The Rise of David Levinsky (52 page)

“Mother dear! Mother dear!” my heart was saying. And then: “Thank God, mother dear! I own a large factory. I am a rich man and I am going to be married to the daughter of a fine Jew, a man of substance and Talmud. And the family comes from around Antomir, too. Ah, if you were here to escort me to the wedding canopy!”

The number of worshipers was slowly increasing. An old woman made her appearance in the gallery reserved for her sex. At last Mr. Kaplan, the father of my fiancée, entered the synagogue—a man of sixty, with a gray patriarchal beard and a general appearance that bespoke Talmudic scholarship and prosperity. He was a native of a small town near Antomir, where his father had been rabbi, and was now a retired flour merchant, having come to America in the seventies. He had always been one of the pillars of the Synagogue of the Sons of Antomir. In 389 the days when I was a frequenter at the old house of prayer the social chasm between him and myself was so wide that the notion of my being engaged to a daughter of his would have seemed absurd. Which, by the way, was one of the attractions that his house now had for me.

“Good holiday, Mr. Kaplan!” some of the other worshipers saluted him, as he made his way toward his pew.

“Good holiday! Good holiday!” he responded, with dignified geniality.

I could see that he was aware of my presence but carefully avoided looking at me until he should be near enough for me to greet him. He was a kindly, serious-minded man, sincerely devout, and not over-bright. He had his little vanities and I was willing to humor them.

“Good holiday, Mr. Kaplan!” I called out to him.

“Good holiday! Good holiday, David!” he returned, amiably. “Here already? Ahead of me? That’s good! Just follow the path of Judaism and everything will be all right.”

“How’s everybody?” I asked.

“All are well, thank God.”

“How’s Fanny?”

“Now you’re talking. That’s the real question, isn’t it?” he chaffed me, with dignity. “She’s well, thank God.”

He introduced me to the cantor—a pug-nosed man with a pale face and a skimpy little beard of a brownish hue.

“Our new cantor, the celebrated Jacob Goldstein!” he said. “And this is Mr. David Levinsky, my intended son-in-law. An Antomir man. Was a fine scholar over there and still remembers a lot of Talmud.”

The newly arrived synagogue tenor was really a celebrated man, in the Antomir section of Russia, at least. His coming had been conceived as a sensational feature of the opening of the new synagogue. While “town cantor” in Antomir he had received the highest salary ever paid there. The contract that had induced him to come over to America pledged him nearly five times as much. Thus the New York Sons of Antomir were not only able to parade a famous cantor before the multitude of other New York congregations, but also to prove to the people at home that they were the financial superiors of the whole town of their birth. So far, however, as the New York end of the sensation was concerned, there was a good-sized bee in the honey. The imported cantor was a tragic disappointment. The trouble was that his New York audiences were far more critical and exacting than the people in Antomir, and he was not up to their standard. For one thing, many of the Sons of Antomir, and others who came to their synagogue to hear the new singer, people who had mostly lived in poverty and ignorance at home, now had a piano or a violin in the house, with a son or a daughter to play it, and had become frequenters of the Metropolitan Opera House or the Carnegie Music Hall; for another, the New York Ghetto was full of good concerts and all other sorts of musical entertainments, so much so that good music had become all but part of the daily life of the Jewish tenement population; for a third, the audiences of the imported cantor included people who had lived in much larger European cities than Antomir, in such places as Warsaw, Odessa, Lemberg, or Vienna, for example, where they had heard much better cantors than Goldstein. Then, too, life in New York had Americanized my fellow-townspeople, modernized their tastes, broadened them out. As a consequence, the methods of the man who had won the admiration of their native town seemed to them old-fashioned, crude, droll.

Still, the trustees, and several others who were responsible for the coming of the pug-nosed singer, persisted in speaking of him as “a greater tenor than Jean de Rezske,” and my prospective father-in-law was a trustee, and a good-natured man to boot, so he had compassion for him.

“In the old country when we meet a new-comer we only say, ‘Peace to you,’ ” I remarked to the cantor, gaily. “Here we say this and something else, besides. We ask him how he likes America.”

