“Scissors to grind! Knives, axes, or saws to sharpen! Everything made as sharp as new!” This is the cry, uttered in a clear and cheerful voice, which is frequently heard in the alleys and back yards as well as the streets and avenues of that vast and densely populated section of the American metropolis known as the great East Side. The man who utters it is an unusually agreeable, as well as active and energetic, representative of the classic trade of scissors-grinding. He is a pleasant-faced, good-humored young fellow, with light-brown hair and rounded, open countenance, from which a pair of bright blue eyes gaze at you with a frank and sympathetic expression. His shabby clothes hang most gracefully on his lithe and erect, not over tall figure; his motions have a sort of trained elegance about them, and when he stands before you with his grinding machine on his back, he seems not so much an humble sharpener of domestic utensils, but rather some strange sort of soldier, and the machine upon his back some peculiar and unusual engine of warfare. He is very well liked in the entire district, and his popularity brings in sufficient trade to insure him a very fair living. When his clear and musical cry is heard anywhere in the neighborhood, the customers pour forth from the many-storied tenements, the cellar dwellings (I had almost written cave dwellings, which term would hardly have rendered me liable to a suit for libel if I had used it), and the little shops and stalls which abound everywhere in the vicinity. Soon he is surrounded by a motley throng—Jews, Italians, Poles, Bohemians, men, women, and children, all sorts and conditions of mankind—who bring him a miscellaneous collection of invalid table knives, dilapidated carving knives, superannuated scissors, and antediluvian saws, all of which he is expected to heal and to restore to their pristine brightness and sharpness.  
THE SCISSORS GRINDER
 
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187But, though our friend is well known and popular in the district, he is nevertheless unknown. By this paradoxical statement is meant that, although the scissors-grinder is personally a familiar and well-esteemed figure, nothing is known by the vast bulk of his constituents and customers of his connections, his history, or his antecedents. This is nothing strange or unusual 188in that section. People are not, as a rule, curious concerning each other on the East Side. The inhabitants are mostly not native to the soil, but are a chance aggregation from all the countries of the civilized world, driven from their native habitats by the storm and stress of harsh experiences and brought together in the New World by the glittering attractions of the Golden Land. It is not always advisable under such circumstances to be over-inquisitive concerning the past history of one’s neighbors and friends, and therefore the dwellers on the East Side are discreetly devoid of curiosity, and are quite content if the people with whom they associate are, in their present stage of life, decent and well behaved. That is why no one knows (or knew until recently) anything about the scissors-grinder—his history, his family, or even his name. Nevertheless his story came out some time ago, and it proved to be, what no one would have anticipated from the scissors-grinder’s blithe and pleasant appearance, a real moral tragedy, a tale of blind, medi?val oppression, of high ambition suddenly blasted, of strange and sublime heroism. It came out through Mendel Greenberger.
Mendel, who keeps a little optician shop in Orchard Street near Grand, is considerable of a 189character himself, and, unlike the majority of the denizens of the region, is gifted with a lively curiosity concerning the persons with whom he comes in contact. Mendel has travelled pretty much all over the world, and has acquired in the course of his wanderings the knowledge of a dozen or more languages and of at least three trades. But what he most prides himself on is his menschenkenntniss, that is, his ability to recognize at a glance the origin of strangers whom he sees for the first time, and to classify them according to the racial, religious, and social elements or subdivisions thereof to which they belong. This he infers from the appearance, conduct, and speech of the individuals concerned, and, in particularly interesting cases, he manages to have them reveal their names and other personal details of interest, but without asking direct questions, which he thinks impertinent.
