Little Humans
One day shortly after her
return Deborah decided that the time had come to take down Menuchim’s basket
from the ceiling. Not without
solemnity she turned the little one over to the older children. ‘You must take him walking!’ said
Deborah. ‘When he gets tired you
must carry him. In God’s name,
don’t let him fall! The holy man
has said that he will get strong.
Do him no harm! From now on
the children’s troubles began.
They dragged Menuchim like a
misfortune through the town. They
let him lie, they let him fall.
They ill endured the scorn of their comrades who tagged after them when
they took Menuchim walking. The
little one had to be carried between his two brothers. He could not put one foot before the
other like a human being. His legs
shook like two broken hoops, he stopped in his tracks, he collapsed. Finally Jonas and Shemariah let him
lie. They stuck him in a corner,
half-covered by a sack. There he
played with pebbles and with the dung of dogs and horses. He ate everything. He scratched the lime from the walls
and stuffed his mouth full of it, then coughed until he was blue in the
face. He lay in the corner like a
scrap of rubbish.
Sometimes he would start to
cry. Then the boys would send
Miriam to him to comfort him.
Dainty, coquettish, with thin hopping legs, ugly hate and disgust in her
heart, she would approach her ridiculous brother. The delicacy with which she stroked his distorted ash-grey
countenance had something murderous in it. She would look about carefully, right and left, and then
pinch her brother in the thigh. He
would yell and neighbours would look out of the windows. She pulled down her mouth in an
expression of grief. Everybody had
pity on her and asked her what was the matter.
One rainy summer day the
children dragged Menuchim out of the house and stuck him in a vat, in which
rainwater had collected for half a year.
Maggots swam about in it, decayed fruit and mouldy bread crusts. They held him by his crooked legs and
pushed his broad grey head a dozen times into the water. Then, with pounding hearts and glowing
cheeks, they pulled him out in the joyful and gruesome expectation that they
were holding a corpse. But Menuchim
lived… (from Joseph Roth’s Job)
The cruelty of children. How quickly we forget…
Thus we have the moral panic over a child killer, and all the old
moralising about societal decline that accompanies the investigation and trial,
like petty gossip in a funeral cortege.
The surprise is that more children are not locked up for murder. Is it the strength of life, so vital
when young, that protects the victim, enabling Menuchim to bounce back up again
and again like a rubber ball?
Despite all the horror stories is it actually very hard to kill a
child? That is, after the first
few vulnerable months (a time when mothers have relatively little maternal
feeling for the baby; to allow for the possibility of infant mortality; an historically common
occurrence).[i]
We see children as innocent and fragile. But are they really? Might they not be tough and cruel, and
it is the adults who are actually the sentimentalists, projecting all their
innocence onto what are little more than domesticated beasts. Is that why some
men and women do not like children: they are afraid of the wild animal…[ii]
Later in the novel the brothers and sisters come to accept
the disabled Menuchim, and even to love him; for by now he is incorporated into
the habit of their lives, part of a family to which they are bound by affection. Shemariah,
Jonas and Miriam are not amoral murderers, but simply vibrant children
constrained by the familial chains of caring for their feeble brother. He holds them back. He denies their freedom; and makes them
a subject of ridicule for their closest friends. He is a dam holding back an overflowing reservoir; and he is
too weak to protect himself. So
life must have its say. The water
must run. And Menuchim must be
tormented by his loved ones.
[ii] “I found it very helpful that I had at that time so
much animal behaviour going on all around me, upstairs, in the garden and on
the hearthrug. Small children are
so literally and unmistakably both animals and human beings that they show up
the absurdity of refusing to bring these two notions together.” (Mary Midgley, The
Owl of Minerva):
However,
Midgley argues against the popular conception of animals as aggressive and
irrational, instead she writes of their generally civilised behaviour; although
there are significant differences across the species. Man, she suggests, tends towards the more violent end of the
spectrum:
“The
restraint apparent in wolves seems to be found in most other social carnivores,
and well armed vegetarian creatures too.
Where murder is so easy, a species must have an adequate inhibition
against it… Solitary animals and those less strongly armed do not need this
defense. Lorenz gives chilling
examples form roe deer and doves, in both of which species stronger members
will slowly murder weaker ones if kept in captivity with them, because in a free
state these creatures save themselves by running away, not by relying on the
victor’s inhibition. And it is
clear that man is in some ways nearer to this group than the wolf. (Beast
and Man)”
Later,
man acquired weapons and thus became more dangerous. Although a counter-trend is increasing number, and its
associated urbanisation, creating inhibitions that reduce potential violence.
That is, the more organised human life becomes the closer it gets to the
cooperative societies of the more social animals, and where inter species
violence is reduced by finding ways of displacing it through gesture and
symbolic action.
So
if these children’s actions are not beastly what exactly are they? Humanity in its purest form? Do they represent our distant
ancestors; those hunter gathers some people appear to like so much?
The
above passage suggests something much more complicated. Mendel Singer’s
children acted because of a conflict within their natures – between the
vitality of their being, a desire to just be and act, and the adult command
that they restrain themselves to look after a weak brother. Trapped within the cage of such adult
responsibility they rebelled… Their actions arose out of the situation. Moreover, one could argue that it is
the parents who are to blame, that their judgement was at fault, by expecting
too much from their children; by giving them too much authority and believing
them more sympathetic than they could possibly be. That is, Mendel and Deborah wanted Miriam and her brothers
to be human when they were still overwhelming animal.
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