VOLUME I

CHAPTER I

Nina Balatka was a maiden of Prague, born of Christian parents, and
herself a Christian--but she loved a Jew; and this is her story.

Nina Balatka was the daughter of one Josef Balatka, an old merchant
of Prague, who was living at the time of this story; but Nina's mother
was dead. Josef, in the course of his business, had become closely
connected with a certain Jew named Trendellsohn, who lived in a mean
house in the Jews' quarter in Prague--habitation in that one allotted
portion of the town having been the enforced custom with the Jews then,
as it still is now. In business with Trendellsohn, the father, there
was Anton, his son; and Anton Trendellsohn was the Jew whom Nina
Balatka loved. Now it had so happened that Josef Balatka, Nina's
father, had drifted out of a partnership with Karil Zamenoy, a wealthy
Christian merchant of Prague, and had drifted into a partnership with
Trendellsohn. How this had come to pass needs not to be told here, as
it had all occurred in years when Nina was an infant. But in these
shiftings Balatka became a ruined man, and at the time of which I write
he and his daughter were almost penniless. The reader must know that
Karil Zamenoy and Josef Balatka had married sisters. Josef's wife,
Nina's mother, had long been dead, having died--so said Sophie Zamenoy,
her sister--of a broken heart; of a heart that had broken itself in
grief, because her husband had joined his fortunes with those of a Jew.
Whether the disgrace of the alliance or its disastrous result may have
broken the lady's heart, or whether she may have died of a pleurisy, as
the doctors said, we need not inquire here. Her soul had been long at
rest, and her spirit, we may hope, had ceased to fret itself in horror
at contact with a Jew. But Sophie Zamenoy was alive and strong, and
could still hate a Jew as intensely as Jews ever were hated in those
earlier days in which hatred could satisfy itself with persecution. In
her time but little power was left to Madame Zamenoy to persecute the
Trendellsohns other than that which nature had given to her in the
bitterness of her tongue. She could revile them behind their back, or,
if opportunity offered, to their faces; and both she had done often,
telling the world of Prague that the Trendellsohns had killed her
sister, and robbed her foolish brother-in-law. But hitherto the full
vial of her wrath had not been emptied, as it came to be emptied
afterward