Free My Glorious Brothers by Howard Fast

for mine. Moses ben Aaron had traveled and seen things, a rare matter with us who are close rooted to our own soil and not a people of commerce like the Greeks or Phoenicians. He had been to the great wine bazaars in Gebel and Tyre, and even to Alexandria where they will pay almost any price for a Judean vintage. He had seen the purple slaves of the Mediterranean coast, and the yellow-haired German mercenaries of the Romans. He had seen black men and brown men, and he liked to talk about it. Yet always he said:
    â€œSimon ben Mattathias, there is so much a man can travel and no more, for when his belly is full of slavery and cruelty, he has to go away from the nokri and come to his own; otherwise the world spins, as if the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob turned his face away, and there is nothing but the greed for money and more money, power and more power…”
    With Ruth, I talked of the child that would be ours. Deborah if she were a girl and David if he were a man. If she had been beautiful before, there was a new glow to her beauty now. Even in our village of Modin, where they had seen her in swaddling clothes, where they had seen her grow and mature, even here she was new and people turned their heads to look after her, and said, “That is a queen of old Israel, a red Kohan of the ancient times.” And when the old men met me on the street, along with “Shalom” (Peace) they said to me, “Breed a race of kings, God willing.”
    When we were alone on the hillside, she would sing in her deep, rich voice that love song that comes from a time out of memory:
    For love is strong as death…
    Many waters cannot quench love,
    Neither can the floods drown it:
    If a man would give all the substance of his house for love,
    It would utterly be contemned.
    So it was and so it finished; that was a long time ago, and tears dry like everything else. I spoke before of how it became worse, not all at once but bit by bit, so that in the two or three weeks that elapsed between the visits of Apelles the warden, or one of his men, we could forget, we could resume our lives. Modin was spared longer than other villages. Our taxes became heavier; we were insulted more frequently and the insults became a little worse, and once the Rabbi Enoch was whipped almost to death. But it was nothing that we couldn’t bear. And then, when Judas had been gone five weeks, Apelles himself returned with one hundred men and called all the village folk into the town square.
    A curious man, Apelles; he thrived on cruelty the way normal people thrive on love and gentleness. It was not merely that he was perverted; the perversion reversed things in him. He had become fatter since he was warden; he had become jollier; he was the image of a full and satisfied man. The killing of Jews, the whipping of Jews, the torturing of Jews, was meat and drink to him—and you could see that as he hopped out of his litter, tossed back his yellow mantle and flicked his little pink skirt. He was a happy man, and he smiled at us before he explained his current visit.
    â€œA nice village, Modin,” he lisped, “but too fruitful, too fruitful. We must see to that. My friend, the Adon!” he called.
    My father came forward and stood in front of the people. The past months had wrought a great change in him. His beard was white. His gray eyes were paler than ever, and all over his face there was a network of deep wrinkles. Nor was his giant frame as upright as once; he had lost height; there was a quality of defeat and default about him that had increased slowly but steadily in all the time Judas was gone. Now, wrapped in his striped cloak, he stood silently and impassively before Apelles.
    â€œYou will be pleased to know,” Apelles said, his voice high and eager, “that the King of Kings has devoted considerable thought to the Jews. At the last meeting of his council—and I am proud to note that I participated—a