SARAH was ten years old when the Cossacks pillaged the small town where her family lived. All her memories of happy childhood were plunged at one blow into horrible darkness, pierced by the plight of blazing houses. Certainly images seemed branded upon her memory by these fires.
A sudden awakening in a winter night. Out-doors the yells of victory and terror. The dark cellar, sacks, barrels, and the smell of rates. A spider moving across her face. Her mother’s hands, cold and trembling against her breast. Then suddenly a gust of icy wind, the whiteness of snow, a frightful man with a sword, another, another… They are searching for wine. Hoarse laughter.
“Ha! See where the mice are hiding !”
She is with her mother in the most remote room of their house. Behind the thin partition, the Cossacks are singing and laughing. Her sister is with them. She shouts, gay and defiant:
“And I, Sir Cossack, I know a word that is a charm against bullets.”
More laughter, then again her sister’s voice:
“Well, try, fire at me, right at my heart ! Nothing will happen.”
Renewed laughter,a shot…. A feeble cry, the fall of a body. Confused noises, then silence.
And on her mother’s agonized face Sarah sees a terrible joy.
A Cossack’s voice:
“She has been clevener than we were,the witch! What a pity ! She was so beautiful !”
Another answers:
“What the devil does it matter? You’ll find plenty of others….”
Her mother, glancing fearfully around, leads Sarah into the street. Bright morning light…acrid smell of fire. Furniture and broken tools lie heaped up on the snow. A pool of blood…. A corpse, another, and yet another…. Her mother bends over them…. There is a frightful scream. She falls. Sarah’s father is there, in the snow, his head split open
From a doorway a nun appears, beautiful and calm. She approaches the little girl, kisses her, asks her name, and with a firm hand, leads her away.
These were the images fixed in Sarah’s mind. And over them hovered her mother’s voice-murmuring, vibrant and passionate-which she heard continually:
“God will save you, sister. God will save us all. He is merciful and kind. He will deliver us from the Cossacks. He will send us the Messiah, the Messiah, the Messiah ! Out of a strange country he will guide us to our Holy Land. Merciful God !”
Little by little, in the quiet convent where the nun had brought her, Sarah’s memories grew fainter. A gentle melancholy enveloped them.
But her mother’s voice, vibrant and prophetic, sounded more and more clearly in the dreams and vigils of the young novice.
She loved the convent silence, the solitude of the cells, the moaning of the organ, the caressing harmony of the choir, the solemnity of the ritual. She began to love the ikons, dim in their gold frames, and the bright face of the Madonna, all white and gold. She forgot the Jewish prayers, she learned to pray on her knees, trembling and excited, in the darkness of the chapel, her eyes fixed upon the curls of the angels and the fleecy whiteness of the lambs.
Her prayers were wordless, for the Polish language with its strange constructions could not express the grief and longing of the young Jewess. And always, as from a secret source, her mother’s voice trembled in her prayers:
“Messiah ! Messiah ! Messiah !”
Sarah did not know why nor to whom this cry arose, but it was the supreme expression of her past and the promise of a future.
The Messiah ! To the young girl he was a marvellous mystery, an inaccessible vision, a lasting ecstasy. His image was inseparable from the deep moaning of the organ, the voices of the choir, and the splendor of the ritual service. But at the same time Sarah dimly remembered the ancient synagogue with Jews in white crowding around the altar, bearing palm branches and singing, “Alleluia !” And it was they, with her mother and father, her sister, she wished to believe inhabited the Messiah’s kingdom.
The years passed. And while the trouble and the mystical ecstasy of the young girl grew, a new idea controlled it. Sarah felt she was destined to take an active part in the events which were to accompany the advent of the Messiah. What these events were to be and what part she would play in them she could not imagine, but she was sure the time would come when she would leave her cell and the convent walls.
From then on a feverish impatience burned within her. Silence and the music of bells at twilight gave her no rest. She listened restlessly to the whispers of night, the rustling of the wind in the trees. Solitude became unbearable. Nightmares suffocated her. She lost all sense of reality and lived in a kind of dream. She saw white nuptial wreaths and continually heard a call:
“Arise, my betrothed !”
The hour of her liberation seemed inevitable and near. Retiring very early to her cell, she would stretch herself on her hard cot and with open eyes give herself up to visions. Often, violating the convent rules, she opened the window and listened avidly to the vague rumors of life outside.
It was thus that one August evening she thought she heard a song. Its feeble echotrembled softly among the leaves of the beech trees. How little did this serene melody resemble the songs of the convent! For there were tears in it, weeping, heartbreaking calls, and something familiar, too, like the trembling and passionate voice of her mother.
(To be continued Monday. The great transformation in Sarah’s soul is the subject of the next chapter)
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
