My Glorious Brothers Read Free Page A

in my life have I known or seen a man like my father, Mattathias; my earliest pictures of God substituted him. Mattathias was Adon, God was Adonai; I grouped them together; and sometimes, may He forgive me, I still do.
    Sleepy, excited, and terrified with the prospect of our trip, we crawled into our clothes, went out into the cold to wash, came back and gulped the hot gruel John had prepared, combed our hair, wrapped ourselves in our long, striped woolen cloaks even as the Adon did with his, five stunted figures striped in black and one giant, and followed him out. The village was just waking when the Adon marched majestically by, and one by one we followed him, John first, then I, Simon; then Judas, then Eleazar, and finally the small, already gasping figure of Jonathan—only eight years old.
    And that way, for thirteen long, cruel, bitter miles, up hill and down dale, I and my brothers kept pace with the Adon to the gates of the holy city, the one city we call our own—Jerusalem.
    ***
    To a Jew, there is a time when he first sees Jerusalem—and how shall I explain that? Other peoples live in cities and look down on the countryside, but from the countryside we look at our city. Then, even then, you understand, we were a conquered people—not conquered the way we were later, not on the basis that Jew and all that Jew means must be wiped from the face of the earth forever, but under the heel of the Macedonian, subject and abject, allowed to live in peace as long as we did not mar the peace. They didn’t want us for slaves; there is a saying among the Gentiles, “Take a Jew for a slave and he’ll be your master yet,” but they wanted our wealth, the glass we make in our furnaces on the shores of the Dead Sea, our Lebanon suede, soft as butter yet enduring, our cedarwood, so fragrant and red, our great cisterns of olive oil, our dyes, our paper and our parchment, our finely woven linen, and the endless crops, so fruitful that, even on the seventh year when all the land lies fallow, no one hungers. So they taxed us and milked us and robbed us, but left us, at least for the time being, an illusion of tranquillity and liberty.
    That in the villages. In the city it was something else, and that time, still a boy, walking with my brothers behind the Adon, I saw the first evidence of what men call Hellenization. The city was like a white jewel—or so it seems now, so long after—proud and high and lovely, its streets flushed by water from the great aqueducts that had brought water to our Temple from a time before any Roman dreamed of such a thing, its towers high and proud, its Temple the grand crown of the rest. But its people were a new thing, clean-shaven, bare-legged, as the Greeks go, many of them naked to the waist, watching us, sneering at us.
    â€œAre they Jews?” I asked my father.
    â€œThey were Jews,” he said, his voice ringing loud enough for anyone within a score of paces to hear. “They are scum today!”
    And then we strode on, the Adon with the same, steady measured pace he had kept from Modin, but we children, ready to drop with weariness, climbing higher and higher, past the lovely white buildings of the city—past the Greek stadium where naked Jews threw the discus and ran races; past the cafés, the restaurants, the hasheesh houses; through the exciting, bewildering turmoil of painted women with one breast hanging bare, Bedouin merchants, pimps and prostitutes, desert Arabs, Greeks, Syrians, Egyptians, Phoenicians; and everywhere, of course, the arrogant, swaggering mercenaries, the Macedonian troops—all colors, all races, these mercenaries, united only by the one and simple fact that their business was murder, for which they were paid and armored and fed.
    To us children, it was one gorgeous tapestry; only later the parts sorted out. To us, there was only one recognizable factor, the mercenaries. Those we knew and understood. The rest was the