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city man, has never learned. They wish to feel, as part of the real rhythm of existence, morning, noon, and night; to experience with their full force the changing moods of nature; to learn what it is to be hungry and thirsty, to suffer from heat and cold — in a word, to know intimately as a part of their own experience all the phases of the dream of existence. It is only thus, they say, that one can become a complete man. There is something of the simplicity and the grandeur of the first Franciscan fathers in this conception the same renunciation of worldly wealth, the same stress upon the value of immaterial treasures, the same humble garb, the same passion to get closer to God and His creation. I may add that the German Youth Movement demands of its adherents total abstinence from alcohol and tobacco.

The numerous organizations belonging to this movement vary radically in their form and methods. Experience proves that the more durable are those with the strongest central government and the strictest interior discipline — that is to say, those that are ablest led. No matter how devoted the members may be to the society itself, permanence generally depends upon one or two powerful leaders. Such leadership does not contradict the principles of these organizations; in fact, loyalty to a chosen leader is part of the brotherhood spirit.

So our Wandervögel, with their leaders and companions forming united troops, go about the country learning to know the Fatherland, seeking new experiences, trying to live of their own motion and upon their own responsibility a true, realistic, complete life.

THE FOOLISH GHOST

BY R. W. POVEY

[New Statesman]

By day, my heart is like a market place
Where loud-voiced merchants wrangle, sell, and buy,
Where one may never see the selfsame face

Twice in the stirring crowd, where tricksters ply,
Where little urchins sport upon the ground,

And cunning, lean, old mendicants abound.

By night, the noisy riot of the day

Is strangely dead. . . . Silenced each merchant's tone,
The tricksters' booths are dumbly packed away,
And all the square is dark, and chill, and lone
Save for a wistful, foolish ghost, who sings
Of love that passed- and other idle things.

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A STEAMER flying the flag of the Soviet Republic lay in Odessa harbor under full steam, ready to put to sea. A boatswain and sailors were washing down the decks, and the scrubbed planks looked ready to reflect sunshine, had there been any; but instead there was a late October drizzle, and a heavy fogbank hung over the water outside the harbor's mouth. At noon emigrants began to come aboard. A crane dropped into the hold trunks, suitcases, baskets, bundles, mattresses, cupboards, troughs. People streamed across the decks carrying bundles wrapped in rags and articles of every description feather feather beds, beds, bedding, birch-bark hampers. One lugged a graphophone; another stowed a basket containing two live geese under a lifeboat.

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They were Jews, five hundred steerage passengers returning to Palestine, which their ancestors had left two thousand years ago. Upon the decks, in the gangways, under the lifeboats, around the two funnels, were stacked heaps of miscellaneous objects, as if they had been hastily dragged there out of a burning house. On top of these, beds were made and women with children made themselves comfortable. Old men looked for vacant spots, where they spread a small rug, put the tfiln upon their foreheads, covered their shoulders with the tales, and began to pray in Hebrew, only to be driven away to make room for new heaps of infants,

1 From Krasnaia Nov (Moscow literary and current-affairs monthly), January

pillows, samovars, and other articles. Loud conversation filled the air, in mixed Hebrew and Russian. The ship smelled of the ghetto.

Soon the decks, which had been so carefully washed down that morning, were littered with watermelon rind, chicken bones, and scraps of paper; and litter fairly bulged out of baskets and boxes. By nightfall every inch of space was packed with people and luggage one had to step over them. Out into the gray dusk sped a subdued murmur of prayer, strange to the Russian ear, and the dense crowd was black.

Night came. The captain finished his coffee and ordered the last whistle to be blown. The first mate reported that young Zionists from Tarbut had gathered in the forecastle, where they were holding a meeting and flourishing a blue Zionist flag. The captain put on his black-leather coat and climbed upon the bridge as the steamer's siren shrieked. As soon as this subsided another wailing noise rose from the ship suggesting tears, laments, and maledictions. Arms were raised toward Heaven, and faces were anxiously lifted upon thin, skinny necks. The rhythm of a chant was audible a guttural, monotonous chant of doom steeped in memories of blood and bitterness, a hymn about Zion and the preëternal chosen destiny of this people bound toward Zion once more. A roaring command from the captain suddenly silenced the crowd: 'Shut up, at the forecastle there! Pilot, have the leaders arrested!'

