He went into a monologue about the strange blood that had been poured into the veins of the Jews in their wanderings. He spoke of strange tribes in Arabia, Africa, China. He thought even the Eskimos might have Jewish blood in them. As he talked he became intoxicated by this idea of the mixture of races and bloods. The world would be a stagnant pool had it not been for the Jews. «We are like seeds carried by the wind,» he said. «We blossom everywhere. Hardy plants. Until we are pulled up by the roots. Even then we don’t perish. We can live upside down. We can grow between stones.»
All this time he had taken me for a Jew. Finally I explained that I was not a Jew, but that my wife was.
«And she became a Christian?»
«No, I’m becoming a Jew.»
Juan was looking at me with big, questioning eyes. Mr. Eisenstein didn’t know whether I was joking or not.
«When I come down here,» I said, «I feel happy. I don’t know what it is, but I feel more at home here. Maybe I have Jewish blood and don’t know it.»
«I’m afraid not,» said Mr. Eisenstein. «You’re attracted, because you’re not a Jew. You like what is different, that’s all. Maybe you hated the Jews once. That happens sometimes. Suddenly a man sees that he was mistaken and then he becomes violently in love with what he once hated. He goes to the other extreme. I know a Gentile who became converted to Judaism. We don’t try to convert, you know that. If you’re a good Christian it’s better that you stay a Christian.»
«But I don’t care about the religion,» I said.
«The religion is everything,» he said. «If you can’t be a good Christian you can’t be a good Jew.
We are not a people or a race—we’re a religion.»
«That’s what you say, but I don’t believe it. It’s more than that. It’s as though you were a kind of bacteria. Nothing can explain your survival, certainly not your faith. That’s why I’m so curious, why I get excited when I’m with your people. I would like to possess the secret.»
«Well, study your wife,» said he.
«I do but I don’t make her out. She’s a mystery.»
«But you love her?»
«Yes,» I said, «I love her passionately.»
«And why aren’t you with her now? Why do you have the dress sent to her? Who is it that died?»
«Her father,» I answered. «But I never met him,» I added rapidly. «I’ve never been inside her home.»: http://home./
«That’s bad,» he said. «There’s something wrong there. You should go to her. Never mind if she didn’t ask you. Go to her! Don’t let her be ashamed of her parents. You don’t have to go to the funeral, but you should let her see that you care for her family. You are only an accident in her life. When you die the family will go on. They will absorb your blood. We have drunk the blood of every race. We go on like a river. You must not think you are marrying her alone—you are marrying the Jewish race, the Jewish people. We give you life and strength. We nourish you. In the end all peoples will come together. We will have peace. We will make a new world. And there will be room for everybody… No, don’t leave her alone now. You will regret it, if you do. She is proud, that’s what it is. You must be soft and gentle. You must woo her like a pigeon. Maybe she loves you now, but later she will love you more. She will hold you like a vise. There is no love like that of the Jewish woman for the man she gives her heart to. Especially if he is of Gentile blood. It is a great victory for her. It is better for you to surrender than to be the master…. You will excuse me for speaking this way, but I know what I am talking about. And I see you are not an ordinary Gentile. You are one of those lost Gentiles—you are searching for something… you don’t know what exactly. We know your kind. We are not always eager to have your love. We have been betrayed so often. Sometimes it is better to have a good enemy—then we know where we stand. With your kind we are never sure where we stand. You are like water—and we are rocks. You eat us away little by little—not with malice, but with kindness. You lap against us like the waves of the sea. The big waves we can meet— but the gentle lapping, that takes our strength away.» I was so excited by this unexpected excursus that I had to interrupt his speech.
«Yes, I know,» he said. «I know how you feel. You see, we know all about you—but you have everything to learn about us. You can be married a thousand times, to a thousand Jewish women, and still you will not know what we know. We are right inside of you all the time. Bacteria, yes, maybe. If you are strong we support you; if you are weak, we destroy you. We live not in the world, as it seems to the Gentile, but in the spirit. The world passes away, but the spirit is eternal. My little boy understood that. He wanted to remain pure. The world was not good enough for him. He died of shame—shame for the world….»
19
Some minutes later, when we sauntered out into the violet light of early evening, I saw the ghetto with new eyes. There are Summer nights in New York when the sky is pure azure, when the buildings are immediate and palpable, not only in their substance but in their essence. That dirty streaked light which reveals only the ugliness of factories and sordid tenements disappears very often with sunset, the dust settles down, the contours of the buildings become more sharply denned, like the lineaments of an ogre in a calcium spotlight. Pigeons appear in the sky, wheeling above the roof-tops. A cupola bobs up, sometimes out of a Turkish Bath. There is always the stately simplicity of St. Marks-on-the-Bouwerie, the great foreign square abutting Avenue A., the low Dutch buildings above which the ruddy gas tanks loom, the intimate side streets with their incongruous American names, the triangles which bear the stamp of old landmarks, the waterfront with the Brooklyn shore so close that one can almost recognize the people walking on the other side. All the glamour of New York is squeezed into this pullulating area which is marked oil by formaldehyde and sweat and tears. Nothing is so familiar, so intimate, so nostalgic to the New Yorker as this district which he spurns and rejects. The whole of New York should have been one vast ghetto: the poison should have been drained off, the misery apportioned; the joy should have been communicated through every vein and artery. The rest of New York is an abstraction; it is cold, geometrical, rigid as rigor mortis and, I might as well add, insane— if one can only stand apart and look at it undauntedly. Only in the beehive can one find the human touch, find that city of sights, sounds, smells which one hunts for in vain beyond the margins of the ghetto. To live outside the pale is to wither and die. Beyond the pale there are only dressed-up cadavers. They are wound up each day, like alarm clocks. They perform like seal; they die like box office receipts. But in the seething honey-comb there is a growth as of plants, an animal warmth almost suffocating, a vitality which accrues from rubbing and glueing together, a hope which is physical as well as spiritual, a contamination which is dangerous but salutary. Small souls perhaps, burning like tapers, but burning steadily—and capable of throwing portentous shadows on the walls which hem them in.
Walk down any street in the soft violet light. Make the mind blank. A thousand sensations assault you at once from every direction. Here man is still furred and feathered; here cyst and quartz still speak. There are audible, voluble buildings with sheet metal vizors and windows that sweat; places of worship too, where the children drape themselves about the porticos like contortionists; rolling, ambulant streets where nothing stands still, nothing is fixed, nothing is comprehensible except through the eyes and mind of a dreamer. Hallucinating streets too, where suddenly all is silence, all is barren, as if after the passing of a plague. Streets that cough, streets that throb like a fevered temple, streets to die on and not a soul take notice. Strange, frangipanic streets, in which attar of roses mingles with the acrid bite of leek and scallion. Slippered streets, which echo with the pat and slap of lazy feet. Streets out of Euclid, which can be explained only by logic and theorem….
Pervading all, suspended between the layers of the skin like a distillate of ruddy smoke, is the secondary sexual sweat—pubic, Orphic, mammalian—a heavy incense smuggled in by night on velvet pads of musk. No one is immune,
