closed with the
words, "Next year, may we be in Jerusalem." On childish lips, indeed,
those words were no conscious aspiration; we repeated the Hebrew
syllables after our elders, but without their hope and longing. Still
not a child among us was too young to feel in his own flesh the lash
of the oppressor. We knew what it was to be Jews in exile, from the
spiteful treatment we suffered at the hands of the smallest urchin
who crossed himself; and thence we knew that Israel had good reason to
pray for deliverance. But the story of the Exodus was not history to
me in the sense that the story of the American Revolution was. It was
more like a glorious myth, a belief in which had the effect of cutting
me off from the actual world, by linking me with a world of phantoms.
Those moments of exaltation which the contemplation of the Biblical
past afforded us, allowing us to call ourselves the children of
princes, served but to tinge with a more poignant sense of
disinheritance the long humdrum stretches of our life. In very truth
we were a people without a country. Surrounded by mocking foes and
detractors, it was difficult for me to realize the persons of my
people's heroes or the events in which they moved. Except in moments
of abstraction from the world around me, I scarcely understood that
Jerusalem was an actual spot on the earth, where once the Kings of the
Bible, real people, like my neighbors in Polotzk, ruled in puissant
majesty. For the conditions of our civil life did not permit us to
cultivate a spirit of nationalism. The freedom of worship that was
grudgingly granted within the narrow limits of the Pale by no means
included the right to set up openly any ideal of a Hebrew State, any
hero other than the Czar. What we children picked up of our ancient
political history was confused with the miraculous story of the
Creation, with the supernatural legends and hazy associations of Bible
lore. As to our future, we Jews in Polotzk had no national
expectations; only a life-worn dreamer here and there hoped to die in
Palestine. If Fetchke and I sang, with my father, first making sure of
our audience, "Zion, Zion, Holy Zion, not forever is it lost," we did
not really picture to ourselves Judaea restored.

So it came to pass that we did not know what _my country_ could mean
to a man. And as we had no country, so we had no flag to love. It was
by no far-fetched symbolism that the banner of the House of Romanoff
became the embl