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Title: The Spirit of the Ghetto
       Studies of the Jewish Quarter in New York

Author: Hutchins Hapgood

Illustrator: Jacob Epstein

Release Date: October 11, 2012 [EBook #41028]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

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Transcriber's Note:

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  On page 70, "enlightment" should possibly be "enlightenment".




     _The_
     Spirit
     _of the_
     Ghetto




     THE SPIRIT of
     THE GHETTO

     STUDIES OF THE JEWISH
     QUARTER IN NEW YORK

     By
     HUTCHINS HAPGOOD

     _With Drawings from Life by
     JACOB EPSTEIN_

     NEW YORK AND LONDON
     FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY

     _NINETEEN HUNDRED AND TWO_




     Copyright, 1902
     by
     Funk & Wagnalls
     Company

     Printed in the
     United States of America

     Published
     November, 1902




NOTE


A number of these chapters have appeared as separate articles in "The
Atlantic Monthly," "The Critic," "The Bookman," "The World's Work,"
"The Boston Transcript," and "The Evening Post" and "The Commercial
Advertiser" of New York. To the editors of these publications thanks
for permission to republish are gratefully tendered by

     THE AUTHOR.




PREFACE


The Jewish quarter of New York is generally supposed to be a place of
poverty, dirt, ignorance and immorality--the seat of the sweat-shop,
the tenement house, where "red-lights" sparkle at night, where the
people are queer and repulsive. Well-to-do persons visit the "Ghetto"
merely from motives of curiosity or philanthropy; writers treat of it
"sociologically," as of a place in crying need of improvement.

That the Ghetto has an unpleasant aspect is as true as it is trite.
But the unpleasant aspect is not the subject of the following
sketches. I was led to spend much time in certain poor resorts of
Yiddish New York not through motives either philanthropic or
sociological, but simply by virtue of the charm I felt in men and
things there. East Canal Street and the Bowery have interested me more
than Broadway and Fifth Avenue. Why, the reader may learn from the
present volume--which is an attempt made by a "Gentile" to report
sympathetically on the character, lives and pursuits of certain
east-side Jews with whom he has been in relations of considerable
intimacy.

     THE AUTHOR.




CONTENTS


     Chapter I                                        Page
     The Old and the New                                 9

       The Old Man
       The Boy
       The "Intellectuals"


     Chapter II
     Prophets without Honor                             44

       Submerged Scholars: A Man of God--A Bitter
         Prophet--A Calm Student
       The Poor Rabbis: Their Grievances--The "Genuine"
         Article--A Down-Town Specimen--The Neglected
         Type


     Chapter III
     The Old and New Woman                              71

       The Orthodox Jewess: Devotion and Customs
       The Modern Type: Passionate Socialists--Confirmed
         Blue-Stockings
       Place of Woman in Ghetto Literature


     Chapter IV
     Four Poets                                         90

       A Wedding Bard
       A Champion of Race
       A Singer of Labor
       A Dreamer of Brotherhood


     Chapter V
     The Stage                                         113

       Theatres, Actors, and Audience
       Realism, the Spirit of the Ghetto Theatre
       The History of the Yiddish Stage


     Chapter VI
     The Newspapers                                    177

       The Conservative Journals
       The Socialist Papers
       The Anarchist Papers
       Some Picturesque Contributors


     Chapter VII
     The Sketch-Writers                                199

       Some Realists
       A Cultivated Literary Man
       American Life Through Russian Eyes
       A Satirist of Tenement Society


     Chapter VIII
     A Novelist                                        230


     Chapter IX
     The Young Art and its Exponents                   254


     Chapter X
     Odd Characters                                    272

       An Out-of-date Story-Writer
       A Cynical Inventor
       An Impassioned Critic
       The Poet of Zionism
       An Intellectual Debauchee




Chapter One

The Old and the New


THE OLD MAN

  [Illustration]

No part of New York has a more intense and varied life than the colony
of Russian and Galician Jews who live on the east side and who form
the largest Jewish city in the world. The old and the new come here
into close contact and throw each other into high relief. The
traditions and customs of the orthodox Jew are maintained almost in
their purity, and opposed to these are forms and ideas of modern life
of the most extreme kind. The Jews are at once tenacious of their
character and susceptible to their Gentile environment, when that
environment is of a high order of civilization. Accordingly, in
enlightened America they undergo rapid transformation tho retaining
much that is distinctive; while in Russia, surrounded by an ignorant
peasantry, they remain by themselves, do not so commonly learn the
Gentile language, and prefer their own forms of culture. There their
life centres about religion. Prayer and the study of "the Law"
constitute practically the whole life of the religious Jew.

When the Jew comes to America he remains, if he is old, essentially
the same as he was in Russia. His deeply rooted habits and the "worry
of daily bread" make him but little sensitive to the conditions of his
new home. His imagination lives in the old country and he gets his
consolation in the old religion. He picks up only about a hundred
English words and phrases, which he pronounces in his own way. Some of
his most common acquisitions are "vinda" (window), "zieling"
(ceiling), "never mind," "alle right," "that'll do," "politzman"
(policeman); "_ein schön kind_, ein reg'lar pitze!" (a pretty child, a
regular picture). Of this modest vocabulary he is very proud, for it
takes him out of the category of the "greenhorn," a term of contempt
to which the satirical Jew is very sensitive. The man who has been
only three weeks in this country hates few things so much as to be
called a "greenhorn." Under this fear he learns the small vocabulary
to which in many years he adds very little. His dress receives rather
greater modification than his language. In the old country he never
appeared in a short coat; that would be enough to stamp him as a
"freethinker." But when he comes to New York and his coat is worn out
he is unable to find any garment long enough. The best he can do is to
buy a "cut-away" or a "Prince Albert," which he often calls a "Prince
Isaac." As soon as he imbibes the fear of being called a "greenhorn"
he assumes the "Prince Isaac" with less regret. Many of the old women,
without diminution of piety, discard their wigs, which are strictly
required by the orthodox in Russia, and go even to the synagogue with
nothing on their heads but their natural locks.

The old Jew on arriving in New York usually becomes a sweat-shop
tailor or push-cart peddler. There are few more pathetic sights than
an old man with a long beard, a little black cap on his head and a
venerable face--a man who had been perhaps a Hebraic or Talmudic
scholar in the old country, carrying or pressing piles of coats in the
melancholy sweat-shop; or standing for sixteen hours a day by his
push-cart in one of the dozen crowded streets of the Ghetto, where
the great markets are, selling among many other things apples, garden
stuff, fish and second-hand shirts.

This man also becomes a member of one of the many hundred lodges which
exist on the east side. These societies curiously express at once the
old Jewish customs and the conditions of the new world. They are
mutual insurance companies formed to support sick members. When a
brother is ill the President appoints a committee to visit him. Mutual
insurance societies and committees are American enough, and visiting
the sick is prescribed by the Talmud. This is a striking instance of
the adaptation of the "old" to the "new." The committee not only
condoles with the decrepit member, but gives him a sum of money.

  [Illustration]

Another way in which the life of the old Jew is affected by his New
York environment, perhaps the most important way as far as
intellectual and educative influences are concerned, is through the
Yiddish newspapers, which exist nowhere except in this country. They
keep him in touch with the world's happenings in a way quite
impossible in Europe. At the Yiddish theatres, too, he sees American
customs portrayed, although grotesquely, and the old orthodox things
often satirized to a degree; the "greenhorn" laughed to scorn and the
rabbi held up to derision.

Nevertheless these influences leave the man pretty much as he was when
he landed here. He remains the patriarchal Jew devoted to the law and
to prayer. He never does anything that is not prescribed, and worships
most of the time that he is not at work. He has only one point of
view, that of the Talmud; and his aesthetic as well as his religious
criteria are determined by it. "This is a beautiful letter you have
written me"; wrote an old man to his son, "it smells of Isaiah." He
makes of his house a synagogue, and prays three times a day; when he
prays his head is covered, he wears the black and white praying-shawl,
and the cubes of the phylactery are attached to his forehead and left
arm. To the cubes are fastened two straps of goat-skin, black and
white; those on the forehead hang down, and those attached to the
other cube are wound seven times about the left arm. Inside each cube
is a white parchment on which is written the Hebrew word for God,
which must never be spoken by a Jew. The strength of this prohibition
is so great that even the Jews who have lost their faith are unwilling
to pronounce the word.

  [Illustration]

Besides the home prayers there are daily visits to the synagogue,
fasts and holidays to observe. When there is a death in the family he
does not go to the synagogue, but prays at home. The ten men necessary
for the funeral ceremony, who are partly supplied by the Bereavement
Committee of the Lodge, sit seven days in their stocking-feet on
foot-stools and read Job all the time. On the Day of Atonement the old
Jew stands much of the day in the synagogue, wrapped in a white gown,
and seems to be one of a meeting of the dead. The Day of Rejoicing of
the Law and the Day of Purim are the only two days in the year when an
orthodox Jew may be intoxicated. It is virtuous on these days to drink
too much, but the sobriety of the Jew is so great that he sometimes
cheats his friends and himself by shamming drunkenness. On the first
and second evenings of the Passover the father dresses in a big white
robe, the family gather about him, and the youngest male child asks
the father the reason why the day is celebrated; whereupon the old
man relates the whole history, and they all talk it over and eat, and
drink wine, but in no vessel which has been used before during the
year, for everything must be fresh and clean on this day. The night
before the Passover the remaining leavened bread is gathered together,
just enough for breakfast, for only unleavened bread can be eaten
during the next eight days. The head of the family goes around with a
candle, gathers up the crumbs with a quill or a spoon and burns them.
A custom which has almost died out in New York is for the
congregation to go out of the synagogue on the night of the full moon,
and chant a prayer in the moonlight.

In addition to daily religious observances in his home and in the
synagogues, to fasts and holidays, the orthodox Jew must give much
thought to his diet. One great law is the line drawn between milk
things and meat things. The Bible forbids boiling a kid in the milk of
its mother. Consequently the hair-splitting Talmud prescribes the most
far-fetched discrimination. For instance, a plate in which meat is
cooked is called a meat vessel, the knife with which it is cut is
called a meat knife, the spoon with which one eats the soup that was
cooked in a meat pot, though there is no meat in the soup, is a meat
spoon, and to use that spoon for a milk thing is prohibited. All these
regulations, of course, seem privileges to the orthodox Jew. The
sweat-shops are full of religious fanatics, who, in addition to their
ceremonies at home, form Talmudic clubs and gather in tenement-house
rooms, which they convert into synagogues.

In several of the cafés of the quarter these old fellows gather. With
their long beards, long black coats, and serious demeanor, they sit
about little tables and drink honey-cider, eat lima beans and
jealously exclude from their society the socialists and freethinkers
of the colony who, not unwillingly, have cafés of their own. They all
look poor, and many of them are, in fact, peddlers, shop-keepers or
tailors; but some, not distinguishable in appearance from the
proletarians, have "made their pile." Some are Hebrew scholars, some
of the older class of Yiddish journalists. There are no young people
there, for the young bring irreverence and the American spirit, and
these cafés are strictly orthodox.

  [Illustration]

In spite, therefore, of his American environment, the old Jew of the
Ghetto remains patriarchal, highly trained and educated in a narrow
sectarian direction, but entirely ignorant of modern culture;
medieval, in effect, submerged in old tradition and outworn forms.


THE BOY

The shrewd-faced boy with the melancholy eyes that one sees everywhere
in the streets of New York's Ghetto, occupies a peculiar position in
our society. If we could penetrate into his soul, we should see a
mixture of almost unprecedented hope and excitement on the one hand,
and of doubt, confusion, and self-distrust on the other hand. Led in
many contrary directions, the fact that he does not grow to be an
intellectual anarchist is due to his serious racial characteristics.

Three groups of influences are at work on him--the orthodox Jewish,
the American, and the Socialist; and he experiences them in this
order. He has either been born in America of Russian, Austrian, or
Roumanian Jewish parents, or has immigrated with them when a very
young child. The first of the three forces at work on his character is
religious and moral; the second is practical, diversified,
non-religious; and the third is reactionary from the other two and
hostile to them.

  [Illustration: THE MORNING PRAYER]

Whether born in this country or in Russia, the son of orthodox parents
passes his earliest years in a family atmosphere where the whole duty
of man is to observe the religious law. He learns to say his prayers
every morning and evening, either at home or at the synagogue. At the
age of five, he is taken to the Hebrew private school, the "chaider,"
where, in Russia, he spends most of his time from early morning till
late at night. The ceremony accompanying his first appearance in
"chaider" is significant of his whole orthodox life. Wrapped in a
"talith," or praying shawl, he is carried by his father to the school
and received there by the "melamed," or teacher, who holds out before
him the Hebrew alphabet on a large chart. Before beginning to learn
the first letter of the alphabet, he is given a taste of honey, and
when he declares it to be sweet, he is told that the study of the
Holy Law, upon which he is about to enter, is sweeter than honey.
Shortly afterwards a coin falls from the ceiling, and the boy is told
that an angel dropped it from heaven as a reward for learning the
first lesson.

In the Russian "chaider" the boy proceeds with a further study of the
alphabet, then of the prayer-book, the Pentateuch, other portions of
the Bible, and finally begins with the complicated Talmud. Confirmed
at thirteen years of age, he enters the Hebrew academy and continues
the study of the Talmud, to which, if he is successful, he will devote
himself all his life. For his parents desire him to be a rabbi, or
Talmudical scholar, and to give himself entirely to a learned
interpretation of the sweet law.

  [Illustration: GOING TO THE SYNAGOGUE]

The boy's life at home, in Russia, conforms with the religious
education received at the "chaider." On Friday afternoon, when the
Sabbath begins, and on Saturday morning, when it continues, he is free
from school, and on Friday does errands for his mother or helps in the
preparation for the Sabbath. In the afternoon he commonly bathes,
dresses freshly in Sabbath raiment, and goes to "chaider" in the
evening. Returning from school, he finds his mother and sisters
dressed in their best, ready to "greet the Sabbath." The lights are
glowing in the candlesticks, the father enters with "Good Shabbas" on
his lips, and is received by the grandparents, who occupy the seats of
honor. They bless him and the children in turn. The father then chants
the hymn of praise and salutation; a cup of wine or cider is passed
from one to the other; every one washes his hands; all arrange
themselves at table in the order of age, the youngest sitting at the
father's right hand. After the meal they sing a song dedicated to the
Sabbath, and say grace. The same ceremony is repeated on Saturday
morning, and afterwards the children are examined in what they have
learned of the Holy Law during the week. The numerous religious
holidays are observed in the same way, with special ceremonies of
their own in addition. The important thing to notice is, that the
boy's whole training and education bear directly on ethics and
religion, in the study of which he is encouraged to spend his whole
life.

In a simple Jewish community in Russia, where the "chaider" is the
only school, where the government is hostile, and the Jews are
therefore thrown back upon their own customs, the boy loves his
religion, he loves and honors his parents, his highest ambition is to
be a great scholar--to know the Bible in all its glorious meaning, to
know the Talmudical comments upon it, and to serve God. Above every
one else he respects the aged, the Hebrew scholar, the rabbi, the
teacher. Piety and wisdom count more than riches, talent and power.
The "law" outweighs all else in value. Abraham and Moses, David and
Solomon, the prophet Elijah, are the kind of great men to whom his
imagination soars.

But in America, even before he begins to go to our public schools, the
little Jewish boy finds himself in contact with a new world which
stands in violent contrast with the orthodox environment of his first
few years. Insensibly--at the beginning--from his playmates in the
streets, from his older brother or sister, he picks up a little
English, a little American slang, hears older boys boast of
prize-fighter Bernstein, and learns vaguely to feel that there is a
strange and fascinating life on the street. At this tender age he may
even begin to black boots, gamble in pennies, and be filled with a
"wild surmise" about American dollars.

With his entrance into the public school the little fellow runs plump
against a system of education and a set of influences which are at
total variance with those traditional to his race and with his home
life. The religious element is entirely lacking. The educational
system of the public schools is heterogeneous and worldly. The boy
becomes acquainted in the school reader with fragments of writings on
all subjects, with a little mathematics, a little history. His
instruction, in the interests of a liberal non-sectarianism, is
entirely secular. English becomes his most familiar language. He
achieves a growing comprehension and sympathy with the independent,
free, rather sceptical spirit of the American boy; he rapidly imbibes
ideas about social equality and contempt for authority, and tends to
prefer Sherlock Holmes to Abraham as a hero.

The orthodox Jewish influences, still at work upon him, are rapidly
weakened. He grows to look upon the ceremonial life at home as rather
ridiculous. His old parents, who speak no English, he regards as
"greenhorns." English becomes his habitual tongue, even at home, and
Yiddish he begins to forget. He still goes to "chaider," but under
conditions exceedingly different from those obtaining in Russia, where
there are no public schools, and where the boy is consequently shut up
within the confines of Hebraic education. In America, the "chaider"
assumes a position entirely subordinate. Compelled by law to go to the
American public school, the boy can attend "chaider" only before the
public school opens in the morning or after it closes in the
afternoon. At such times the Hebrew teacher, who dresses in a long
black coat, outlandish tall hat, and commonly speaks no English,
visits the boy at home, or the boy goes to a neighboring "chaider."

Contempt for the "chaider's" teaching comes the more easily because
the boy rarely understands his Hebrew lessons to the full. His real
language is English, the teacher's is commonly the Yiddish jargon, and
the language to be learned is Hebrew. The problem before him is
consequently the strangely difficult one of learning Hebrew, a tongue
unknown to him, through a translation into Yiddish, a language of
growing unfamiliarity, which, on account of its poor dialectic
character, is an inadequate vehicle of thought.

The orthodox parents begin to see that the boy, in order to "get
along" in the New World, must receive a Gentile training. Instead of
hoping to make a rabbi of him, they reluctantly consent to his
becoming an American business man, or, still better, an American
doctor or lawyer. The Hebrew teacher, less convinced of the usefulness
and importance of his work, is in this country more simply commercial
and less disinterested than abroad; a man generally, too, of less
scholarship as well as of less devotion.

  [Illustration: THE "CHAIDER"]

The growing sense of superiority on the part of the boy to the Hebraic
part of his environment extends itself soon to the home. He learns to
feel that his parents, too, are "greenhorns." In the struggle between
the two sets of influences that of the home becomes less and less
effective. He runs away from the supper table to join his gang on the
Bowery, where he is quick to pick up the very latest slang; where his
talent for caricature is developed often at the expense of his
parents, his race, and all "foreigners"; for he is an American, he is
"the people," and like his glorious countrymen in general, he is quick
to ridicule the stranger. He laughs at the foreign Jew with as much
heartiness as at the "dago"; for he feels that he himself is almost as
remote from the one as from the other.

"Why don't you say your evening prayer, my son?" asks his mother in
Yiddish.

"Ah, what yer givin' us!" replies, in English, the little
American-Israelite as he makes a bee-line for the street.

The boys not only talk together of picnics, of the crimes of which
they read in the English newspapers, of prize-fights, of budding
business propositions, but they gradually quit going to synagogue,
give up "chaider" promptly when they are thirteen years old, avoid the
Yiddish theatres, seek the up-town places of amusement, dress in the
latest American fashion, and have a keen eye for the right thing in
neckties. They even refuse sometimes to be present at supper on Friday
evenings. Then, indeed, the sway of the old people is broken.

"Amerikane Kinder, Amerikane Kinder!" wails the old father, shaking
his head. The trend of things is indeed too strong for the old man of
the eternal Talmud and ceremony.

An important circumstance in helping to determine the boy's attitude
toward his father is the tendency to reverse the ordinary and normal
educational and economical relations existing between father and son.
In Russia the father gives the son an education and supports him until
his marriage, and often afterward, until the young man is able to take
care of his wife and children. The father is, therefore, the head of
the house in reality. But in the New World the boy contributes very
early to the family's support. The father is in this country less able
to make an economic place for himself than is the son. The little
fellow sells papers, blacks boots, and becomes a street merchant on a
small scale. As he speaks English, and his parents do not, he is
commonly the interpreter in business transactions, and tends generally
to take things into his own hands. There is a tendency, therefore, for
the father to respect the son.

There is many a huge building on Broadway which is the external sign
(with the Hebrew name of the tenant emblazoned on some extended
surface) of the energy and independence of some ignorant little
Russian Jew, the son of a push-cart peddler or sweat-shop worker, who
began his business career on the sidewalks, selling newspapers,
blacking boots, dealing in candles, shoe-strings, fruit, etc., and
continued it by peddling in New Jersey or on Long Island until he
could open a small basement store on Hester Street, then a more
extensive establishment on Canal Street--ending perhaps as a rich
merchant on Broadway. The little fellow who starts out on this
laborious climb is a model of industry and temperance. His only
recreation, outside of business, which for him is a pleasure in
itself, is to indulge in some simple pastime which generally is
calculated to teach him something. On Friday or Saturday afternoon he
is likely, for instance, to take a long walk to the park, where he is
seen keenly inspecting the animals and perhaps boasting of his
knowledge about them. He is an acquisitive little fellow, and seldom
enjoys himself unless he feels that he is adding to his figurative or
literal stock.

The cloak and umbrella business in New York is rapidly becoming
monopolized by the Jews who began in the Ghetto; and they are also
very large clothing merchants. Higher, however, than a considerable
merchant in the world of business, the little Ghetto boy, born in a
patriarchal Jewish home, has not yet attained. The Jews who as
bankers, brokers, and speculators on Wall Street control millions
never have been Ghetto Jews. They came from Germany, where conditions
are very different from those in Russia, Galicia, and Roumania, and
where, through the comparatively liberal education of a secular
character which they were able to obtain, they were already beginning
to have a national life outside of the Jewish traditions. Then, too,
these Jews who are now prominent in Wall Street have been in this
country much longer than their Russian brethren. They are frequently
the sons of Germans who in the last generation attained commercial
rank. If they were born abroad, they came many years before the
Russian immigration began and before the American Ghetto existed, and
have consequently become thoroughly identified with American life.
Some of them began, indeed, as peddlers on a very small scale;
travelled, as was more the habit with them then than now, all over the
country; and rose by small degrees to the position of great financial
operators. But they became so only by growing to feel very intimately
the spirit of American enterprise which enables a man to carry on the
boldest operation in a calm spirit.

To this boldness the son of the orthodox parents of our Ghetto has not
yet attained. Coming from the cramped "quarter," with still a tinge of
the patriarchal Jew in his blood, not yet thoroughly at home in the
atmosphere of the American "plunger," he is a little hesitant, though
very keen, in business affairs. The conservatism instilled in him by
the pious old "greenhorn," his father, is a limitation to his American
"nerve." He likes to deal in ponderable goods, to be able to touch and
handle his wares, to have them before his eyes. In the next
generation, when in business matters also he will be an instinctive
American, he will become as big a financial speculator as any of them,
but at present he is pretty well content with his growing business on
Broadway and his fine residence up-town.

  [Illustration: FRIDAY NIGHT PRAYER]

Altho as compared with the American or German-Jew financier who does
not turn a hair at the gain or loss of a million, and who in personal
manner maintains a phlegmatic, Napoleonic calm which is almost the
most impressive thing in the world to an ordinary man, the young
fellow of the Ghetto seems a hesitant little "dickerer," yet, of
course, he is a rising business man, and, as compared to the world
from which he has emerged, a very tremendous entity indeed. It is not
strange, therefore, that this progressive merchant, while yet a child,
acquires a self-sufficiency, an independence, and sometimes an
arrogance which not unnaturally, at least in form, is extended even
toward his parents.

If this boy were able entirely to forget his origin, to cast off the
ethical and religious influences which are his birthright, there would
be no serious struggle in his soul, and he would not represent a
peculiar element in our society. He would be like any other practical,
ambitious, rather worldly American boy. The struggle is strong because
the boy's nature, at once religious and susceptible, is strongly
appealed to by both the old and new. At the same time that he is
keenly sensitive to the charm of his American environment, with its
practical and national opportunities, he has still a deep love for his
race and the old things. He is aware, and rather ashamed, of the
limitations of his parents. He feels that the trend and weight of
things are against them, that they are in a minority; but yet in a
real way the old people remain his conscience, the visible
representatives of a moral and religious tradition by which the boy
may regulate his inner life.

The attitude of such a boy toward his father and mother is
sympathetically described by Dr. Blaustein, principal of the
Educational Alliance:

     "Not knowing that I speak Yiddish, the boy often acts as
     interpreter between me and his exclusively Yiddish-speaking
     father and mother. He always shows a great fear that I
     should be ashamed of his parents and tries to show them in
     the best light. When he translates, he expresses, in his
     manner, great affection and tenderness toward these people
     whom he feels he is protecting; he not merely turns their
     Yiddish into good English, but modifies the substance of
     what they say in order to make them appear presentable, less
     outlandish and queer. He also manifests cleverness in
     translating for his parents what I say in English. When he
     finds that I can speak Yiddish and therefore can converse
     heart to heart with the old people, he is delighted. His
     face beams, and he expresses in every way that deep pleasure
     which a person takes in the satisfaction of honored
     protégés."

The third considerable influence in the life of the Ghetto boy is that
of the socialists. I am inclined to think that this is the least
important and the least desirable of the three in its effect on his
character.

