The Promised Land | Page 5

on me, I wiped my face and thought nothing at

all. I accepted ill-usage from the Gentiles as one accepts the weather.
The world was made in a certain way, and I had to live in it.
Not quite all the Gentiles were like Vanka. Next door to us lived a
Gentile family which was very friendly. There was a girl as big as I,
who never called me names, and gave me flowers from her father's
garden. And there were the Parphens, of whom my grandfather rented
his store. They treated us as if we were not Jews at all. On our festival
days they visited our house and brought us presents, carefully choosing
such things as Jewish children might accept; and they liked to have
everything explained to them, about the wine and the fruit and the
candles, and they even tried to say the appropriate greetings and
blessings in Hebrew. My father used to say that if all the Russians were
like the Parphens, there would be no trouble between Gentiles and Jews;
and Fedora Pavlovna, the landlady, would reply that the Russian people
were not to blame. It was the priests, she said, who taught the people to
hate the Jews. Of course she knew best, as she was a very pious
Christian. She never passed a church without crossing herself.
The Gentiles were always crossing themselves; when they went into a
church, and when they came out, when they met a priest, or passed an
image in the street. The dirty beggars on the church steps never stopped
crossing themselves; and even when they stood on the corner of a
Jewish street, and received alms from Jewish people, they crossed
themselves and mumbled Christian prayers. In every Gentile house
there was what they called an "icon," which was an image or picture of
the Christian god, hung up in a corner, with a light always burning
before it. In front of the icon the Gentiles said their prayers, on their
knees, crossing themselves all the time.
I tried not to look in the corner where the icon was, when I came into a
Gentile house. I was afraid of the cross. Everybody was, in Polotzk--all
the Jews, I mean. For it was the cross that made the priests, and the
priests made our troubles, as even some Christians admitted. The
Gentiles said that we had killed their God, which was absurd, as they
never had a God--nothing but images. Besides, what they accused us of
had happened so long ago; the Gentiles themselves said it was long ago.

Everybody had been dead for ages who could have had anything to do
with it. Yet they put up crosses everywhere, and wore them on their
necks, on purpose to remind themselves of these false things; and they
considered it pious to hate and abuse us, insisting that we had killed
their God. To worship the cross and to torment a Jew was the same
thing to them. That is why we feared the cross.
Another thing the Gentiles said about us was that we used the blood of
murdered Christian children at the Passover festival. Of course that was
a wicked lie. It made me sick to think of such a thing. I knew
everything that was done for Passover, from the time I was a very little
girl. The house was made clean and shining and holy, even in the
corners where nobody ever looked. Vessels and dishes that were used
all the year round were put away in the garret, and special vessels were
brought out for the Passover week. I used to help unpack the new
dishes, and find my own blue mug. When the fresh curtains were put
up, and the white floors were uncovered, and everybody in the house
put on new clothes, and I sat down to the feast in my new dress, I felt
clean inside and out. And when I asked the Four Questions, about the
unleavened bread and the bitter herbs and the other things, and the
family, reading from their books, answered me, did I not know all
about Passover, and what was on the table, and why? It was wicked of
the Gentiles to tell lies about us. The youngest child in the house knew
how Passover was kept.
The Passover season, when we celebrated our deliverance from the land
of Egypt, and felt so glad and thankful, as if it had only just happened,
was the time our Gentile neighbors chose to remind us that Russia was
another Egypt. That is what I heard people say, and it was true. It was
not so bad in Polotzk, within the Pale; but in Russian cities, and even
more in the country districts, where Jewish families lived scattered,