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No. 14. | Vienna, 3 April 1901. | 5th Year

Elihu hanuvi.

A Passover Fantasy by Heinrich York-Steiner (Vienna).

With faltering voice, infinitely earnest and yet joyfully stirred, I recited my appointed task, the great question: “Ma nistano balajlo haze mikol halejlos?”

I made as though I were fetching the sentences out of the book, and yet I knew them by heart, word for word, the Hebrew text and the German translation. I hit the tone of the question quite admirably, too. Father smiled; it was a restrained feeling of joy that shone out of his eyes; one does not laugh aloud in the white kittel with the gold-braided cap upon one's head. The mood of the Day of Atonement and of the everlastingly long night casts its shadow into the festal feeling. The first agitation had passed from me, and in a full voice I put the last question: “Why do we sit on other nights either upright or reclining, and on this night only reclining?”

The others fell in with sonorous voices. They answered my questions.

“Bondmen were we unto Pharaoh in Egypt, but the Eternal, our God, brought us forth with a strong hand!”

Ah, we knew question and answer beforehand, we laughed in secret at the harmless make-believe, and yet we felt deeply the consecration of the moment, the meaning of the plain words.

We lived through the part we played, and we told an ancient story that had befallen us yesterday.

There was no need at all of the Agada's express assurance that our enemies rise up against us in every age; that I learned almost daily after school.

After school there were fights of the wildest sort. And since the good Lord is mostly on the side of the stronger battalions, many a Jewish mother had to press down a bump with the flat of a knife, so that her little son should not carry lasting traces of Christian superiority upon his forehead. Such fights were mostly fought out in the autumn; in the spring we left it to the good Lord to chastise our enemies. About the time of the first equinox the legendary figures of the Agada drew near. The old story of the sufferings of the Jews, together with their miraculous deliverance, played about our senses.

We too looked in hope towards the great miracle, the liberating event. For us the old Jehovah was still alive. He who thousands of years ago had drowned the Egyptians in the Red Sea might take a fancy to-morrow to fling big Mischko, my special Pharaoh, into the brook, together with his dog, which he had so often set upon me.

When Father heard this unholy wish, he grew angry. We were going in the dusk of early morning to the morning prayer when I laid this hope of mine before him.

“Pray, my child,” he urged upon me, “pray that in these days no harm may befall any Christian child.” I was six years old at the time, but Father had no great trouble in making me understand what a great misfortune it was for the Jews if a Christian child came to grief about Easter.

Who is it that mocks at the early ripeness of Jewish children?

I prayed for my Pharaoh's welfare; I even put in a good word for his dog. And behold, Mischko throve admirably.

As often as he passed me by, he shouted choice abuse at me with such vigour that I could not doubt his well-being. Gladly would I have told him that he owed his strength to nothing but my care for the welfare of Jewry, that the old Jehovah still lived, and that after all the Easter peace would soon be at an end.

Since then I have lived to see many a scoundrel spared out of regard for the welfare of the community.

But neither the gentlemen our opponents nor their currish yelpers ever gave us any thanks for it.

* * *

The further we advanced in the Agada, the more my conciliatory disposition dwindled.

There is something inflaming in that thin little book; it calls to mind old, unspeakably hard sufferings, pains beyond number.

Sufferings undergone, endured at the hand of man — they do not make one humble.