My Glorious Brothers by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online Page A

venerable of old Israel.
    He hefted the sword, as if he was taking the weight of it, the feel and balance of it, so that he would remember when the time came. Then, still moving silently, he went to an alcove where we kept the big earthenware jugs of olive oil. He took off the cover of one of these jugs and placed the sword inside, in the oil, and then put the cover back. There it was safe and close at hand.
    I rolled over and slept.
    ***
    It was about two weeks after that, a little less perhaps, or a little more, that three women, half-naked, disheveled, their feet bleeding, staggered into Modin. One of them carried a dead baby at her bosom; one was young and one was very old—and they were the beginning of a stream of refugees that poured into Modin and into every other village in the neighborhood over a period of four or five days.
    They all told the same short, tragic story. They were from Jerusalem; they were city people. Many of them had given up thinking of themselves as Jews. They were prepared to become Greek and more Greek. They were civilized people. They were cultured people. They had passed beyond the wearing of beards, of linen pants, of striped cloaks. They wore tunics, they went bare-legged. Many of them underwent painful operations to remove the signs of circumcision. Many of them spoke Greek and pretended to be ill at ease with the Hebrew or the Aramaic. Therefore, what happened was all the more terrible to them.
    Antiochus Epiphanes, the King of Kings, who ruled all the land from Antioch, appointed a new general for Jerusalem. His name was Apollonius, and on a larger scale he was to Jerusalem what Apelles was to Modin. He came in with ten thousand mercenaries instead of eighty, and he was largely unappreciative of the culture of the New Jew. In any case, on the Sabbath day, he told his mercenaries to go into the streets for their pay and to take it with their swords—on God’s day, the day when no Jew will raise an arm for his defense. All day long, the mercenaries killed; they killed until they could no longer lift their arms. They cut off fingers for rings, arms for bracelets. They turned the city into a butcher shop, and the half-crazed, half-hysterical survivors told us how the streets ran ankle-deep in blood. Then they broke into the Temple and sacrificed swine on the altar.
    And of one man who told the tale my father asked: “And where was Menelaus, the high priest?”
    â€œApollonius bought him.”
    My father hated and always had hated the high priest, who wore a Greek name and Greek garb, but this he would not believe.
    â€œYou’re lying!”
    â€œAs God is my witness! For three talents, he bought him—and Menelaus prayed over the swine’s blood.”
    â€œIt’s true,” others said.
    My father went to his house. He went to the hearth, took a handful of ashes and rubbed them into his face and hair. Then, with the tears flowing, he said the prayer for the dead.
    ***
    Judas told me. “Bathe and dress yourself,” he said. “The Adon is going to the Temple, and we go with him.”
    â€œIs he mad?”
    â€œYou ask him that. I’ve never seen him the way he is.”
    I went to my father with the words on my tongue, Are you mad? Will you risk your lives and ours? Is there profit in putting your head into the lion’s den?— all this and more I had on my tongue; and when I saw his face, I said nothing.
    â€œBathe, Simon,” he said to me gently, “and anoint yourself with oil and spices, for we go to God’s Temple.”
    So again and for the last time, Mattathias and his five sons went to the Temple in Jerusalem. As so many times in the past, we walked in a line, the old man, the Adon, first, and then my brother John, and then I, Simon, and then my brother Judas, and then my brother Eleazar, and lastly, Jonathan.
    And we were men, and the old times were done. Even Jonathan was no boy; a few weeks had taken the