BOOKS.

KOMPERT'S SKETCHES OF JEWISH LIFE.*

'LEESE stories, though written, apparently, as far back as 1848, are tolerably fair transcripts of Jewish life in Slavonic countries at the present day, and throw no little light upon the ,Tuclen- luzss to which the Ashkenazim are still, as they were then, exposed. The Jew usurer and the Jew, dram-seller are not, probably, worse than other usurers and dram-sellers, but the Children of Israel have for ages—be it their misfortune, or be it -their fault—nearly monopolised both trades in Central and Eastern Europe, and cannot escape the penalty of mingled fear and hatred attached to pursuits that have become associated in their lucrative results with the necessities and fillings of the weak and the vicious. Doubtless, this is by no means the whole explanation of the peculiarly bitter detestation in which they are held, wherever they form a notable element in the population. Their obstinate scorn, not so much of Christianity as of Christian folk, manifested openly enough, though after a passive rather than • a militant fashion, and their persistent isolation from all but gainful intercourse with surrounding humanity, are permanent and more fundamental causes of Gentile hostility. " Schmah, Isroel " (" Hear, Israel"), cries the wife of the "Bandar," or farmer of spirits, in one of the most striking of these novel ten, addressing her son, "do you want to drink brandy P Do you forget you are the son of Rebb (Master) Schmall ? What Jewish child - drinks brandy ? Brandy is for peasants alone.

"

"I am forbidden to kneel," cries the boy at school when ordered to do so in expiation of some fault. "Do you not prefer a single Jewish soul to a whole village of peasants ?" ex- .claims an old-clothes man. "Your dear Moritz," writes the last- mentioned character to the Bandar, "went with his chaver '[companion] Honza [a Christian schoolmate] to the village, and there danced, drank, ate,—and with whom ? Great

'God ! with peasant girls and youths " Honza's father is sent to prison for having fired the Randar's house. ' You Jews," shrieks his son, "are the sole cause of my father's

'misery' Have you not supplied him with drink, have you not made profit out of him, until he is at last in irons ? Your father" (he is speaking to the Randar's son) "is a leech, glutted with the blood of the whole village." The Itandar'e -daughter is reproached for singing a Bohemian song. "But -they sing it in the village," pleads the girl. "That is the very reason," is the stern reply. Moritz cannot understand his Lather's unpopularity. At last he hits upon the reason,—it is 'his father's intellectual superiority. "If the Jews were a little gess intelligent and the peasants a little more so, the true secret of accord would then have been found." As the. tale, "The Bandar's Children," proceeds, the son gets more enlightened. ' It is precisely your present profession," he tells his father, -" which puts you in such sad relations with the peasants. Can you not take farmland, and get your living by that P" Un- fortunately, in those days, that was exactly what the laws did not allow a Jew to do. Moritz, who is intended for a doctor, and receives a fair education, becomes more and more liberal in his views. In a very curious written soliloquy, he speculates upon the quarrel between Jew and Christian.

Yesterday evening, I saw Hannele [his sister], lighting two wax tapers. But the first, in giving its luminous kiss to the second went out itself. Will it be thus with the Jewish and Christian religions P" He admires a State religion. "We Jews

had one formerly in what does it really consist ?" The people as a mass "ask but one thing,—to see" this religion -a freely chiselled in all places on stone, declared verbally, repro. sented by pictures, proclaimed to the sound of music." "It is rare," he laments, "in the Ghetto, to see a child with flowers in its hand. Are the Jews really deprived of the sentiment of nature ? With them, even children can do without flowers." "What is wanting to our religion," he concludes, and doubtless

-the author speaks through him," is the feminine element then would have disappeared some of that stiffness which is only now beginning to bend. Women know how to soften every-

thing As it is, the Jewish religion is only for men." The book abounds with like undesigned explanations of the ever- recurring Intlenhetze. To be sad as a Christian, to take pleas- ure as a Christian, to eat or drink, marry or die like a Christian, is to be a posche Isroel,—a bad Jew. The Jew is a foreigner in 'the land of his birth and life, out of all sympathy with his * Scenes from the Ghetto. Translated from the German of Leopold Rompert. London: Remington and Co. 1882.

compatriots, who are so only by accident of locality ; his re- ligion is hard, unlovely, strange, Oriental, exclusive, disdainful, as repellent now as in the days of Moses, for never in the course of their history have the Jews attracted Pagan, Idolator, Christian, or Moslem.

The scene of these novelle*, which are only four in number, is laid in Czeckish Bohemia. Despite the title, they are as descrip- tive of the life of the village Jew as of that of his fellow in the Ghetto. The portrait of the latter is not an attractive one.