Socialism as it is agitated in the Jewish quarter consists in a
wholesale rejection, often founded on a misunderstanding, of both
American and Hebraic ideals. The socialists harp monotonously on the
relations between capital and labor, the injustice of classes, and
assume literature to comprise one school alone, the Russian, at the
bottom of which there is a strongly anarchistic and reactionary
impulse. The son of a socialist laborer lives in a home where the main
doctrines are two: that the old religion is rubbish and that American
institutions were invented to exploit the workingman. The natural
effects on such a boy are two: a tendency to look with distrust at the
genuinely American life about him, and to reject the old implicit
piety.

The ideal situation for this young Jew would be that where he could
become an integral part of American life without losing the
seriousness of nature developed by Hebraic tradition and education. At
present he feels a conflict between these two influences: his youthful
ardor and ambition lead him to prefer the progressive, if chaotic and
uncentred, American life; but his conscience does not allow him entire
peace in a situation which involves a chasm between him and his
parents and their ideals. If he could find along the line of his more
exciting interests--the American--something that would fill the
deeper need of his nature, his problem would receive a happy solution.

At present, however, the powers that make for the desired synthesis of
the old and the new are fragmentary and unimportant. They consist
largely in more or less charitable institutions such as the University
Settlement, the Educational Alliance, and those free Hebrew schools
which are carried on with definite reference to the boy as an American
citizen. The latter differ from the "chaiders" in several respects.
The important difference is that these schools are better organized,
have better teachers, and have as a conscious end the supplementing of
the boy's common school education. The attempt is to add to the boy's
secular training an ethical and religious training through the
intelligent study of the Bible. It is thought that an acquaintance
with the old literature of the Jews is calculated to deepen and
spiritualize the boy's nature.

The Educational Alliance is a still better organized and more
intelligent institution, having much more the same purpose in view as
the best Hebrew schools. Its avowed purpose is to combine the American
and Hebrew elements, reconcile fathers and sons by making the former
more American and the latter more Hebraic, and in that way improve
the home life of the quarter. With the character of the University
Settlement nearly everybody is familiar. It falls in line with
Anglo-Saxon charitable institutions, forms classes, improves the
condition of the poor, and acts as an ethical agent. But, tho such
institutions as the above may do a great deal of good, they are yet
too fragmentary and external, are too little a vital growth from the
conditions, to supply the demand for a serious life which at the same
time shall be American.

But the Ghetto boy is making use of his heterogeneous opportunities
with the greatest energy and ambition. The public schools are filled
with little Jews; the night schools of the east side are practically
used by no other race. City College, New York University, and Columbia
University are graduating Russian Jews in numbers rapidly increasing.
Many lawyers, indeed, children of patriarchal Jews, have very large
practices already, and some of them belong to solid firms on Wall
Street; although as to business and financial matters they have not
yet attained to the most spectacular height. Then there are
innumerable boys' debating clubs, ethical clubs, and literary clubs in
the east side; altogether there is an excitement in ideas and an
enthusiastic energy for acquiring knowledge which has interesting
analogy to the hopefulness and acquisitive desire of the early
Renaissance. It is a mistake to think that the young Hebrew turns
naturally to trade. He turns his energy to whatever offers the best
opportunities for broader life and success. Other things besides
business are open to him in this country, and he is improving his
chance for the higher education as devotedly as he has improved his
opportunities for success in business.

It is easy to see that the Ghetto boy's growing Americanism will be
easily triumphant at once over the old traditions and the new
socialism. Whether or not he will be able to retain his moral
earnestness and native idealism will depend not so much upon him as
upon the development of American life as a whole. What we need at the
present time more than anything else is a spiritual unity such as,
perhaps, will only be the distant result of our present special
activities. We need something similar to the spirit underlying the
national and religious unity of the orthodox Jewish culture.

Altho the young men of the Ghetto who represent at once the most
intelligent and the most progressively American are, for the most
part, floundering about without being able to find the social growths
upon which they can rest as true Americans while retaining their
spiritual and religious earnestness, there are yet a small number of
them who have already attained a synthesis not lacking in the ideal. I
know a young artist, a boy born in the Ghetto, who began his conscious
American life with contempt for the old things, but who with growing
culture has learned to perceive the beauty of the traditions and faith
of his race. He puts into his paintings of the types of Hester Street
an imaginative, almost religious, idealism, and his artistic sympathy
seems to extend particularly to the old people. He, for one, has
become reconciled to the spirit of his father without ceasing to be an
American. And he is not alone. There are other young Jews, of American
university education, of strong ethical and spiritual character, who
are devoting themselves to the work of forming, among the boys of the
Ghetto, an ideal at once American and consistent with the spirit at
the heart of the Hebraic tradition.


THE "INTELLECTUALS"

Between the old people, with their religion, their traditions, the
life pointing to the past, and the boy with his young life eagerly
absorbent of the new tendencies, is a third class which may be called
the "Intellectuals" of the Ghetto. This is the most picturesque and
interesting, altho not the most permanently significant, of all. The
members of this class are interesting for what they are rather than
for what they have been or for what they may become. They are the
anarchists, the socialists, the editors, the writers; some of the
scholars, poets, playwrights and actors of the quarter. They are the
"enlightened" ones who are at once neither orthodox Jews nor
Americans. Coming from Russia, they are reactionary in their political
opinions, and in matters of taste and literary ideals are Europeans
rather than Americans. When they die they will leave nothing behind
them; but while they live they include the most educated, forcible,
and talented personalities of the quarter. Most of them are
socialists, and, as I pointed out in the last section, socialism is
not a permanently nutritive element in the life of the Ghetto, for as
yet the Ghetto has not learned to know the conditions necessary to
American life, and can not, therefore, effectively react against them.

It is this class which contains, however, the many men of "ideas" who
bring about in certain circles a veritable intellectual fermentation;
and are therefore most interesting from what might be called a
literary point of view, as well as of great importance in the
education of the people. Gifted Russian Jews hold forth passionately
to crowds of working men; devoted writers exploit in the Yiddish
newspapers the principles of their creed and take violent part in the
labor agitation of the east side; or produce realistic sketches of the
life in the quarter, underlying which can be felt the same kind of
revolt which is apparent in the analogous literature of Russia. The
intellectual excitement in the air causes many "splits" among the
socialists. They gather in hostile camps, run rival organs, each
prominent man has his "patriots," or faithful adherents who support
him right or wrong. Intense personal abuse and the most violent
denunciation of opposing principles are the rule. Mellowness,
complacency, geniality, and calmness are qualities practically unknown
to the intellectual Russian Jews, who, driven from the old country,
now possess the first opportunity to express themselves. On the other
hand they are free of the stupid Philistinism of content and are not
primarily interested in the dollar. Their poets sing pathetically of
the sweat-shops, of universal brotherhood, of the abstract rights of
man. Their enthusiastic young men gather every evening in cafés of the
quarter and become habitually intoxicated with the excitement of
ideas. In their restless and feverish eyes shines the intense idealism
of the combined Jew and Russian--the moral earnestness of the Hebrew
united with the passionate, rebellious mental activity of the modern
Muscovite. In these cafés they meet after the theatre or an evening
lecture and talk into the morning hours. The ideal, indeed, is alive
within them. The defect of their intellectual ideas is that they are
not founded on historical knowledge, or on knowledge of the conditions
with which they have to cope. In their excitement and extremeness they
resemble the spirit of the French "intellectuals" of 1789 rather than
that more conservative feeling which has always directed the
development of Anglo-Saxon communities.

  [Illustration: IN THESE CAFÉS THEY MEET AFTER THE THEATRE OR AN
   EVENING LECTURE]

Among the "intellectuals" may be classed a certain number of poets,
dramatists, musicians, and writers, who are neither socialists nor
anarchists, constituting what might roughly be called the literary
"Bohemia" of the quarter; men who pursue their art for the love of it
simply, or who are thereto impelled by the necessity of making a
precarious living; men really without ideas in the definite,
belligerent sense, often uneducated, but often of considerable native
talent. There are also many men of brains who form a large
professional class--doctors, lawyers, and dentists--and who yet are
too old when they come to America to be thoroughly identified with the
life. They are, however, a useful part of the Jewish community, and,
like others of the "intellectual" class, are often men of great
devotion, who have left comparative honor and comfort in the old
country in order to live and work with the persecuted or otherwise
less fortunate brethren.

The greater number of the following chapters deal with the men of this
"intellectual" class, their personalities, their literary work and the
light it throws upon the life of the people in the New York Ghetto.




Chapter Two

Prophets without Honor


SUBMERGED SCHOLARS

A ragged man, who looks like a peddler or a beggar, picking his way
through the crowded misery of Hester Street, or ascending the stairs
of one of the dingy tenement-houses full of sweat-shops that line that
busy mart of the poor Ghetto Jew, may be a great Hebrew scholar. He
may be able to speak and write the ancient tongue with the facility of
a modern language--as fluently as the ordinary Jew makes use of the
"jargon," the Yiddish of the people; he may be a manifold author with
a deep and pious love for the beautiful poetry in his literature; and
in character an enthusiast, a dreamer, or a good and reverend old man.
But no matter what his attainments and his quality he is unknown and
unhonored, for he has pinned his faith to a declining cause, writes
his passionate accents in a tongue more and more unknown even to the
cultivated Jew; and consequently amid the crowding and material
interests of the new world he is submerged--poor in physical estate
and his moral capital unrecognized by the people among whom he lives.

  [Illustration: HE IS UNKNOWN AND UNHONORED]

Not only unrecognized by the ignorant and the busy and their teachers
the rabbis, who in New York are frequently nearly as ignorant as the
people, he is also (as his learning is limited largely to the
literature of his race) looked down upon by the influential and
intellectual element of the Ghetto--an element socialistic, in
literary sympathy Russian rather than Hebraic, intolerant of
everything not violently modern, wedded to "movements" and scornful of
the past. The "maskil," therefore, or "man of wisdom"--the Hebrew
scholar--is called "old fogy," or "dilettante," by the up-to-date
socialists.

Of such men there are several in the humble corners of the New York
Ghetto. One peddles for a living, another has a small printing-office
in a basement on Canal Street, a third occasionally tutors in some one
of many languages and sells a patent medicine, and a fourth is the
principal of the Talmud-Thora, a Hebrew school in the Harlem Ghetto,
where he teaches the children to read, write, and pray in the Hebrew
language.

Moses Reicherson is the name of the principal. "Man of wisdom" of the
purest kind, probably the finest Hebrew grammarian in New York, and
one of the finest in the world, his income from his position at the
head of the school is $5 a week. He is seventy-three years old, wears
a thick gray beard, a little cap on his head, and a long black coat.
His wife is old and bent. They are alone in their miserable little
apartment on East One Hundred and Sixth Street. Their son died a year
or two ago, and to cover the funeral expenses Mr. Reicherson tried in
vain to sell his "Encyclopædia Britannica." But, nevertheless, the
old scholar, who had been bending over his closely written manuscript,
received the visitor with almost cheerful politeness, and told the
story of his work and of his ambitions. Of his difficulties and
privations he said little, but they shone through his words and in the
character of the room in which he lived.

Born in Vilna, sometimes called the Jerusalem of Lithuania or the
Athens of modern Judæa because of the number of enlightened Jews who
have been born there, many of whom now live in the Russian Jewish
quarter of New York, he has retained the faith of his orthodox
parents, a faith, however, springing from the pure origin of Judaism
rather than holding to the hair-splitting distinctions later embodied
in the Talmud. He was a teacher of Hebrew in his native town for many
years, where he stayed until he came to New York some years ago to be
near his son. His two great intellectual interests, subordinated
indeed to the love of the old literature and religion, have been
Hebrew grammar and the moral fables of several languages. On the
former he has written an important work, and of the latter has
translated much of Lessing's and Gellert's work into pure Hebrew. He
has also translated into his favorite tongue the Russian fable-writer
Krilow; has written fables of his own, and a Hebrew commentary on the
Bible in twenty-four volumes. He loves the fables "because they teach
the people and are real criticism; they are profound and combine fancy
and thought." Many of these are still in manuscript, which is
characteristic of much of the work of these scholars, for they have no
money, and publishers do not run after Hebrew books. Also unpublished,
written in lovingly minute characters, he has a Hebrew prayer-book in
many volumes. He has written hundreds of articles for the Hebrew
weeklies and monthlies, which are fairly numerous in this country, but
which seldom can afford to pay their contributors. At present he
writes exclusively for a Hebrew weekly published in Chicago,
_Regeneration_, the object of which is to promote "the knowledge of
the ancient Hebrew language and literature, and to regenerate the
spirit of the nation." For this he receives no pay, the editor being
almost as poor as himself. But he writes willingly for the love of the
cause, "for universal good"; for Reicherson, in common with the other
neglected scholars, is deeply interested in revivifying what is now
among American Jews a dead language. He believes that in this way only
can the Jewish people be taught the good and the true.

  [Illustration: MOSES REICHERSON]

"When the national language and literature live," he said, "the
nation lives; when dead, so is the nation. The holy tongue in which
the Bible was written must not die. If it should, much of the truth of
the Bible, many of its spiritual secrets, much of its beautiful
poetry, would be lost. I have gone deep into the Bible, that greatest
book, all my life, and I know many of its secrets." He beamed with
pride as he said these words, and his sense of the beauty of the
Hebrew spirit and the Hebrew literature led him to speak wonderingly
of Anti-Semitism. This cause seemed to him to be founded on ignorance
of the Bible. "If the Anti-Semites would only study the Bible, would
go deep into the knowledge of Hebrew and the teaching of Christ, then
everything would be sweet and well. If they would spend a little of
that money in supporting the Hebrew language and literature and
explaining the sacred books which they now use against our race, they
would see that they are Anti-Christians rather than Anti-Semites."

The scholar here bethought himself of an old fable he had translated
into Hebrew. Cold and Warmth make a wager that the traveller will
unwrap his cloak sooner to one than to the other. The fierce wind
tries its best, but at every cold blast the traveller only wraps his
cloak the closer. But when the sun throws its rays the wayfarer
gratefully opens his breast to the warming beams. "Love solves all
things," said the old man, "and hate closes up the channels to
knowledge and virtue." Believing the Pope to be a good man with a
knowledge of the Bible, he wanted to write him about the Anti-Semites,
but desisted on the reflection that the Pope was very old and
overburdened, and that the letter would probably fall into the hands
of the cardinals.

All this was sweetly said, for about him there was nothing of the
attitude of complaint. His wife once or twice during the interview
touched upon their personal condition, but her husband severely kept
his mind on the universal truths, and only when questioned admitted
that he would like a little more money, in order to publish his books
and to enable him to think with more concentration about the Hebrew
language and literature. There was no bitterness in his reference to
the neglect of Hebrew scholarship in the Ghetto. His interest was
impersonal and detached, and his regret at the decadence of the
language seemed noble and disinterested; and, unlike some of the other
scholars, the touch of warm humanity was in everything he said.
Indeed, he is rather the learned teacher of the people with deep
religious and ethical sense than the scholar who cares only for
learning. "In the name of God, adieu!" he said, with quiet intensity
when the visitor withdrew.

Contrasting sharply in many respects with this beautiful old teacher
is the man who peddles from tenement-house to tenement-house in the
down-town Ghetto, to support himself and his three young children.
S. B. Schwartzberg, unlike most of the "submerged" scholars, is still a
young man, only thirty-seven years old, but he is already discouraged,
bitter, and discontented. He feels himself the apostle of a lost
cause--the regeneration in New York of the old Hebrew language and
literature. His great enterprise in life has failed. He has now given
it up, and the natural vividness and intensity of his nature get
satisfaction in the strenuous abuse of the Jews of the Ghetto.

He was born in Warsaw, Poland, the son of a distinguished rabbi. In
common with many Russian and Polish Jews, he early obtained a living
knowledge of the Hebrew language, and a great love of the literature,
which he knows thoroughly, altho, unlike Reicherson and a scholar who
is to be mentioned, Rosenberg, he has not contributed to the
literature in a scientific sense. He is slightly bald, with burning
black eyes, an enthusiastic and excited manner, and talks with almost
painful earnestness.

Three years ago Schwartzberg came to this country with a great idea in
his head. "In this free country," he thought to himself, "where there
are so many Russian and Polish Jews, it is a pity that our tongue is
dying, is falling into decay, and that the literature and traditions
that hold our race together are being undermined by materialism and
ethical skepticism." He had a little money, and he decided he would
establish a journal in the interests of the Hebrew language and
literature. No laws would prevent him here from speaking his mind in
his beloved tongue. He would bring into vivid being again the national
spirit of his people, make them love with the old fervor their ancient
traditions and language. It was the race's spirit of humanity and
feeling for the ethical beauty, not the special creed of Judaism, for
which he and the other scholars care little, that filled him with the
enthusiasm of an apostle. In his monthly magazine, the _Western
Light_, he put his best efforts, his best thoughts about ethical
truths and literature. The poet Dolitzki contributed in purest Hebrew
verse, as did many other Ghetto lights. But it received no support,
few bought it, and it lasted only a year. Then he gave it up, bankrupt
in money and hope. That was several years ago, and since then he has
peddled for a living.

The failure has left in Schwartzberg's soul a passionate hatred of
what he calls the materialism of the Jews in America. Only in Europe,
he thinks, does the love of the spiritual remain with them. Of the
rabbis of the Ghetto he spoke with bitterness. "They," he said, "are
the natural teachers of the people. They could do much for the Hebrew
literature and language. Why don't they? Because they know no Hebrew
and have no culture. In Russia the Jews demand that their rabbis
should be learned and spiritual, but here they are ignorant and
materialistic." So Mr. Schwartzberg wrote a pamphlet which is now
famous in the Ghetto. "I wrote it with my heart's blood," he said, his
eyes snapping. "In it I painted the spiritual condition of the Jews in
New York in the gloomiest of colors."

"It is terrible," he proceeded vehemently. "Not one Hebrew magazine
can exist in this country. They all fail, and yet there are many
beautiful Hebrew writers to-day. When Dolitzki was twenty years old
in Russia he was looked up to as a great poet. But what do the Jews
care about him here? For he writes in Hebrew! Why, Hebrew scholars are
regarded by the Jews as tramps, as useless beings. Driven from Russia
because we are Jews, we are despised in New York because we are Hebrew
scholars! The rabbis, too, despise the learned Hebrew, and they have a
fearful influence on the ignorant people. If they can dress well and
speak English it is all they want. It is a shame how low-minded these
teachers of the people are. I was born of a rabbi, and brought up by
him, but in Russia they are for literature and the spirit, while in
America it is just the other way."

The discouraged apostle of Hebrew literature now sees no immediate
hope for the cause. What seems to him the most beautiful lyric poetry
in the world he thinks doomed to the imperfect understanding of
generations for whom the language does not live. The only ultimate
hope is in the New Jerusalem. Consequently the fiery scholar, altho
not a Zionist, thinks well of the movement as tending to bring the
Jews again into a nation which shall revive the old tongue and
traditions. Mr. Schwartzberg referred to some of the other submerged
scholars of the Ghetto. His eyes burned with indignation when he
spoke of Moses Reicherson. He could hardly control himself at the
thought that the greatest Hebrew grammarian living, "an old man, too,
a reverend old man," should be brought to such a pass. In the same
strain of outrage he referred to another old man, a scholar who would
be as poor as Reicherson and himself were it not for his wife, who is
a dressmaker. It is she who keeps him out of the category of
"submerged" scholars.

 [Illustration: REV. H. ROSENBERG]

But the Rev. H. Rosenberg, of whose condition Schwartzberg also
bitterly complained, is indeed submerged. He runs a printing-office in
a Canal Street basement, where he sits in the damp all day long
waiting for an opportunity to publish his _magnum opus_, a cyclopedia
of Biblical literature, containing an historical and geographical
description of the persons, places, and objects mentioned in the
Bible. All the Ghetto scholars speak of this work with bated breath,
as a tremendously learned affair. Only two volumes of it have been
published. To give the remainder to the world, Mr. Rosenberg is
waiting for his children, who are nearly self-supporting, to
contribute their mite. He is a man of sixty-two, with the high, bald
forehead of a scholar. For twenty years he was a rabbi in Russia, and
has preached in thirteen synagogues. He has been nine years in New
York, and, in addition to the great cyclopedia, has written, but not
published, a cyclopedia of Talmudical literature. A "History of the
Jews," in the Russian language, and a Russian novel, "The Jew of
Trient," are among his published works. He is one of the most learned
of all of these men who have a living, as well as an exact, knowledge
of what is generally regarded as a dead language and literature.

Altho he is waiting to publish the great cyclopedia, he is patient and
cold. He has not the sweet enthusiasm of Reicherson, and not the
vehement and partisan passion of Schwartzberg. He has the coldness of
old age, without its spiritual glow, and scholarship is the only idea
that moves him. Against the rabbis he has no complaint to make; with
them, he said, he had nothing to do. He thinks that Schwartzberg is
extreme and unfair, and that there are good and bad rabbis in New
York. He is reserved and undemonstrative, and speaks only in reply.
When the rather puzzled visitor asked him if there was anything in
which he was interested, he replied, "Yes, in my cyclopedia." The only
point at which he betrayed feeling was when he quoted proudly the
words of a reviewer of the cyclopedia, who had wondered where Dr.
Rosenberg had obtained all his learning. He stated indifferently that
the Hebrew language and literature is dead and cannot be revived. "I
know," he said, "that Hebrew literature does not pay, but I cannot
stop." With no indignation, he remarked that the Jews in New York have
no ideals. It was a fact objectively to be deplored, but for which he
personally had no emotion, all of that being reserved for his
cyclopedia.

  [Illustration: "SUBMERGED SCHOLARS"]

These three men are perfect types of the "submerged Hebrew scholar" of
the New York Ghetto. Reicherson is the typical religious teacher;
Schwartzberg, the enthusiast, who loves the language like a mistress,
and Rosenberg, the cool "man of wisdom," who only cares for the
perfection of knowledge. Altho there are several others on the east
side who approach the type, they fall more or less short of it. Either
they are not really scholars in the old tongue, altho reading and
even writing it, or through business or otherwise they have raised
themselves above the pathetic point. Thus Dr. Benedict Ben-Zion, one
of the poorest of all, being reduced to occasional tutoring, and the
sale of a patent medicine for a living, is not specifically a scholar.
He writes and reads Hebrew, to be sure, but is also a playwright in
the "jargon;" has been a Christian missionary to his own people in
Egypt, Constantinople, and Rumania, a doctor for many years, a teacher
in several languages, one who has turned his hand to everything, and
whose heart and mind are not so purely Hebraic as those of the men I
have mentioned. He even is seen, more or less, with Ghetto _literati_
who are essentially hostile to what the true Hebrew scholar holds
by--a body of Russian Jewish socialists of education, who in their
Grand and Canal Street cafés express every night in impassioned
language their contempt for whatever is old and historical.

Then, there are J. D. Eisenstein, the youngest and one of the most
learned, but perhaps the least "submerged" of them all; Gerson
Rosenschweig, a wit, who has collected the epigrams of the Hebrew
literature, added many of his own, and written in Hebrew a humorous
treatise on America--a very up-to-date Jew, who, like Schwartzberg,
tried to run a Hebrew weekly, but when he failed, was not discouraged,
and turned to business and politics instead; and Joseph Low Sossnitz,
a very learned scholar, of dry and sarcastic tendency, who only
recently has risen above the submerged point. Among the latter's most
notable published books are a philosophical attack on materialism, a
treatise on the sun, and a work on the philosophy of religion.

It is the wrench between the past and the present which has placed
these few scholars in their present pathetic condition. Most of them
are old, and when they die the "maskil" as a type will have vanished
from New York. In the meantime, tho they starve, they must devote
themselves to the old language, the old ideas and traditions of
culture. Their poet, the austere Dolitzki, famous in Russia at the
time of the revival of Hebrew twenty years ago, is the only man in New
York who symbolizes in living verse the spirit in which these old men
live, the spirit of love for the race as most purely expressed in the
Hebrew literature. This disinterested love for the remote, this
pathetic passion to keep the dead alive, is what lends to the lives of
these "submerged" scholars a nobler quality than what is generally
associated with the east side.


THE POOR RABBIS

The rabbis, as well as the scholars, of the east side of New York have
their grievances. They, too, are "submerged," like so much in humanity
that is at once intelligent, poor, and out-of-date. As a lot, they are
old, reverend men, with long gray beards, long black coats and little
black caps on their heads. They are mainly very poor, live in the
barest of the tenement houses and pursue a calling which no longer
involves much honor or standing. In the old country, in Russia--for
most of the poor ones are Russian--the rabbi is a great person. He is
made rabbi by the state and is rabbi all his life, and the only rabbi
in the town, for all the Jews in every city form one congregation, of
which there is but one rabbi and one cantor. He is a man always full
of learning and piety, and is respected and supported comfortably by
the congregation, a tax being laid on meat, salt, and other foodstuffs
for his special benefit.

But in New York it is very different. Here there are hundreds of
congregations, one in almost every street, for the Jews come from many
different cities and towns in the old country, and the New York
representatives of every little place in Russia must have their
congregation here. Consequently, the congregations are for the most
part small, poor and unimportant. Few can pay the rabbi more than $3
or $4 a week, and often, instead of having a regular salary, he is
reduced to occasional fees for his services at weddings, births and
holy festivals generally. Some very poor congregations get along
without a rabbi at all, hiring one for special occasions, but these
are congregations which are falling off somewhat from their orthodox
strictness.

