"The week that my elder brother left school and went out to work my little sister died. My mother woke up one morning and found that for half of the night she had been sleeping with a dead child.
"They gave her a charity burial, and the house became so hateful to my mother that we left it soon after. Then times became a little brighter: my brother got a situation in one of those 'picture faking' firms, as they call them, and my mother was promised regular work. She paid six shillings a week for that little house, and two shillings a week for some furniture on the hire purchase system. I think that between them they averaged thirty shillings a week.
"Then a year later, when I was eleven years old, I won a scholarship, and an exhibition worth five pounds a year. You will wonder how I came to go to a Secondary School; well, we argued it out that in any case I would have to go to school till I was fourteen, so I might as well finish the last two, with the five pounds extra, in a Secondary School.
“When those two years came to an end I got another scholarship at ten pounds a year. My brother was doing splendidly for a boy of sixteen. He was making over thirty shillings a week regularly. My mother did only better class work now, when she could get it—and when she could not, my brother insisted that she shouldn’t work.”
Here he stopped speaking for a moment, and paused as though unable to find words. Then he spoke slowly and painfully.
“I can’t tell you, in the exact medium of words, the inexact and indefinable mental developements of these later years. It is said that before modern times emotions were simpler and stronger; but it is not true. They were always complex, are still complex with the least reflective persons, but they are seldom analyzed. I simply am unable to tell you how my mother and I drifted apart. I never noticed the beginning of it—indeed, I have never, at any time, been cognisant of a distinct step. It all happened subconsciously, happened before I knew it. I only know that three years ago I suddenly looked round, as it were, and found that my mother and I were lost to each other.
"I tell you again, it is the detail of the thing which gives it its characteristic, and it is the detail which baffles me in the description. I say to you that my mother and I drifted apart. Does that mean that we ever quarreled, were ever harsh with one another, or unkind? No. What was it then? That I can't tell you. It's something you can't fix,
and yet it's vital. It was not merely my lack of ceremonial religion, nor merely my lack of good Yiddish, nor yet my English expression of my Jewish feelings. Perhaps it was a mixture of all three, and perhaps it was something in her I have been unable to glimpse.
“And that is why I have wondered, and asked a thousand times the question without an answer— what did it all mean? I have lain awake a hundred nights and looked down the stretches of years. and I have seen nothing but series after series of contiguous details—nothing more: triviality after triviality—now a greater—the death of my sister—now a smaller—the lack of rent—but all trivialities, incoherent, formless, meaningless. I have tortured myself a hundred times to find a unifying principle, a consolation for this life of mean suffering, and I never found it.”
"Tonight I found it."
He rose from his place and went over to the door. He opened it and laid a finger on the Mezuzah, saying "See this," then he turned round and pointed to the Mizrach on the wall, saying, "And this": last he went over to his little corner in the room, and drew aside the curtain: "And these." In that corner there was a number of books: a Hebrew grammar, Herzl's "A Jewish State," Nordau's "Zionism," and I suddenly remembered the minute book of our own Zionist society.
"These," he said, "I owe to her. She endowed me with these no less than with my limbs or with my mind: and I know that these are as vital to my life, and as integral a part of it.
"In absolute blindness she carried the light between the two generations. Sometimes I see them, these blind mothers of Israel, like a long line of martyrs, fulfilling their noble purpose generation after generation. Themselves knowing but one law, the law of suffering, they form part of a sublimer law than they can conceive. I have heard men speak reverently of the teachers that in the face of opposition, ignorance, contempt, indifference, have carried the banner of their mission until their dying day: but there is not one that has fulfilled his mission as perfectly as she."
He turned round to the window, and drew the blind aside. We saw the blue-grey dawn over the wilderness of slates and bricks, and the rain dimpling the pools on the ground.
"From today onward," he said, "I am the torch-bearer."
JEHUDA HALEVI'S "LIBI BEMISRACH"
While I in western lands do pine, My heart is in the East! How can I taste of food or wine When thou art sore oppress'd? How can I vows and oaths repay While Edom Zion holds, While Arab's bonds this land doth sway, His chains me tight enfolds? Th' abundance of this Spanish land Would be but nought to me, If I, midst brimming tears, thy strand, Thy ruin'd strand could see!