When the scissors-grinder began to come into the neighborhood and Mendel began to give him employment in his vocation, he at once recognized that here was an interesting and extremely puzzling personality. It was a real problem of the kind Mendel Greenberger loved to solve, but it defied his powers of analysis and classification. For the life of him he could not 190make out who or what the handsome, pleasant-spoken young man, with the lowly trade apparently so unsuited for him, was. His type was absolutely non-distinctive. As far as appearance went there was no telling whether he was Jew or Gentile, and no reason to assign him to any one European nation rather than another. His conduct and manner were just as little guide, for, though polite and manifestly well-bred, he had no mannerisms of any kind. Baffled by his inability to “locate” his new acquaintance by these usually infallible indications, Mendel resorted to the expedient of addressing him in various languages. But here Mendel “tripped up,” so to speak, even more emphatically than before. The scissors-grinder spoke, with one exception, every European language which Mendel did, but with superior accent and correcter grammar. His English was that of one to the manner born, though devoid of either Cockney accent or Yankee twang; his French would have done credit to any boulevardier; his German was as faultlessly exact in construction and pronunciation as that of any compatriot of Goethe or Schiller; and as for Italian, Spanish, Russian, Polish, and Hungarian, to say nothing of the minor tongues, Bohemian, Roumanian, Servian, Greek, Turkish, he spoke them all with 191perfect ease and fluency. It mattered not in what tongue the puzzled Mendel addressed him, the scissors-grinder always answered in the same, but without betraying any surprise and as though it were the natural and to-be-expected thing to speak any and every idiom in existence. But, as already stated, there was one exception to the polyglot ability of the scissors-grinder. He did not know Yiddish, for when Mendel addressed him in that tongue, he did not understand him well and answered in German, the tongue most nearly related to the dialect of the Jews of the Slavonic lands, and without using any Hebrew words or phrases with which even the German Jews habitually interlard their speech. Mendel had to confess to himself that the scissors-grinder was an enigma, which even he, with his great knowledge of human beings, could not solve. Of two things, however, he felt certain: first, that the scissors-grinder was originally of far higher social station than his humble vocation would suggest, for his manners and bearing, and, above all, his extraordinary linguistic attainments, were only explainable on the ground of refined surroundings and the best of education; secondly, that he was no Jew, for his ignorance of Yiddish and Hebrew and his manifest unfamiliarity with Jewish ideas and 192usages showed conclusively that he had had no Jewish bringing up nor had ever associated intimately with Jewish circles.
Mendel at first conjectured that the scissors-grinder was a nobleman of some European nation, who had been compelled to leave his native land for a political or other reason, and was obliged to support himself by his own labor in exile. Noblemen in exile do not, however, usually select a vocation requiring as much skill and industry and withal so low in the social scale as scissors-grinding, so on second thought Mendel abandoned this conjecture as untenable, and, not being able to set up any more satisfactory one, found himself, as far as this question was concerned, vis à vis de rien. Not feeling able to remain in this condition, he cast about for other means of solving the problem and gratifying his curiosity. He determined to ask the scissors-grinder’s name. Names, it is true, may be assumed, but Mendel thought that even an assumed name would be some sort of clew to its bearer’s identity, for it would, at least, indicate to what nation or class the bearer considered himself and desired to have others consider him as belonging. Accordingly when next the scissors-grinder appeared in the neighborhood of Mendel’s shop and was bringing back finely 193renovated the penknife which Mendel had given him to sharpen, the latter remarked: “Fine weather we are having to-day, Mr. ——!” and paused with expectant air.
“My name,” said the scissors-grinder quietly, “is Eliezer Schwartzfeld.”
Mendel gazed at him in undisguised astonishment. “That sounds extremely Jewish,” he said. “You are not one of the chosen people, are you?”
“Yes, I am a Jew,” answered the scissors-grinder, with just a suggestion of a smile at Mendel’s evident surprise; “a Russian Jew at that, too.”
Mendel’s astonishment increased to a degree that was absolutely comical. Here was an utterly inexplicable case. It was not that the scissors-grinder’s physiognomy did not contain a feature that suggested the Semite—that was common enough, especially among Russian Jews; but what might be called the psychology of the case was utterly baffling to Mendel. He had often met Jews that were well educated and spoke a number of languages with fluency, but in all his experience he had never come across one who had not at least some, however slight, acquaintance with the Jewish mother tongues, Yiddish or Hebrew. He had frequently come 194in contact with Jews, well and gently reared in their native lands, who had been forced by adverse circumstances to earn their bread by humble labor in America; but they had invariably found employment in some one of the so-called “Jewish” branches of industry, tailoring, cloak-making, cigar-packing, or the like, which open at least the door to a future as an independent manufacturer or merchant. But something so plebeian and hopeless as scissors-grinding, and embraced, too, by a man of evident refinement—why, that was utterly anomalous, unheard of! He gazed at the scissors-grinder without uttering a word, but with eyes which told unmistakably their tale of amazement.