  [Illustration]

The result of this state of affairs is a pretty general falling off in
the character of the rabbis. In Russia they are learned men--know the
Talmud and all the commentaries upon it by heart--and have degrees
from the rabbinical colleges, but here they are often without degrees,
frequently know comparatively little about the Talmud, and are
sometimes actuated by worldly motives. A few Jews coming to New York
from some small Russian town, will often select for a rabbi the man
among them who knows a little more of the Talmud than the others,
whether he has ever studied for the calling or not. Then, again, some
mere adventurers get into the position--men good for nothing, looking
for a position. They clap a high hat on their heads, impose on a poor
congregation with their up-to-dateness and become rabbis without
learning or piety. These "fake" rabbis--"rabbis for business
only"--are often satirized in the Yiddish plays given at the Bowery
theatres. On the stage they are ridiculous figures, ape American
manners in bad accents, and have a keen eye for gain.

The genuine, pious rabbis in the New York Ghetto feel, consequently,
that they have their grievances. They, the accomplished interpreters
of the Jewish law, are well-nigh submerged by the frauds that flood
the city. But this is not the only sorrow of the "real" rabbi of the
Ghetto. The rabbis uptown, the rich rabbis, pay little attention to
the sufferings, moral and physical, of their downtown brethren. For
the most part the uptown rabbi is of the German, the downtown rabbi of
the Russian branch of the Jewish race, and these two divisions of the
Hebrews hate one another like poison. Last winter when Zangwill's
dramatized _Children of the Ghetto_ was produced in New York the
organs of the swell uptown German-Jew protested that it was a pity to
represent faithfully in art the sordidness as well as the beauty of
the poor Russian Ghetto Jew. It seemed particularly baneful that the
religious customs of the Jews should be thus detailed upon the stage.
The uptown Jew felt a little ashamed that the proletarians of his
people should be made the subject of literature. The downtown Jews,
the Russian Jews, however, received play and stories with delight, as
expressing truthfully their life and character, of which they are not
ashamed.

Another cause of irritation between the downtown and uptown rabbis is
a difference of religion. The uptown rabbi, representing congregations
larger in this country and more American in comfort and tendency,
generally is of the "reformed" complexion, a hateful thought to the
orthodox downtown rabbi, who is loath to admit that the term rabbi
fits these swell German preachers. He maintains that, since the uptown
rabbi is, as a rule, not only "reformed" in faith, but in preaching as
well, he is in reality no rabbi, for, properly speaking, a rabbi is
simply an interpreter of the law, one with whom the Talmudical wisdom
rests, and who alone can give it out; not one who exhorts, but who, on
application, can untie knotty points of the law. The uptown rabbis
they call "preachers," with some disdain.

So that the poor, downtrodden rabbis--those among them who look upon
themselves as the only genuine--have many annoyances to bear. Despised
and neglected by their rich brethren, without honor or support in
their own poor communities, and surrounded by a rabble of unworthy
rivals, the "real" interpreter of the "law" in New York is something
of an object of pity.

Just who the most genuine downtown rabbis are is, no doubt, a matter
of dispute. I will not attempt to determine, but will quote in
substance a statement of Rabbi Weiss as to genuine rabbis, which will
include a curious section of the history of the Ghetto. He is a jolly
old man, and smokes his pipe in a tenement-house room containing 200
books of the Talmud and allied writings.

"A genuine rabbi," he said, "knows the law, and sits most of the time
in his room, ready to impart it. If an old woman comes in with a goose
that has been killed, the rabbi can tell her, after she has explained
how the animal met its death, whether or not it is _koshur_, whether
it may be eaten or not. And on any other point of diet or general
moral or physical hygiene the rabbi is ready to explain the law of the
Hebrews from the time of Adam until to-day. It is he who settles many
of the quarrels of the neighborhood. The poor sweat-shop Jew comes to
complain of his "boss," the old woman to tell him her dreams and get
his interpretation of them, the young girl to weigh with him questions
of amorous etiquette. Our children do not need to go to the Yiddish
theatres to learn about "greenhorn" types. They see all sorts of
Ghetto Jews in the house of the rabbi, their father.

"I myself was the first genuine rabbi on the east side of New York. I
am now sixty-two years old, and came here sixteen years ago--came for
pleasure, but my wife followed me, and so I had to stay."

Here the old rabbi smiled cheerfully. "When I came to New York," he
proceeded, "I found the Jews here in a very bad way--eating meat that
was "thrapho," not allowed, because killed improperly; literally,
killed by a brute. The slaughter-houses at that time had no rabbi to
see that the meat was properly killed, was _koshur_--all right.

"You can imagine my horror. The slaughter-houses had been employing an
orthodox Jew, who, however, was not a rabbi, to see that the meat was
properly killed, and he had been doing things all wrong, and the
chosen people had been living abominably. I immediately explained the
proper way of killing meat, and since then I have regulated several
slaughter-houses and make my living in that way. I am also rabbi of a
congregation, but it is so small that it doesn't pay. The
slaughter-houses are more profitable."

  [Illustration: THE RABBI CAN TELL WHETHER OR NOT IT IS KOSHUR]

These "submerged" rabbis are not always quite fair to one another.
Some east side authorities maintain that the "orthodox Jew" of whom
Rabbi Weiss spoke thus contemptuously, was one of the finest rabbis
who ever came to New York, one of the most erudite of Talmudic
scholars. Many congregations united to call him to America in 1887, so
great was his renown in Russia. But when he reached New York the
general fate of the intelligent adult immigrant overtook him. Even the
"orthodox" in New York looked upon him as a "greenhorn" and deemed his
sermons out-of-date. He was inclined, too, to insist upon a stricter
observance of the law than suited their lax American ideas. So he,
too, famous in Russia, rapidly became one of the "submerged."

One of the most learned, dignified and impressive rabbis of the east
side is Rabbi Vidrovitch. He was a rabbi for forty years in Russia,
and for nine years in New York. Like all true rabbis he does not
preach, but merely sits in his home and expounds the "law." He employs
the Socratic method of instruction, and is very keen in his indirect
mode of argument. Keenness, indeed, seems to be the general result of
the hair-splitting Rabbinical education. The uptown rabbis,
"preachers," as the down-town rabbi contemptuously calls them, send
many letters to Rabbi Vidrovitch seeking his help in the untying of
knotty points of the "law." It was from him that Israel Zangwill, when
the _Children of the Ghetto_ was produced on the New York stage,
obtained a minute description of the orthodox marriage ceremonies.
Zangwill caused to be taken several flash-light photographs of the old
rabbi, surrounded by his books and dressed in his official garments.

There are many congregations in the New York Ghetto which have no
rabbis and many rabbis who have no congregations. Two rabbis who have
no congregations are Rabbi Beinush and Rabbi, or rather, Cantor,
Weiss. Rabbi Weiss would say of Beinush that he is a man who knows the
Talmud, but has no diploma. Rabbi Beinush is an extremely poor rabbi
with neither congregation nor slaughter-houses, who sits in his poor
room and occasionally sells his wisdom to a fishwife who wants to know
if some piece of meat is _koshur_ or not. He is down on the rich
up-town rabbis, who care nothing for the law, as he puts it, and who
leave the poor down-town rabbi to starve.

Cantor Weiss is also without a job. The duty of the cantor is to sing
the prayer in the congregation, but Cantor Weiss sings only on
holidays, for he is not paid enough, he says, to work regularly, the
cantor sharing in this country a fate similar to that of the rabbi.
The famous comedian of the Ghetto, Mogolesco, was, as a boy, one of
the most noted cantors in Russia. As an actor in the New York Ghetto
he makes twenty times as much money as the most accomplished cantor
here. Cantor Weiss is very bitter against the up-town cantors: "They
shorten the prayer," he said. "They are not orthodox. It is too hot in
the synagogue for the comfortable up-town cantors to pray."

Comfortable Philistinism, progress and enlightment up town; and
poverty, orthodoxy and patriotic and religious sentiment, with a touch
of the material also, down town. Such seems to be the difference
between the German and the Russian Jew in this country, and in
particular between the German and Russian Jewish rabbi.




Chapter Three

The Old and the New Woman


The women present in many respects a marked contrast to their American
sisters. Substance as opposed to form, simplicity of mood as opposed
to capriciousness, seem to be in broad lines their relative qualities.
They have comparatively few _états d'ame_; but those few are revealed
with directness and passion. They lack the subtle charm of the
American woman, who is full of feminine devices, complicated
flirtatiousness; who in her dress and personal appearance seeks the
plastic epigram, and in her talk and relation to the world an indirect
suggestive delicacy. They are poor in physical estate; many work or
have worked; even the comparatively educated among them, in the
sweat-shops, are undernourished and lack the physical well-being and
consequent temperamental buoyancy which are comforting qualities of
the well-bred American woman. Unhappy in circumstances, they are
predominatingly serious in nature, and, if they lack alertness to the
social _nuance_, have yet a compelling appeal which consists in
headlong devotion to a duty, a principle or a person. As their men do
not treat them with the scrupulous deference given their American
sisters, they do not so delightfully abound in their own sense, do not
so complexedly work out their own natures, and lack variety and grace.
On the other hand, they are more apt to abound in the sense of
something outside of themselves, and carry to their love affairs the
same devoted warmth that they put into principle.


THE ORTHODOX JEWESS

The first of the two well-marked classes of women in the Ghetto is
that of the ignorant orthodox Russian Jewess. She has no language but
Yiddish, no learning but the Talmudic law, no practical authority but
that of her husband and her rabbi. She is even more of a Hausfrau than
the German wife. She can own no property, and the precepts of the
Talmud as applied to her conduct are largely limited to the relations
with her husband. Her life is absorbed in observing the religious law
and in taking care of her numerous children. She is drab and plain in
appearance, with a thick waist, a wig, and as far as is possible for a
woman a contempt for ornament. She is, however, with the noticeable
assimilative sensitiveness of the Jew, beginning to pick up some of
the ways of the American woman. If she is young when she comes to
America, she soon lays aside her wig, and sometimes assumes the rakish
American hat, prides herself on her bad English, and grows slack in
the observance of Jewish holidays and the dietary regulations of the
Talmud. Altho it is against the law of this religion to go to the
theatre, large audiences, mainly drawn from the ignorant workers of
the sweat-shops and the fishwives and pedlers of the push-cart
markets, flock to the Bowery houses. It is this class which forms the
large background of the community, the masses from which more
cultivated types are developing.

  [Illustration: HER LIFE IS ABSORBED IN OBSERVING THE RELIGIOUS LAW]

Many a literary sketch in the newspapers of the quarter portrays these
ignorant, simple, devout, housewifely creatures in comic or pathetic,
more often, after the satiric manner of the Jewish writers, in
serio-comic vein. The authors, altho they are much more educated, yet
write of these women, even when they write in comic fashion, with
fundamental sympathy. They picture them working devotedly in the shop
or at home for their husbands and families, they represent the sorrow
and simple jealousy of the wife whose husband's imagination, perhaps,
is carried away by the piquant manner and dress of a Jewess who is
beginning to ape American ways; they tell of the comic adventures in
America of the newly-arrived Jewess: how she goes to the theatre,
perhaps, and enacts the part of Partridge at the play. More
fundamentally, they relate how the poor woman is deeply shocked, at
her arrival, by the change which a few years have made in the
character of her husband, who had come to America before her in order
to make a fortune. She finds his beard shaved off, and his manners in
regard to religious holidays very slack. She is sometimes so deeply
affected that she does not recover. More often she grows to feel the
reason and eloquence of the change and becomes partly accustomed to
the situation; but all through her life she continues to be dismayed
by the precocity, irreligion and Americanism of her children. Many
sketches and many scenes in the Ghetto plays present her as a pathetic
"greenhorn" who, while she is loved by her children, is yet rather
patronized and pitied by them.

In "Gott, Mensch und Teufel," a Yiddish adaptation of the Faust idea,
one of these simple religious souls is dramatically portrayed. The
restless Jewish Faust, his soul corrupted by the love of money, puts
aside his faithful wife in order to marry another woman who has
pleased his eye. He uses as an excuse the fact that his marriage is
childless, and as such rendered void in accordance with the precepts
of the religious law. His poor old wife submits almost with reverence
to the double authority of husband and Talmud, and with humble
demeanor and tears streaming from her eyes begs the privilege of
taking care of the children of her successor.

In "The Slaughter" there is a scene which picturesquely portrays the
love of the poor Jew and the poor Jewess for their children. The wife
is married to a brute, whom she hates, and between the members of the
two families there is no relation but that of ugly sordidness. But
when it is known that a child is to be born they are all filled with
the greatest joy. The husband is ecstatic and they have a great feast,
drink, sing and dance, and the young wife is lyrically happy for the
first time since her marriage.

Many little newspaper sketches portray the simple sweat-shop Jewess of
the ordinary affectionate type, who is exclusively minded so far as
her husband's growing interest in the showy American Jewess is
concerned. Cahan's novel, "Yekel," is the Ghetto masterpiece in the
portrayal of these two types of women--the wronged "greenhorn" who has
just come from Russia, and she who, with a rakish hat and bad English,
is becoming an American girl with strange power to alienate the
husband's affections.


THE MODERN TYPE

The other, the educated class of Ghetto women, is, of course, in a
great minority; and this division includes the women even the most
slightly affected by modern ideas as well as those who from an
intellectual point of view are highly cultivated. Among the least
educated are a large number of women who would be entirely ignorant
were it not for the ideas which they have received through the
Socialistic propaganda of the quarter. Like the men who are otherwise
ignorant, they are trained to a certain familiarity with economic
ideas, read and think a good deal about labor and capital, and take an
active part in speaking, in "house to house" distribution of
socialistic literature and in strike agitation. Many of these women,
so long as they are unmarried, lead lives thoroughly devoted to "the
cause," and afterwards become good wives and fruitful mothers, and
urge on their husbands and sons to active work in the "movement." They
have in personal character many virtues called masculine, are simple
and straightforward and intensely serious, and do not "bank" in any
way on the fact that they are women! Such a woman would feel insulted
if her escort were to pick up her handkerchief or in any way suggest a
politeness growing out of the difference in sex. It is from this class
of women, from those who are merely tinged, so to speak, with ideas,
and who consequently are apt to throw the whole strength of their
primitive natures into the narrow intellectual channels that are open
to them, that a number of Ghetto heroines come who are willing to lay
down their lives for an idea, or to live for one. It was only recently
that the thinking Socialists were stirred by the suicide of a young
girl for which several causes were given. Some say it was for love,
but what seems a partial cause at least for the tragedy was the girl's
devotion to anarchistic ideas. She had worked for some time in the
quarter and was filled with enthusiastic Tolstoian convictions about
freedom and non-resistance to evil, and all the other idealistic
doctrines for which these Anarchists are remarkable. Some of the
people of the quarter believe that it was temporary despair of any
satisfactory outcome to her work that brought about her death. But
since the splits in the Socialistic party and the rise among them of
many insincere agitators, the enthusiasm for the cause has diminished,
and particularly among the women, who demand perfect integrity or
nothing; tho there is still a large class of poor sweat-shop women who
carry on active propaganda work, make speeches, distribute literature,
and go from house to house in a social effort to make converts.

  [Illustration: INTENSELY SERIOUS]

As we ascend in the scale of education in the Ghetto we find women who
derive their culture and ideas from a double source--from Socialism
and from advanced Russian ideals of literature and life. They have
lost faith completely in the orthodox religion, have substituted no
other, know Russian better than Yiddish, read Tolstoi, Turgenef and
Chekhov, and often put into practice the most radical theories of the
"new woman," particularly those which say that woman should be
economically independent of man. There are successful female dentists,
physicians, writers, and even lawyers by the score in East Broadway
who have attained financial independence through industry and
intelligence. They are ambitious to a degree and often direct the
careers of their husbands or force their lovers to become doctors or
lawyers--the great social desiderata in the match-making of the
Ghetto. There is more than one case on record where a girl has
compelled her recalcitrant lover to learn law, medicine or dentistry,
or submit to being jilted by her. An actor devoted to the stage is now
on the point of leaving it to become a dentist at the command of his
ambitious wife. "I always do what she tells me," he said
pathetically.

The career of a certain woman now practising dentistry in the Ghetto
is one of the most interesting cases, and is also quite typical. She
was born of poor Jewish parents in a town near St. Petersburg, and
began early to read the socialist propaganda and the Russian
literature which contains so much implicit revolutionary doctrine.
When she was seventeen years old she wrote a novel in Yiddish, called
"Mrs. Goldna, the Usurer," in which she covertly advocated the
anarchistic teachings. The title and the sub-theme of the book was
directed against the usurer class among the Jews, and were mainly
intended to hide from the Government her real purpose. The book was
afterwards published in New York, and had a fairly wide circulation. A
year or two later her imagination was irresistibly enthralled by the
remarkable wave of "new woman" enthusiasm which swept over Russia in
the early eighties, and resulted in so many suicides of young girls
whom poverty or injustice to the Jew thwarted in their scientific and
intellectual ambition. She went alone to St. Petersburg with sixty
five cents in her pocket, in order to obtain a professional education,
which, after years of practical starvation, she succeeded in securing.
With several degrees she came to America twelve years ago and fought
out an independent professional position for herself. She believes
that all women should have the means by which they may support
themselves, and that marriage under these conditions would be happier
than at present. Her husband is a doctor, and her idea is that they
are happier than if she were a woman of the old type, "merely a wife
and mother," as she put it. She maintains that no emotional interest
is lost under the new régime, while many practical advantages are
gained. Since she has been in America she has furthered the Socialist
cause by literary sketches published in the Yiddish newspapers, altho
she has been too busy to take any direct part in the movement.

  [Illustration: A RUSSIAN GIRL-STUDENT]

The description of this type of woman seems rather cold and forbidding
in the telling; but such an impression is misleading. There is no
commoner reproach made by the women of the Ghetto against their
American sister than that she is unemotional and "practical." They
come to America, like the men, because they cannot stand the
political conditions in Russia, which they describe as "fierce," but
they never cease loving the land of their birth; and the reason they
give is that the ideal still lives in Muscovite civilization, while in
America it is trampled out by the cult of the dollar. They think
Americans are dry and cold, unpoetic, uninterested in great
principles, and essentially frivolous, incapable of devotion to
persons or to "movements," reading books only for amusement, and
caring nothing for real literature. One day an American dined with
four Russian Jews of distinction. Two were Nihilists who had been in
the "big movement" in Russia and were merely visiting New York. The
other two were a married couple of uncommon education. The Nihilists
were gentle, cultivated men, with feeling for literature, and deeply
admired, because of their connection with the great movement, by the
two New Yorkers. The talk turned on Byron, for whom the Russians had a
warm enthusiasm. The Americans made rather light of Byron and incurred
thereby the great scorn of the Russians, who felt deeply the
"tendency" character of the poet without being able to understand his
æsthetic and imaginative limitations. After the Nihilists had left,
the misguided American used the words "interesting" and "amusing" in
connection with them; whereupon the Russian lady was almost indignant,
and dilated on the frivolity of a race that could not take serious
people seriously, but wanted always to be entertained; that cared only
for what was "pretty" and "charming" and "sensible" and "practical,"
and cared nothing for poetry and beauty and essential humanity.

The woman referred to, as well as many others of the most educated
class in the quarter, some of them the wives of socialists, doctors,
lawyers or literary men, are strongly interesting because of their
warm temperaments, and genuine, if limited, ideas about art, but most
of them are lacking in grace, and sense of humor, and of proportion.
They are stiff and unyielding, have little free play of imagination,
little alertness of ideas, and their sense of literature is limited
largely to realism. Japanese art, for instance, as any art which
depends on the exquisiteness of its form, is lost on these stern
realists. They no more understand the latest subtle literary
consciousness than they do the interest and eloquence of a creature
who makes of herself a perfect social product such as the clever
French woman of history.

  [Illustration: WORKING GIRLS RETURNING HOME]

But the charm of sincere feeling they have; and, in an intellectual
race, that feeling shapes itself into definite criticism of society.
Emotionally strong and attached by Russian tradition to a rebellious
doctrine, they are deeply unconventional in theory and sometimes in
practice; altho the national morality of the Jewish race very
definitely limits the extent to which they realize some of their
ideas. The passionate feeling at the bottom of most of their
"tendency" beliefs is that woman should stand on the same social basis
as man, and should be weighed in the same scales. This ruling creed is
held by all classes of the educated women of the Ghetto, from the poor
sweat shop worker, who has recently felt the influence of Socialism,
to the thoroughly trained "new woman" with her developed literary
taste; and all its variations find expression in the literature of the
quarter.


PLACE OF WOMAN IN GHETTO LITERATURE

Ibsen's "Doll's House" has been translated and produced at a Yiddish
theatre; and an original play called "Minna" registers a protest by
the Jewish woman against that law of marriage which binds her to an
inferior man. Married to an ignorant laborer, Minna falls in love (for
his advanced ideas) with the boarder--every poor family, to pay the
rent, must saddle themselves with a boarder, often at the expense of
domestic happiness--and finally kills herself, when the laws of
society press her too hard. Another drama called "East Broadway"
presents the case of a Russian Jewess devoted to Russia, to idealism
and Nihilism, and to a man who shared her faith until they came to New
York, when he became a business man pure and simple, and lost his
ideals and his love for her. In a popular play called "The Beggar of
Odessa," lines openly advocating the freest love between the sexes
accompany other extreme anarchistic views put into the loosest and
most popular form. "Broken Chains" is a drama which criticises the
relative freedom of action given to the man in matters of love. The
heroine reads Ibsen at night while her husband amuses himself in the
quarter. A young bookkeeper is there who serves to make concrete her
growing theories. But her sense of duty to her child restrains her
from the final step, and she dies in despair. Suicides in sketches and
plays abound, and as often as not result simply from intellectual
despondency. "Vain Sacrifice" is the fierce outcry of a woman against
the poverty which makes her marry a man she loathes for the sake of
her father. In the newspaper sketches there are many pictures of
sordid homes and conditions from the midst of which fierce protests
by wives and mothers are implicitly given.

  [Illustration: A RUSSIAN TYPE]

An appealing characteristic of the "new woman" of the Ghetto is the
consideration which she manifests towards the orthodox "greenhorn" who
may be her aunt, her mother, her mother-in-law or her grandmother. The
sense of infinite form prescribed by the Talmud is dead to her, but
extraordinary love for the family bond is not, and, moved by that, she
observes the complicated formulæ on all the holidays in order to
please the dear old "greenhorn" who lives with her; eats unleavened
bread, weeps on Atonement Day in the synagogue, and goes through the
whole long list. Her conduct in this respect is in striking contrast
to the off-hand treatment of parents by their American daughters, and
to that of the Orthodox Jewish woman in relation to the theatre. The
law forbids the theatre, but even the slightly disillusioned ladies of
the quarter will go on the Sabbath; and it is said that they sometimes
hypocritically relieve their consciences by hissing the actor who,
even in his rôle, dares to smoke on that day. This is on a par with
the hypocrisy which leads many Orthodox Jewish families to have a
Gentile as their servant, so that they can drink the tea, and warm
themselves by the fire, made by him, without technically violating
"the law."

Love in the Ghetto is, no doubt, very much the same as it is
elsewhere; and this in spite of the fact that among the Orthodox
marriage is arranged by the parents, a custom which is condemned in
"The Slaughter," for instance, where the terrible results of a
loveless union are portrayed. The system of matrimonial agents in the
quarter does not seem to have any important bearing on the question of
love. In this respect the free thinking of the people grows apace, and
love-marriages in the quarter are on the increase. In matters of taste
and inclination between the sexes, however, there are some qualities
quite startling to the American. The most popular actor with the girls
of the Ghetto is a very fat, heavy, pompous hero who would provoke
only a smile from the trim American girl; and the more popular
actresses are also very stout ladies. From an American point of view
the prettiest actresses of the Ghetto are admired by the minority of
Jews who have been taken by the rakish hat, the slim form, and the
indefinite charm to which the Ghetto is being educated. It is alleged
that at an up-town theatre, where a large proportion of the audience
is Jewish, the leading lady must always be of very generous build; and
this in spite of the fact that the well-to-do Jews up-town have been
in America a long time, and have had ample opportunity to become
smitten with the charms of the slender American girl.




Chapter Four

Four Poets


In East Canal Street, in the heart of the east side, are many of the
little Russian Jewish cafés, already mentioned, where excellent coffee
and tea are sold, where everything is clean and good, and where the
conversation is often of the best. The talk is good, for there
assemble, in the late afternoon and evening, the chosen crowd of
"intellectuals." The best that is Russian to-day is intensely serious.
What is distinctively Jewish has always been serious. The man hunted
from his country is apt to have a serious tone in thought and feeling.

It is this combination--Russian, Jewish, and exile--that is
represented at these little Canal Street cafés. The sombre and earnest
qualities of the race, emphasized by the special conditions, receive
here expression in the mouths of actors, socialists, musicians,
journalists, and poets. Here they get together and talk by the hour,
over their coffee and cake, about politics and society, poetry and
ethics, literature and life. The café-keepers themselves are
thoughtful and often join in the discussion,--a discussion never
light but sometimes lighted up by bitter wit and gloomy irony.

