The Hired Girl(53)

I recognized that word, anti-Semitism, from my first night at the Rosenbachs’. “What is that?” I inquired. “What is anti —?”

“Anti-Semitism. The hatred of the Jews,” said Mr. Rosenbach. “The word is modern, but the hatred has a long history. We’ve been hated for thousands of years.”

“I don’t understand it,” I said.

He shrugged. “Perhaps we are both too innocent to understand it. But we have wandered from the point. What I was trying to explain is that for Malka, your crucifix is not a symbol of the God you love, but of the Christians who have oppressed the Jews. Can you understand that?”

I thought about Malka. For some reason, it wasn’t hard to picture her as a little girl. I imagined her: a little black fly of a child, listening with big scared eyes to her grandmother’s stories. “I guess I can,” I said. “Anyway, I’ll tell her I’m sorry. I never meant to call her a liar. But I still don’t know what to do about my crucifix. Must I take it down?”

“That is for you to decide. I have no wish to persecute you for your faith,” he said, and though he smiled very kindly, I knew our talk had come to an end.

Now I am writing in the library. After my bath, I put on my old brown dress and crept downstairs to write. It will be midnight in another fifteen minutes, and then I must go to bed, because I promised Mr. Rosenbach.

But I want to write two more things. One is that I made up with Malka. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. She was sitting in the kitchen with the Thomashefsky cat in her lap, so I went and knelt before her. I acted as if I was kneeling to stroke the cat, but I was really kneeling because I wanted to atone for all the bad things that were done to the Jews.

I told her I was sorry and that I hadn’t meant to call her a liar. I had a whole speech planned, very penitent and touching, but before I could say much, the cat bit me. I wasn’t hurting him — I was rubbing his cheek with one finger. But he bit me. I swear that cat knows I’m a Gentile.

Malka’s face brightened. She’d been listening to me stonily, but having the cat bite me cheered her right up. She said Thomashefsky was a bad boy, though I know she loved him all the more for it.

But pretending to scold the cat was her way of making up. She asked if I wanted a cookie. When I said I did, she put the cat off her lap and went to the icebox to pour me a glass of milk. While I was eating her cookies, I promised I’d take the crucifix off the wall.

So that’s the second thing I did. I took down the crucifix. I decided I’d sleep with it under my pillow. That way, it doesn’t bother Malka, but Jesus is still close to me. Even though taking Him down is a little bit like being persecuted, it isn’t the kind of persecution where babies are torn apart in the street.

I think this is a good compromise, and I feel peaceful and kind of virtuous. But when I think of the things Mr. Rosenbach told me, I don’t feel virtuous anymore. I feel ashamed and shocked that Christians can be so bad. And it seems to me that Jews like Mr. Rosenbach must be very good not to hate all Christians — though it would be unfair of him to hate me, because I’ve never done any anti-Semitism.

I wonder what my new bathrobe will look like.



Wednesday, July the nineteenth, 1911

I want to read, but I have so much to write! Today I had my day off, and I spent a fortune — a fortune! — in Rosenbach’s Department Store. I rode the streetcar, I met Nora Himmelrich, and I have a new HAT!

I am wildly excited about my hat, so I’ll write about that first. It’s cream-colored straw trimmed with cornflowers and a pale-pink taffeta ribbon. Mimi says it’s a Cheyenne-style hat, which means that the brim turns up in front, more on one side than the other. It’s awfully becoming. Mimi says my hat has a lot of style for a dollar and seventy cents. A dollar and seventy cents! Ma would be horrified if she knew I spent that on a hat. But Mimi seemed to think it was a bargain, and in a way it was, because I saw one hat that cost twelve dollars. Mimi said that was because it had a lot of ostrich feathers, which are becoming very dear. It’s a pity girls don’t run department stores, because Mimi seems to know a lot about such things.

Mimi was in a bad humor when we met today, almost silent, except when she was explaining to me about the streetcar. She sat next to me with her nose in the air and a grouch on her face. I made up my mind that I wasn’t going to let a little girl of twelve be rude to me without saying anything, so at last I asked her what the matter was. Then she burst out talking.