“But I have not yet seen it,” the cantor returned, with a broad smile in which his pug nose seemed to grow in size.

I told him the threadbare joke of American newspaper reporters boarding an incoming steamer at Sandy Hook and asking some European celebrity how he likes America hours before he has set foot on its soil.

“That’s what we call ‘hurry up,”’ Kaplan remarked.

“That means quick, doesn’t it?” the cantor asked, with another broad smile.

“You’re picking up English rather fast,” I jested.

“He has not only a fine voice, but a fine head, too,” Kaplan put in.

“I know what’ all right’ means, too,” the cantor laughed.

I thought there was servility in his laugh, and I ascribed it to the lukewarm reception with which he had met. I was touched. We talked of Antomir, and although a conversation of this kind was nothing new to me, yet what he said of the streets, market-places, the bridge, the synagogues, and of some of the people of the town interested me inexpressibly.

Presently the service was begun—not by the imported singer, but by an amateur from among the worshipers, the service on a Passover evening not being considered important enough to be conducted by a professional cantor of consequence.

My heart was all in Antomir, in the good old Antomir of synagogues and Talmud scholars and old-fashioned marriages, not of college students, revolutionists, and Matildas.

When the service was over I stepped up close to the Holy Ark and recited the Prayer for the Dead, in chorus with several other men and boys. As I cast a glance at my “memorial candle” my mother loomed saintly through its flame. I beheld myself in her arms, a boy of four, on our way to the synagogue, where I was to be taught to parrot the very words that I was now saying for her spirit.

The Prayer for the Dead was at an end. “A good holiday! A merry holiday!” rang on all sides, as the slender crowd streamed chatteringly toward the door.

Mr. Kaplan, the cantor, and several other men, clustering together, lingered to bandy reminiscences of Antomir, interspersing them with “bits of law.”

T
HE Kaplans occupied a large, old house on Henry Street, one that had been built at a period when the neighborhood was considered the best in the city. While Kaplan and I were taking off our overcoats in the broad, carpeted, rather dimly lighted hall, a dark-eyed girl appeared at the head of a steep stairway.

“Hello, Dave! You’re a good boy,” she shouted, joyously, as she ran down to meet me with coquettish complacency.

She had regular features, and her face wore an expression of ease and self-satisfaction. Her dark eyes were large and pretty, and altogether she was rather good-looking. Indeed, there seemed to be no reason why she should not be decidedly pretty, but she was not. Perhaps it was because of that self-satisfied air of hers, the air of one whom nothing in the world could startle or stir. Temperamentally she reminded me somewhat of Miss Kalmanovitch, but she was the better-looking of the two. I was not in love with her, but she certainly was not repulsive to me.

“Good holiday, dad! Good holiday, Dave!” she saluted us in Yiddish, throwing out her chest and squaring her shoulders as she reached us.

She was born in New York and had graduated at a public grammar-school and English was the only language which she spoke like one born to speak it, and yet her Yiddish greeting was precisely what it would have been had she been born and bred in Antomir.

Her “Good holiday, dad. Good holiday, Dave!” went straight to my heart.

“Well, I’ve brought him to you, haven’t I? Are you pleased?” her father said, with affectionate grimness, in Yiddish.

“Oh, you’re a dandy dad. You’re just sweet,” she returned, in English, putting up her red lips as if he were her baby. And this, too, went to my heart.

When her father had gone to have his shoes changed for slippers and before her mother came down from her bedroom, where she was apparently dressing for supper, Fanny slipped her arm around me and I kissed her lips and eyes.

A chuckle rang out somewhere near by. Standing in the doorway of the back parlor, Mefisto-like, was Mary, Fanny’s twelve-year-old sister.

“Shame!” she said, gloatingly.

“The nasty thing!” Fanny exclaimed, half gaily, half in anger.

“You’re nasty yourself,” returned Mary, making faces at her sister.

“Shut up or I’ll knock your head off.”

“Stop quarreling, kids,” I intervened. Then, addressing myself to Mary, “Can you spell ‘eavesdropping’?”

Mary laughed.