There are many poets among them, four of whom stand out as men of
great talent. One of the four, Morris Rosenfeld, is already well known
to the English-speaking world through a translation of some of his
poems. Two of the other three are equally well known, but only to the
Jewish people. One is famous throughout Jewish Russia.


A WEDDING BARD

The oldest of the four poets is Eliakim Zunser. It is he that is known
to millions of people in Russia and to the whole New York Ghetto. He
is the poet of the common people, the beloved of all, the poet of the
housewife, of the Jew who is so ignorant that he does not even know
his own family name. To still more ignorant people, if such are
possible, he is known by what, after all, is his distinctive title,
Eliakim the _Badchen_, or the Wedding Bard. He writes in Yiddish, the
universal language of the Jew, dubbed "jargon" by the Hebrew
aristocrat.

Zunser is now a printer in Rutger's Square, and has largely given up
his duties as _Badchen_, but at one time he was so famous in that
capacity that he went to a wedding once or twice every day, and made
in that way a large income. His part at the ceremony was to address
the bride and bridegroom in verse so solemn that it would bring tears
to their eyes, and then entertain the guests with burlesque lines. He
composed the music as well as the verses, and did both extempore. When
he left his home to attend the wedding there was no idea in his head
as to what he would say. He left that to the result of a hurried talk
before the ceremony with the wedding guests and the relatives of the
couple.

Zunser's wedding verses died as soon as they were born, but there are
sixty-five collections of his poems, hundreds of which are sung every
day to young and old throughout Russia. Many others have never been
published, for Zunser is a poet who composes as he breathes, whose
every feeling and idea quivers into poetic expression, and who
preserves only an accidental part of what he does.

  [Illustration: ELIAKIM ZUNSER]

He is a man of about seventy years of age, with kind little eyes, a
gray beard, and spare, short figure. As he sits in his printing
office in the far east side he wears a small black cap on his head.
Adjoining the office is another room, in which he lives with his wife
and several children. The stove, the dining-table, the beds, are all
in the same room, which is bare and chill. But the poet is hospitable,
and to the guests he offered cake and a bottle of sarsaparilla. Far
more delightful, however, the old man read some of his poems aloud. As
he read in a chanting tone he swayed gently backwards and forwards,
unconscious of his visitors, absorbed in the rhythm and feeling of the
song. There was great sweetness and tenderness in his eyes, facility
and spontaneity in the metre, and simple pathos and philosophy in the
meaning of what he said. He was apparently not conscious of the
possession of unusual power. Famous as he is, there was no sense of it
in his bearing. He is absolutely of the people, childlike and simple.
So far removed is he from the pride of his distinction that he has
largely given up poetry now.

"I don't write much any more," he said in his careless Yiddish; "I
have not much time."

His poetry seemed to him only a detail of his life. Along with the
simplicity of old age he has the maturity and aloofness of it. The
feeling for his position as an individual, if he ever had it, has
gone, and left the mind and heart interested only in God, race, and
impersonal beauty.

So as he chanted his poems he seemed to gather up into himself the
dignity and pathos of his serious and suffering race, but as one who
had gone beyond the suffering and lived only with the eternities. His
wife and children bent over him as he recited, and their bodies kept
time with his rhythm. One of the two visitors was a Jew, whose
childhood had been spent in Russia, and when Zunser read a dirge which
he had composed in Russia twenty-five years ago at the death by
cholera of his first wife and children--a dirge which is now chanted
daily in thousands of Jewish homes in Russia--the visitor joined in,
altho he had not heard it for many years. Tears came to his eyes as
memories of his childhood were brought up by Zunser's famous lines;
his body swayed to and fro in sympathy with that of Zunser and those
of the poet's second wife and her children; and to the Anglo-Saxon
present this little group of Jewish exiles moved by rhythm, pathos,
and the memory of a far-away land conveyed a strange emotion.

Zunser's dirge is in a vein of reflective melancholy. "The Mail Wagon"
is its title. The mail wagon brings joy and sorrow, hope and despair,
and it was this awful mechanism that brought Zunser's grief home to
him. "But earth, too, is a machine, a machine that crushes the bones
of the philosopher into dust, digests them, that crushes and digests
all things. From it all comes. Into it all goes. Why may I not
therefore be chewing at this moment the marrow of my children?"

Another song the old man read aloud was composed in his early
childhood, and is representative in subject and mood of much of his
later work. "The Song of the Bird" it is called, and it typifies the
Jewish race. The bird's wing is broken, and the bird reflects in
tender melancholy over his misfortunes. "Take me away from Roumania"
has the same melancholy, but also a humorous pathos in the title, for
the poet meant he would like to be taken away from Russia, but was
afraid to say so for political reasons. But the sadness of Zunser's
poetry is lightened by its spontaneity and by the felicity of verse
and music, and the naïve idea in each poem is never too solemnly
insisted upon for popular poetry.

The dirge, which touched upon an episode of his life, led the poet to
tell in his simple way the other events of a life history at once
typical and peculiar.

He was born in Vilna, the capital of ancient Lithuania, and became
apprentice to a weaver of gold lace at the age of six. His general
education was consequently slight, tho he picked up a little of the
Talmud and sang Isaiah and Jeremiah while at work. At the end of six
years, when he was supposed to know his trade, his master was to give
him twenty roubles as total wage. But the master refused to pay, and
young Zunser took to the road with no money. He went to Bysk in the
Ostsee province, and there worked at his trade during the day and at
night studied the Talmud under the local rabbi. He also began to read
books in pure Hebrew for the love of the noble poetry in that tongue.
Before long he received word from home that his little brother had
died. He went back and helped his mother cry, as he expressed it. Away
he went again from home to a place called Bobroysk, where he obtained
a position to teach Hebrew in the family of an innkeeper, who promised
to pay him twenty-five roubles at the end of six months. When the time
came his employer said he would pay at the end of the year. Ingenuous
Zunser agreed, but the innkeeper, just before the end of the year,
went to a government official and reported that there was a boy at his
house who was fit to be a soldier. Young Zunser was pressed into the
service. He was then thirteen. It was in the barracks that he composed
his first three songs. In these songs he poured out his heart, told
all his woe, but did not print them, "for," he said, "it was my own
case."

On being released from the service, Zunser went to Vilna and continued
his trade as a gold-lace maker. He also wrote many poems and songs.
They were not printed at first, but circulated in written copies.
Zunser is said to be the first man to write songs in Yiddish, and soon
he became famous. "It was 'the lacemaker boy' everywhere," as the poet
expressed it. Now that he could make money by his songs he gave up his
trade and devoted himself to art. In 1861 he returned to his native
town a great man. There he first saw his work in print. Then came a
period when he wrote a great deal and performed every day his function
as wedding bard. For ten years things prospered with him, but in 1871
his wife and four children died of cholera. Zunser composed the famous
dirge, left Vilna, which appeared to him unlucky, and went to Minsk.
Here he continued to get a living with his pen, and married again. Ten
years ago he came to New York with his family and kept up his
occupation as wedding bard for some time.

The character of Zunser's poetry is what might be expected from his
popularity, slight education, and humble position in the Jewish world.
His melancholy is common to all Jewish poets. There is a constant
reference to his race, too, a love for it, and a sort of humble pride.
More than any of the four poets whom we are to mention, with the
possible exception of Morris Rosenfeld, Zunser has a fresh lyric
quality which has gone far to endear him to the people. Yet in spite
of his sweet bird-like speed of expression, Zunser's is a poetry of
ideas, altho the ideas are simple, fragmentary, and fanciful, and are
seldom sustained beyond what is admissible to the lyric touch. The
pale cast of thought, less marked in Zunser's work than in that of the
other three poets, is also a common characteristic of Jewish poetry.
Melancholy, patriotic, and thoughtful, what is lacking in Zunser is
what all modern Jewish poetry lacks and what forms a sweet part of
Anglo-Saxon literature--the distinctively sensuous element. A Keats is
a Hebrew impossibility. The poetry of simple presentation, of the
qualities of mere physical nature, is strikingly absent in the
imaginative work of this serious and moral people. The intellectual
element is always noticeable, even in simple Zunser, the poet of the
people.


A CHAMPION OF RACE

A striking contrast to the popular wedding bard is Menahem Dolitzki,
called the Hebrew poet because he has the distinction of writing in
the old Hebrew language.

His learning is limited to the old literature of his race. He is not a
generally well educated man, not knowing or caring anything about
modern life or ideas. The poet of the holy tongue, he is what the Jews
call _maskil_, fellow of wisdom. The aloof dignity of his position
fills him with a mild contempt for the "jargon," the Yiddish of
Rosenfeld and Zunser, and makes him distrustful of what the fourth
poet, Wald, represents--the modern socialistic spirit.

Singularly enough, he is called by the socialists of the Ghetto the
poet of the dilettanti. An Anglo-Saxon American employs the term to
mean those persons superficially interested in much, deeply interested
in nothing; but these socialistic spirits stigmatize as dilettante
whatever is not immersed in the spirit of the modern world. The man of
form, the lover of the old, the cool man with scholastic tinge has no
place in the sympathetic imagination of the Ghetto intellectuals. They
leave him to the learned among old fogies. And it is true that
Dolitzki's appeal is a limited one, both as a man and as a poet. He is
a handsome man of about forty-five years, with a fine profile, an
unenthusiastic manner, a native reserve very evident in his way of
reading his poetry. He has nothing of the buoyant spontaneity, the
impersonal feeling of Zunser. The poet of the people was a part of his
verse as he read. He threw himself into it, identified himself with
his musical and fanciful creation. But Dolitzki, who has been recently
a travelling agent for a Yiddish newspaper on the east side, and has a
little home suggesting greater cleanliness and comfort than that of
Zunser, held his manuscript at arm's length and read his verses with
no apparent sign of emotion. About his poetry and life he talked with
comparative reserve, in the former evidently caring most for the form
and the language, and in the latter for the ideas which determined his
intellectual life rather than for picturesque details and events.

  [Illustration: MENAHEM DOLITZKI]

Dolitzki's life and work are identified with the revival of Hebrew
literature of fifty years ago, and, more narrowly, of twenty years
ago. He is one of the great poets of that revival, and wherever it is
felt in the Jewish world, there Dolitzki is known and admired. He was
born in Byelostock, but spent his early manhood in Moscow, whence he
was expelled. That event partly determined the character of his first
writings--patriotic poems of culture, reasoned outcries against the
religious prejudice of the orthodox Jews, the Jews who take their
stand on the Talmud, led by the hair-splitting rabbi, upholders of the
narrow Jewish theology. Just as the revival of learning in Europe
brought doubt of orthodoxy along with it, so the revival of the pure
Hebrew literature brought doubt of the religion of the established
rabbi, founded on a minute interpretation of the Talmud. The Hebrew
scholars who went back to the sources of Jewish literature for their
inspiration were worse than infidels to the orthodox. And Dolitzki was
the poet of these "infidels."

When, however, the Jews were expelled from Moscow, Dolitzki's interest
broadened to love of his race. It is not so much interest in human
nature that these noble and austere poems manifest, as an epic love
for the race as a whole, a lofty and abstract emotion. The
intellectual and moral element characteristic of Jewish poetry is
particularly marked in Dolitzki's work. His first poems, those of
culture inspired by hatred of Talmudic prejudice, and his later ones,
filled with the abstract love of his race, are poems of idealism
expressed largely in complicated symbolical language, lacking, as
compared with Zunser's poetry, spontaneity, wholly wanting in sensuous
imagery, but written in musical and finished verse.

A poem illustrating Dolitzki's first period tells how a cherub bore
the poet, symbolizing the Jewish people, aloft where he could see pure
and beautiful things, but soon the earth appeared, in the shape of a
round loaf of bread symbolizing need and poverty and prejudice; and to
this the aspiring Jew must return and from this he could not escape.
One of the poems in which Dolitzki's love of his race is expressed
describes a man and a maiden (the Jewish race) who, driven by love of
one another and fear of oppression, are sitting upon a lofty rock.
Below them on the plain they see their family murdered by the
invaders. Then they voluntarily die, declaring that they will yet live
forever in the race.

Dolitzki's remote idealism represents a nobler kind of thing than what
is generally associated with the east side. A dignified and epic
poet, he is filled with moral rather than enthusiastic love of the
old language and the old race.


A SINGER OF LABOR

Morris Rosenfeld, poet and former tailor, strikes in his personality
and writings the weary minor. Full of tears are the man and his song.
Zunser, Dolitzki, and Wald, altho in their verse runs the eternal
melancholy of poetry and of the Jews, have yet physical buoyancy and a
robust spirit. But Rosenfeld, small, dark, and fragile in body, with
fine eyes and drooping eyelashes, and a plaintive, childlike voice, is
weary and sick--a simple poet, a sensitive child, a bearer of burdens,
an east side tailor. Zunser and Dolitzki have shown themselves able to
cope with their hard conditions, but the sad little Rosenfeld,
unpractical and incapable in all but his songs, has had the hardest
time of all. His life has been typical of that of many a delicate
poet--a life of privation, of struggle borne by weak shoulders, and a
spirit and temperament not fitted to meet the world.

  [Illustration: MORRIS ROSENFELD]

Much younger than Zunser or Dolitzki, Morris Rosenfeld was born
thirty-eight years ago in a small village in the province of Subalk,
in Russian Poland, at the end of the last Polish revolution. The very
night he was born the world began to oppress him, for insurgents threw
rocks through the window. His grandfather was rich, but his father
lost the money in business, and Morris received very little
education--only the Talmud and a little German, which he got at a
school in Warsaw. He married when he was sixteen, "because my father
told me to," as the poet expressed it. He ran away from Poland to
avoid being pressed into the army. "I would like to serve my
country," he said, "if there had been any freedom for the Jew." Then
he went to Holland and learned the trade of diamond-cutting; then to
London, where he took up tailoring.

Hearing that the tailors had won a strike in America, he came to New
York, thinking he would need to work here only ten hours a day. "But
what I heard," he said, "was a lie. I found the sweat-shops in New
York just as bad as they were in London."

In those places he worked for many years, worked away his health and
strength, but at the same time composed many a sweetly sad song. "I
worked in the sweat-shop in the daytime," he said to me, "and at night
I worked at my poems. I could not help writing them. My heart was full
of bitterness. If my poems are sad and plaintive, it is because I
expressed my own feelings, and because my surroundings were sad."

Next to Zunser, Rosenfeld is the most popular of the four Jewish
poets. Zunser is most popular in Russia, Rosenfeld in this country.
Both write in the universal Yiddish or "jargon," both are simple and
spontaneous, musical and untutored. But, unlike Zunser, Rosenfeld is a
thorough representative, one might say victim, of the modern spirit.
Zunser sings to an older and more buoyant Jewish world, to the
Russian Hebrew village and the country at large. Rosenfeld in weary
accents sings to the maimed spirit of the Jewish slums. It is a fresh,
naïve note, the pathetic cry of the bright spirit crushed in the
poisonous air of the Ghetto. The first song that Rosenfeld printed in
English is this:

     "I lift mine eyes against the sky,
     The clouds are weeping, so am I;
     I lift mine eyes again on high,
     The sun is smiling, so am I.
     Why do I smile? Why do I weep?
     I do not know; it lies too deep.

     "I hear the winds of autumn sigh,
     They break my heart, they make me cry;
     I hear the birds of lovely spring,
     My hopes revive, I help them sing.
     Why do I sing? Why do I cry?
     It lies so deep, I know not why."


A DREAMER OF BROTHERHOOD

Abraham Wald, whose _nom de plume_ is Lessin, is only twenty-eight
years old, the youngest and least known of the four poets, yet in some
respects the most interesting. He is the only one who is on a level
with the intellectual alertness of the day. His education is broad and
in some directions thorough. He is the only one of the four poets whom
we are discussing who knows Russian, which language he often writes.
He is an imaginative critic, a violent socialist, and an excitable
lover of nature.

One of his friends called the poet on one occasion an intellectual
_débauché_. It was in a Canal Street café, where Wald was talking in
an excited tone to several other intellectuals. He is a short, stocky
man, with a suggestion of physical power. His eyes are brilliant, and
there seems to be going on in him a sort of intellectual consumption.
He is restlessly intense in manner, speaks in images, and is always
passionately convinced of the truth of what he sees so clearly but
seldom expresses in cold logic. His fevered idealism meets you in his
frank, quick gaze and impulsive and rapid speech.

  [Illustration: ABRAHAM WALD]

Lacking in repose, balance, and sobriety of thought, Wald is well
described by his friend's phrase. Equally well he may be called the
Jewish bohemian. He is not dissipated in the ordinary sense. Coffee
and tea are the drinks he finds in his little cafés. But in these
places he practically lives, disputing, arguing, expounding, with
whomsoever he may find. He has no fixed home, but sleeps wherever
inevitable weariness finds him. He prefers to sleep not at all. Like
all his talented tribe he is poor, and makes an occasional dollar by
writing a poem or an article for an east side newspaper. When he has
collected three or four dollars he quits the newspaper office and
seeks again his beloved café, violently to impart his quick-coming
thoughts and impulses. Only after his money is gone--and it lasts him
many days--does he return to his work on the paper, the editor of
which must be an uncommonly good-natured fellow.

Impelled by political reasons, Wald left Russia three years ago, but
before that time, which was in his twenty-fifth year, he had passed
through eight mental and moral crises. Perhaps the number was a
poetical exaggeration, for when I asked the poet to enumerate he gave
only five. As a boy he revolted from the hair-splitting Talmudic
orthodoxy, and was cursed in consequence; then he lost his Jewish
faith altogether; then his whole _Cultur-Anschauung_ changed, on
account of the influence of Russian literature. He became an atheist
and then a socialist and perhaps a pantheist: at least he has written
poems in which breathes the personified spirit of nature. Without the
peace of nature, however, is the man and his work. He dislikes America
because it lacks the ebullient activity of moral, imaginative life.
Wald likes Russia better than America because Russia, to use the
poet's words, is idealism, hope, and America is realization.

"Before I came to America," he said, "I thought it would not be as
interesting as Russia, and when I got here I saw that I was right.
America seemed all worked out to me, as if mighty things had already
been done, but it seemed lifeless at the core. Russia, on the other
hand, with no external form of national prosperity, is all activity at
heart, restless longing. Russia is nothing to see, but alive and
bubbling at the core. The American wants a legal wife, something there
and sure, but the Russian wants a wife behind a mountain, through
which he cannot penetrate, but can only dream and strive for her."

These four poets have what is distinctive of Jewish poetry--the pulse
of desire and hope, in which there is strain and reproach, constant
effort. The Russian Jew's lack of appreciation of completed beauty or
of merely sensuous nature is strikingly illustrated by the fact that
there has never been a great expression of plastic art in his history.
Painting, sculpture, and architecture are nothing to the Jew in
comparison with the literature and music of ideas. In nearly all the
Jews of talent I have met there is the same intellectual consumption,
the excitement of beauty, but no enjoyment of pure beauty of form. The
race is still too unhappy, too unsatisfied, has too much to gain, to
express a complacent sense of the beauty of what is.

Wald's is the poetry of socialism and of nature, and one form is as
turbulent as the other. He writes, for instance, of the prisoner in
Siberia, his verses filled with passionate rebellion. Then he tells
how he dreamed beside the gleaming river, and of the fancies that
passed through his brain--not merely pretty fancies, but passionately
moral images in which rebellion, longing, wonder, are by turns
expressed; never peaceful enjoyment of nature, never simply the humble
eye that sees and questions not, but always the moral storm and
stress.

Wald and Rosenfeld represent at once things similar and unlike. Both
are associated with the modern spirit of socialism, both are
identified with the heart of big cities, both are very civilized, yet
in temperament and quality no two poets could be more widely
separated. Rosenfeld is the finer spirit, the more narrow, too. He is
eminently the Ghetto Jew. But Wald, as one sees him talking in the
café, his whole body alive with emotion, with his youthful, open face,
his constant energy, and the modernity and freshness of his ideas,
seems the Russian rather than the Jew, and suggests the vivid spirit
of Tolstoi.

In comparison with Wald and Rosenfeld the older men, Dolitzki and
Zunser, seem remote. Dolitzki has the remoteness of culture and Zunser
that of old age and relative peace of spirit. But compared among
themselves the poets of the four are Zunser and Rosenfeld, the
spontaneous lyric singers. Wald, however, is making his way rapidly
into the sympathetic intelligence of the socialists--a growing
class--but has not as yet the same wide appeal as the two poets who
sing only in the tongue of the people.




Chapter Five

The Stage


THEATRES, ACTORS AND AUDIENCE

In the three Yiddish theatres on the Bowery is expressed the world of
the Ghetto--that New York City of Russian Jews, large, complex, with a
full life and civilization. In the midst of the frivolous Bowery,
devoted to tinsel variety shows, "dive" music-halls, fake museums,
trivial amusement booths of all sorts, cheap lodging-houses, ten-cent
shops and Irish-American tough saloons, the theatres of the chosen
people alone present the serious as well as the trivial interests of
an entire community. Into these three buildings crowd the Jews of all
the Ghetto classes--the sweat-shop woman with her baby, the
day-laborer, the small Hester Street shopkeeper, the Russian-Jewish
anarchist and socialist, the Ghetto rabbi and scholar, the poet, the
journalist. The poor and ignorant are in the great majority, but the
learned, the intellectual and the progressive are also represented,
and here, as elsewhere, exert a more than numerically proportionate
influence on the character of the theatrical productions, which,
nevertheless, remain essentially popular. The socialists and the
literati create the demand that forces into the mass of vaudeville,
light opera, historical and melodramatic plays a more serious art
element, a simple transcript from life or the theatric presentation of
a Ghetto problem. But this more serious element is so saturated with
the simple manners, humor and pathos of the life of the poor Jew, that
it is seldom above the heartfelt understanding of the crowd.

The audiences vary in character from night to night rather more than
in an up-town theatre. On the evenings of the first four week-days the
theatre is let to a guild or club, many hundred of which exist among
the working people of the east side. Many are labor organizations
representing the different trades, many are purely social, and others
are in the nature of secret societies. Some of these clubs are formed
on the basis of a common home in Russia. The people, for instance, who
came from Vilna, a city in the old country, have organized a Vilna
Club in the Ghetto. Then, too, the anarchists have a society; there
are many socialistic orders; the newspapers of the Ghetto have their
constituency, which sometimes hires the theatre. Two or three hundred
dollars is paid to the theatre by the guild, which then sells the
tickets among the faithful for a good price. Every member of the
society is forced to buy, whether he wants to see the play or not, and
the money made over and above the expenses of hiring the theatre is
for the benefit of the guild. These performances are therefore called
"benefits." The widespread existence of such a custom is a striking
indication of the growing sense of corporate interests among the
laboring classes of the Jewish east side. It is an expression of the
socialistic spirit which is marked everywhere in the Ghetto.

On Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights the theatre is not let, for
these are the Jewish holidays, and the house is always completely sold
out, altho prices range from twenty-five cents to a dollar. Friday
night is, properly speaking, the gala occasion of the week. That is
the legitimate Jewish holiday, the night before the Sabbath. Orthodox
Jews, as well as others, may then amuse themselves. Saturday, altho
the day of worship, is also of holiday character in the Ghetto. This
is due to the Christian influences, to which the Jews are more and
more sensitive. Through economic necessity Jewish workingmen are
compelled to work on Saturday, and, like other workingmen, look upon
Saturday night as a holiday, in spite of the frown of the orthodox.
Into Sunday, too, they extend their freedom, and so in the Ghetto
there are now three popularly recognized nights on which to go with
all the world to the theatre.

On those nights the theatre presents a peculiarly picturesque sight.
Poor workingmen and women with their babies of all ages fill the
theatre. Great enthusiasm is manifested, sincere laughter and tears
accompany the sincere acting on the stage. Pedlers of soda-water,
candy, of fantastic gewgaws of many kinds, mix freely with the
audience between the acts. Conversation during the play is received
with strenuous hisses, but the falling of the curtain is the signal
for groups of friends to get together and gossip about the play or the
affairs of the week. Introductions are not necessary, and the Yiddish
community can then be seen and approached with great freedom. On the
stage curtain are advertisements of the wares of Hester Street or
portraits of the "star" actors. On the programmes and circulars
distributed in the audience are sometimes amusing announcements of
coming attractions or lyric praise of the "stars." Poetry is not
infrequent, an example of which, literally translated, is:

     Labor, ye stars, as ye will,
     Ye cannot equal the artist;
     In the garden of art ye shall not flourish;
     Ye can never achieve his fame.
     Can you play _Hamlet_ like him?
     The _Wild King_, or the _Huguenots_?
     Are you gifted with feeling
     So much as to imitate him like a shadow?
     Your fame rests on the pen;
     On the show-cards your flight is high;
     But on the stage every one can see
     How your greatness turns to ashes,
     Tomashevsky! Artist great!
     No praise is good enough for you;
     Every one remains your ardent friend.
     Of all the stars you remain the king.
     You seek no tricks, no false quibbles;
     One sees Truth itself playing.
     Your appearance is godly to us;
     Every movement is full of grace;
     Pleasing is your every gesture;
     Sugar-sweet your every turn;
     You remain the King of the Stage;
     Everything falls to your feet.

On the playboards outside the theatre, containing usually the portrait
of a star, are also lyric and enthusiastic announcements. Thus, on the
return of the great Adler, who had been ill, it was announced on the
boards that "the splendid eagle has spread his wings again."

