Free Departure by Howard Fast Page B

it not said in the Book, “Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thy heart?” And is it not also said, “I will also give thee for a light to the Gentiles”?
    Among the Mingoes, we dwelt and traded and among the Delawares, too, and among the Wyandottes and the Shawnees and the Eries and the Miamis and the Kickapoos, and even among the Menomini, where only the French have been, and never did we carry a weapon. “Men do not kill for the sake of killing,” my father answered once to a hunter who could not understand why we didn’t walk in fear of the red savage. “My people walked in fear for too long,” my father said. “I don’t fear what is different.”
    The hunter was one who slew his meat and ate it, even as the red men do, but our law is different. We kept the Law. Would you understand if I told you how we suffered to keep the Law? The Law says that when a beast is slain, it must be with the hand of a holy man, so that the lifeblood will run out as an offering to God rather than as a wanton slaughter of one of His creatures—with God’s will and God’s blessing.
    Long, long, ago, when I was only nine, my father said, “The high holy days are coming, and we have not sat down with our own people since your mother’s death three years ago,” speaking in the old tongue, which he taught me so carefully, being a man of learning. “I would have you pray for your mother’s soul, and I would be with my own people for a little while, there is such a hunger in me.” So we saddled our horses and made the long journey eastward to Philadelphia, where were a handful of our own people. Not that they welcomed us so well, we were two such wild buckskin folk, my father’s great black beard falling to his waist; but we prayed with them and we ate meat with them.
    You would have thought that we were unclean, they were such fine people there in Philadelphia, and when they talked about certain things, politics and who ruled over whom, indeed we sat as silent as the red men in their own woods. What does a man who trades with the Indians know of politics, my father thought? And what is it to a Jew who rules over a land? A Jew is a Jew, whether it be the old world or this new world, where the forest rolls like the sea. But when they talked of the Law and of holy things, then it was different, for my father was a man of learning and when he lifted the meat to his mouth, he pointed out that this was the first meat he or I had eaten in years—and even after that day in Philadelphia, no unclean meat passed our lips.
    I speak of this because I must make you understand my father, the man who traded with the Indians, so you will not judge me too harshly. I am not my father. My father fared forth to a wild land from far-off Poland, and of Poland I know no more than a dream and a legend, nor do I care. With his own hands he buried his wife in the wilderness, and he was mother and father to me, even though he left me with the Indians when I was small, and I lived in their lodges and learned their tongue. I am not like my father. He had a dream, which was to trade with the Indians until there was enough money to buy freedom, peace, security—all those things which, so it goes, only money can buy for a Jew; and because he had that dream, he never knew any comfort and the taste of meat was a strange thing to him. A stream of beaver skins went back to the Company on the donkeys and the flatboats that were owned by the Company, and all of it went to a place called London, and in this place there was a thing called an account .
    Those were names and words and without meaning to me. I cared nothing of the beaver skins and nothing of the acount, but if my father said that these things were of such importance, then indeed they were, even as the Law was. I knew other things; I knew the talk of the Shawnees and Algonquin talk, and I could make palaver with the men of the Six