My Glorious Brothers Read Free

slave. The masters, with those slaves they need to serve them, live in walled cities; the slaves, in mud and wattled huts, scarcely more noticeable than anthills. When the masters make war, they hire great armies of mercenaries, and then it may or may not be that the slaves in the mud huts in the countryside will have new masters; it makes little difference, for outside of the cities men are like beasts and less than beasts, half naked, scratching at the earth so that the masters may be fed, neither reading nor writing, not dreaming and not hoping, dying and giving birth… I say this not with pride because we are different, because we alone of all people do not live in walled cities; not with pride—how could I have pride and say the benediction, “We were slaves in Egypt”? Not with pride, but to make you who read and are not Jews understand how it is with us who are Jews—and even then there is so much I cannot explain!
    I can only tell the tale of my glorious brothers and hope that something will come out of the telling. I can tell you that in Modin, then, there were two lines of ’dobe houses, and the street ran between them, from the house at one end of Ruben, the smith—though precious little iron to work came his way—to the house of Melek, the Mohel, the father of nine children which was at the other end. And in between were twenty-odd houses on either side of the street, all sunny and old and venerable in the wintertime, but in spring and summer covered over with a wonder of honeysuckle and roses, with hot bread steaming on the sills and fresh-made cheeses hanging by the doors, and then, in the fall, the houses were festooned with garlands of dried fruits, like maidens in necklaces going to dance. The streets were full of chickens and goats and children, too—but that changed, as you will see—and the nursing mothers would sit on the doorsteps, gossiping, while their bread cooled and while their men were out in the fields.
    We were farmers in Modin, as we are farmers in a thousand other villages up and down the land, and our village lay like a nugget in the center of our vineyards, our wheat fields, our fig trees, and our barley patches.
    In all the world there is no other land as rich as ours, but in all the world there are no other people who till their fields as free men. Whereupon, it is not strange that, talking of many things in Modin, we talked mostly of freedom.
    ***
    My father was Mattathias ben John ben Simon, the Adon; always he had been the Adon. In some villages, one man is the Adon one year, and the next year another. But as long as people cared to recall, my father had been Adon. Even when he spent much of the year at the city, serving the Temple—for as I said we are Kohanim, out of the tribe of Levi and the blood of Aaron—he was still Adon at Modin.
    We knew that. He was our father, but he was the Adon; and when our mother died, when I was twelve years old, he became less our father and more and more the Adon. It was not long after that, I remember, that he made one of his journeys to the Temple, taking the five of us with him for the first time. I have no memory of the Temple or of the city or of the city people before that; yet somehow I remember every detail of that trip—yes, and of the last trip the six of us made to the Temple some years later.
    He woke us while it was yet dark, before the dawn, rooting us out of our pallets while we whimpered and protested and begged for more sleep—a tall, unsmiling, somber-eyed man, his red beard shot through with gray and here and there a streak of pure white, his arms frightening in their massive strength. He was fully dressed, in his long white trousers, his white waistcoat and his beautiful pale blue jacket, belted in with a silk girdle, his wide sleeves folded back. His great shock of hair fell behind almost to his waist, and his beard, uncropped, swept across his bosom like a splendid fan. Never