A Jew Writes Out of His Bones
The Story. She it was that had brought the wrath of Yahweh upon her kind little father. She, Leah, an outcast from Israel. The mark of the beast was upon her for meeting a vast shaggy moujik (Gentile peasant) with strong arms and tender lips in the willows where once he had come upon her bathing naked.
Before the nodding copse, tangled in its phylacteries, her cry of guilt was the hollow hooting of a nameless bird in a field of desecration. The Kravno women of Israel lamented her madness. That such a year should come upon Serra Golda, her popular grocer-mother !
None so humble and strict in her pieties as hollow-breasted Leah, penitent Jewess. The wicked willows saw her live black hair hacked off. Come Yom Kippur, she fainted with fasting. After a year, pale, pious Eli from the yeshiveh (seminary) brought her to peace.
In the smoking pogrom of Kravno, her flesh-guilt cried out at her again as the demoniac moujik smashed a Jewish child on the wall before her face.
They fled over the waste world to Doomington. Leah made good ingber (candy) as Serra Golda had taught. Children of English Israel came buying. Soon there was a modest grocery store. Eli, turned carpenter, could pore over his Scriptures late evenings and during the long strikes, still tracking down the far-to-seek revelation of his God. The Lord blessed such piety with a solemn little son, Reuben, content to, learn his catechisms and caress Miriam, his kosher white hen.
Under the hypnotic taunts of Dovvid Pollock, cynic, Eli had to face the Apostles and refute, as became a fearless Jew scholar, the hated Christ. The Apostles made Eli Christ's man. In a Catholic woman's house where Eli, his lungs crushed by a lorry, his veins running morphine, hung in bandages, the Christ hung upon an alabaster crucifix. On the sixth day, the curtains of the niche opened to the sick man, Christ's wounds bled miraculously and Eli was recruited, another carpenter, to strengthen his brethren.
Such was his end: the pious Jew apostate preaching salvation in Israel. They stoned him at street corners, kicked his body and head. Dovvid Pollock saw his handiwork and hung himself on a stout hook.
On the Day of Atonement, Eli the
Unclean entered the wailing place, full synagog. They listened thunderstruck to his blasphemy. They growled. They arose to rend him. Leah, whose beloved life he had had to break and to whom he was "dead," cried them from defilement, cried their thumbs to their ears to defeat his sacrilege. After the fast she saw the face of her guilt a last time, calling her Yahweh's Avenger, by night to go to Eli with a knife and at dawn to the police station. Little Reuben was left to cry in the wilderness, to hate Christ and Yahweh alike, to cleave to a bust of the beautiful Apollo.
From Reuben, Sicilian goatherd, Author Golding had this history.