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Updated: August 27, 2024
She had, indeed, scarcely heard of such things. Zionism was something in the East End. Nobody in her class ever mentioned it. But, then, Barstein was a sculptor and strange, and, besides, he did not look at all like a Jew, so it didn't sound so horrible in his mouth.
Leopold Barstein, the sculptor, was sitting in his lonesome studio, brooding blackly over his dead illusions, when the postman brought him a letter in a large, straggling, unknown hand. It began 'Angel of God! He laughed bitterly.
It was the climax of the romance that had so strangely stolen over the British dinner-table. Rebuild Jerusalem to-day! Did Jews really conceive it as a contemporary possibility? Barstein went hot and cold. The idea was absolutely novel to him; evidently as a boy he had not understood his own prayers or his own people. All his imagination was inflamed.
It was not even as if he were really a Jew. Did they imagine he wore phylacteries or earlocks, or what? His few childish years in the Russian Pale what were they to the long years of European art and European culture? And even if in Rome or Paris he had foregathered with Jews like Schneemann or Leopold Barstein, it was to the artist in them he had gravitated, not the Jew.
Presently, however, it occurred to Barstein that Nehemiah himself would have scant opportunity of influential contact with Ottoman officials, and that the real question at issue was, how Nehemiah, his wife, and his 'at least eleven children, were to be supported in Turkey. He mentioned the point. Nehemiah waved it away.
Alas! he found only the bluff Briton, and a Briton no longer genially, but bluntly, bluff. 'It is perfectly impossible. Barstein, bewildered, pleaded for enlightenment. Was he not pious enough, or not rich enough, too artistic or too low-born? Or did Sir Asher consider his past life improper or his future behaviour dubious? Let Sir Asher say. But Sir Asher would not say.
Perhaps it persisted still under the head of Turkey. Not least characteristic Barstein found Nehemiah's tenacious gloating over his ancient ruin at the hands of Russia. For some days the sculptor went about weighed down by Nehemiah's misfortunes, and the necessity of finding time to journey to the Minories.
'Jews can't live off one another, Mabel explained with an air of philosophy. Barstein did not reply. He was asking himself with an artist's analytical curiosity whence came this suicidal anti-Semitism. Was it the self-contempt natural to a race that had not the strength to build and fend for itself? No, alas! it did not even spring from so comparatively noble a source.
Then the tall melancholy man raised his eyes to heaven, and uttered a Hebrew voluntary in which references to the ram whose horns were caught in the thicket to save Isaac's life were distinctly audible. Barstein waited patiently till the pious lips were at rest. 'But what business do you think you ? he began. 'Shall I presume dictation to the angel? asked Nehemiah with wet shining eyes.
Nehemiah as a petticoated romance was too tickling. 'You shall read the letter, he said. Schneemann protested comically. 'No, no, that would be ungentlemanly you read to us what the angel says. 'It is I that am the angel, Barstein laughed, as he tore open the letter.
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