Edward Alfred Steiner

“ Loud laughter greeted this speech, for it betrayed my race and religion. Mockingly, the Pany took me by the back of the neck.
“Ah, so!” he said; “that’s your new business, being a king. Now, you dirty little Schid, get out of here, quick!” And down the broad stairway, which a few minutes before led me up to Paradise, I stumbled onto earth again.
With tears streaming down my blackened face and the acolyte’s garments half torn from my body, I tried to find my way out of the lower hall, the other two kings having basely deserted me—when a woman’s hand reached out to me in the dark. ”

“ It is easy to glorify those who already wear a halo, and I felt all the emotions which one is likely to experience in the presence of one’s ideal; but the final, distinct impression which remained, strengthened rather than weakened by renewed acquaintanceship, was that I had met a man—not a Russian Count or the peasant he tried to be; not a cosmopolitan who has a touch of culture borrowed from the capitals of the world—but a man who had thrown off all antagonisms and prejudices, and was able to meet all human beings upon a high and common level. ”

“ I have looked down from many a hilltop since that morning; from the ruins of Athens, the hills of Rome, the mountains round about Jerusalem, the sky-scrapers of the New World metropolis, and I have discovered that one’s world, no matter how large or how small, is full of compartments. Everywhere people shut themselves in and shut others out; they are moved by what they call class-feeling, race-prejudice, religious intolerance ”

“ There came a time, however, when, in spite of my cosmopolitan nature, I felt pride of race—felt the spirit of Israel within me; and this feeling was awakened by one who, like myself, had struggled against the current, but made for himself a permanent place in the history of the Jewish race.
When first I saw this prince among men, Theodore Herzl, he stood head and shoulders above his brethren, like Saul among the sons of Kish. Around him surged a mass of enthusiastic men who hailed him as the New Moses to lead them out of their manifold captivities. ”

“ The synagogue was at its best on the eve of the Sabbath. Through the rusty iron gate came its Israel, the fathers and sons; the women being busy with the evening meal, the best of the week. Israel looked outwardly renewed. The Sabbath scrubbing was a religious duty; each boy showed its effects in his clean and glowing face, and he was clothed in his best garments.
How unconventionally Israel approaches its God, and how democratically! There is a ceremonial rigidly adhered to, but each man follows it as he pleases, without regard to harmony or order. ”

“ My mother tongue is German, as are my passion for intellectual freedom and my impatience with its restraint; while the inward look, which so easily leads to despair, bears the German stamp.
I came to America early enough in life to catch the passion for liberty and the love of democracy; but too late to be anything but an impractical idealist to whom “life is more than meat,” and human history more than a succession of economic facts. ”

“ I remember distinctly the feeling which came over me when I held that poor little waif in my arms and carried it as far as the loft in which Shimek was domiciled, while he led the goose girl who was too weak to walk alone. I then felt for the first time what I have since felt a thousand times when holding children in my arms: a joyous sense of relationship which no one can dispute and the children cannot repudiate. I hovered around that stable many a day and heard with aching heart the crying of the baby. ”

“ I cannot give up the name “Christian,” I cannot return to Judaism, although it betray weakness or even cowardice.
I feel myself born again, and I cannot undo so vital an experience unless I am overwhelmed by some great moral catastrophe.
Christianity is to me the real internationalism in which all the races and nations are one or are growing into oneness. In it the individual casts off that which is specific to his race, he becomes one with all men, and therefore one with the divine in them. ”

“ A coarse joke, common commercial envy, inherited prejudice, religious intolerance and that which professes to be self-protection.
“I do not regard the Jewish question as a social or a religious one. It is a national problem, and to solve it, we must make it, first of all, a political world question whose solution must come through councils of all the civilized nations; for we are a nation! A nation!”
Many a time I have felt the lashing of emotions roused against the encumbering flesh; but never before as then, when thousands and thousands of men took up the cry: “We are a nation! A nation!” ”

“ The women in the omnibus said: “Oh! Virgin Mary, intercede for us!” For some reason, the Virgin never appealed to me until in riper years I saw the Sistine in the Dresden gallery. I think I now understand why the women adore her.
Good-bye, faithful old priest; you always looked like a Sphinx to me. Your face was like that of a Cæsar and not of the Christ. You were a Roman and not a Jew. Yet they loved you and you were on your way to make some one’s dying easier. I never liked your acolytes—they were always cruel to me, and I ran whenever I saw one. ”

