I walked about in the neighborhood. A row of houses on one side and a row of houses on the other, with a kind of road winding between, producing weeds and growing thorns, and a broken-down car sunk in the ground. Some of the houses are unpainted; others have their walls calcimined to look like slabs of marble. Some are on the point of collapse; the builders did not want to invest their money in deepening the foundations, for if they had sunk deeper foundations they would not have had enough to build the houses. The soil of Jerusalem, which was accustomed to sanctuaries, does not like the light houses, so it undermines them until they collapse. Another thing this soil does is to grow bushes and trees inside the houses. Usually, bushes and trees that are planted need care; here they flourish and grow of themselves, and break up the floor and the walls. And why does the soil not make the gardens grow around the houses? Because if the people of the neighborhood plow and hoe and water to grow a little greenery, their bad neighbors come along and loose their goats on them. From the Talmud we learn that the wicked Titus laid waste our land, but the evidence of our eyes teaches us that the goats are laying it waste, and it is still far from clear which did more damage.
I walk about in the neighborhood. Peace and quiet everywhere; not a living soul but goats and cats and dogs. Those who have work in town have gone to town, and those who have nothing to do have gone to look for work. And there are some people who have despaired of work, so they stay at home and recite psalms, or study Mishnah or Midrash. As for the women, some of them have kinds of shops in towns and some have gone to buy vegetables in the market, for the two shopkeepers in the neighborhood have nothing to sell and are going around the town to plead with their creditors. And where are the children? Those who have shoes for their feet have gone to town to study, and those who have no shoes are playing with their brothers at home, for the rainy days have come, and if their clothes are tattered and they have no shoes they cannot play outside.
I walk through the neighborhood, in the length of it and in the breadth of it, looking at the rickety windows with their slackly hanging shutters. On one house at the top of the neighborhood hangs a tin sign bearing the name of a certain benefactor after whom the street is named. The rains and winds of two or three winters have obliterated the name of the man who has taken to himself the name of a street in Jerusalem, and left him no name, but only a buckled sign.
As I walked through the neighborhood the silence was broken by the arrival of a bus full of people. They stretched their limbs as they got off, some to collect taxes and some to collect charity, and some to examine the houses to see which were fit to be security for loans. As they found no one, they started to pester me. As I could tell them nothing, they insulted me. If Mr. Gedaliah Klein were alive and I were walking with him, no one would dare to speak to me like that.
The driver went into one of the houses to rest awhile from the fatigue of the journey, for part of the way from the main road to the neighborhood is covered with holes and pitfalls, and part with spikes and stones; the bus is also rickety, and unless the driver lent it some of his strength it would not go more than a yard or two. Since the visitors wanted to leave and could not find him, they went in to have a look at the synagogue.
The synagogue is a fine building outside and inside. Pious women in America donated the money to build it, but they left one place unfinished, for in the course of construction a great deal of money was wasted to no purpose, and when the donors were asked to make up the difference they could not do it, for America was short of money at the time. So one corner was left uncompleted, but if you do not look in that direction you do not see what is missing.
The synagogue rises higher than any of the houses in the neighborhood — a fine building outside and inside. The floor is made of large stones, and the ceiling is white as the whitewash of the Temple. The walls are straight, and there are twelve windows in them, like the number of the gates of prayer in the Heavens. Our father Jacob, on whom be peace, produced twelve tribes, and the Holy One, blessed be He, correspondingly opened twelve windows in the firmament to receive the prayers of each tribe. But the seed of the tribes were fruitful and split up into Sephardim and Ashkenazim, Perushim and Hasidim — and the Hasidim, too, are split up according to their rabbis, each group praying in a different style. But the Heavens are still intact and no new gates are opened in them, and every worshipper wants the prayers to be recited in his own style, so that there is great confusion, and quarrels break out.
At last the driver came out, sat down in the bus, hooted and blared and hooted again. The travelers pushed their way in. The driver hooted and blared, started up the bus, and set off for town. Again the neighborhood was silent, and were it not for the thick, heavy smell of burnt gasoline which defiled the air there would be no sign that human beings had been here.
I saw a man sitting beside his house and reading the Book of Legends. I went up to him and talked to him, praising the late Mr. Gedaliah Klein, without whom there would be no one living here. The man put down the Book of Legends, sighed and smiled, and said, “It’s a hopeless mess. Half my house is a wreck and the other half a ruin — and the whole of it is mortgaged. If it were sold to pay the debt, not even a small part of the debt would be settled, and if it remains in my hands — where will I get the money to repair it? And so far I’ve only been talking about myself. The others are in the same predicament, and there’s another difficulty: we’re far from town, where the people work, and to get to town we need the bus. The bus isn’t always there, and the money’s not there either. So we go on foot, but you cannot be sure you will get there safely. In times of peace our bad neighbors threaten your money, and in times of stress they threaten your life.”
“Well,” I asked him, “what will you do?” “What we ought to do we certainly shall not do,” he replied with a smile. “But I only hope the future is no worse than the past, for nothing is so bad that there’s nothing worse. Master Gedaliah Klein, may he rest in peace, was a great man and meant to help the builders of the neighborhood. He came forward when they were in difficulties and found them money at a low rate of eight per cent when people pay nine or ten and up to twelve. But anyone who gets into debt has to leave his house in the end.”
“And is there no hope for your neighborhood?” I asked. “There is one hope,” he replied. “And what is it?” I asked. “When the Messiah comes,” he said, “and the wolf dwells with the lamb, we shall no longer be afraid of our bad neighbors, and the goats will do no more harm either.” “And until the Messiah comes?” I said. He smiled and replied, “The Old Man of Shpoli used to say, ‘Master of the universe, I can assure Thee that the world will go on degenerating in this way until the coming of the Redeemer.’ True, there was once a chance to put things right. You see the two rows of houses, on the road to our neighborhood, that separate us from the town and the next neighborhood? All these houses, as you see them, are new, recently built. But before they were built, that was virgin soil, and we could get from one neighborhood to the other in a short time. The owners of the land offered to sell it to us, and we agreed. So we went to our wealthy neighbors and said to them, ‘This land is up for sale; buy it, and both of us will no longer be surrounded by the Arabs, who terrorize us so long as we are few. And we will pay our share for the bus and the watchmen and all the other public facilities that every Jewish community must have to survive.’ But our neighbors sent us away empty-handed. After all, they had moved away from the town and its paupers, and then paupers come along and propose to get closer. We started going around from one institution to another, but they put us off, some for budgetary reasons and some for economic. ‘It isn’t enough that you haven’t succeeded,’ they said, ‘but you want to drag other people into this mess.’ So we were in despair. Meanwhile, along came Syrians from Syria, bought the land, and built themselves large houses. So we are still living in fear and trembling, and we can’t keep up any public facility, not even a grocery. Our dignified neighbor has also suffered for its pride, for the Arabs have surrounded it, and it is far from any Jewish settlement, and the bus hardly comes for lack of passengers, for anyone who has no house of his own moves to town, and new houses are not being built there, for no one builds his home in a neighborhood whose people are leaving. And even those who own their own houses would be glad to leave, and this garden city, builded in beauty, is gradually being abandoned.”