“Never mind laughing,” I insisted. “Do you know what eavesdropping means? Is it a nice thing to do? Anyhow, when you’re as big as Fanny and you have a sweetheart, won’t you let him kiss you?” As I said this I took Fanny’s hand tenderly.

“She has sweethearts already,” said Fanny. “She is running around with three boys.”

“I ain’t,” Mary protested, pouting.

“Well, three sweethearts means no sweetheart at all,” I remarked.

Fanny and I went into the front parlor, a vast, high-ceiled room, as large as the average four-room flat in the “modern apartment-house” that had recently been completed on the next block. It was drearily too large for the habits of the East Side of my time, depressingly out of keeping with its sense of home. It had lanky pink-and-gold furniture and a heavy bright carpet, all of which had a forbidding effect. It was as though the chairs and the sofa had been placed there, not for use, but for storage. Nor was there enough furniture to give the room an air of being inhabited, the six pink-and-gold pieces and the marbre-topped center-table losing themselves in spaces full of gaudy desolation.

“She’s awful saucy,” said Fanny.

I caught her in my arms. “ I have
not
three sweethearts. I have only one, and that’s a real one,” I cooed.

“Only one? Really and truly?” she demanded, playfully. She gathered me to her plump bosom, planting a deep, slow, sensuous kiss on my lips.

I cast a side-glance to ascertain if Mary was not spying upon us.

“Don’t be uneasy,” Fanny whispered. “She won’t dare. We can kiss all we want.”

I thought she was putting it in a rather matter-of-fact way, but I kissed her with passion, all the same.

“Dearest! If you knew how happy I am,” I murmured.

“Are you really? Oh, I don’t believe you,” she jested, self-sufficiently. “You’re just pretending, that’s all. Let me kiss your sweet mouthie again.”

She did, and then, breaking away at the sound of her mother’s lumbering steps, she threw out her bosom with an upward jerk, a trick she had which I disliked.

 

Ten minutes later the whole family, myself included, were seated around a large oval table in the basement dining-room. Besides the members already known to the reader, there was Fanny’s mother, a corpulent woman with a fat, diabetic face and large, listless eyes, and Fanny’s brother, Rubie, a boy with intense features, one year younger than Mary. Rubie was the youngest of five children, the oldest two, daughters, being married.

Mr. Kaplan was in his skull-cap, while I wore my dark-brown derby. Everything in this house was strictly orthodox and as old-fashioned as the American environment would permit.

That there was not a trace of leavened bread in the house, its place being taken by thin, flat, unleavened “matzos,” and that the repast included “matzo balls,” wine, mead, and other accessories of a Passover meal, is a matter of course.

Mr. Kaplan was wrapped up in his family, and on this occasion, though he presided with conscious dignity, he was in one of his best domestic moods, talkative, and affectionately facetious. The children were the real masters of his house.

Watching his wife nag Rubie because he would not accept another matzo ball, Mr. Kaplan said:

“Don’t worry, Malkah. Your matzo balls are delicious, even if your ‘only son’ won’t do justice to them. Aren’t they, David?”

“They certainly are,” I answered. “What is more, they have the genuine Antomir taste to them.”

“Hear that, Fanny?” Mr. Kaplan said to my betrothed. “You had better learn to make matzo balls exactly like these. He likes everything that smells of Antomir, you know.”

“That’s all right,” said Malkah. “Fanny is a good housekeeper. May I have as good a year.”

“It’s a good thing you say it,” her husband jested. “Else David might break the engagement.”

“Let him,” said Fanny, with a jerk of her bosom and a theatrical glance at me. “I really don’t know how to make matzo balls, and Passover is nearly over, so there’s no time for mamma to show me how to do it.”

“I’ll do so next year,” her mother said, with an affectionate smile that kindled life in her diabetic eyes. “The two of you will then have to pass Passover with us.”

“I accept the invitation at once,” I said.

“Provided you attend the
seder,
too,” remarked Kaplan, referring to the elaborate and picturesque ceremony attending the first two suppers of the great festival.

I had been expected to partake of those ceremonial repasts on the first and second nights of this Passover, but had been unavoidably kept away from the city. Kaplan had resented it, and even now, as he spoke of the next year’s
seder,
there was reproach in his voice.