“ A BACKWARD LOOK FROM some ancestor, perhaps from my race, I inherited an abnormal sensitiveness. Even as a child I felt instinctively the attitude of people towards me. Consequently, situated as I was in an atmosphere charged with race antagonism, I suffered constantly and often, of course, needlessly. Therefore my childhood seems blurred, as if I were looking at it through a dark cloud, or through eyes misty from tears. Yet there was a bright side to it which should be recalled now, if only in justice to the racial group that composed my close environment. ”

“ It isn’t easy to have faith at such a time, old teacher, and yet Hosea, in his grief, said: “Come let us return unto the Lord. For He hath torn and He will heal us. He hath smitten and He will bind us up.” Too bad we couldn’t have read Hosea together.
Good-bye, Adèle, whose grief I shared. Love—I understand it now. Love and not wrath is a consuming fire. All those who love, suffer, especially when love tries to break the barriers of class or race.
Good-bye, old Jewish soldier, you three-quarters of a man, who showed me “Old Glory” and interpreted to me the riddle of the Stars and Stripes. ”

“ When Protestantism becomes rabbinical, and when it holds or withholds the keys of Heaven, I shall feel myself as much a stranger to it as I felt to the synagogue or the cathedral. In its cry for righteousness and personal purity, in its emphasis upon a Christian democracy, in its demand for rational self-sacrifice to achieve great, social ends, it appeals to me and claims my allegiance. ”

“ We carved our name upon the hearts of men by fear, and chiselled upon the rocks with tools of iron, and we did it all that we might fulfill Thy law. And the Lord answered them and said, Ye have swept the earth with your fury that men might fear you; ye have broken the nations to exult in your own strength, and ye have carved your name upon the hearts of men and upon the rocks that it may not be forgotten, but I am the Lord whom the nations shall fear, and ye were not afraid of Me, saith the Lord. And the Assyrians left the presence of the Almighty trembling and sighing. ”

“ He was not handsome, this Slavic pastor; yet that night he seemed to me supremely beautiful. My uncle’s theological interest had been aroused, and closing the prayer-book, open before him, he asked: “Your Reverence, what do you mean by the kingdom of God?”
“I mean,” the pastor answered, “that a day will come when all the scattered shall be gathered again; when no barriers of race and religion shall divide; when the strong shall serve the weak, the rich shall succour the poor and when the chief delight of men will be to do the will of God. ”

“ It was a new world, out-of-doors, which opened like Paradise to us Jewish children, shut in since our birth in a small, dusty town. We ate with ravenous appetites, went through the exercises to the satisfaction of our exacting teacher, the rabbi, the president of the congregation and the rest of the Jewish dignitaries—and as the Hungarian officials, headed by the judge, appeared, we sang the national anthem, baring our heads, a grievous offense in the eyes of the conservative Jews. ”

“ For hours I would sit in his bake shop and while he was decorating cakes or making gorgeously coloured stick candy, he led me into the outskirts of the scientific view of creation, in a crude but, to me, satisfactory manner. The world was self-created, there was no God, no Adam, no Eve, no flood, no patriarchs and no revelation on Sinai. Moses was a shrewd leader who used Egyptian magic to impress the barbaric Israelites. The candy-maker was particularly severe with the heroes of the New Testament, and no less so with Jesus Himself. ”

“ One winter’s evening when I called unexpectedly—for my visits were always in the daytime—I found my seat occupied by a young man. Other eyes than mine watched Adèle’s skillful fingers and looked at her as I had never seen a man look at a woman. He was the postmaster’s assistant, a Slavic youth belonging to a rich peasant family. He had entered government service by virtue of his father’s money and the fact that he became a Magyar, half-traitor to his race, and wholly conscious of it. He drew me to him on the cushioned seat and said something that made Adèle smile. ”

“ Hard-faced and hard-fisted men, going to the city to work and seek their fortune; women, bent nearly double by the loads upon their backs, linen and embroideries for sale among the city folk; insolent young men surrounding young girls who bravely resisted the assaults upon their purity.
I have often seen that picture since and breathed the same foul atmosphere; but never again has it been as terrible as it was that night. The mixed train for Vienna came, and when we tried to board it without tickets we were arrested as vagrants, and thrown into the town jail. ”

“ The Protestants marched like soldiers, their heavy psalm-books clasped to their breasts. Thus fortified, as if by gun or bayonet, they went to the house of God, erect and defiant. Although the generation that I knew never fought for its right to worship according to the dictates of its conscience, its forefathers fought, killed and were killed; while the weather-vane turned on its rusty hinges to face the storms that raged. ”