The Yiddish actors, as may be inferred from the verses quoted, take
themselves with peculiar seriousness, justified by the enthusiasm,
almost worship, with which they are regarded by the people. Many a
poor Jew, man or girl, who makes no more than $10 a week in the
sweat-shop, will spend $5 of it on the theatre, which is practically
the only amusement of the Ghetto Jew. He has not the loafing and
sporting instincts of the poor Christian, and spends his money for the
theatre rather than for drink. It is not only to see the play that the
poor Jew goes to the theatre. It is to see his friends and the actors.
With these latter he, and more frequently she, try in every way to
make acquaintance, but commonly are compelled to adore at a distance.
They love the songs that are heard on the stage, and for these the
demand is so great that a certain bookshop on the east side makes a
specialty of publishing them.

The actor responds to this popular enthusiasm with sovereign contempt.
He struts about in the cafés on Canal and Grand Streets, conscious of
his greatness. He refers to the crowd as "Moses" with superior
condescension or humorous vituperation. Like thieves, the actors have
a jargon of their own, which is esoteric and jealously guarded. Their
pride gave rise a year or two ago to an amusing strike at the People's
Theatre. The actors of the three Yiddish companies in New York are
normally paid on the share rather than the salary system. In the case
of the company now at the People's Theatre, this system proved very
profitable. The star actors, Jacob Adler and Boris Thomashevsky, and
their wives, who are actresses--Mrs. Adler being the heavy realistic
tragedienne and Mrs. Thomashevsky the star soubrette--have probably
received on an average during that time as much as $125 a week for
each couple. But they, with Mr. Edelstein, the business man, are
lessees of the theatre, run the risk and pay the expenses, which are
not small. The rent of the theatre is $20,000 a year, and the weekly
expenses, besides, amount to about $1,100. The subordinate actors, who
risk nothing, since they do not share the expenses, have made amounts
during this favorable period ranging from $14 a week on the average
for the poorest actors to $75 for those just beneath the "stars." But,
in spite of what is exceedingly good pay in the Bowery, the actors of
this theatre formed a union, and struck for wages instead of shares.
This however, was only an incidental feature. The real cause was that
the management of the theatre, with the energetic Thomashevsky at the
head, insisted that the actors should be prompt at rehearsals, and if
they were not, indulged in unseemly epithets. The actors' pride was
aroused, and the union was formed to insure their ease and dignity
and to protect them from harsh words. The management imported actors
from Chicago. Several of the actors here stood by their employers,
notably Miss Weinblatt, a popular young ingénue, who, on account of
her great memory is called the "Yiddish Encyclopedia," and Miss
Gudinski, an actress of commanding presence. Miss Weinblatt forced her
father, once an actor, now a farmer, into the service of the
management. But the actors easily triumphed. Misses Gudinski and
Weinblatt were forced to join the union, Mr. Weinblatt returned to his
farm, the "scabs" were packed off to Philadelphia, and the wages
system introduced. A delegation was sent to Philadelphia to throw
cabbages at the new actors, who appeared in the Yiddish performances
in that city. The triumphant actors now receive on the average
probably $10 to $15 a week less than under the old system. Mr. Conrad,
who began the disaffection, receives a salary of $29 a week, fully $10
less than he received for months before the strike. But the dignity of
the Yiddish actor is now placed beyond assault. As one of them
recently said: "We shall no longer be spat upon nor called 'dog.'"

The Yiddish actor is so supreme that until recently a regular system
of hazing playwrights was in vogue. Joseph Latteiner and Professor M.
Horowitz were long recognized as the only legitimate Ghetto
playwrights. When a new writer came to the theatre with a manuscript,
various were the pranks the actors would play. They would induce him
to try, one after another, all the costumes in the house, in order to
help him conceive the characters; or they would make him spout the
play from the middle of the stage, they themselves retiring to the
gallery to "see how it sounded." In the midst of his exertions they
would slip away, and he would find himself shouting to the empty
boards. Or, in the midst of a mock rehearsal, some actor would shout,
"He is coming, the great Professor Horowitz, and he will eat you"; and
they would rush from the theatre with the panic-stricken playwright
following close at their heels.

The supremacy of the Yiddish actor has, however, its humorous
limitations. The orthodox Jews who go to the theatre on Friday night,
the beginning of Sabbath, are commonly somewhat ashamed of themselves
and try to quiet their consciences by a vociferous condemnation of the
actions on the stage. The actor, who through the exigencies of his
rôle, is compelled to appear on Friday night with a cigar in his
mouth, is frequently greeted with hisses and strenuous cries of
"Shame, shame, smoke on the Sabbath!" from the proletarian hypocrites
in the gallery.

  [Illustration: MR. MOSHKOVITZ]

The plays at these theatres vary in a general way with the varying
audiences of which I have spoken above. The thinking socialists
naturally select a less violent play than the comparatively illogical
anarchists. Societies of relatively conservative Jews desire a
historical play in which the religious Hebrew in relation to the
persecuting Christian is put in pathetic and melodramatic situations.
There are a very large number of "culture" pieces produced, which,
roughly speaking, are plays in which the difference between the Jew of
one generation and the next is dramatically portrayed. The pathos or
tragedy involved in differences of faith and "point of view" between
the old rabbi and his more enlightened children is expressed in many
historical plays of the general character of _Uriel Acosta_, tho in
less lasting form. Such plays, however, are called "historical
plunder" by that very up-to-date element of the intellectual Ghetto
which is dominated by the Russian spirit of realism. It is the demand
of these fierce realists that of late years has produced a supply of
theatrical productions attempting to present a faithful picture of the
actual conditions of life. Permeating all these kinds of plays is the
amusement instinct pure and simple. For the benefit of the crowd of
ignorant people grotesque humor, popular songs, vaudeville tricks, are
inserted everywhere.

Of these plays the realistic are of the most value,[1] for they often
give the actual Ghetto life with surprising strength and fidelity. The
past three years have been their great seasons, and have developed a
large crop of new playwrights, mainly journalists who write
miscellaneous articles for the east side newspapers. Jacob Gordin, of
whom we shall have frequent occasion to speak, has been writing plays
for several years, and was the first realistic playwright; he remains
the strongest and most prominent in this kind of play. Professor
Horowitz, who is now the lessee of the Windsor Theatre, situated on
the Bowery, between Grand and Canal Streets, represents, along with
Joseph Latteiner, the conservative and traditional aspects of the
stage. He is an interesting man, fifty-six years of age, and has been
connected with the Yiddish stage practically since its origin. His
father was a teacher in a Hebrew school, and he himself is a man of
uncommon learning. He has made a great study of the stage, has written
one hundred and sixty-seven plays, and claims to be an authority on
_dramaturgie_. Latteiner is equally productive, but few of their plays
are anything more than Yiddish adaptations of old operas and
melodramas in other languages. Long runs are impossible on the Yiddish
stage and consequently the playwrights produce many plays and are not
very scrupulous in their methods. The absence of dramatic criticism
and the ignorance of the audience enable them to "crib" with impunity.
As one of the actors said, Latteiner and Horowitz and their class took
their first plays from some foreign source and since then have been
repeating themselves. The actor said that when he is cast in a
Latteiner play he does not need to learn his part. He needs only to
understand the general situation; the character and the words he
already knows from having appeared in many other Latteiner plays.

  [Illustration: YIDDISH PLAYWRIGHTS DISCUSSING THE DRAMA]

The professor, nevertheless, naturally regards himself and Latteiner
as the "real" Yiddish playwrights. For many years after the first
bands of actors reached the New York Ghetto these two men held
undisputed sway. Latteiner leaned to "romantic," Horowitz to
"culture," plays, and both used material which was mainly historical.
The professor regards that as the bright period of the Ghetto stage.
Since then there has been, in his opinion, a decadence which began
with the translation of the classics into Yiddish. _Hamlet_,
_Othello_, _King Lear_, and plays of Schiller, were put upon the stage
and are still being performed. Sometimes they are almost literally
translated, sometimes adapted until they are realistic representations
of Jewish life. Gordin's _Yiddish King Lear_, for instance, represents
Shakespeare's idea only in the most general way, and weaves about it a
sordid story of Jewish character and life. Of _Hamlet_ there are two
versions, one adapted, in which Shakespeare's idea is reduced to a
ludicrous shadow, the interest lying entirely in the presentation of
Jewish customs.

The first act of the Yiddish version represents the wedding feast of
Hamlet's mother and uncle. In the Yiddish play the uncle is a rabbi in
a small village in Russia. He did not poison Hamlet's father but broke
the latter's heart by wooing and winning his queen. Hamlet is off
somewhere getting educated as a rabbi. While he is gone his father
dies. Six weeks afterwards the son returns in the midst of the wedding
feast, and turns the feast into a funeral. Scenes of rant follow
between mother and son, Ophelia and Hamlet, interspersed with jokes
and sneers at the sect of rabbis who think they communicate with the
angels. The wicked rabbi conspires against Hamlet, trying to make him
out a nihilist. The plot is discovered and the wicked rabbi is sent to
Siberia. The last act is the graveyard scene. It is snowing violently.
The grave is near a huge windmill. Ophelia is brought in on the bier.
Hamlet mourns by her side and is married, according to the Jewish
custom, to the dead woman. Then he dies of a broken heart. The other
version is almost a literal translation. To these translations of the
classics, Professor Horowitz objects on the ground that the ignorant
Yiddish public cannot understand them, because what learning they have
is limited to distinctively Yiddish subjects and traditions.

Another important step in what the professor calls the degeneration of
the stage was the introduction a few years ago of the American
"pistol" play--meaning the fierce melodrama which has been for so long
a characteristic of the English plays produced on the Bowery.

But what has contributed more than anything else to what the good man
calls the present deplorable condition of the theatre was the advent
of realism. "It was then," said the professor one day with calm
indignation, "that the genuine Yiddish play was persecuted. Young
writers came from Russia and swamped the Ghetto with scurrilous
attacks on me and Latteiner. No number of the newspaper appeared that
did not contain a scathing criticism. They did not object to the
actors, who in reality were very bad, but it was the play they aimed
at. These writers knew nothing about _dramaturgie_, but their heads
were filled with senseless realism. Anything historical and
distinctively Yiddish they thought bad. For a long time Latteiner and
I were able to keep their realistic plays off the boards, but for the
last few years there has been an open field for everybody. The result
is that horrors under the mask of realism have been put upon the
stage. This year is the worst of all--characters butchered on the
stage, the coarsest language, the most revolting situations, without
ideas, with no real material. It cannot last, however. Latteiner and I
continue with our real Yiddish plays, and we shall yet regain entire
possession of the field."

At least this much may fairly be conceded to Professor Horowitz--that
the realistic writers in what is in reality an excellent attempt often
go to excess, and are often unskilful as far as stage construction is
concerned. In the reaction from plays with "pleasant" endings, they
tend to prefer equally unreal "unpleasant" endings, "onion" plays, as
the opponents of the realists call them. They, however, have written a
number of plays which are distinctively of the New York Ghetto, and
which attempt an unsentimental presentation of truth. A rather
extended description of these plays is given in the next section.
Professor Horowitz's plays, on the contrary, are largely based upon
the sentimental representation of inexact Jewish history. They herald
the glory and wrongs of the Hebrew people, and are badly constructed
melodramas of conventional character. Another class of plays written
by Professor Horowitz, and which have occasionally great but temporary
prosperity, are what he calls _Zeitstucke_. Some American newspaper
sensation is rapidly dramatized and put hot on the boards, such as
_Marie Barberi_, _Dr. Buchanan_ and _Dr. Harris_.

The three theatres--the People's, the Windsor and the Thalia, which is
on the Bowery opposite the Windsor--are in a general way very similar
in the character of the plays produced, in the standard of acting and
in the character of the audience. There are, however, some minor
differences. The People's is the "swellest" and probably the least
characteristic of the three. It panders to the "uptown" element of the
Ghetto, to the downtown tradesman who is beginning to climb a little.
The baleful influence in art of the _nouveaux riches_ has at this
house its Ghetto expression. There is a tendency there to imitate the
showy qualities of the Broadway theatres--melodrama, farce, scenery,
etc. No babies are admitted, and the house is exceedingly clean in
comparison with the theatres farther down the Bowery. Three years ago
this company were at the Windsor Theatre, and made so much money that
they hired the People's, that old home of Irish-American melodrama,
and this atmosphere seems slightly to have affected the Yiddish
productions. Magnificent performances quite out of the line of the
best Ghetto drama have been attempted, notably Yiddish dramatizations
of successful up-town productions. Hauptman's _Versunkene Glocke_,
_Sapho_, _Quo Vadis_, and other popular Broadway plays in flimsy
adaptations were tried with little success, as the Yiddish audiences
hardly felt themselves at home in these unfamiliar scenes and
settings.

The best trained of the three companies is at present that of the
Thalia Theatre. Here many excellent realistic plays are given. Of late
years, the great playwright of the colony, Jacob Gordin, has written
mainly for this theatre. There, too, is the best of the younger
actresses, Mrs. Bertha Kalisch. She is the prettiest woman on the
Ghetto stage and was at one time the leading lady of the Imperial
Theatre at Bucharest. She takes the leading woman parts in plays like
_Fedora_, _Magda_ and _The Jewish Zaza_. The principal actor at this
theatre is David Kessler, who is one of the best of the Ghetto actors
in realistic parts, and one of the worst when cast, as he often is, as
the romantic lover. The actor of most prominence among the younger men
is Mr. Moshkovitch, who hopes to be a "star" and one of the
management. When the union was formed he was in a quandary. Should he
join or should he not? He feared it might be a bad precedent, which
the actors would use against him when he became a star. And yet he did
not want to get them down on him. So before he joined he entered
solemn protests at all the cafés on Canal Street. The strike, he
maintained, was unnecessary. The actors were well paid and well
treated. Discipline should be maintained. But he would join because of
his universal sympathy with actors and with the poor--as a matter of
sentiment merely, against his better judgment.

  [Illustration: DAVID KESSLER]

The company at the Windsor is the weakest, so far as acting is
concerned, of the three. Very few "realistic" plays are given there,
for Professor Horowitz is the lessee, and he prefers the historical
Jewish opera and "culture" plays. Besides, the company is not strong
enough to undertake successfully many new productions, altho it
includes some good actors. Here Mrs. Prager vies as a prima-donna with
Mrs. Karb of the People's and Mrs. Kalisch of the Thalia. Professor
Horowitz thinks she is far better than the other two. As he puts it,
there are two and a half prima-donnas in the Ghetto--at the Windsor
Theatre there is a complete one, leaving one and a half between the
People's and the Thalia. Jacob Adler of the People's, the professor
thinks, is no actor, only a remarkable caricaturist. As Adler is the
most noteworthy representative of the realistic actors of the Ghetto,
the professor's opinion shows what the traditional Yiddish playwright
thinks of realism. The strong realistic playwright, Jacob Gordin, the
professor admits, has a "biting" dialogue, and "unconsciously writes
good cultural plays which he calls realistic, but his realistic plays,
properly speaking, are bad caricatures of life."

The managers and actors of the three theatres criticise one another
indeed with charming directness, and they all have their followers in
the Ghetto and their special cafés on Grand or Canal Streets, where
their particular prejudices are sympathetically expressed. The actors
and lessees of the People's are proud of their fine theatre, proud
that no babies are brought there. There is a great dispute between the
supporters of this theatre and those of the Thalia as to which is the
stronger company and which produces the most realistic plays. The
manager of the Thalia maintains that the People's is sensational, and
that his theatre alone represents true realism; while the supporter of
the People's points scornfully to the large number of operas produced
at the Thalia. They both unite in condemning the Windsor, Professor
Horowitz's theatre, as producing no new plays and as hopelessly behind
the times, "full of historical plunder." An episode in _The Ragpicker
of Paris_, played at the Windsor when the present People's company
were there, amusingly illustrates the jealousy which exists between
the companies. An old beggar is picking over a heap of moth-eaten,
coverless books, some of which he keeps and some rejects. He comes
across two versions of a play, _The Two Vagrants_, one of which was
used at the Thalia and the other at the Windsor. The version used at
the Windsor receives the beggar's commendation, and the other is
thrown in a contemptuous manner into a dust-heap.


REALISM, THE SPIRIT OF THE GHETTO THEATRE

The distinctive thing about the intellectual and artistic life of the
Russian Jews of the New York Ghetto, the spirit of realism, is
noticeable even on the popular stage. The most interesting plays are
those in which the realistic spirit predominates, and the best among
the actors and playwrights are the realists. The realistic element,
too, is the latest one in the history of the Yiddish stage. The Jewish
theatres in other parts of the world, which, compared with the three
in New York, are unorganized, present only anachronistic and fantastic
historical and Biblical plays, or comic opera with vaudeville
specialties attached. These things, as we have said in the last
section, are, to be sure, given in the Yiddish theatres on the Bowery
too, but there are also plays which in part at least portray the
customs and problems of the Ghetto community, and are of comparatively
recent origin.

  [Illustration: JACOB ADLER]

There are two men connected with the Ghetto stage who particularly
express the distinctive realism of the intellectual east side--Jacob
Adler, one of the two best actors, and Jacob Gordin, the playwright.
Adler, a man of great energy, tried for many years to make a theatre
succeed on the Bowery which should give only what he called good
plays. Gordin's dramas, with a few exceptions, were the only plays on
contemporary life which Adler thought worthy of presentation. The
attempt to give exclusively realistic art, which is the only art on
the Bowery, failed. There, in spite of the widespread feeling for
realism, the mass of the people desire to be amused and are bored by
anything with the form of art. So now Adler is connected with the
People's Theatre, which gives all sorts of shows, from Gordin's plays
to ludicrous history, frivolous comic opera, and conventional
melodrama. But Adler acts for the most part only in the better sort.
He is an actor of unusual power and vividness. Indeed, in his case, as
in that of some other Bowery actors, it is only the Yiddish dialect
which stands between him and the distinction of a wide reputation.

In almost every play given on the Bowery all the elements are
represented. Vaudeville, history, realism, comic opera, are generally
mixed together. Even in the plays of Gordin there are clownish and
operatic intrusions, inserted as a conscious condition of success. On
the other hand, even in the distinctively formless plays, in comic
opera and melodrama, there are striking illustrations of the popular
feeling for realism,--bits of dialogue, happy strokes of
characterization of well-known Ghetto types, sordid scenes faithful to
the life of the people.

It is the acting which gives even to the plays having no intrinsic
relation to reality a frequent quality of naturalness. The Yiddish
players, even the poorer among them, act with remarkable sincerity.
Entirely lacking in self-consciousness, they attain almost from the
outset to a direct and forcible expressiveness. They, like the
audience, rejoice in what they deem the truth. In the general lack of
really good plays they yet succeed in introducing the note of realism.
To be true to nature is their strongest passion, and even in a
conventional melodrama their sincerity, or their characterization in
the comic episodes, often redeems the play from utter barrenness.

And the little touches of truth to the life of the people are
thoroughly appreciated by the audience, much more generally so than in
the case of the better plays to be described later, where there is
more or less strictness of form and intellectual intention, difficult
for the untutored crowd to understand. In the "easy" plays, it is the
realistic touches which tell most. The spectators laugh at the exact
reproduction by the actor of a tattered type which they know well. A
scene of perfect sordidness will arouse the sympathetic laughter or
tears of the people. "It is so natural," they say to one another, "so
true." The word "natural" indeed is the favorite term of praise in the
Ghetto. What hits home to them, to their sense of humor or of sad
fact, is sure to move, altho sometimes in a manner surprising to a
visitor. To what seems to him very sordid and sad they will frequently
respond with laughter.

One of the most beloved actors in the Ghetto is Zelig Mogalesco, now
at the People's Theatre, a comedian of natural talent and of the most
felicitous instinct for characterization. Unlike the strenuous Adler,
he has no ideas about realism or anything else. He acts in any kind of
play, and could not tell the difference between truth and burlesque
caricature. And yet he is remarkable for his naturalness, and popular
because of it. Adler with his ideas is sometimes too serious for the
people, but Mogalesco's naïve fidelity to reality always meets with
the sympathy of a simple audience loving the homely and unpretentious
truth. About Adler, strong actor that he is, and also about the
talented Gordin, there is something of the doctrinaire.

But, altho the best actors of the three Yiddish theatres in the Ghetto
are realists by instinct and training, the thoroughly frivolous
element in the plays has its prominent interpreters. Joseph Latteiner
is the most popular playwright in the Bowery, and Boris Thomashevsky
perhaps the most popular actor. Latteiner has written over a hundred
plays, no one of which has form or ideas. He calls them _Volksstücke_
(plays of the people), and naïvely admits that he writes directly to
the demand. They are mainly mixed melodrama, broad burlesque, and
comic opera. His heroes are all intended for Boris Thomashevsky, a
young man, fat, with curling black hair, languorous eyes, and a rather
effeminate voice, who is thought very beautiful by the girls of the
Ghetto. Thomashevsky has a face with no mimic capacity, and a
temperament absolutely impervious to mood or feeling. But he
picturesquely stands in the middle of the stage and declaims
phlegmatically the rôle of the hero, and satisfies the "romantic"
demand of the audience. Nothing could show more clearly how much more
genuine the feeling of the Ghetto is for fidelity to life than for
romantic fancy. How small a part of the grace and charm of life the
Yiddish audiences enjoy may be judged by the fact that the romantic
appeal of a Thomashevsky is eminently satisfying to them. Girls and
men from the sweat-shops, a large part of such an audience, are moved
by a very crude attempt at beauty. On the other hand they are so
familiar with sordid fact, that the theatrical representation of it
must be relatively excellent. Therefore the art of the Ghetto,
theatrical and other, is deeply and painfully realistic.

  [Illustration: JACOB GORDIN]

When we turn to Jacob Gordin's plays, to other plays of similar
character and to the audiences to which they specifically appeal, we
have realism worked out consciously in art, the desire to express life
as it is, and at the same time the frequent expression of revolt
against the reality of things, and particularly against the actual
system of society. Consequently the "problem" play has its
representation in the Ghetto. It presents the hideous conditions of
life in the Ghetto--the poverty, the sordid constant reference to
money, the immediate sensuality, the jocular callousness--and
underlying the mere statement of the facts an intellectual and
passionate revolt.

The thinking element of the Ghetto is largely Socialistic, and the
Socialists flock to the theatre the nights when the Gordin type of
play is produced. They discuss the meaning and justice of the play
between the acts, and after the performance repair to the Canal Street
cafés to continue their serious discourse. The unthinking Nihilists
are also represented, but not so frequently at the best plays as at
productions in which are found crude and screaming condemnation of
existing conditions. The Anarchistic propaganda hired the Windsor
Theatre for the establishment of a fund to start the _Freie Arbeiter
Stimme_, an anarchistic newspaper. The _Beggar of Odessa_ was the play
selected,--an adaptation of the _Ragpicker of Paris_, a play by Felix
Piot, the Anarchistic agitator of the French Commune in 1871. The
features of the play particularly interesting to the audience were
those emphasizing the clashing of social classes. The old ragpicker, a
model man, clever, brilliant, and good, is a philosopher too, and says
many things warmly welcomed by the audience. As he picks up his rags
he sings about how even the clothing of the great comes but to dust.
His adopted daughter is poor, and consequently noble and sweet. The
villains are all rich; all the very poor characters are good. Another
play, _Vogele_, is partly a satire of the rich Jew by the poor Jew.
"The rich Jews," sang the comedian, "toil not, neither do they spin.
They work not, they suffer not, why then do they live on this earth?"
This unthinking revolt is the opposite pole to the unthinking
vaudeville and melodrama. In many of the plays referred to roughly as
of the Gordin-Adler type--altho they were not all written by Gordin
nor played by Adler--we find a realism more true in feeling and cast
in stronger dramatic form. In some of these plays there is no problem
element; in few is that element so prominent as essentially to
interfere with the character of the play as a presentation of life.

One of the plays most characteristic, as at once presenting the life
of the Ghetto and suggesting its problems, is _Minna_, or the Yiddish
Nora. Altho the general idea of Ibsen's _Doll's House_ is taken, the
atmosphere and life are original. The first scene represents the house
of a poor Jewish laborer on the east side. His wife and daughter are
dressing to go to see _A Doll's House_ with the boarder,--a young man
whom they have been forced to take into the house because of their
poverty. He is full of ideas and philosophy, and the two women fall in
love with him, and give him all the good things to eat. When the
laborer returns from his hard day's work, he finds that there is
nothing to eat, and that his wife and daughter are going to the play
with the boarder. The women despise the poor man, who is fit only to
work, eat, and sleep. The wife philosophizes on the atrocity of
marrying a man without intellectual interests, and finally drinks
carbolic acid. This Ibsen idea is set in a picture rich with realistic
detail: the dialect, the poverty, the types of character, the humor of
Yiddish New York. Jacob Adler plays the husband, and displays a vivid
imagination for details calculated to bring out the man's beseeching
bestiality: his filthy manners, his physical ailments, his greed, the
quickness of his anger and of resulting pacification. Like most of the
realistic plays of the Ghetto, _Minna_ is a genuine play of manners. It
has a general idea, and presents also the setting and characters of
reality.