"The Jew of the Ghetto is rarely simple-minded and primitive ; he is, on the contrary, sharp, angular, and as biting as an acid." On the other hand, the village Jew is "nearer to nature," but "heavier, and less keen ;" living away from the Ghetto, he "has no need to be clever and cunning." "The Jew's sharpness," it is added—and the remark is as just as it is acute—" is, after all, a sort of moral weapon, directed against certain offences which he is either unwilling or unable to repress by physical means." The most interesting of the four stories are " The Bandar's Children," which is rather a sketch of Jewish village life contrasted with the surrounding Christianity than a tale, and "Without Authorisation." The last named is one of the most charming stories we have ever read. and, even in the translation, is redolent of the humour of Otto Muller and the grace of Paul Heyse. It turns on the love and pride of a Jewish mother. Jaeker (Jacob) Lederer was the last-born of his father's four sons, and "being neither first- born, nor a doctor, nor a workman (like his elder brothers), could not, by the State laws, be the head of a family." In fact, he was a "State criminal," in merely continuing to exist. Nevertheless, he lived on and, what is more, fell in love with a "pretty girl, named Resel [Rachel] the daughter of a poor hawker like himself." Before he could marry, however, he had to get the proper reschojin, or official permission. Such a permission was not given save to a familiant, or Jew pos- sessed of a "right of family," a right only granted in 1848, according to the translator, to some thousand families in all Bohemia. Without such a right, being neither a learned gradu- ate nor a licensed artisan, he had no title even to residence. The pair, notwithstanding, were betrothed, and for fourteen years endeavoured, but without success, to get over the reschojin difficulty. Jaeker was now thirty-six, his fiancge three years younger, and, after much hesitation, they resolved to dispense with the resehojin, and to get as much married as was possible "without authorisation." A boy was born, and, some few years afterwards, a new burgomaster coming into office, discovered Lederer's contravention, and, with the zeal of a freshly-appointed functionary, cited the unlucky hawker be- fore him. Jaeker consulted the "advocate," Rebb Lippmann. Goldberg, "of whom people said, by way of eulogy, that 'he had a head of iron.' The only way of getting out of the scrape was to avoid admitting the marriage, and, after much persuasion, the wife was induced to say before the official, but in the midst of tears and sobs, "Am I not his housekeeper ?" The burgomaster, who saw through the matter, and regretted his hasty zeal, dismissed Jaeker, with a caution to treat his " illegitimate " child and his housekeeper as though they were legitimate child and wife. Jaeker was glad enough to get of so easily, but the mother brooded over the term " illegitimate " applied to her boy, and on learning its meaning was beside herself with grief. It was afflicting enough that she should be a "housekeeper," but that her boy should be a "natural child" broke her very heart. Then she conceived the notion of asking the aid of the Emperor towards procuring a "family right" to be conferred upon Jaeker, so that her child might be legitimated. Of course, every one, her husband loudest of all, ridiculed the idea; of course, the mother stuck to it, became more and more convinced of its feasibility, and with the help of an admirable petition drawn up by the advocate with "ahead of iron," actually carried it out, with all the success her courage and constancy merited.

The book is full of vivid descriptions of the quaint life of the Ghetto. Every young Jew has to go through a somewhat try- ing ordeal on his bar-mitzveh (initiation). He reads or intones before the Synagogue a chapter of the Thora, and woe to him if he mispronounces a word, or stumbles over a punctuation ; he is ever after a " stickit " Jew, like the schlemiel (" lout ") in the first story, whose discomfiture upon such an occasion is most humorously described. The houses of the well-to-do Jews are rendezvous of wandering schnorrer, or bedeamen, who bring the news of Israel from the remotest corners of Central and

Eastern Europe, and are often full of "good stories, clever tricks, and Talmudic subtleties." One of these schnorrer, Mendel Wilna by name, mentioned in the story of "The Bandar's Children," was an ardent believer in the restoration of Jerusalem, and the glow of his enthusiasm seems to radiate from the carefully drawn and striking portrait which the author has presented to us of this strange tramp. Of the many Ghetto holidays, none is more welcome than the Holemoed,—" it laughs, jokes, and performs a thousand pranks." Yet the Holemoed is but a minor feast, inserted, as it were, to give relief, in the festivals at Easter and at Tabernacles. It is "the intermediary element between the silent lips of the Sab- bath and the noisy gesticulations of the work-day." A peculiar festal air envelops everything; "nowhere can be heard the piercing business cry, and it is only to avoid losing the habit that people go their daily rounds." The sun itself seems "to shine in a more joyous manner. It throws its rays like so many golden threads on the narrow and pointed gable-ends of the Ghetto. Above the houses, daylight ; below, twilight. But where the street widens, the golden threads disperse themselves, falling unobstructed to the earth; and the faces of those who happen to walk under these threads become covered with the sun's rays, and as if gilded."

We must not, however, linger lbnger over these charming stories, in turn pathetic and humorous, always picturesque in style, and simple, almost naïf, in language, but permeated by a reflective earnestness that lifts them far above the level of mere tales. A word of thanks is due to the translator, who, judging from the smoothness of his English, seems to have performed his task extremely well; and the reader will be grateful for the notes, in themselves often interesting, explaining the numerous Jewish expressions and usages mentioned in the text.