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Updated: May 3, 2025
Everybody jumped away from the table in disgust and anger. I met Marusya's eye, and was ashamed to look into it. Anna got up, boiling with rage, and took me by the ear, and pulled me outside: "Get out of here, you dirty Zhid; and don't you dare enter my house any more!" Well, she chased me out. Peter and Marusya kept quiet.
He looked at me, and there was love and hatred mixed in that look. "Zhid," said he, with his last breath, and gave up the ghost. Rest in peace, thou beloved enemy of mine! From behind I heard someone groaning and moaning; but the voice sounded full and strong. I turned my head in the direction of the voice, and I saw that Serge Ivanovich was lying on his side and moaning.
"Didn't your mother chase me out?" "That is nothing. Don't you know her temper? That is her way." "She keeps nagging at me all the time, and calls me nothing but Zhid, Zhid." "And what of it? Aren't you a Jew? Should I feel insulted if some one were to call me Christian?!" I had nothing to say.
So we walked on in silence. The hard, crisp snow was squeaking rhythmically under our feet, as if we were trying to play a tune. And from the house snatches of music reached us, mixed with sounds of quarreling and merry-making. It seemed as if all those sounds were pursuing us: "Zhid! Zhid!" Suddenly a sense of resentment overtook me, as if I had been called upon to defend the Jews.
I did as she wanted; the pig started to squeal and squeak horribly. To me it sounded like "Zhid, Zhid, is that the way to treat me?" Then Anna handed me a knife, and showed me where to make the cut. . . . The pig began to bleed fearfully, gurgling, and choking with his own blood. Forthwith Anna ordered wood to be brought, a fire to be kindled, and the pig to be put upon it.
But when Zagrubsky reported for duty, Jacob dismissed him. It was against Jacob's nature to have others do for him what he could do himself. Zagrubsky departed, hissing "Zhid" under his breath. It was the way he had treated me. My patience was gone. I put myself in his way, stopped him and asked him: "Now listen, you Pollack, how do you come to find out so quickly who is a Jew, and who is not?
She hated me heartily. She never called me by my own name. She called me "Zhid" all the time, in a tone of deep hatred and contempt. Among the orders the Cantonists had to obey were the following: to speak no Yiddish; to say no Jewish prayer; to recite daily a certain prayer before the image of the Virgin and before the crucifix, and not to abstain from non-kosher food.
Otherwise she would not have called me Zhid, and would not have hated me so much, in spite of seeing me break all the ordinances of the Jewish ritual. At times I thought that I and my comrades were captains in God's army, that all His ordinances were not meant for us, but for the plain soldiers of the line.
Of course, stealing is stealing. But then, they argued, had the Zhid youngsters any right to meddle with their affairs? Was it their property that was being stolen? As one of my Gentile acquaintances told me once: "The trouble with the Jews is that they are always pushing themselves in where they are not wanted at all."
He did not fail to take it, but at the same time I heard him sizzle out "Zhid" from between his tightly closed lips. I looked at him in amazement: how on earth could he guess I was a Jew, when I spoke my Russian with the right accent and inflection, while his was lame, broken, and half mixed with Polish? That was a riddle to me. But I had no time to puzzle it out, and I forgot it on the spot.
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