_The Slaughter_, written by Gordin, and with the main masculine
character taken by David Kessler, an actor of occasionally great
realistic strength, is the story of the symbolic murder of a fragile
young girl by her parents, who force her to marry a rich man who has
all the vices and whom she hates. The picture of the poor house, of
the old mother and father and half-witted stepson with whom the girl
is unconsciously in love, in its faithfulness to life is typical of
scenes in many of these plays. It is rich in character and _milieu_
drawing. There is another scene of miserable life in the second act.
The girl is married and living with the rich brute. In the same house
is his mistress, curt and cold, and two children by a former wife. The
old parents come to see the wife; she meets them with the joy of
starved affection. But the husband enters and changes the scene to one
of hate and violence. The old mother tells him, however, of the heir
that is to come. Then there is a superb scene of naïve joy in the
midst of all the sordid gloom. There is rapturous delight of the old
people, turbulent triumph of the husband, and satisfaction of the
young wife. They make a holiday of it. Wine is brought. They all love
one another for the time. The scene is representative of the way the
poor Jews welcome their offspring. But indescribable violence and
abuse follow, and the wife finally kills her husband, in a scene where
realism riots into burlesque, as it frequently does on the Yiddish
stage.

But for absolute, intense realism Gordin's _Wild Man_, unrelieved by a
problem idea, is unrivaled. An idiot boy falls in love with his
stepmother without knowing what love is. He is abused by his father
and brother, beaten on account of his ineptitudes. His sister and
another brother take his side, and the two camps revile each other in
unmistakable language. The father marries again; his new wife is a
heartless, faithless woman, and she and the daughter quarrel. After
repeated scenes of brutality to the idiot, the daughter is driven out
to make her own living. Adler's portraiture of the idiot is a great
bit of technical acting. The poor fellow is filled with the mysterious
wonderings of an incapable mind. His shadow terrifies and interests
him. He philosophizes about life and death. He is puzzled and worried
by everything; the slightest sound preys on him. Physically alert, his
senses serve only to trouble and terrify the mind which cannot
interpret what they present. The burlesque which Mr. Adler puts into
the part was inserted to please the crowd, but increases the horror of
it, as when Lear went mad; for the Elizabethan audiences laughed, and
had their souls wrung at the same time. The idiot ludicrously
describes his growing love. In pantomime he tells a long story. It is
evident, even without words, that he is constructing a complicated
symbolism to express what he does not know. He falls into epilepsy and
joins stiffly in the riotous dance. The play ends so fearfully that it
shades into mere burlesque.

This horrible element in so many of these plays marks the point where
realism passes into fantastic sensationalism. The facts of life in the
Ghetto are in themselves unpleasant, and consequently it is natural
that a dramatic exaggeration of them results in something poignantly
disagreeable. The intense seriousness of the Russian Jew, which
accounts for what is excellent in these plays, explains also the
rasping falseness of the extreme situations. It is a curious fact that
idiots, often introduced in the Yiddish plays, amuse the Jewish
audience as much as they used to the Elizabethan mob.

One of the most skillful of Gordin's Yiddish adaptations is _The
Oath_, founded on Hauptman's _Fuhrmann Henschel_. In the first act a
dying peasant is exhibited on the stage. In Hauptman's play it is a
woman; in Gordin's it is a man. He is racked with coughing. A servant
clatters over the floor with her heavy boots. Another servant feeds
the sick man from a coarse bowl and the steward works at the
household accounts. The dying man's wife, and their little boy, enter
and it is apparent that something has been going on between her and
the steward. They and the servants dine realistically and coarsely and
neglect the dying man. When they leave, the dying man teaches his son
how to say "Kaddish" for his soul when he is dead. When he dies he
makes his wife swear that she will never marry again. In the second
act she is about to marry the steward, and the Jewish customs are here
used, as is often the case with the Yiddish playwright, to intensify
the dramatic effect of a scene. It is just a year from the time of her
husband's death, and the candles are burning, therefore, on the table.
According to the orthodox belief the soul of the dead is present when
the candles burn. The little boy, feeling that his mother is about to
marry again, blows out the candles. The mother, horror-stricken,
rushes to him and asks him why he did it. "I did not want my father to
see that you are going to marry again," says the little fellow. It was
an affecting scene and left few dry eyes in the audience.

At the beginning of the third act the wife and servant are living
together, married. He comes on the stage, sleepy, brutal, calling
loudly for a drink, abuses the little boy and quarrels with his wife;
he is a crude, dishonorable, coarse brute. He drives away a faithful
servant and returns to his swinish slumber. An old couple, the woman
being the sister of the dead man, who are always torturing the wife
with having broken her vow, hint to her that her new husband is too
attentive to the maid-servant. She is angry and incredulous, and calls
the maid to her, but when she sees her in the doorway, before a word
is spoken, she realizes it is true, and sends her away. The husband
enters and she passionately taxes him. He admits it, but justifies
himself: he is young, a high-liver, etc., why shouldn't he? Just then
the child is brought in, drowned in the river nearby.

In the beginning of the fourth and last act the husband again appears
as a riotous, jovial fellow. He has played a joke and turned a driver
out of his cart, and he nearly splits his sides with merriment. Drunk,
he admirably sings a song and dances. His wife enters. She hears her
vow repeated by the winds, by the trees, everywhere. Her dead child
haunts her. Her husband has stolen and misspent their money. She talks
with the faithful servant about the maid's baby. She wanders about at
night, unable to sleep. Her brute husband calls to her from the house,
saying he is afraid to sleep alone. Another talk ensues between them.
He asks her why she is old so soon. She burns the house and herself,
the neighbors rush in, and the play is over.

Some of the more striking of the realistic plays on the Ghetto stage
have been partly described, but realism in the details of character
and setting appears in all of them, even in comic opera and melodrama.
In many the element of revolt, even if it is not the basis of the
play, is expressed in occasional dialogues. Burlesque runs through
them all, but burlesque, after all, is a comment on the facts of life.
And all these points are emphasized and driven home by sincere and
forcible acting.

Crude in form as these plays are, and unpleasant as they often are in
subject and in the life portrayed, they are yet refreshing to persons
who have been bored by the empty farce and inane cheerfulness of the
uptown theatres.


THE HISTORY OF THE YIDDISH STAGE

The Yiddish stage, founded in Roumania in 1876 by Abraham Goldfaden,
has reached its highest development in the city of New York, where
there are seventy or eighty professional actors; not far from a dozen
playwrights, of whom three have written collectively more than three
hundred plays; dramas on almost every subject, produced on the
inspiration of various schools of dramatic art; and an enormous
Russian Jewish colony, which fills the theatres and creates so strong
a demand that the stage responds with a distinctive, complete, and
interesting popular art.

The best actor now in the Ghetto, with one exception, was in the
original company. That exception, with the help of a realistic
playwright, introduced an important element in the development of the
stage. With the lives of these three men the history of the Yiddish
stage is intimately connected. The first actor was a singer in the
synagogue of Bucharest, the first playwright a composer of Yiddish
songs. The foundation of the Yiddish stage might therefore be said to
lie in the Bucharest synagogue and the popular music-hall performance.

Zelig Mogalesco, the best comedian in the New York Ghetto, has seen,
altho not quite forty years of age, the birth of the Yiddish stage,
and may survive its death. He was born in Koloraush, a town in the
province of Bessarabia, near Roumania. His father was a poor
shop-keeper, and Mogalesco never went to school. But he was endowed by
nature with a remarkable voice and ear, and composed music with easy
felicity. The population of the town was orthodox Jewish, and
consequently no theatre was allowed. It was therefore in the synagogue
that the musical appetite of the Jews found satisfaction. It was the
habit of the poor people to hire as inexpensive a cantor as possible,
and this cantor might very well be ignorant of everything except
singing. Yet these cantors were so popular that the famous ones
travelled from town to town, in much the same way that the visiting
German actor--_Gast_--does to-day, and sometimes charged admission
fees.

When Mogalesco was nine years old, Nissy of the town of Bells, the
most famous cantor in the south of Russia, visited Mogalesco's town.
The boy's friends urged him to visit the great man and display his
voice. Little Mogalesco, with his mezzo-soprano, went to the inn, and
Nissy was astounded. "My dear boy," he said, "go home and fetch your
parents." With them the cantor signed a contract by which Zelig was
bound to him as a kind of musical apprentice for three years. The boy
was to receive his board and clothing, five rubles, the first year,
ten the second, and fifteen the third--fifteen dollars for the three
years.

Soon Mogalesco became widely known among the cantors of South Russia.
In six months he could read music so well that they called him "Little
Zelig, the music-eater." At the end of the first year the leading
cantor of Bucharest, Israel Kupfer, who, by the way, has been cantor
in a New York synagogue of the east side, went to Russia to secure the
services of Mogalesco. To avoid the penalties of a broken contract,
Kupfer hurried with little Zelig to Roumania, and the boy remained in
Bucharest for several years. At the age of fourteen he conducted a
choir of twenty men under Kupfer. He also became director of the
chorus in the Gentile opera. While there he began "to burn," as he
expressed it, with a desire to go on the stage, but the Gentiles would
not admit the talented Jew.

It was when Mogalesco was about twenty years old that the Yiddish
stage was born. In 1876 or 1877, Abraham Goldfaden went to Bucharest.
This man had formerly been a successful merchant in Russia, but had
failed. He was a poet, and to make a living he called that art into
play. In Russia he had written many Yiddish songs, set them to music,
and sung them in private. In the society in which he lived he deemed
that beneath his dignity, but when he lost his money he went to
Bucharest and there on the stage sang his own poems, the music for
which he took from many sources. He became a kind of music-hall
performer, but did not long remain satisfied with this modest art. His
dissatisfaction led him to create what later developed into the
present Yiddish theatre. The Talmud prohibited the stage, but at the
time when Goldfaden was casting about for something to do worthy of
his genius, the gymnasia were thrown open to the Jews, and the result
was a more tolerant spirit. Therefore, Goldfaden decided to found a
Yiddish theatre. He went to Kupfer, the cantor, and Kupfer recommended
Mogalesco as an actor for the new company. Goldfaden saw the young man
act, and the comedy genius of Mogalesco helped in the initial idea of
a Yiddish play. Mogalesco at first refused to enter into the scheme. A
Yiddish drama seemed too narrow to him, for he aspired to the
Christian stage. But when Goldfaden offered to adopt him and teach him
the Gentile languages Mogalesco agreed and became the first Yiddish
actor. Other singers in Kupfer's choir also joined Goldfaden's
company.

Thus the foundation of the Yiddish stage lay in the Bucharest
synagogue. The beginnings, of course, were small. Several other actors
were secured, among them Moses Silbermann, who is still acting on the
New York Ghetto stage. No girls could at that time be obtained for
the stage, for it is against the Talmudic law for a man even to hear a
girl sing, and men consequently played female rôles, as in Elizabethan
times in England. The first play that Goldfaden wrote was _The
Grandmother and her Grandchild_; the second was _The Shwendrick_ and
Mogalesco played the grandmother in one and a little spoiled boy in
the other. His success in both was enormous, and he still enacts on
the Bowery the part of the little boy. The first performances of
Goldfaden's play were given in Bucharest, at the time of the
Russian-Turkish war, and the city was filled with Russian contractors
and workmen. They overcrowded the theatre, and applauded Mogalesco to
the echo. From that time the success of the Yiddish stage was assured.
Goldfaden tried to get a permit to act in Russia, without success at
first; but he played in Odessa without a license, in a secret way, and
in the end a permit was secured. Other Yiddish companies sprang up.
Girls were admitted to the chorus, and women began to play female
rôles. The first woman on the Yiddish stage was a girl who is now Mrs.
Karb, and who may be seen in the Yiddish company at present in the
People's Theatre on the Bowery. She is the best liked of all the
Ghetto's actresses, has been a sweet singer, and is now an actress of
considerable distinction. In Bucharest, before she went on the stage,
she was a tailor-girl, and used to sing in the shop. She appeared in
1878 in _The Evil Eye_, and made an immediate hit. That was the third
Yiddish play, and, in the absence of Goldfaden, it was written by the
prompter, Joseph Latteiner, who, with the possible exception of
Professor Horowitz, who began to write about the same time, was for
many years the most popular playwright in the New York Ghetto.

In 1884 the Yiddish theatre was forbidden in Russia. It was supposed
by the Government to be a hotbed of political plots, but some of the
Yiddish actors think that the jealousy of Gentile actors was
responsible for this idea. Two years before there had been a
transmigration of Russian and Roumanian Jews to America on a large
scale. Therefore the players banished from Russia had a refuge and an
audience in New York. In 1884 the first Yiddish company came to this
country. It was not Goldfaden's or Mogalesco's company, but one formed
after them. In it were actors who still act in New York--Moses Heine,
Moses Silbermann, Mrs. Karb, and Latteiner the playwright.

The first Yiddish theatre was called the Oriental. It was a music-hall
on the Bowery, transformed for the purpose. A year later Mogalesco,
Kessler, Professor Horowitz, and their company came to New York and
opened the Roumania Theatre. From that time they changed theatres
frequently. It is worthy of note that with one exception the actors
identified with the beginnings of the Yiddish stage are still the
best.

That exception is Jacob Adler, who, not counting Mogalesco, is the
best actor in the Ghetto. They are both character actors, but
Mogalesco is essentially a comedian, while Adler plays rôles ranging
from burlesque to tragedy. Mogalesco is a natural genius, with a
spontaneity superior to that of Adler, but he has no general education
nor intellectual life. But the forcible Adler, a man of great energy,
a fighter, is filled with one great idea, which is almost a passion
with him, and which has marked a development in the Yiddish theatre.
To be natural, to be real, to express the actual life of the people,
with serious intent, is what Jacob Adler stands for. Up to the time
when he appeared on the scene in New York there had been no serious
plays acted on the Yiddish stage. Comic opera, lurid melodrama,
adaptations and translations, historical plays representing the
traditions of the Jews, were exclusively the thing. Through the
acting, indeed, which on the Yiddish stage is constantly animated by
the desire for sincerity and naturalness, the real life of the people
was constantly suggested in some part of the play. When Mogalesco took
a comic part, he would interpolate phrases and actions, suggesting
that life, which he instinctively and spontaneously knew, and it was
so with the other actors also. But this element was accidental and
fragmentary previous to the coming of Jacob Adler.

Until then Latteiner and Professor Horowitz, the authors of the first
historical plays of the Yiddish stage, and still the most popular
playwrights in the Ghetto, held almost undisputed sway.

Joseph Latteiner, of whom brief mention has already been made,
represents thoroughly the strong commercial spirit of the Yiddish
stage. He writes with but one thought, to please the mass of the
people, writes "easy plays," to quote his own words. His plays,
therefore, are the very spirit of formlessness--burlesque, popularly
vulgar jokes, flat heroism combined about the flimsiest dramatic
structure. He is the type of the business man of the Ghetto. Altho
successful, he lives in an unpleasant tenement, and seems much poorer
than he really is. He has an unemphatic, conciliatory manner of
talking, and everything he says is discouragingly practical. He is a
Roumanian Jew, forty-six years of age. His parents intended him for a
rabbi, but he was too poor to reach the goal, altho he learned several
languages. These afterwards stood him in good stead, for he often
translates and adapts plays for the Bowery stage. Unable to be a
rabbi, Latteiner cast about for a means of making his living. As a boy
he was not interested in the stage, but one day he saw a German play
in one act and thought he could adapt it with music to the Yiddish
stage. It was successful, and Latteiner, as he put it, "discovered
himself." He has since written over a hundred plays, and is engaged by
the company at the Thalia Theatre as the regular playwright. He calls
himself _Volksdichter_, and maintains that his plays improve with the
taste of the people, but this statement is open to considerable doubt.

In speaking of the popular playwright, and the purely commercial
character and consequent formlessness of the plays before the
appearance of Adler, important mention should be made of Boris
Thomashevsky, already briefly referred to as the idol of the Jewish
matinée girls. He is the most popular actor on the Yiddish stage, and
for him Latteiner particularly writes. Thomashevsky is a large fat
man, with expressionless features and curly black hair, which he
arranges in leonine forms. He generally appears as the hero, and is a
successful tho a rather listless barnstormer. The more intelligent of
his audience are inclined to smile at Mr. Thomashevsky's talent in
romantic parts, of the reality of which, however, he, with a large
section of the community, is very firmly convinced. In fairness,
however, it should be said that when Mr. Thomashevsky occasionally
leaves the rôle of hero for an unsentimental character, particularly
one which expresses supercilious superiority, he is excellent. As time
goes on he will probably take less and less the romantic lead and grow
more and more satisfactory. He is the youngest of the prominent actors
of the Bowery. Before the coming of Heine's company in 1884, he was a
pretty little boy in the Ghetto, who used to play female rôles in
amateur theatricals. But when the professionals came he was eclipsed,
and went out of sight for some time. He grew to be a handsome man,
however; his voice changed, and, with the help of a very different
man, Jacob Adler, Thomashevsky found an important place on the Yiddish
stage. He and Adler are now the leading actors of the People's
Theatre, but they never appear together, Thomashevsky being the main
interpreter of the plays which appeal distinctively to the rabble,
and Adler of those which form the really original Yiddish drama of a
serious nature.

Jacob Adler was born in Odessa, Russia, in 1855, of middle-class
parents. He went to the public school, but was very slow to learn, and
was treated roughly by his teachers, whose favorite weapon was a ruler
of thorns. School, therefore, as he says, "made a bad impression" on
him, and he left it for business, but got along equally badly there,
not being able to brook the brutally expressed authority of his
masters. But while he passed rapidly from one firm to another, through
the kindness of a wealthy uncle he was able to cut a swell figure in
Odessa, and became a dandy and something of a lady-killer. He was then
only eighteen, but the serious ideas which at a later time he
strenuously sought to bring into prominence in New York already began
to assert themselves. Then there was no Yiddish theatre, but of the
Gentile Russian theatre in Odessa he was very fond. The serious
realistic Russian play was what particularly took his fancy. The
Russian tragedians Kozelski and Miloslowski especially helped to form
his taste, and he soon became a critic well known in the galleries. It
was the habit of Russian audiences to express their ideas and
impressions on the spot. The galleries were divided into parties, with
opposing artistic principles. One party hissed while the other
applauded, and then and there they held debates, between the acts and
even during the performance. Adler soon became one of the fiercest
leaders of such a party that Odessa had ever known. He stood for
realism, for the direct expression of the life of the people. All else
he hissed down, and did it so effectively that the actors tried to
conciliate him. One season two actresses of talent, but of different
schools, were playing in Odessa--Glebowa, whom Adler supported because
of her naturalness, and Kozlowski, whose style was affected and
artificial from Adler's point of view. After the strife between the
rival parties had waged for some time very fiercely, one night
Kozlowski sent for Adler, and asked him what she could do to get the
great critic to join her party. Adler replied that so long as Glebowa
played with such wonderful naturalness he should remain faithful to
her colors, and advised Kozlowski, who was a kind of Russian
Bernhardt, to change her style.

Adler's lack of education always weighed on his spirit, and his high
ideals of the stage seemed to shut that art away from him. Yet his
friends who heard him recite the speeches of his favorites, which he
easily remembered, told him he had talent. "I wanted to believe them,"
Adler said, "but I always thought that the actor ought to know
everything in order to interpret humanity."

But just about that time, when Adler was twenty-three years old, he
heard that a theatre had been started in Roumania by a Russian Jew
named Goldfaden, and that the actors spoke Yiddish.

"I was astonished," he said. "How could they act a play in a language
without literature, in the jargon of our race, and who could be the
actors?"

Soon Adler heard that the Jewish singers of hymns who sometimes
visited Odessa, and who moved him so, because "they sang so
pitifully," were the actors of the first Yiddish company, and his
astonishment grew. In 1879 Goldfaden went to Odessa with his company,
and his theatre was crowded with Gentiles as well as Jews; and Adler
saw with his eyes what he had hardly believed possible--a Jewish
company in a Yiddish play. The plays, however, seemed to Adler very
poor--mainly light opera with vaudeville accompaniment--and the acting
was also poor; but Israel Rosenberg, whom Adler describes as a
long-faced Jew with protruding teeth, enormous eyes, and a mouth as
wide as a saucer, amused Adler with the wit which he interpolated as
he acted. Rosenberg, "more ignorant than I," says Adler, "was yet
very successful." The two became intimate, and Rosenberg and Fräulein
Oberländer urged Adler to go on the stage; Rosenberg because Adler at
that time was comparatively rich, and the Fräulein because she loved
(and afterwards married) the vigorous young man from Odessa. And Adler
felt his education to be superior to that of these successful actors,
and decided to make the experiment. To choose the stage, however, was
to choose poverty, as he had begun to succeed in business, but he did
not hesitate and, leaving his friends and family, he went on a tour
with the company.

In the first performance he was so frightened that he did not hear his
own words. He lost all his critical faculty, and played merely
instinctively. It was a long time before he acted better than the
average, which was at that time very low; but, finally, in a small
town named Elizabetgrad, Adler learned his lesson. A critic visited
the theatre every night, and wrote long articles upon it, but Adler
never found his name mentioned therein. He used to get up in the
morning very early, before any one else, to buy the newspaper, but was
always chagrined to find that the great man had overlooked him. At
first he thought that the critic must have a personal spite against
him, then that he was not noticed because he had only small rôles. At
last he was cast for a very long and emotional rôle. He thought that
this part would surely fetch the critic, and the next morning eagerly
bought a paper, but there was no criticism of the play at all.
Rosenberg went to the critic and asked the reason.

"Adler spoiled the whole thing," was the reply. "His acting was
unnatural and loud. I advise him to leave the stage."

"Then," said Adler, "I began to think. I cut my hair, which I had
allowed to grow long after the fashion of actors, and was at first
much discouraged. But thereafter I studied every rôle with great care,
and read the classic plays, and never played a part until I understood
it. Before that it was play with me; but after that it was serious
work."

For a number of years Adler continued to act in the cities of Russia,
and became the head of a company. In 1883, when Russia was closed to
the Jewish stage, Adler took his company to London, where he nearly
starved. There was no Ghetto there, and the company gave occasional
performances at various Yiddish clubs scattered through the city.
Adler lost all his money, and got into debt. His wife and child died,
and at one time in despair he thought of leaving the stage. But it was
too late to go back to Odessa, for he had once for all cut himself off
from his family and friends. He was falsely informed by a Jew who had
been to America that to succeed there he would have to sing, dance,
and speak German. So he stayed some time longer in London. The
Rothschilds, Dr. Felix Adler, and others, took an interest in him, and
told him that as the Jewish theatre could have no future, since
Yiddish must ultimately be forgotten, he had better give it up.

It was in 1887 that Adler came to New York, where he found two Yiddish
companies already well started. To avoid conflict with them, he went
to Chicago, where, however, a Yiddish theatre could get no foothold.
Some rich Chicago people tried to induce Adler to learn English and go
on the American stage; but Adler, always distrustful of his education
and ability to learn, declined their offers, now much to his regret.
He returned to New York, where Mogalesco and Kessler urged him to
stay, but the Ghetto actors in general were hostile to him, and he
went back to London. The next year, however, he was visited by four of
the managers of the New York Ghetto companies (among them Mogalesco),
vying with one another to secure Adler, whose reputation in the
Jewish community was rapidly growing. He went back to New York in
1889, where he appeared first at the Germania Theatre. He was
advertised in advance as a Salvini, a Barrett, a Booth, as all stars
combined. When he found how extravagantly he had been announced he was
angry, and wanted to go back to London, feeling that it was impossible
to live up to what his foolish managers had led the people to expect.
He consented to stay, but refused to appear in _Uriel Acosta_ for
which he was billed, preferring to begin in comedy, in order not to
appear to compete with the reputation of Salvini. The play, which was
called _The Ragpicker_, can still be seen in the Ghetto. In it Adler
tried to score as a character actor. But the people, expecting a
tragedy, took _The Ragpicker_ seriously, and did not laugh at all. The
play fell flat, and the managers rushed before the curtain and told
the audience that Adler was a poor actor, and that they had been
deceived in him. Through the influence of the management, the whole
company treated him with coldness and contempt, except the wife of one
of the directors. She is now Mrs. Adler, and is one of the capable
serious actresses at present at the People's Theatre. Finally, the
lease of the theatre passed into Adler's hands, and he dismissed the
whole company and formed a new one. Soon after began the struggle
which brought about the latest development of the Yiddish stage.

For some time Adler was successful, but he grew more and more
dissatisfied with his repertory. He could find no plays which
seriously portrayed the life of the people or contained any serious
ideas. Only the translated plays were good from his point of view; he
wished something original, and looked about for a playwright. One
night in a restaurant he was introduced to Jacob Gordin, who
afterwards wrote the greater part of the only serious original Yiddish
plays which exist.

Gordin at that time had written no plays, but he was a man of varied
literary activity, of a rarely good education, a thorough Russian
schooling, and of uncommon intelligence and strength of character. He
is Russian in appearance, a large broad-headed man with thick black
hair and beard. As he told me in his little home in Brooklyn, the
history of his life, he omitted all picturesque details, and
emphasized only his intellectual development. He was born in the same
town as Gogol, Ubigovrod in southern Russia, of rich parents. As a boy
he frequented the theatre, and like Adler, became a local critic and
hissed down what he did not approve. Like Adler, too, he was often
carried off to the police station and fined. He married early, became
a school-teacher and then a journalist (in Russian), writing every
sort of article, except political, and often sketches and short
stories for newspapers and periodicals in Odessa, where he finally
controlled a newspaper--the _Odessakianovosti_. He was a great admirer
of Tolstoi, and desiring to live on a farm to put into practice the
Count's ideas, he came to America in 1891, and nearly starved. He
became an editor of a Russian newspaper in New York and contributed to
other journals. In his own paper he wrote violent articles against the
Russian Government, as well as literary sketches. In Russia, Gordin
had never been in a Yiddish theatre, and when he met Adler in the New
York restaurant he knew little of the conventional Yiddish play. So he
wrote his first play in a fresh spirit, with only the character of the
people and his own ideals to work from. _Siberia_, produced in 1892,
was a success with the critics and actors, and may fairly be called
the first original Yiddish play of the better type.

