chasanim voon die callohs
Hi, hi, did-a-rid-a-ree!

They tear away their lovers from the maidens,
Hi, hi, did-a-rid-a-ree!

The air mingled the melancholy of Polish music with the sadness of
Jewish and the words hinted of God knew what.

"Old unhappy far-off things
And battles long ago."

And so over all the songs and stories was the trail of tragedy, under
all the heart-ache of a hunted race. There are few more plaintive chants
in the world than the recitation of the Psalms by the "Sons of the
Covenant" on Sabbath afternoons amid the gathering shadows of twilight.
Esther often stood in the passage to hear it, morbidly fascinated, tears
of pensive pleasure in her eyes. Even the little jargon story-book which
Moses Ansell read out that night to his _Kinder_, after tea-supper, by
the light of the one candle, was prefaced with a note of pathos. "These
stories have we gathered together from the Gemorah and the Midrash,
wonderful stories, and we have translated the beautiful stories, using
the Hebrew alphabet so that every one, little or big, shall be able to
read them, and shall know that there is a God in the world who forsaketh
not His people Israel and who even for us will likewise work miracles
and wonders and will send us the righteous Redeemer speedily in our
days, Amen." Of this same Messiah the children heard endless tales.
Oriental fancy had been exhausted in picturing him for the consolation
of exiled and suffering Israel. Before his days there would be a wicked
Messiah of the House of Joseph; later, a king with one ear deaf to hear
good but acute to hear evil; there would be a scar on his forehead, one
of his hands would be an inch long and the other three miles, apparently
a subtle symbol of the persecutor. The jargon story-book among its
"stories, wonderful stories," had also extracts from the famous
romance, or diary, of Eldad the Danite, who professed to have
discovered the lost Ten Tribes. Eldad's book appeared towards the end of
the ninth century and became the Arabian Nights of the Jews, and it had
filtered down through the ages into the Ansell garret, in common with
many other tales from the rich storehouse of mediaeval folk-lore in the
diffusion of which the wandering few has played so great a part.

Sometimes Moses read to his charmed hearers the description of Heaven
and Hell by Immanuel, the friend and contemporary of Dante, sometimes a
jargon version of Robinson Crusoe. T