Mr. Monday and other tales of Jewish Amsterdam

MR. MONDAY 7 9

There I began to know a world whose existence I had only vaguely suspected. It was not a pleasant world. Poverty, exploitation, prejudice, bigotry and backwardness were the parapets against which the Zionists stormed. Palestine was more than just an idea, more than the centuries-old yearning for the land with which the Jews were tied by mystical bonds. It was the New Era that strove to triumph.

Up to that day I had thought that Mr. Monday represented a rare human specimen, an eccentric being, a unique case. But Eastern Europe fairly teemed with people like him. They lived spiritually in the Middle Ages. Surrounded by black misery, they were dreamers and seekers, thinkers and sages.

Dualistic characters, they were. Mildly contemptuous of earthly troubles, yet at the same time gripped by the strong desire to get more from the social cake than their neighbour. Men of the Book, and at the same time small business men who wanted to make money by any means or schemes they could devise.

In Mukacevo in the Micaciemikagassa, I visited the miracle-rabbi Spira.When I mentioned the subject of Zionism to the rabbi, he exploded into a revealing diatribe against his archenemies, the Zionists. "Those Zionists.. .Communists they are, all of them!" Spira raged. "I have cursed them and I will curse them again. They undermine everything we have built here. They have even got the Town Council so meshuggah that it named two streets after their leaders. Now we have here the Bialik Street and the Yehuda Halevi Street. That Bialik, he is a swindler and a brigand, and he eats pork, too. And that