The play struck a new note. It fell into line with the Russian spirit
of realism now so marked in intellectual circles in the Ghetto. Life
and types are what Gordin tried for, and Jacob Adler had found his
playwright. Since then Gordin has written about fifty plays, some of
which have been successful, and many have been marked by literary and
dramatic power. Some of the better ones are _Siberia_, the _Jewish
King Lear_, _The Wild Man_, _The Jewish Priest_, _Solomon Kaus_, _The
Slaughter_, and the _Jewish Queen Lear_. Jacob Adler has been until
recently his chief interpreter, altho Mogalesco, Kessler, and
Thomashevsky take his plays.

  [Illustration: MADAM LIPTZEN]

For several years an actress, Mrs. Liptzen, was the main interpreter
of Gordin's plays. She is one of the most individual, if not one of
the most skillful, actresses on the stage of New York's Ghetto, and is
sometimes spoken of in the quarter as the Yiddish Duse. She is the
only actress of the east side who is thus compared, by a sub-title,
with a famous Gentile artist, altho in many directions there is a
great tendency in the Ghetto to adopt foreign names and ideas. As a
matter of fact, her art is exceedingly limited, but she has the
unusual distinction of appearing only in the best plays, steadfastly
refusing to take part in performances which she deems to be
dramatically unworthy. She consequently appears very seldom, usually
only in connection with the production of a new play by Jacob Gordin,
who at present writes many of his plays with the "Yiddish Duse" in
mind.

Mrs. Liptzen was born in Zitomir, South Russia, and was interested
exclusively in the stage from her childhood. The founder of the
Yiddish stage, Abraham Goldfaden, and Jacob Adler, played in her town
for a few nights when she was about eighteen years old. Her parents
were orthodox Jews, and to go to the theatre she was forced to resort
to subterfuge. She became acquainted with Goldfaden and Adler, and ran
away from home in order to accompany them as an actress. At first she
sang and acted in such popular operatic plays as _Der Schmendrik_, and
continued for three years in Russia, until the Yiddish theatre was
forbidden there. Then she went with a new company to Berlin, where the
whole aggregation nearly starved. They were reduced to selling all
their stage properties, the proceeds of which were made away with by a
dishonest agent. During the time their performances in Berlin
continued Mrs. Liptzen received, it is said, the sum of ten pfennige
(two and one-half cents) a day, on which she lived. She paid five
pfennige for lodging and five pfennige for bread and coffee; and there
is left in her now a correspondingly amazing impression of the
cheapness with which she could live in Germany in those days.

Jacob Adler was at that time in London with a company, eking out a
miserable existence. He wrote to Mrs. Liptzen's husband, an invalid in
Odessa, to send his wife to London to play in his company. About 1886
Mrs. Liptzen went to London and played in _Esther von Engedi_ (the
Yiddish _Othello_), _Leah the Forsaken_, _Rachel_, _The Jews_, etc. In
London she stayed three years, when, the theatre burning down, she
went with Adler to Chicago. They tried to find a place in New York,
but the Yiddish company, with Kessler and Mogalesco at its head,
already in New York, froze them out, and they tried to get a foothold
in Chicago. A little later Mrs. Liptzen left Chicago for New York,
called by the Yiddish company there to play leading parts. She began
in New York with _Leah the Forsaken_, and received only $10 for the
first three performances. It is said that she now receives from $100
to $200 for every performance, a fact indicating not only her growth
in popularity but also the great financial success of the Yiddish
theatres in New York.

Twelve years ago Mrs. Liptzen retired for a time from the stage, the
reason being that there were no new plays in which she desired to
appear, since the demand was entirely supplied by the romantic and
historical operatic playwrights, Prof. Horowitz and Mr. Latteiner.

It was not until Jacob Gordin came into prominence as a realistic
playwright, that Mrs. Liptzen came out of her dignified retirement.
Jacob Adler was the first to play Gordin's pieces; but he played many
others, too, trying in a practical way gradually to make the cause of
realism triumphant. Mrs. Liptzen, however, made no compromise, and
kept quiet until she was able to get the plays she wanted, which soon
were written by Gordin.

Mrs. Liptzen's first success with a Gordin play was in _Medea_, for
which Gordin received, it is said, the enormous sum of $85--having
sold plays previous to that time for the well-fixed price of $35.
_Medea's Youth_, written by Gordin for Mrs. Liptzen, was a failure,
altho the author thought so well of it as a literary production that
he had it translated into English. The next of Mrs. Liptzen's
successes was the _Jewish Queen Lear_, for which Gordin received
$200--an enormous sum for a Yiddish playwright in those days. _The
Slaughter_ was produced two years ago, and last year Mrs. Liptzen
appeared in Gordin's _The Oath_, a Yiddish production of _Fuhrmann
Henschel_. Of late Mr. Gordin's plays have been produced by a younger
actress of more varied talent than Mrs. Liptzen--Mrs. Bertha Kalisch,
on the whole a much worthier interpreter than the older woman.

It is Adler, however, who has been the belligerent promoter of the
original and serious Yiddish drama. In 1893 he tried to introduce
Gordin's plays and the new spirit of realism and literature into his
company at the Windsor Theatre. But the old style is still strong in
popular affection, and Adler's company rebelled. Whereupon Adler went
to Russia to form a new company which would be more amenable to his
ideas. He came back with the new troupe, and ordered a new play from
Gordin, who produced _The Jewish King Lear_. At the first reading of
the play the company protested, but Adler begged for a trial, telling
them that they did not know what a good play was. The play proved a
great and deserved success, and is now frequently repeated. It
contains several scenes of great power, and portrays with faithful art
the life of the Russian Jew. In 1894 Adler tried the experiment of
leasing a small theatre, the Roumania, in which nothing but plays
which expressed his ideas should be presented. A number of Gordin's
plays were given, but the theatre had much the same fate that would
befall a theatre up town which should play only the ideally best. It
failed completely. After that both Adler and Gordin were compelled to
compromise. Adler is now associated with a company which presents
every kind of play known to the Ghetto, and Gordin has had to
introduce horseplay and occasional vaudeville and comic opera into his
plays. Even the best of the Yiddish plays contain these excrescences.

But both Adler and Gordin, while remaining practical men, with an eye
to the box-office receipts, are working to eliminate more and more
what is distasteful to them and impertinent to art. A year ago last
autumn Gordin succeeded in having his latest play, _The Slaughter_,
performed without any vaudeville accompaniment. He deemed it a
triumph, particularly as it was successful, and felt a debt of
gratitude to Mrs. Liptzen, who produced the play without insisting on
unworthy interpolations.

Gordin now hopes that the days of compromise for him are past, and
Adler expects to secure, some day, a theatre in which he can
successfully produce only the serious plays of Jewish life. But both
these men are pessimistic about the future of dramatic art in the
Ghetto. They feel not only the weight of the commercial spirit, but
also the imminent death of their stage. For the Jews of the Ghetto as
they become Americanized are liable to lose their instinctive Yiddish,
and then there will be no more drama in that tongue. The only Yiddish
stage, worthy of the name, in the world will probably soon be no more.
Jacob Adler consequently regrets that his "jargon" confines him to the
Bowery stage, and Jacob Gordin longs to have his plays translated and
produced on the English stage.

Mogalesco, the actor, who has, perhaps, the greatest talent of them
all, whose dramatic art was born with the Yiddish stage, and who is
equally happy in a comedietta by Latteiner or a character-play by
Gordin, is, like the true actor, without ideas, but always felicitous
in interpretation, and enthusiastically loved by the Jewish
play-goers. He and Adler, if they had been fortunate enough to have
received a training consistently good, and had acted in a language of
wider appeal, would easily have taken their places among those
artistically honored by the world. Even as it is they have, with
Gordin, with Kessler, with Mrs. Liptzen, Mrs. Kalisch and the rest,
the distinction of being prominent figures in the short career of the
Yiddish stage, which, founded by Goldfaden in 1876, in Roumania, has
received to-day, in New York, its highest and almost exclusive
development.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] See text, section on "Realism."




Chapter Six

The Newspapers


Yiddish newspapers have, as compared with their contemporaries in the
English language, the strong interest of great freedom of expression.
They are controlled rather by passion than by capital. It is their joy
to pounce on controlling wealth, and to take the side of the laborer
against the employer. A large proportion of the articles are signed, a
custom in striking contrast with that of the American newspaper; the
prevalence of the unsigned article in the latter is held by the
Yiddish journals to illustrate the employer's tendency to arrogate
everything to himself, and to make the paper a mere organ of his own
policy and opinions. The remark of one of the Jewish editors, that the
"Yiddish newspaper's freedom of expression is limited by the Penal
Code alone," has its relative truth. It is, of course, equally true
that the new freedom of the Jews, who in Russia had no journal in the
common Yiddish, runs in these New York papers into an emotional
extreme, a license which is apt to distort the news and to give over
the editorial pages to virulent party disputes.

Nevertheless, the Yiddish press, particularly the Socialistic branch
of it, is an educative element of great value in the Ghetto. It has
helped essentially to extend the intellectual horizon of the Jew
beyond the boundaries of the Talmud, and has largely displaced the
rabbi in the position of teacher of the people. Not only do these
papers constitute a forum of discussion, but they publish frequent
translations of the Russian, French, and German modern classics, and
for the first time lay the news of the world before the poor Jewish
people. An event of moment to the Jews, such as a riot in Russia,
comes to New York in private letters, and is printed in the papers
here often before the version "prepared" by the Russian Government
appears in the Russian newspapers. Thus a Jew on the east side
received a letter from his father in Russia asking why the reserves
there had been called out, and the son's reply gave him the first
information about the war in China.

The make-up of the Yiddish newspaper is in a general way similar to
that of its American contemporary. The former is much smaller, however,
containing only about as much reading matter as would fill six or
eight columns of a "down-town" newspaper. The sporting department is
entirely lacking, the Jew being utterly indifferent to exercise of any
kind. They are all afternoon newspapers, and draw largely for the news
upon the morning editions of the American papers. The staff is very
limited, consisting of a few editors and, usually, only one reporter
for the local news of the quarter. They give more space proportionately
than any American paper to pure literature--chiefly translations, tho
there are some stories founded on the life of the east side--and to
scientific articles of popular character. The interesting feature of
these newspapers, however, consists in their rivalries and their
differences in principle. This can be presented most simply in a short
sketch of their history.


THE CONSERVATIVE JOURNALS

Yiddish journalism in New York began about thirty years ago, and
continued in unimportant and unrepresentative newspapers until about
twelve years ago, when the _Tageblatt_, the first daily newspaper, and
the _Arbeiterzeitung_, an important Socialistic weekly, now defunct,
but from which developed the present Socialist dailies, came into
existence. The _Tageblatt_, which has maintained its general character
from the beginning, is the most conservative, as well as the oldest,
of the daily newspapers of the Ghetto. It is national and orthodox,
and fights tooth and nail for whatever is distinctively Jewish in
customs, literature, language, and religion. It hates the reform sects
in religion and the Socialistic tendencies in politics and economics.
It is called a "capitalist" paper by its opponents, and is so in the
sense that it is more dependent upon its advertisements than the
Socialistic papers, which are partly supported by frequent
entertainments and balls, to which all their friends go. And yet how
little capitalistic is even this paper is shown by the fact that while
it takes a non-committal attitude towards strikes in the Ghetto it
supports those which occur outside.

Sympathetic with workingmen and not antagonistic to the employers of
the Ghetto, the _Tageblatt_ conventionally unites all the Jewish
interests it consistently can, and has admittedly the largest
circulation of any daily paper in the Ghetto. The Socialists call it
"bourgeois" as well as "capitalistic" (which is the most horrid of all
words in the quarter). Some call it chauvinistic because of its strong
Nationalist tendency, and fanatic because it upholds the religion of
the Jews; the Jew who wants first of all to be an American and
up-to-date hates the _Tageblatt_ as tending to strengthen the
distinction between Jew and Gentile. This paper goes so far in its
conservatism that, according to its enemies, it condemns all rabbis
who mention the name of Christ in their sermons, and holds to a strict
interpretation of Talmudic law in regard to habits of life. "It is
only the old-fashioned greenhorns," said the editor of one of the
other papers, "coming from the old country, who will stand for it."


THE SOCIALIST PAPERS

The Socialist weekly, the _Arbeiterzeitung_, marked the beginning of
the most vital journalism of the east side, and stood in striking
contrast to the _Tageblatt_. In the circumstances attending its
development into the two existing rival Socialistic papers, the
_Vorwärts_ and the _Abendblatt_,[2] a picture of the progressive and
passionate character of the Russian-Jewish Socialists of the Ghetto is
presented, and some of the most important and picturesque personages.
The most educated and intelligent among the Jews of the east side
speak Russian, and are reactionary in politics and religion. Coming
from Russia, as they do, they have a fierce hatred of government and
capitalism, and a more or less Tolstoian love for the peasant and the
workingman. The purpose of the organizers of the _Arbeiterzeitung_
Publishing Association was to educate the people, promulgate the
doctrines of Socialism, and be altogether the organ of the workman
against the employer. From the outset, beginning in 1890, the
_Arbeiterzeitung_ was a popular and influential paper.

All the older journals had affected a Germanized Yiddish, which the
people did not understand; but the new paper, aiming at the modern
heart of the Ghetto, carried on its propaganda in the common jargon of
the Jew, the pure Yiddish; and, growing enormously in circulation,
forced the language down the throats of the conservative journals. In
this popular tongue, the _Arbeiterzeitung_ carried on for five years a
most energetic campaign for a broad Socialism, admitting all allied
movements in favor of common ownership, directing and encouraging
strikes, printing popular scientific articles, realistic stories,
dramatic criticisms, and expressing and leading generally the best
intelligence of the Yiddish community. With the constituency of which
this journal was the organ, Socialism had almost the force and passion
of a religious movement. An example of the paper's power was in
connection with the Bakers' Union. That organization imposed a label
on all bread made in the Ghetto, and insisted that all the bakers
should handle only bread of that brand. The _Arbeiterzeitung_
supported the Union so effectively that no other bread could possibly
be obtained in the quarter. At the first _Yahresfest_ of the journal,
Cooper Union overflowed with enthusiastic workingmen, and long lines
of the excluded stretched out down the Bowery to Houston Street.

  [Illustration: IN THE OFFICE OF THE "VÖRWARTS"]

The man whose name is most intimately connected with the
_Arbeiterzeitung_ is its former editor, Abraham Cahan, now known
outside of the Ghetto as a writer in English of novels and short
stories of Jewish life. He is of the best type of the ethical
agitator; a convincing and impassioned speaker; he has held hundreds
of workingmen by his clear and strongly expressed ideas, whether
written in his paper or spoken at nightly meetings in some poor hall
on the east side, where the men gathered after the labors of the day.
Twice he went abroad to speak at international labor conferences. At
the same time that he supported the definite cause of the Social
Democracy, he put the same energy and passion into the education of
the people in scientific and literary directions. He spoke and wrote
for directness, simplicity, and humanity. In art, therefore, the
realistic school of Russian writers, of whom in our generation there
have been so many great men, received his fighting allegiance. For
five years Cahan put all his intelligence and devotion into this work,
and the power of the _Arbeiterzeitung_ was partly his power. To-day,
in the Ghetto, where fierce jealousies are rampant, Cahan is admitted
to be the man, among many men of energy, intelligence, and devotion,
who has wielded most influence in the community.

A literary and dramatic event happened in 1892 which showed the power
of Cahan and his Socialist associates in influencing the taste of the
Ghetto. It was the production of Gordin's drama _Siberia_. Up to that
time, nothing but conventional opera, melodrama, and historical plays
had been given on the Bowery, but the day after the performance of
_Siberia_ the _Arbeiterzeitung_ contained a long review of the play by
Cahan, welcoming it enthusiastically as an event breaking the way for
realistic art in the colony. Since then this type of play has taken a
prominent place in the repertory at the Yiddish theatres. For five
years the _Arbeiterzeitung_ continued its influence, but then came a
split among the Socialists, which resulted in two daily papers--the
_Abendblatt_ and the _Vorwärts_.

  [Illustration: BUYING A NEWSPAPER]

Cahan, Miller and others of the men who had started the
_Arbeiterzeitung_ gradually lost control through the share system
which had been inaugurated. They desired to maintain a liberal policy
towards all labor movements, and to allow the literary and Socialistic
societies to be represented in the paper, but the other faction wanted
the newspaper to be exclusively an organ of Socialism in its narrow
sense. The result was that, soon after the publication of the
_Arbeiterzeitung_ as the _Daily Abendblatt_, Cahan resigned the
editorship and turned disgusted to English newspapers and to realistic
fiction, in which he was absorbed until recently. A few months ago he
resumed the editorship of the _Vorwärts_ after an absence of several
years from participation in Yiddish journalism. Louis Miller, a witty
and energetic Socialist and writer, who had from the first been active
in the management of the weekly, was one of the most prominent of the
men who continued the fight against the narrower Socialistic
element--a fight which resulted in the establishment in 1897 of the
other Socialist daily now existing, the _Vorwärts_.

These two papers were, until recently, when the _Abendblatt_ died,
bitter rivals. The _Abendblatt_ was devoted to the interests of the
Socialist Labor Party while the _Vorwärts_ supports in a general way
the Social Democracy; altho it is not so distinctively a party paper
as was the _Abendblatt_. The adherents of the latter paper looked upon
the _Vorwärts_ as unreliable and the _Vorwärts_ people thought the
_Abendblatt_ intolerant. The _Abendblatt_ prided itself on its
uncompromising character, and the _Vorwärts_ is content to adapt
itself to what it deems the present needs of the Jewish community.
Thus the _Vorwärts_ is willing to join hands with reform movements in
general, with trades unions, etc., while the _Abendblatt_ stiffly
demanded that allied organizations should enter the socialist camp.
The triumph of the _Vorwärts_ was therefore a triumph of the more
liberal spirits.

Two other daily publications are more distinctively mere newspapers
than the two Socialistic organs, and make no consistent attempt to
influence public opinion, at least in the definite direction of a
"movement." The _Abend-Post_ seems to have no very distinctive policy
or character; it is neither Socialistic nor conservative Jewish; the
distinction it aims at is to be a newspaper simply, to reflect events
and not to determine opinion. In the editor's words, the _Abend-Post_
"is not chauvinistic, like the _Tageblatt_; the Jew does not resound
in it. It aims to Americanize the Ghetto, and diminish or ignore the
chasm between Jew and Gentile." The editor of one of the Socialist
papers calls this sort of thing by another name. "The _Abend-Post_,"
he said, "is an imitation of American yellow journalism." A fifth
daily, the _Herald_, is even less distinctive than the _Abend-Post_.
It has no party and is not as sensational as the other. It might,
perhaps, be called the Jewish "mugwump."

Recently a sixth daily, _The Jewish World_, has been organized under
favorable auspices. Its avowed policy is to bridge the chasm which
exists between sons and fathers in the Ghetto; to make the sons more
Hebraic and the fathers more American; the sons more conservative and
the fathers more progressive. Connected with its management is H.
Masliansky, one of the most impassioned orators of the Ghetto.

The question of the circulation figures of these five dailies is a
difficult one. About the only thing that seems certain is that the
_Tageblatt_ leads in this respect. Even the editors of the other
papers admit that, altho they differ as to the absolute figures. The
editor of the _Tageblatt_ places his paper's circulation at 40,000,
the _Abend-Post_ at 14,000, the _Herald_ next, and the two Socialistic
papers last, which ending is a felicitous consummation for the editor
of the most conservative newspaper in the Ghetto. The editor of the
_Abend-Post_ says the _Tageblatt_ leads with a daily issue of about
30,000, the _Abend-Post_ coming next with 23,700, the _Herald_ and the
Socialist papers stringing out in the rear. The editors of the
Socialist sheets naturally give a somewhat different order. Mr. Miller
of the _Vorwärts_ puts the actual circulation of the _Tageblatt_ at
about 17,000; his own paper, the _Vorwärts_, next, with about 14,000
daily except on Saturday, the Jewish Sunday, when the number ranges
between 20,000 and 25,000, owing to the fact that the conservative
newspapers (_i. e._, those that are not Socialistic) do not appear on
that day. The circulation of the rival Socialistic paper, the
_Abendblatt_, he puts at about 8,000. In these figures there is no
attempt at entire accuracy.


THE ANARCHIST PAPERS

There are several Yiddish weekly and monthly journals published in New
York. The _Tageblatt_, _Abend-Post_ and _Herald_ have weekly editions,
but by far the most interesting of the papers which are not dailies
are the two Anarchistic sheets, the _Freie Arbeiter-stimme_, a weekly,
and the _Freie Gesellschaft_, a monthly.

  [Illustration: A "GHETTO" NEWSPAPER OFFICE]

Contrary to the general impression of the character of these people,
in which bombs play a large part, the Anarchists of the Ghetto are a
gentle and idealistic body of men. The abnormal activity of the
Russian Jews in this country is expressed by the Socialists rather
than the Anarchists. The latter are largely theorists and aim rather
at the education of the people by a journalistic exploitation of their
general principles than by a warlike attitude towards specific events
of the time. Their attitude is not so partisan as that of the
Socialists. They quarrel less among themselves, and are characterized
by dreamy eyes and an unpractical scheme of things. They believe in
non-resistance and the power of abstract right, and are trying to work
out a peaceful revolution, maintaining that the violence often
accompanying the movement in Europe is due to the fact that many
Anarchists are passionate individuals who in their indignation do not
live up to their essentially gentle principles. The Socialists aim at
a more strictly centralized government, even than any one existing,
since they desire the whole machinery of production and distribution
to be in the hands of the community; the Anarchists desire no
government whatever, believing that law works against the native
dignity of the individual, and trusting to man's natural goodness to
maintain order under free conditions. A man's own conscience only can
punish him sufficiently, they think. The Socialists go in vividly for
politics, while the Anarchists have nothing to do with them. The point
on which these two parties agree is the common hatred of private
property.

  [Illustration: S. JANOWSKY]

The weekly Anarchistic paper, the _Freie Arbeiter-stimme_, prints
about 7,000 copies. Out of this circulation, with the assistance of
balls, entertainments, and benefits at the theatres, the paper is
able to exist. It pays a salary to only one man, the editor, S.
Janowsky, who receives the sum of $13 a week. He is a little
dark-haired man, with beautiful eyes, and soft, persuasive voice. He
thinks that government is so corrupt that the Anarchists need do
little to achieve their ends; that silent forces are at work which
will bring about the great day of Anarchistic communism. In his
newspaper he tries to educate the common people in the principles of
anarchy. The aim is popular, and the more intelligent exploitation of
the cause is left to the monthly. The _Freigesellschaft_, with the
same principles as the _Freie Arbeiter-stimme_, has a higher literary
and philosophical character. The editors and contributors are men of
culture and education, and work without any pay. It is still gentler
and more pacific in its character than the weekly, of whose
comparatively contemporaneous and agitatory method it disapproves
calmly; believing, as the editors of the monthly do, that a weekly
paper cannot exist without giving the people something other than the
ideally best. With reference to the ideally best, a number of
serious, contemplative men gather in a basement opposite the Hebrew
Institute, the headquarters of the monthly, and there talk about the
subjects often discussed within its pages, such as Slavery and
Freedom, Darwinism and Communism, Man and Government, the Purpose of
Education, etc.,--any broad economic subject admitting of abstract
treatment.

  [Illustration: KATZ]

The talk of these Anarchists is distinguished by a high idealism, and
the unpractical and devoted attitude. One of the foremost among them
(they say they have no leaders, as that would be against individual
liberty) is Katz, literary editor of the _Vorwärts_, a contributor to
the Anarchistic monthly, a former editor of the Anarchistic weekly,
and a recently successful playwright in the Ghetto. His play, the
_Yiddish Don Quixote_, was produced at the Thalia Theatre on the
Bowery. Not since Gordin's _Siberia_ has a play aroused such
intelligent interest. The hero is a Quixotic Jew, full of kindness,
devotion, and love for his race and for humankind.


