of flesh and blood, like their own. As a small child, death had seemed horrible to him: red worms crawling upon white flesh. Now his thoughts willingly lingered before the happy moment of giving up the ghost. Other lives beyond the tomb? But the world is not big enough for a single life; it never ceases repeating itself. Books, newspapers — what heavy boredom! A small number of ideas cleverly recombined, for there is nothing new under the sun. Life is like a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing. Shakespeare found its supreme expression, as of all that it contains.
He slipped softly out by the half-open door, crossed the anteroom decorated with tapestries and statues of old Venetians clad in armour, descended the great staircase into the courtyard, which seemed sepulchral by the gleam of a match that allowed him to find the door to the water and to see his shadow monstrously bent along the roof that overhung the deep darkness. He opened the door cautiously and tasted the sweetness of the spring night. All was silent. The narrow canal reflected the moonlight; the opposite palace was dark with a patch of light at one window; above his head, in the small notch of deep blue sky, a cluster of stars shone, like brilliant birds in the velvety darkness. The water beat sadly against the marble steps; a gondola tied to the posts seemed to sway gently toward its black shadow in the canal.
He walked to the place where the avenue of water was deeper and let himself slip in quietly. He found himself struggling, but vanquished the instinctive will to live.
As he plunged for the last time, the mystery of the night, of the stars, of death merged with a strange whirl of childhood memories, and the immemorial words of the dying Jew burst violently from his strangled throat:
“Hear, O Israel, the Lord, our God, the Lord is One!”
Through the open door floated the last words of the hymn and of the service:
…And the Holy One, blessed be His name, came and slew the angel of death, who had slain the butcher, who had slain the ox, that had drunk the water, that had quenched the fire, that had burned the stick, that had struck the dog, that had bitten the cat, that had devoured the kid that my father had bought for two zuzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!