The Maccabaean

T

THE RECRUIT.

THE best part of life is its digressions. When one is seated puzzling over one’s Hebrew lesson,' listening for the droning voice of a young Talmud Thora student, as he recounts the changes in the kal and niphel of certain irregular verbs, and then by a casual observation, is suddenly awakened to the fact that the melamed student before you of thick brain and unusual speech is a soldier, a hero, a militant Jew, fired with all the enthusiasm of a Maccabaean of old—why! then things begin to hum and life becomes interesting.

Naturally one cannot always sit with a student of the ancient writings without getting something more from him than just Hebrew paradigms; so that to discover that Finegold was an anthropologist as well as a Talmudist, and that this discovery should lead to disclosures about himself, dating from his earliest years, was all of it a natural outcome of a friendly relation established between teacher and pupil.

So, in our constant intercourse, Finegold told me many stories, which I in turn shall tell you. One of them is the following. It is not much of a story, as I shall tell it in correct English, but listening to it, as I did, in broken guttural, a mixture of jargon and English; seeing the man, as I did, thick set, apparently dense and uncultured, sticking imaginary pins into yourself, as I did, to make sure

that his eager, impassioned, exalted warrior-Jew was the self-same Yeshibah Bochur of a few moments before, [{

“The first time I ran away from home,” said Fenigold, not droning in the regulation sing-song of the Yeshibah student, but with his real voice and eyes glinting at the recollection, “was when I was eleven years old. After that I ran away about twice every year until I had seen every large city in Russia. The great buildings, the streets, the soldiers! Always I watched the soldiers. I wanted to be a soldier. From a little urchin I planned all the fights of all the boys in my own and the neighboring villages, drilled them, marched them in imaginary battles and stood, as a soldier ought to, the punishment for this disgraceful offense against my dayin father's traditions of learning.

“When I was seventeen I wrote to the Governor of Vilna about my wish to become a soldier. He recommended me to the city marshal. Everything was all right, except that I was a Jew. A Jew could be a common soldier but never a volunteer. That sent me back to my father, and his plans for the Rabbinate.

"Then I ran away again, and after many months worked my way to America; and the first thing I did after six months of trying to learn English was to go to a recruiting office and register. The man in charge listened to my story; you