Books New and Old
Glimpses of Jewish Life in the Balkans
Our Allies and Enemies in the Near East. By JEAN VICTOR BATES. With an Introduction by the Right Hon. SIR EDWARD CARSON, K.C., M.P. New York, E. P. Dutton & Company.
ISS BATES has had a long and intimate familiarity M with the peoples of the Balkan Peninsula, with their daily lives, their speech, their history, their legends and traditions, their occupations, manners, and ideas. She possesses the faculties of understanding and imagination which are so necessary to the historian. Her style is simple, vivid and flexible. She makes us see what she has seen, and enjoy the warm, intoxicating perfumes in which she delights. Our ear has pleasure not only in the sound she describes but in the tonal value of her own words.
Let us quote the description of Widdin on the Danube.
It is the chief fair day of the summer, and many quaint folks and strangers have come to buy and sell. Here are some poor, eringing, unmanly Armenians, dressed in ankle-long dirty cotton dressing-gowns, slit up at the sides, giving a glimpse of baggy trousers, their bare feet thrust into slippers the heels of which have long departed, with dirty fezzes on their shaggy, filthy heads. Here, too, are a couple of nomad Turkomans, accompanied by their ladies, all riding astride. Greeks, Jews, Serbs, Vlachs, flit in and out of the shops and stand in knots about the corners. Roumanian shepherds, brown of face, brown of eye, clad in voluminous soft brown woolen cloaks, brown woolen leg wrappings and brown hide sandals, discourse wild melodies on brown reed pipes as they lead their shuflling, bleating flocks of brown sheep to the market-place. Troops of blunt-nosed, mat-like dogs wander about. That high- turbaned, blue-cloaked, crumpled-looking personage over there is a Tartar farmer from Medjidie, in the Dobrudja. He has an evil countenance and his squinting, shifty eyes peer furtively from under his lofty headgear. Whoever tries to cheat this gentleman with regard to the value of the woolpacks which he has brought by barge up river from the Dobrudja, will literally find that he has caught a Tartar. Under the shade of a spreading catalpa tree, near a yellow-colored, three-towered church of the Orthodox Faith, an old Turk, with a parrot nose and beady black eyes, with a face not unlike those seen on the ancient Byzantine mosaics, is selling rahat lakoum, which is set out in little sugary pink and white pyramids on a lacquered tray, and his companion, a boy, in a red fez and indigo blue shirt, is diligently stirring a brass cauldron of the boiling sweetmeat over a charcoal-filled, brazier. A prodig- iously fat, long-haired, black-robed priest puffs and pants up the steps of the sacred edifice, pausing half-way to take breath and bestow his blessing on any who may care to claim it.”
With Miss Bates we travel delightfully down the Danube along “muddy sunken river banks where willows are a brilliant green.” We look.out “at things not near at hand which attract and rivet the attention; vast limitless soli- tudes; and the steppe which, parched under the burning summer sun, drifts and rolls away. The soil is yellow, and the whole landscape is touched by the same hue. Out there is a desert. Here and there, at rare intervals are villages, or rather clusters of rude, clay, waitle-roofed huts surrounded by tall, decrepit, wattle fences.”