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'Shut up!' from the captain. 'Put hung before the light, and the bird was them into the chain locker!'

'Citizen Captain! I've been struck upon the neck!'

'Shut up, there! Pilot Pogodin, bring these trouble-makers to the bridge!' 'Yes, sir!'

'Listen, there!' The captain spoke more calmly. 'Zionists, when we are out in the open sea you may sing from five to nine in the evening and from nine to twelve in the morning. Shut up! Take these disturbers to the chain locker. You'll sing out in the open sea!'

The wind grew colder. The lighthouse already twinkled far behind them and one by one the harbor lights disappeared. An old Jew clad in a long lapserdak, his gray beard reaching to his waist, stood leaning against the rail at the stern. He was going to the Wailing Wall at Jerusalem to shed there all the tears still left him, and then to die happy and dry-eyed in the promised land of Jehoshaphat. He gazed back toward the land where his forefathers were born and where they had lived for centuries under persecution, and he wept as he bade it farewell. He had cursed that country where his dispersed people dwelt he could not do otherwise; but he could not help weeping. Yet he would kiss with his withered lips the soil whither he was bound - he would press his aged bosom against that earth; and those kisses and that embrace would be the most passionate of his life.

The lighthouse twinkled no longerit was lost in the darkness. The night

awake. In the gangway lay an old man sound asleep, his head upon a knapsack. Upon a bench two young women drowsed, clasping each other tightly to keep from falling off; and under the bench a young man had laid himself to rest and was smoking before going to sleep. All the other space was covered with luggage. The old Jew sat down near his wife and their youngest child, put on the tales and the tfiln, opened his prayer book and read, noiselessly moving his lips. Some ten ancient elders like himself sat in different places with their opened books. The old man was carried away by his devotion, and when he came upon a sentence that described Jehovah as a stern but just God he raised his head and chanted it out loud. Instantly the other old men responded, and soon a strange, reverent, passionate singsong rose from the decks.

Meanwhile upon the forecastle a youth stood, dressed in a leather jacket, military breeches, and brand-new rubber overshoes. If a searchlight had been thrown upon his face at that moment, its expression would have appeared serene, severe, and determined; but it would also have shown that the youth was in poor health and probably already stricken with tuberculosis. He wore eyeglasses, and stood erect, with his head thrown back, looking straight into the darkness, breasting the wind that struck him with full force. The ship had begun to roll, the sea swished, and the forecastle rose and

fell ponderously in the foaming water. This youth, when bidding farewell to a young girl in the harbor, had shouted to her, 'Next year in Jerusalem!' in Jerusalem!' and had sung the Zionist hymn with great fervor. There, ahead of him, was the Promised Land. The old men went to weep at the Wall of Tears, but he was bound for Tel Aviv, to pave roads, to plant gardens, to raise grapes and castor-oil beans, to dig wells, and to drain the Tiberiad fever swamps. He was going to liberate himself from strangers and to relieve them of his presence. He was going to build himself a home with his own hands, with pickaxe and spade- he, the son of a great people ever in exile but never lost. Through the night and the wind he saw in mental vision the foothills of Zion, Arabian breezes heavy with heat and dust; and in a perspective of red sand stood a city with high crenelated walls rising above a flat plateau. Caravans of camels go toward that city but he and his brethren will build roads there, to the very verge of India, and will turn the arid desert, with its palms and Bedouins, into orange groves. There in Palestine, after a lapse of two thousand years, the ancient tongue has been reborn - and who knows but perhaps there, between rocks, near a cactus-clothed ravine where a bright stream runs giving new life to the desert, he will whisper again to the far-away girl a story of love, as he had whispered it to her once before back in their native mestechko, in the government of Vitebsk?