“You are surprised,” said the latter, “I suppose, because I, though a Jew, do not speak Yiddish, and because I found nothing better to do than to sharpen scissors and knives. Let me tell you my story and you will wonder no longer. I can recollect very little of my earliest childhood. My mother must have died, I think, when I was hardly more than an infant, for all I can recollect of her is a picture, very dim and faint, of a sweet, motherly face bending over me and of a tender, loving voice calling me darling and dove. My father, too, must have left this earth when I was only about four or 195five years of age. My memories of him, too, are few and indistinct. I can recall that I was a very small child in charge of an old, cross-tempered woman, a Jewess, I think, who treated me with a strange alternation of cruelty and kindness. My father used to visit me at rare intervals in this place, and bring me sweetmeats and little presents, and I can remember that on these occasions he was always dressed in a brilliant uniform, which filled my childish heart with admiration and awe. My most distinct recollection concerning my father is of the circumstances attending his death. He was brought to the house one day with blood-stained bandages around his head and breast and with face ghastly pale. They laid him upon a couch, and for several days physicians came to treat him, and men dressed in even brighter and finer uniforms than his came to visit him, and some of them chucked me under the chin and called me a fine little fellow. Then one day he called me to his bedside and said to me, in such a faint voice that I had to put my ear to his mouth in order to catch his words: ‘Eliezer, my darling boy, I am going to die and must leave you alone in the world. But I have spoken to good people, and they have promised me to care for you and to see 196that you are educated to become what your father was—a soldier—but a higher and nobler one than he could be. Always be good and honorable in all your doings, and above all, my son, never forget, wherever you may be or whatever you may become, that you are a Jew, as your father was, and never permit anything to swerve you from your faithfulness to the holy traditions of our religion and people.’ Then he kissed me on my brow, and, child though I was, I knew that something dreadful was going to happen, and burst forth into an agony of bitter weeping that shook my little frame convulsively. That same night he died, and the day after the next he was taken away in the midst of a great concourse of people, among whom were many Jewish men and women whom I knew not, and who wept and cried aloud as they accompanied the funeral procession. There was also a long line of soldiers, who marched with flags draped and guns reversed, and in front of whom went musicians and drummers with crape-covered drums, who played together a sad, funereal strain as they marched. I was left behind, gazing out of the window at the funeral procession as long as it was in sight, weeping as though my very heart would break and feeling that I was left all alone now in the world, without 197friend, protector, or well-wisher. But the same afternoon a kindly spoken, friendly looking officer, attired in a brilliant uniform, came to my lodgings, told the old woman who had charge of me that he was Col. Ivan Mentchikoff, and that he had been appointed legal guardian of Corporal Schwartzfeld’s son and had come to take me away. I noticed that the old woman did not seem satisfied, and grumbled something to herself with a discontented air, but she did not audibly object, but took the money which the colonel offered her. She then packed together my little belongings, carried them down to the carriage which was waiting at the door, and the colonel and I entered and drove off to the railroad station, whence we left for the colonel’s home, which was in the town of Yellisavetgrad, many miles away. I remained with the family of the colonel for eight or nine years. I was treated with the utmost kindness—in fact, in all regards, except one, exactly like the children of the family. Colonel Mentchikoff was very particular in regard to the education of his children. He kept the best of private tutors for all subjects, and was especially insistent that they should learn all the chief European languages, a knowledge of which, he declared, was essential 198to a Russian gentleman. I had, of course, the advantage of all this, the same as all the others, and I quickly discovered that I had a special linguistic talent, and, while I easily kept pace with the Mentchikoff boys and girls in all the subjects of instruction generally, as regards the acquisition of languages I was so superior that I could not be compared with them at all. It was no trouble at all to me to acquire a new language; the forms seemed to impress themselves naturally on my mind, and my memory retained with the greatest ease the multitudes of new terms and expressions which each tongue presented.
 
I WAS LEFT BEH............