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Pictures of Jerusalem
The Little Daughter of Jerusalem. By MYRIAM HARRY. E. P. Dutton, New York, 1919. 289 pp.
LIKE many other novels, Myriam Harry's "The Little Daughter of Jerusalem" is very obviously autobiographic. This fact makes it more necessary than ever to consider a little the unusual career of the author of the book—as this is explained in an introduction by Jules Lemaître, a famous French critic and member of the French Academy.
a ee en Be The name Myriam Harry is apparently a pseudonym. M. Lemaitre tells how twenty years ago he interviewed “a very fair, slim girl with a face that was all.eyes—such blue eyes, too—and speaking with a very odd accent,” who had attracted his attention by writing him a letter asking for advice and expressing a firm sentiment— “I mean to become famous.” she said.
The fact developed that the young woman had been born in Jerusalem. Her grandfather was a Russian Jew, but her father had become a convert to the English Church, whilst her mother was a German deaconess. She was born and brought up in an old Saracen house in the Holy City, speaking German, English, and Arabic from childhood—but practically no French. After her father’s death she came to Germany with her mother, and early began to write in German, several of her novels appearing in the Berliner Tageblatt.
At seventeen she happened to visit Paris, and immediately was seized with an overpowering enthusiasm for France and all things French. She read and studied French authors with frenzied zeal and completely discarded German. When she had become a master of the language (all her subsequent books have appeared in French) she went on her travels again, visiting Arabia, Egypt, half of Europe, Ceylon, India, China, Indo-China, and Tunis. Certainly a superb equipment for a writer.
M. Lemaître mentions the fact that Myriam Harry is entirely without religion, an absolute heathen, despite her baptism and education as a Protestant.
The present volume is the latest that has appeared from her pen. The heroine, Siona Benedictus, is the daughter of a meshummad (the word is applied to him, as we shall see, in the book) and of a German woman. She spends the earlier part of her childhood in a Saracen home, and comes in contact with the marvelously diverse nationalities of the Holy City. When her father dies, at the close of the story, she and her mother set out for Germany. It is plain, then, that the novel is intended as a highly imaginative account of the author’s birth, childhood, and early youth, on the order of Goethe’s “Dichtung und Wahrheit.” In effect, it is a
As for references to Jews in the volume, a few may be culled.
"Well betide, well betide, our happy, blushing, youthful bride!"
very picturesque and attractive series of pictures of the people and places of Jerusalem, its natives, its visitors, its pilgrims, its religious institutions and its holy places, its follies and its raptures. It is moreover, a diary of the heroine’s—that is, the author’s—mental and spiritual growth, her reaction to life and its diversities, to religion, to men and women, to sex, to beauty, to srief.
To the shop of her father, who owns a very prosperous bookstore, selling in addition antiques and souvenirs, there came a very varied stream of people, to take a typical picture: the Bulgarians, with their straw shoes; the Tcherkesses, carrying organ pipes on their chest; the Greeks, wearing white garments like ballet-girls; the Polish Jews in their kaftans; the Persians in their astrakhan fur caps; the tall Austrians, wearing head garments with small peaks; the Russian pilgrims, with their hobnail boots. At the end of the day, when Mr. Benedictus came home with the day’s in- take, his wife and older daughter would count the miscellaneous collection of money, in itself representative of the hodge-podge of peoples in Jerusalem—gold and silver coins, paper notes, guineas, napoleons, Italian liras, clean cheques and greasy roubles, thalers and Turkish mediidi.
The story opens with some description of funeral customs in Jerusalem, including those of the Jews. Siona’s mother, listening, hears them announce their approach by their singularly rapid, jerky tread, for the time is one of epidemic and they are consequently prevented, as in normal times, from burying their dead at night. At another scene, a wedding this time, “a troop of Jewish musicians—male and female—had been hired for the occasion, and, duly primed beforehand, they opened the entertainment by singing the marriage song:
Ill-treatment of the Jews in the Holy City is occasionally mentioned. Once some of them are killed by the Turks and thrown into wells; again, Jews are the only people denied admittance to the Cave of Machpelah.
Siona's reactions to the Jews are not especially favorable. Thus on her way to the post office for a letter from her father, she finds "further annoyance," for it "was just at the entrance of the Ghetto, and was always choked with a human mass of rags and filth. For here all the Jews belonging to Russia, Poland, and Galicia were assembled, awaiting tidings from their respective fellow-Israelites, just as their fathers had flocked together of old in the wilderness to gather up the manna. On every side their quavering voices were to be heard
uttering quaint Bible names, whilst their trembling hands were outstretched to pounce on the oddest-looking envelopes bearing outlandish addresses in all sorts of dialects." Later, however, when she is afflicted with bad news, Siona "resumed her Bible-reading and her study of the Psalms; and now, when she went to the post office near the Ghetto, she dismounted humbly from her horse and mingled amongst the Polish Jews in their dirty kaftans, invoking, as they did, the great Shepherd of Israel, the one true God, the God of the country."
De EA 5 ie li ee VAL ann Te u There are some interesting references to attempts to proselytize the Jews and to Zionism. When massacres in Russia drive many Jews to the ancient home of their fathers, a society, the author states, was organized in England, for helping Jewish Refugees (the “J. R. S.”), who raised subscriptions to equip and send out a relief party to Palestine, consisting of doctors, builders, agricultural experts, missionaries, and one clergyman, “for although the society was keen on rehabilitating the Israelites in their native land, their conversion to Protestantism was a sine qua non.” But although this society starts auspiciously enough at the beginning of the year, in the autumn its progress is impeded by a new factor—the “Society of the Zionists,” supported by wealthy Jewish bankers, who in their turn, says the author, “were bent on regaining possession of Palestine, but whose sole object was to found exclusively Jewish settlements. No renegade Jew, no matter how deep his contrition, was to be admitted to share in the benefits of the society. As might be expected, a prompt falling-off in the number of converts set in, and even those refugees who were under instruction for baptism suddenly changed their minds, and announced that they intended to remain true to the faith of their fathers. It was a terrible blow to the J. R. S.”
Later, when Siona falls in love with a young Russian Jew who is about to be baptized, her old Arab nurse, (herself a Christian) renounces him as "a traitor and a turncoat," and prays that "Allah scorch him from top to toe."
In conclusion, as bearing also on this matter of conversion, may be quoted a scene in the Jews' settlement near the Jaffa gate, visited by Siona and her father on business:
"It was here that the carpenters lived who made all the olive-wood bindings for the tourists' books, and engraved the gold lettered inscriptions on the covers of the albums. Here, every one worked on Sunday, and Siona enjoyed moving about amongst the fragrant chips of wood, and watching the Jews bending over their benches at work, with their hair twisted up in long curl-papers, which dangled over each ear and looked very like the spiral shavings which fell from their planes. These work-