“ Animals are never fiercer than these men were. Oaths in a dozen languages and dialects filled the putrid air; races and classes united against each other; the Slavs cursed the Magyars, and they together beat the Jews and drove the Gypsies into a corner by themselves.
The women fought like tigers; they had to, for the men were assaulting them and there was no protection but their inborn sense of virtue, which is a mighty force in women, even in the lowest. One girl, who had the hardest fight, was a young Gypsy. ”

“ On a certain Sabbath morning I had absented myself from the synagogue. It was a June day of rare beauty with a warm, wooing, gentle wind, calling the boy in me back to the creek, the willow-trees, the goslings and the Gentile boys and girls. While nature with its willows and its goslings had no objection to my “cutting” the synagogue service, its Gentile and ungenteel children objected seriously, and I was driven back to the dusty street, with its cobblestone pavement. ”

“ ABRAHAM LINCOLN IN HUNGARY TEN o’clock in the morning was the one tense hour of the day, for the omnibus was due to arrive and, with it, everything which connected our town with the outside world. Although most of the villagers expected neither letters nor friends, every one who had even a moment of leisure stepped to his front door when the omnibus came, and tried to catch a glimpse of the sleepy passengers who had spent a torturing night in the sombre, springless vehicle. ”

“ Lastly, I am writing for those who, like myself, have struggled against the limitations imposed upon their faith and vision by narrow, racial ties, who believe themselves debtors to every race, who believe that their forefathers are all those who bequeathed to the world great thoughts to grapple with and fair visions to realize—whether their dust rests in the cave of the fields of Machpelah, the crowded Père la Chaise or beneath simple headstones in the churchyards of the Puritans. ”

“ Mother always looked more longingly into my face than into the faces of the other children. They said she spoiled me because I looked like you. Sometimes I think I feel you in me—some one—not quite myself—sometimes many who are not myself—is it you? Is it you, father, and all the passing generations? Is it a race? ”

“ Imagine what it meant to children to decipher difficult Hebrew characters without vowel points, which were finally sounded by the lips and were in a large measure meaningless and unconnected with life. Imagine such children hearing a teacher speak and teach in German, soft and musical; having the day’s work open with a song, a really gladsome song about winds and flowers and blue skies and all the other things around them—things of which they had been as unconscious as if they had not existed. ”

“ The Gentile bar maid took an ancient looking stick of candy out of an open jar and, giving it to me, assuaged my grief. The Jewess locked the bar, temporarily suspending business, and drew my mother into the adjoining living-room, a third of which was occupied by a bake-oven, which served as bed for a fair share of the large family. On top of the oven lay the husband—paralyzed. His black eyes seemed to be the only members of his body that he could move and they were pathetic in their mute helplessness and appeal for sympathy. ”

“ When autumn came the cholera was over and again the witch went through the street crying: ‘There will be famine! There will be famine!’ The poor had no bread. The little flour which the king sent them, they mixed with bran or ground roots or even sawdust. To this day the peasants count time as so many years before the famine or after it. A hard winter it was for every one. We lived in constant dread; for robber bands were passing through the town at night and many Jewish homes were broken into and plundered. ”

“ THE DAWN OF RACE CONSCIOUSNESS THE town of Maria’s Bosom was a little larger than the one in which I lived and was famous for its healing waters, drawn from a spring in which the face of the Virgin was to be seen. This water cured all manner of diseases, and many grateful pilgrims had enriched the monastery in whose centre the spring bubbled. The town itself drew a fair share of revenue from this sacred fame; there were inns for all sorts of pocketbooks and for all conditions of men, and there were sellers of honey cakes who fashioned their sweet wares in various symbolic and saintly forms. ”

“ Theodore Herzl returned to his people because the other people did not want him.
I cannot return, whether the other people reciprocate my feeling for them or not.
Into my sphere of relationship no rebuff nor insult can enter; because I ask nothing for myself; while for the other man, whether he be Jew or Gentile, I ask only that he shall have the opportunity to earn the respect of his fellow men, regardless of the faults of his race. ”

“ An orthodox Jewish wedding ceremony is a sadly solemn occasion. The groom wears his shroud and the bride’s head is covered by an impenetrable veil. The rabbi reads the ceremony in the Hebrew Chaldaic dialect which no one understands, the cantor chants a solemn tune and the parents walk about the bridal couple weeping and praying. Never before was there a wedding in our town so solemn as this, and when the bride lifted her veil to drink from the ceremonial cup, her face looked like that of a corpse. ”