To Die in Jerusalem by Israel Zangwill

Such disappointment as often befalls the visionary when he sees the land of his dreams was spared to the Maggid, who remained a visionary even in the presence of the real; beholding with spiritual eye the refuse-laden alleys and the rapacious _Schnorrers_ (beggars). He lived enswathed as with heavenly love, waiting for the moment of transition to the shining World-To-Come, and his supplications at the Wailing Wall for the restoration of Zion's glory had, despite their sympathetic fervour, the peaceful impersonality of one who looks forward to no worldly kingdom. To outward view he lived -- in the rare intervals when he was not at a synagogue or a house-of-learning -- somewhere up a dusky staircase in a bleak, narrow court, in one tiny room supplemented by a kitchen in the shape of a stove on the landing, itself a centre of pilgrimage to _Schnorrers_ innumerable, for whom the rich English Maggid was an unexpected windfall.

Rich and English were synonymous in hungry Jerusalem, but these beggars' notion of charity was so modest, and the coin of the realm so divisible, that the Maggid managed to gratify them at a penny a dozen. At uncertain intervals he received a letter from Miriam, written in English. The daughter had not carried on the learned tradition of the mother, and so the Maggid was wont to have recourse to the head of the philanthropic technical school for the translation of her news into Hebrew. There was, however, not much of interest; Miriam's world had grown too alien: she could scrape together little to appeal to the dying man. And so his last ties with the past grew frailer and frailer, even as his body grew feebler and feebler, until at last, bent with great age and infirmity, so that his white beard swept the stones, he tottered about the sacred city like an incarnation of its holy ruin. He seemed like one bent over the verge of eternity, peering wistfully into its soundless depths.