Free My Glorious Brothers by Howard Fast Page A

decision was reached to hasten and complete Hellenization of the province. Certain measures must be taken, and decisions will be enforced—lawfully and justly, of course, but enforced—and, naturally, defaulters will be punished.”
    Apelles took a deep breath, wrinkled his nose, and arranged and patted the folds of his yellow mantle. One fat little hand sought in his sleeve and found his handkerchief and touched it delicately to each nostril.
    â€œBut there will be no defaulters,” he smiled. “You will recognize that the vile superstitions of your religion and what you call your Law place an insurmountable barrier before civilization. Dietary rules in particular are considered an affront to all Greeks; you will cease to practice them. Reading and writing serve merely to extend and deepen all other vile practices of Jews; your schools will be permanently closed. And since the repository of superstition and ignorance among you are your five books of Moses, these books will be neither read nor intoned. To enforce the last provision, my men will enter your synagogue, obtain your scrolls, and publicly burn them. By order of the King,” he finished—with one delicate flick of his handkerchief.
    Ruth stood beside me, and I recall the pressure of her fingers on my arm as Apelles finished speaking. But I watched the Adon; I never took my eyes off him, and I knew that somewhere in that crowd Eleazar and Jonathan and John were watching him—as everyone else was—for him to say whether this was the end or not. And as had happened the last time, the Adon never moved. Not by the flicker of a muscle or an eyelid did he betray what he felt. A mercenary stood by him; mercenaries ringed the people; and twenty mounted mercenaries sat on their horses watchfully, bows strung, arrows loosely held in their fingers.
    We stood there while four of Apelles’s men went into the synagogue, tore down the draperies behind the pulpit, and brought out the seventeen scrolls of the Law that belonged to Modin. How well I knew those scrolls! How well every man and woman and child in the village knew them! I had read from them from the time I was able to read; I had pressed my lips to them; I had fingered the ancient parchment and traced out the black Hebrew words. Eight of the scrolls had been brought from Babylon hundreds of years ago, when the Jews returned from the long exile. Three of them were said to date back to the kingdom of David, and one was said to have been David ben Jesse’s own, annotated by his own hand. With what loving care they had been preserved, each of them receiving every seven years a new envelope of the finest silk, stitched with stitches too small to be seen by the naked eye, and embroidered all over! How well they had been hidden through catastrophe, fire and flame! And they were now to be burned by the perverted servant of a pervert—in the name of civilization!
    A moan of agony went up from the people as the scrolls were thrown carelessly on a pile of hay. A mercenary went into one of the houses, returned with a jug of olive oil, knocked off the head, and poured it over the scrolls; another mercenary found a coal in a fireplace, fanned it, and then set the oil-soaked pile on fire.
    Borne by his slaves, Apelles was already on his way—and still the people watched the Adon. I think it would have been the end of the village, of every living soul in it, if my father had been anything else than the man he was. I can’t tell what went on inside of him; I can only guess. I watched him and saw his body tense, become rigid, and vibrate a little—but not enough for the people to notice, since they said afterwards that Mattathias stood like stone. It was not stone, but a man whose heart bled as Apelles and his mercenaries marched away. The horsemen waited; watching the pile of burning scrolls, watching the people, they sat with notched arrows, dirty men on ill-kept beasts, men who