Charles Lewinsky - Melnitz

The long tables that stood at an angle to the stage, didn’t reach all the way to the front. Right in front of the steps was a single row of unoccupied chairs, guarded on either side by young lads with blue and black arm bands. They stepped back simultaneously, as precisely as if they had been practising, and freed the path. The schoolmaster sat down in the middle, flanked on each side by Pinchas and the master butcher. The gentlemen from the league sat down in this row as well. There were a few chairs free on both sides. None of the people who had failed to find a seat dared to use them.

Pinchas looked searchingly around, but there was no sign of Salomon and Chanele now. They had probably stopped by the door.

One could sense that the people in the hall were impatient, albeit in a disciplined way. Pinchas was reminded of Simchas Torah, how, in his childhood, the silence required during the service had also been kept only with difficulty, in the knowledge that a bag of sweets was waiting for him at the end.

When the schoolmaster climbed up onto the stage, he was initially greeted with applause. But then the mood quickly changed, when his words of greeting turned into a long address. In an effort to remain on the level of his audience he only quoted Swiss writers, and kept weaving a pithy quote from Gottfried Keller or Conrad Ferdinand Meyer into his remarks. Except that the people hadn’t come to hear him set out the goals of his Popular Education Association. A buzzing noise, as if from an irritable swarm of bees, swelled from the back of the hall to the stage, and because the schoolmaster would not be deterred and had now reached Pestalozzi, they started calling for another speaker, at first only a few voices and then more and more. ‘Gubser! Gubser!’ they shouted.

In a bid to drown out the catcallers — how he would have put them in the corner of his schoolroom, the lines he would have given them to write! — the old schoolmaster’s voice grew ever shriller, and so squeaky that the people eventually started laughing at him. When he resignedly announced the first speech and then climbed back down to his seat, it was as if he were running away.

Gubser took the four steps to the stage very slowly, like a parson climbing to the pulpit, collected and calling the assembly to silence. He didn’t step behind the lectern straight away, but stood right at the front by the steps, looked into the hall and shook his head sadly. ‘You should be ashamed of yourselves,’ said master butcher Gubser. ‘Just laughing at a man like our schoolmaster. Are you all children?’

That was not what they had expected of him.

‘What will the world think of us if you behave so badly?’ asked Gubser, and seemed to mean it quite seriously. ‘It isn’t as if we’re just among ourselves here. We have visitors from a long way away. People want to check if we’re doing everything correctly, we simple Swiss. Someone has come to us from Lemberg. That is somewhere far away in the East, where the garlic grows. The gentleman’s name is Lowy. Or Löwental or something of the kind. I am too stupid to remember those foreign names. But it’s something to do with a lion, I’m sure of that. He certainly has a wild mane, at any rate.’ He pointed to the hall entrance, and people craned their necks round or even stood up to see who he meant. The sudden attention so startled Reb Tsvi that he took shelter behind Salomon, which prompted laughter in their immediate vicinity.

‘So, do not shame your country,’ said Gubser. ‘Or do you want people in Lemberg to say that people in the Aargau don’t know how to behave themselves? In Lemberg, of all places, that centre of civilisation, compared to which Paris and London are only shabby little backwaters?’ They showed clear signs of relief that Gubser hadn’t been serious after all. Those unaccustomed to irony are twice as pleased when it opens itself up to them.

Gubser laughed too, just for a moment, and then made his serious pastor face again. He stepped out from behind the lectern, took a manuscript from the inside pocket of his jacket and carefully aligned the pages. Then he poured himself a glass of water from the carafe that stood ready for the purpose, and took a long sip.

‘Dear friends,’ he began, reading from his manuscript, ‘the reason for meeting here today is a very serious one. In a few weeks we Swiss will be summoned to the urn to vote for a very serious matter that touches the innermost heart of our state. It is not simply about the pros and cons of the duty of stunning before blood is drawn, no that is only the outward occasion. On that Sunday we will all be called to answer a much more fundamental question. Can there, in our country, can there, in a state in which laws are made for all, be special rights for a single small group?’

‘No!’ cried the hall.

‘With all respect for traditions, even if they are not our own…’

‘This is still a Christian country!’ a voice called out.

‘With all due respect: can customs which — I do not wish to dispute this for a moment — might have had a certain justification thousands of years ago, can such practices carry more weight in our modern times than the suffering of a tortured animal?’

‘No!’

‘Let us take another look at the facts!’ said Gubser, and began to list all the arguments that Pinchas had expected. He himself, said Gubser, making sentimental eyes, he himself was a friend to the Jews, a friend who welcomed with his heart, with all his heart, the fact that in Switzerland the old narrow-minded barriers had fallen, and that the Israelites were now granted the equal rights that should be nothing more than their due in a modern state. However, he said, and made a long, significant pause after that word, however, it must also be possible to demand that the Jews for their part also acknowledged their newly acquired equality, and did not behave like pettifogging lawyers and only try to pick the raisins out of the cake.

‘That’s what they’re like!’ The heckler seemed always to be the same one.

The Jews, and this was not an unreasonable demand, Gubser continued, must accept the duties that came with their new rights, which applied to all the other citizens of the country, and not, as in the question of animal slaughter, insist for a long time on an outdated practice. Indeed, his fraternal feeling towards the Jews went so far, he said, and put his hand on his heart, that he felt compelled, indeed obliged, to voice a warning here. Clinging to Medieval practices could only, in uneducated circles, encourage the belief in unproven tales of horror, as the ritual murder trial in Tisza-Eszlar had demonstrated once again only recently. He himself, and he had thought about the problem for a long time, could only say, ‘Only in the stuffy air of outdated practices can such superstition flourish!’

Then Gubser turned his attention to the various methods of animal slaughter. As a butcher of long standing he was confident in all modesty, yes, in all modesty, that he could deliver an expert judgement on his question. He himself had witnessed shechita countless times from close to, and the Jewish shochet Naftali Pomeranz, who was incidentally the father of his adversary today, had always been, if not a close friend, then at least a valued colleague, and he had to admit that the bloodthirsty process had always shaken him to the core. And even though he was not, as anyone who knew him was aware, an old maid who only had to cut her finger with a letter opener to fall into a faint straight away.

The audience, who would have welcomed a little more ribaldry, received his little joke with grateful laughter.

Even throwing the animals down, said Gubser, caused them unnecessary pain, and it was not rare for horns or ribs to be broken, or for innards to be crushed. He would not describe the actual process of shechita in detail, to spare his audience’s sensitivities, but only quote what the royal-court veterinarian Dr Sondermann of Munich had said on the subject. One could but admire, he had written in an essay, anyone who could perform this act of human senselessness without internal outrage.