Seven of the passengers were from his mestechko, four youths and three girls, and the seven camped together under a lifeboat. These were the group that had succeeded in smuggling their Zionist banner past the customs and police and had unfurled it on shipboard and had sung the Zionist hymn. When the captain ordered silence they held

counsel whether to continue singing or not, and this young man had advised them to obey on the presumption that their singing interfered with the officer's commands. Now he was going to sleep. He took off his shoes together with the rubbers, put his stockings into the shoes, and wormed himself in between his sleeping friends, modestly adjusting the skirts of one of the sleeping girls. She did not awake, but another girl and another youth woke up; and the one who had just joined them said to them in a low voice, using the ancient language with difficulty:

'In Palestine the English work to divide the Hebrew and the Arabs. We must hold counsel together how to make friends with the Arabs. Later on we shall both have to fight the English.'

By this time different groups began to stand out from the mass. Under the steps leading to the spar deck camped a family of Bokhara Jews. Their costumes and manners reflected the thousand years they had spent among the Uzbegs. The mother wore an Uzbeg khilat, and lay on a variegated feather bed under a very broad silken cover, gathering her children around her. She had lain there ever since the ship put out to sea, and had evidently decided not to budge. The father left the feather bed once in a while to visit another family from Bokhara at the other end of the ship, and to play dice; at such times the mother would cut watermelons into huge slices and distribute them among the children. A heap of watermelon rind lay at their side, and near it stood their night vessel.

Mountaineer Jews from Caucasus, every one of them handsome, also kept together, and seemed to have brought with them something of the Caucasian peaks and gorges - they were tall, leisurely, elastic-stepping men. Ukrain

ian Jews were larger and more robust than those from Poland and Lithuania. Most of the Lithuanian Jews were small artisans of puny build. Upon the spar deck lived a family of Sabbathists Ukrainians who accepted Judaism. The husband knew Hebrew besides his Ukrainian, but his wife could speak only her native Ukrainian tongue. All day long she sat in a typical pose of a Russian peasant woman at rest.

The old men requested the captain to allow them a special room for prayer, and he assigned them part of the hold where there was no light. Their scanty candles could not dispel the darkness. The place smelled like the ghetto, the way it always smells in ship holds. There the old men sat upon the floor or upon whatever happened to be there, in their tales and tfilns and with leather-bound books upon their knees, and chanted prayers that could be heard all over the deck above. There was no ventilation in the hold, the smoke from candles made their eyes smart, the heat was intense, but at all times of the day and the night these people prayed to the unknown, awesome Adonai-prayed frantically, passionately, resignedly.

At the same time young people held meetings upon the forecastle. There were very few passengers in the first and second class - dentists and artists. Their wives were well fed and fat, and lounged on deck chairs, where they received much attention from young pilots and volunteers.

When they reached the Bosporus they had to stop for disinfection. It never hurts people to bathe, but the way the Turks drove those people, who otherwise were not permitted to touch Turkish soil, to the bathhouse seemed humiliating. Everybody knew the night before what was going to happen. Women began to whisper and argue

with each other, and the old ones among them went to the captain and asked to be spared the bathhouse ordeal, explaining their ailments in detail. The captain was angry at first, but then began to enjoy the situation, and told the women that in Turkish baths eunuchs washed everybody, and that the women would have their heads washed with a special Persian mud which would make their hair fall out, because the Mohammedan law prescribes bald heads, and so forth. One old woman, panic-stricken, suddenly affected a condition too delicate to allow her to go to the bathhouse; until even her women friends began to laugh at her, and extracted a goodsized pillow from under her dress. The ship cast anchor in front of the bathhouse. Turkish policemen and sanitary officers with good-natured faces climbed upon the deck. The little houses under the plane trees peacefully sent their smoke to the mountains and the sky, into the blue spaces of Anatolia. The doctor began to call the list: Rosenfeld, Gelikman, Frenkel, Katz, Jamaiker! 'Jamaiker!'

Nobody answered. They hunted for Jamaiker all over the ship, but it took long to find him. He was somewhere under the shafts in the engineroom. Two Turkish policemen led out on deck a very emaciated old man with a wedgeshaped beard. His face expressed terror, his beard trembled. He jabbered excitedly, explaining that the names of his wife and child were put down with a different party of bathers from the one to which he was assigned, and that he wanted to go together with his wife. The boat was waiting below, packed with people, and an educated emigrant in glasses and carrying a sack with his clean linen called indignantly:

'Comrades, what is the meaning of these jokes? I request you to attend to the business earnestly, and I don't

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