SOME PICTURESQUE CONTRIBUTORS

There are many other picturesque and interesting men connected with
these Yiddish journals, either as editors or contributors. Morris
Rosenfeld, the sweat-shop poet, writes articles and occasionally poems
for the Socialistic papers; Abraham Wald, the vigorous and stormy
young poet, contributes literary and Socialistic articles three times
a week to _Vorwärts_; the editor of one of the conservative papers,
distinguished for his logic and his clever business management, is
interesting because of the facility with which he adapts his
principles to the commercial needs of the moment. At one time he was a
Socialist, then became a Christian, then a Jew again simply, and now
is a conservative Jew. Another editor remarked that he was a man of
sense and logic. One of the Jews who writes for the Ghetto papers is
A. Frumkin, who has the rare distinction of having been born and
educated in Jerusalem. There he lived until he was eighteen, when he
went to Constantinople and studied Turkish law; afterwards he
journeyed to Paris, where he married, and then to New York, where he
writes many articles in Yiddish about Jerusalem and Palestine, which
are published largely in the _Vorwärts_. He is a young man of about
thirty, with a fresh, rosy look and a buoyant manner. He is an
Anarchist, and his energetic bearing is in strong contrast to the pale
cast of thought that marks his fellows, the intellectuals among the
Anarchists of New York. Other occasional or constant writers are the
Hebrew poet Dolitzki, who is characterized in another chapter; and the
poets Morris Winchevsky and Abraham Sharkansky.

  [Illustration: A. FRUMKIN]

These two men are in a class quite different from that of the four
poets to whom a separate paper has been devoted. They are, as opposed
to Rosenfeld, Zunser, Dolitzki and Wald, interesting rather for form
than for substance. They are men with some lyric gift and a talent for
verse, but are strong neither in thought nor feeling. Winchevsky is a
Socialist, a man who has edited more than one Yiddish publication with
success, of uncommon learning and cultivation. In literary attempt he
is more nearly like the ordinary American or English writer than the
Jewish. Most of the Ghetto poets portray the dark and sordid aspect of
their lives. Most of them do it with unhappy strength, certainly one
of them, Rosenfeld, does it with genius. But Winchevsky attempts to
give a bright picture of things. He tries to be entertaining, and
heartfelt, sentimental and sweet. Truth is not so much what he attains
as a little vein of sentimental verse which is sometimes touched with
a true lyric quality.

Sharkansky can not be put in any intellectual category. He is a man of
considerable poetic talent, but he seems to have little feeling and
fewer ideas. There is no "movement" or tendency for which he cares. In
character he is a business man, with a detached talent unrelated to
the remainder of his personality.

Philip Kranz and A. Feigenbaum, editors and writers of political
editorials, are two of the most prominent men connected with the
history of Yiddish journalism. They are men of energy and force and
represent a large class of Jews interested in social science and
political economy. A. Tannenbaum occupies a peculiar and interesting
position as a writer for the newspapers. He writes very long novels,
the plots of which are drawn from books in French, German or Russian.
About these plots he weaves incidents and characters from American
history, and inserts popular ideas of science and philosophy. His aim
is to educate the Ghetto by dishing up science and philosophy in a
palatable form. D. Hermalin's distinctive character is that of a
translator of foreign books into Yiddish. Swift, Tolstoi, de
Maupassant, have been in part translated by him into the Ghetto's
dialect. He, like some of the other men best known for more
unpretentious work, is an author of very poor plays. David Pinsky, a
writer for the _Abendblatt_, is very interesting not only as a writer
of short sketches of literary value, in which capacity he is mentioned
in another chapter, but also as a dramatic critic and as one of the
more wide-awake and distinctively modern of the young men of Yiddish
New York. He is so keen with the times that he looks even on realism
with distrust. Even the great philosopher, the second Spinoza, a man
highly respected in a professional way by eminent scientists of the
day, Silverstein, is an occasional contributor to these interesting
newspapers.

FOOTNOTE:

[2] Recently defunct--June, 1901.




Chapter Seven

The Sketch-Writers


The Russian Jews of the east side of New York are, in proportion as
they are educated, as I have said, realists in literary faith. Is it
natural? Is it true to life? they are inclined to ask of every piece
of writing that comes under their eyes. As their lives are
circumscribed and more or less unfortunate, their ideas of what
constitutes the truth are limited and gloomy. Their criteria of art
are formed on the basis of the narrow but intense work of modern
Russian fiction. They look up to Tolstoi and Chekhov, and reject all
principles founded upon more romantic and more genial models. The
simplicity of their critical ideals lends, however, to their
intellectual lives a certainty which is striking enough when compared
with the varied, wavering, ungrounded literary norms and judgments of
the ordinary intelligent Anglo-Saxon. The lack of authoritative
literary criticism in America is partly due to the multiplicity of our
classic models. With a simpler literature in mind the Russian is more
constantly able to apply a decisive test.

  [Illustration: A TYPE OF LABORING MAN]

The Russian Jew of culture when he comes to New York carries with him
Russian ideals of literature. The best Yiddish work produced in
America is Russian in principle. Many of the writers who publish
literary sketches in the newspapers of the Ghetto have written
originally in the Russian language, and know the Russian Jewish life
better than the life of the Yiddish east side; and even now they write
mainly about conditions in Russia. Moreover, those who know their New
York and its special Jewish life thoroughly and mirror it in their
work are in method, tho not in material, Russian; are close, faithful,
unhappy realists.

Whatever its form, however, a considerable body of fiction is
published more or less regularly in the daily and weekly periodicals
of the quarter which represents faithfully the life of the poor
Russian Jew in the great American city. A "Gentile" who knew nothing
of the New York Ghetto, but could read the Yiddish language, might get
a good picture of something more than the superficial aspects of the
quarter through the sketches of half a dozen of the more talented men
who write for the Socialist newspapers. The conditions under which the
children of Israel live in New York, their manners, problems and
ideals, appear, if not with completeness, at least with
suggestiveness, in these short articles, usually in fiction form, the
best of them direct, simple and unpretentious, true to life in general
and to the life of the Russian Jew in America in particular. The sad
aspect of life predominates, but not through conventional
sentimentality on the part of the writers, who are not aware that they
are objects of possible pity. They merely tell without comment the
facts they know. For the most part, those facts are gloomy and
sordid, often lightened, however, by the sense of the ridiculous,
which seldom entirely deserts the Jew; and as likely as not rendered
attractive by feeling and by beauty of characterization.


SOME REALISTS

  [Illustration: S. LIBIN]

S. Libin holds the place among prose writers that Morris Rosenfeld
does among poets. Like Rosenfeld, he has been a sweat-shop worker,
and, like him, writes about the sordid conditions of the life. The
shop, the push-cart pedler and the tenement-house mark the range of
his subjects; but into these unsightly things he puts constant feeling
and an unfailing pathos and humor. As in the case of Rosenfeld, there
are tears in everything he writes; but, unlike Rosenfeld, he also
smiles. He is a dark, thin, little man, as ragged as a tramp, with
plaintive eyes and a deprecatory smile when he speaks. He is
uncommonly poor, and at present sells newspapers for a living and
writes an occasional sketch, for which he is paid at the rate of $1.50
or $2.00 a column by the Yiddish newspapers. He is able to produce
these little articles only on impulse; and, consequently, altho he is
one of the more prolific of the sketch-writers of the quarter, writes
for relief rather than for income. Some of his contemporaries, with
greater constancy to commercial ideals, have partly given up
unremunerative literature for the position of newspaper hacks; but
Libin, remembering his sweat-shop days, does not like a "boss," and is
under the constant necessity of relieving his feelings by his work.

Libin lives with his wife and child in a tenement-house in Harlem,
where he has continually before his eyes the home conditions which
form the subject of so many of his sketches. This little man, who
looks like the commonest kind of a sweat-shop "sheeny," has the
simplest and sincerest interest in domestic things. With great pride
he pointed out to the visitor his one-year-old baby, who lay asleep on
a miserable sofa, and talked of it and of his wife, who has also been
a worker in the shops, with greater pleasure even than of his
sketches, which, however, he writes with joy and solace. He wept when
he spoke of his child that died, and he has written poems in prose
about it which weep, too. In the story of his life which he told, a
common, ignorant Jew was revealed, a thorough product of the
sweat-shop--a man distinguished from the proletarian crowd only by a
capacity for feeling and by a genuine talent. He was born in Russia
twenty-nine years ago, and came to New York when he was twenty-two
years old. For four years he worked as a cap-maker in shops which were
then more wretched than they are now, from sixteen to seventeen hours
a day. While at his task he would steal a few minutes to devote to his
sketches, which he sent to the _Arbeiter-Zeitung_. Cahan recognized in
Libin's misspelled, illiterate, almost illegible manuscript a quality
which worthily ranked it with good realistic literature. Since then
Libin has written extensively for the _Zukunft_, a monthly now
defunct; the _Truth_, published at one time by the poet Winchevsky in
Boston, and for the New York daily _Vorwärts_, to which he still
contributes.

  [Illustration: HE IS TIRED, DISTRESSED AND IRRITATED]

One of his sketches, the "New Law," about a column and a half long,
expresses one aspect of the life led by a sweat-shop family. A tailor,
going to the shop one morning, as usual, finds the boss and the other
workers in a state of excitement. They have just heard about the new
law limiting the day in the shop to ten hours and forbidding the men
to do any work at home. This to them is a serious proposition, for,
as they are paid by the piece, they need many hours to make enough to
pay their expenses. The tailor goes home earlier than usual that
night, about ten o'clock, with the customary bundle of clothes for his
wife and children to work over. He is tired, distressed and irritated
at the thought of the law. He finds his wife and ten-year-old daughter
half asleep, as usual, but yet sewing busily. They, too, are pale and
tired, and near them on the lounge is a sleeping baby; on the floor
another. The little girl tries to hide her drowsiness from her father,
and works more busily than ever.

"Why are you back so early?" asks his wife.

"Pretty soon," he replies morosely, "I'll be back still earlier."

"Is work slack again?" she asks, her cheek growing paler.

"It's another trouble, not that," he says. "It's a new law, a bitter
law." To his little daughter he adds: "Sleep, child, you will soon
have time to sleep all day."

His ignorant wife does not understand.

"A new law? What is that? What does it mean?" she asks.

"It means that I can work only ten hours a day."

Then they calculate how much money he can make in ten hours. Now he
works nineteen hours, and they have nothing to spare. Under the new
law he will be idle seven or eight hours a day. What will they do? She
thinks the boss must be responsible for the terrible arrangement, for
does not all trouble come from the boss? He is irritated by her
simplicity, and she begins to weep. The little girl is overjoyed at
the thought that she will no longer have to work, but tries to conceal
her pleasure. The laborer, moved by his wife's tears, endeavors to
comfort her.

"Ah," he says, "it's only a law! Two years ago there was one like it,
but the work went on just the same." But she continues to weep until
their evening meal is ready, when the children are aroused from their
sleep to obey "the supper law," Libin concludes in a spirit of
tragi-comedy.

  [Illustration: HE WAS BEWITCHED BY MATHEMATICS]

"She Got Her Prize" is the title of a sketch in which unexhilarating
comedy predominates. A laborer borrows some clothes to go to a party.
In his absence his wife sells a number of rags to the old-clothes man,
who innocently takes off her husband's only suit, carelessly put near
the bundle he was to carry away. The husband does not notice the loss
until the next day, when he has nothing to wear, cannot go to the
shop, and so loses his job. "Betty" is the story of a girl who falls
sick just before the day set for her wedding, and is taken to the
hospital. The sketch pictures her in bed, reading a farewell letter
from her lover who has deserted her. "Misery" is a prose poem, written
by Libin when his child died. It has no plot, is merely the outcry of
a simple, wounded heart, telling of pain, longing and wonder at the
sad mystery of the world. A pleasing rhythm runs through the Yiddish,
and as the author read it aloud it seemed, indeed, like a "human
document." "A Child of the Ghetto," one of the longest and most
detailed of all, is full of the sad, tho gently satiric, quality of
Libin's art. The author meets a pedler on Ludlow Street, who
recognizes him as the man who once saved his life by attracting to
himself the snow-balls of a number of urchins who had been plaguing
the pedler one cold winter day. They have a chat, and the author asks
the ragged push-cart man how he is getting on in the world. The
pedler replies that all of his class have their troubles--the fruit
quickly spoils, and the "bees" (policemen) come around regularly for
some of the "honey." But he has a sorrow all to himself. His oldest
son is a mathematician, and no good. When in the Jewish school in
Russia the little fellow had learned to figure, and had been figuring
ever since. His father had found, much to his disappointment, that in
America also the boy would have to spend some time in school. The
"monkey business" of learning had ruined the child. He was bewitched
by mathematics and studied all day long. Sent successively to a
sweat-shop, a grocery, to tend a push-cart, he proved thoroughly
incapable of learning any trade; was absent-minded and constantly
calculating, and always lost his job. And his old father bemoaned the
misfortune all day long as he sold his bananas on Ludlow Street.

Younger than Libin, less mature and less devoted to his art, with a
very limited amount of work done; simpler and more naïve, if possible,
than the older man, is Levin, a typesetter in the office of
_Vorwärts_. His sketches are swifter and shorter than those of Libin,
more effective and dramatic in form, with greater conventional relief
of surprises and antitheses, but they have not so much feeling and do
not manifest so high a degree of realistic art. In contrast with
Libin, who aims only for the quiet picture of ordinary life, Levin
seeks the poignant moment in the flow of daily events. With more of a
commercial attitude toward his work, Levin is, consequently, in more
comfortable circumstances. Like Libin, he has worked in the shops, is
uneducated and has married a tailor girl. Like Libin, again, he takes
his subjects from the sweat-shop, the tenement house and the street.
He is a handsome, ingenuous young fellow of twenty-two years. Only
eight of these have been spent in America, yet in this short time he
has worked himself into the life of Hester and Suffolk streets to such
an extent that his short sketches give most faithful glimpses of
various little points of human nature as it shapes itself on the east
side.

  [Illustration: HE LEAVES HER WITH THE CART AND RUNS TO THE
   TENEMENT-HOUSE]

"Where Is She?" is a striking and typical incident in the career of a
push-cart pedler. The itinerant seller of fruit is doing some hard
thinking one day in Hester Street. He is worried about something, and
does not display the activity necessary for a successful merchant of
his class. A vivid picture of the street is given--the passers-by, the
tenement-houses, the heat. He knows that his business is suffering,
but his thoughts dwell, in spite of himself, with his wife, who is
about to be confined, perhaps that very day. Yesterday she had done
the washing, but on this day, for the first time, remained in bed. But
he must go to the street, as usual. Otherwise, his bananas would
spoil. He worries, too, about the condition of his children, left
without the care of their mother. A woman crosses the street to
inspect his bananas. Perhaps a buyer, he thinks, and concentrates his
attention. She selects the best bananas, those that will keep the
longest, and asks the price. "Two for a cent," he says. "Too much,"
she replied. "I will give you two cents for five." That is less than
they cost him, and he refuses, and she goes away, and then he is sorry
he had not sold. Just then his little daughter runs hatless,
breathless up to him. "Mamma," she says, and weeps. She can say no
more. He leaves her with the cart and runs to the tenement-house,
finds his little boy playing on the floor, but his wife gone. He
rushes distractedly out, looks up the stairs, and sees clothes hanging
on a line on the roof, where he goes and finds his wife. She had left
the bed in order to dry the wash of the day before, and was unable to
return. He carries her back to bed and returns to his push-cart.

"Put Off Again" is the story of a man and a girl who try to save
enough money from their work in the sweat-shop to marry. They need
only a couple of hundred dollars for clothes and furniture, and have
saved almost that sum when a letter comes from the girl's mother in
Russia: her husband is dead after a long illness, and she needs money.
The girl sends her $70, and the wedding is put off. The next time it
is the girl's brother who arrives in New York and borrows $50 to make
a start in business. When they are again ready for the wedding, and
the day set, the young fellow quarrels with the sweat-shop boss, and
is discharged. That is the evening before the day set for the wedding,
and the young man calls on the girl and tells her. "We must put it off
again, Jake," she says, "till you get another job." They cling to each
other and are silent and sad.

A sketch so simple that it seems almost childish is called "The Bride
Weeps." It is a hot evening, and the people in the quarter are all out
on their stoops. There are swarms of children about, and a bride and
groom are embracing each other and watching the crowd. "Poor people,"
says the bride reflectively, "ought not to have children." "What do
you know about it?" asks the groom, rather piqued. Their pleasure is
dampened, and she goes to bed and wets her pillow with tears.

"Fooled," one of the most interesting of Levin's sketches, is the tale
of an umbrella pedler. It is very hot in the Ghetto, and everybody is
uncomfortable, but the umbrella pedler is more uncomfortable than any
one else. He hates the bright sun that interferes with his business.
It has not rained for weeks, and his stock in trade is all tied up in
the house. He has no money, and wishes he were back in Russia, where
it sometimes rains. He goes back to his apartment and sits brooding
with his wife. "When are you going to buy us some candy, papa?" ask
the children. Suddenly his wife sees a cloud in the sky, and they all
rush joyfully to the window. The sun disappears, and the clouds
continue to gather. The wife goes out to buy some food, the children
say, "Papa is going to the street now, and will bring us some candy";
and the pedler unpacks his stock of umbrellas and puts on his rubber
boots. But the clouds roll away, and the hated sun comes out again,
and the pedler takes off his boots and puts his pack away. "Ain't you
going to the street, papa?" ask the children sorrowfully. "No,"
replies the pedler, "God has played a joke on me."

Libin and Levin, altho they differ in the way described, are yet to be
classed together in essentials. They are both simple, uneducated men
who write unpretentious sketches about a life they intimately know.
They picture the conditions almost naïvely without comment and without
subtlety. Libin, in a way to draw tears, Levin with the buoyant
optimism of healthy youth, notice the quiet things in the every-day
life of the Yiddish quarter that are touching and effective.


A CULTIVATED LITERARY MAN

Contrasting definitely with the sketches of Libin and Levin are those
of Jacob Gordin, who, altho he is best known in the Ghetto as a
playwright, has yet written voluminously for the newspapers. Unlike
the other two, Gordin is a well-educated man, knowing thoroughly
several languages and literatures, including Greek, Russian and
German. His greater resources of culture and his sharper natural wit
have made of him by far the most practised writer of the lot. With
many literary examples before him, he knows the tricks of the trade,
is skilful and effective, has a wide range of subjects and is full of
"ideas" in the semi-philosophical sense. The innocent Libin and Levin
are children in comparison, and yet their sketches show greater
fidelity to the facts than do those of the talented Gordin, who is too
apt to employ the ordinary literary devices wherever he can find them,
caring primarily for the effect rather than for the truth, and almost
always heightening the color to an unnatural and pretentious pitch. In
the drama Gordin's tendency toward the sensational is more in place.
He has the sense of character and theatrical circumstance, and works
along the broad lines demanded by the stage; but these qualities when
transferred to stories from the life result in what is sometimes
called in the Ghetto "onion literature." So definitely theatrical,
indeed, are many of his sketches that they are sometimes read aloud by
the actors to crowded Jewish audiences. Another point that takes from
Gordin's interest to us as a sketch-writer is that his best stories
have Russia rather than New York as a background; that his sketches
from New York life are comparatively unconvincing. He has a great
contempt for America, which he satirizes in some of his sketches,
particularly the political aspect, and intends some day to return to
Russia, where he had a considerable career as a short-story writer in
the Russian language. He is forty-nine years old, and, compared with
the other men, is in comfortable circumstances, as he now makes a
good income from his plays, which grow in popularity in the quarter.
Before coming to America he taught school and wrote for several
newspapers in Russia, where he was known as "Ivan der Beissende," on
account of the sharp character of his feuilletons. He came to this
country in 1891, and shortly after, his first play, _Siberia_, was
produced and made a great hit among the "intellectuals" and Socialists
of the quarter. He began immediately to write for the Socialist
newspapers, and also established a short-lived weekly periodical in
the Russian language, which he wrote almost entirely himself.

"A Nipped Romance" is a story of two children who are collecting coals
on a railway track. The boy of thirteen and the girl of eleven talk
about their respective families, laying bare the sordidness, misery
and vice in which their young lives are encompassed. They know more
than children ought to know, and insensibly develop a sentimental
interest in each other, when a train comes along and kills them.
"Without a Pass," sometimes recited in the theatre by the actor
Moshkovitch, pictures with gruesome detail a girl working in the
sweat-shop. The brutal doorkeeper refuses to let her go out for relief
without a pass, and she dies of weakness, hunger and cold. "A Tear,"
one of the best, is the tale of an old Jewish woman who has come to
New York to visit her son. He is married to a Gentile, and the old
lady is so much abused by her daughter-in-law that she goes back to
Russia. The sketch represents her alone at the pier, about to embark.
She sees the friends of the other passengers crowding the landing, but
no one is there to say good-by to her; and as the ship moves away a
tear rolls down her cheek to the deck. "Who Laughs?" satirizes the
Americans who laugh at Russian Jews because of their beards, dress and
accent. Another sketch denounces the "new woman"--she who apes
American manners, lays aside her Jewish wig, becomes flippant and
interested in "movements." Still another is a highly colored contrast
between woman's love and that of less-devoted man. A story
illustrating how the author's desire to make an effect sometimes
results in the ludicrous is the would-be pathetic wail of a calf which
is about to be slaughtered.


AMERICAN LIFE THROUGH RUSSIAN EYES

In connection with Gordin, two other writers of talent who work on the
Yiddish newspapers may be briefly mentioned, altho one of them has
written as yet nothing and the other comparatively little that is
based on the life of New York. They are, as is Gordin in his best
sketches, Russian not only in form, but also in material. David
Pinsky, who did general translating and critical work on the
_Abendblatt_ until a few months ago, when that newspaper died, has
been in New York only a little more than a year, and has written very
little about the local quarter. He has not even as yet approached near
enough to the New York life to realize that there are any special
conditions to portray. He is the author, however, of good sketches in
German and is somewhat different in the character of his inspiration
from the other men. They are close adherents of the tradition of
Russian realism, while he is under the influence of the more recent
European faith that disclaims all "schools" in literature. His
stories, altho they remain faithful to the sad life portrayed, yet
show greater sentimentality and some desire to bring forward the
attractive side.

The other of these two writers, B. Gorin, knew his Russian-Jewish life
so intimately before he came to New York, seven years ago, that he has
continued to draw from that source the material of his best stories;
altho he has written a good deal about Yiddish New York. His sketches
have the ordinary Russian merit of fidelity in detail and
unpretentiousness of style. Compared with the other writers in New
York, he is more elaborate in his workmanship. More mature than Libin,
he is free from Gordin's artistic insincerity. He has been the editor
of several Yiddish papers in the quarter, and has contributed to
nearly all of them.

Of Gorin's stories which touch the Russian-Jewish conditions in New
York, "Yom Kippur" is one of the most notable. It is the tale of a
pious Jewish woman who joins her husband in America after he has been
there several years. The details of the way in which she left the old
country, how she had to pass herself off on the steamer as the wife of
another man, her difficulties with the inspecting officers, etc., give
the impression of a life strange to the Gentile world. On arriving in
America, she finds her husband and his friends fallen away from the
old faith. He had shaved off his beard, had grown to be slack about
the "kosher" preparation of food and the observance of the religious
holidays, no longer was careful about the morning ablutions, worked on
the Sabbath and compelled her to take off the wig which every orthodox
Jewish woman must wear. She soon fell under the new influence and felt
herself drifting generally into the ungodly ways of the New World. On
the day of the great "White Feast" she found herself eating when she
should have fasted. On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the sense of
her sins overpowered her quite.

"Yom Kippur! Now the children of Israel are all massed together in
every corner of the globe. They are congregated in synagogues and
prayer-houses, their eyes swollen with crying, their voices hoarse
from wailing and supplicating, their broken hearts full of repentance.
They all stand now in their funeral togas, like a throng of newly
arisen dead."

She grows delirious and imagines that her father and mother come to
her successively and reproach her for her degeneracy. In a series of
frightful dreams, all bearing on her repentance, the atmosphere of the
story is rendered so intense that her death, which follows, seems
entirely natural.

The theme of one of Gorin's longer stories on Jewish-American life is
of a young Jew who had married in the old country and had come to New
York alone to make his fortune. If he had remained in Russia, he would
have lived happily with his wife, but in America he acquired new ideas
of life and new ideals of women; and, therefore, felt alienated from
her when she joined him in the New World. Many children came to them,
his wages as a tailor diminished and his wife grew constantly less
congenial. He remained with her, however, from a sense of duty for
eleven years, when, after insuring his life, he committed suicide.


A SATIRIST OF TENEMENT SOCIETY

Leon Kobrin stands midway between Libin and Levin, on the one hand,
and Gordin on the other. He carries his Russian traditions more
intimately with him than do Libin and Levin, but more nearly
approaches to a saturated exposition in fiction form of the life of
Yiddish New York than does Gordin. Unlike the latter, he has the
pretence rather than the reality of learning, and the reality rather
than the pretence of realistic art. Yet he never quite attains to the
untutored fidelity of Libin. Many of his sketches are satirical, some
are rather burlesque descriptions of Ghetto types, and some suggest
the sad "problem" element which runs through Russian literature. He
was born in Russia in 1872 of poor parents, orthodox Jews, who sent
him to the Hebrew school, of which the boy was never very fond, but
preferred to read Russian at night surreptitiously. He found some
good friends, who, as he put it, "helped me to the light through
Ghetto darkness." Incidentally, it may be pointed out that the
intellectual element of the Ghetto--the realists and Socialists--think
that progress is possible only in the line of Russian culture, and
that to remain steadfast to Jewish traditions is to remain immersed in
darkness. So Kobrin struggled from a very early age to master the
Russian language, and even wrote sketches in that tongue. He, like
Gordin, refers to the fact of his being a writer in Yiddish
apologetically as something forced upon him by circumstances. Unlike
Gorin, however, he believes in the literary capacity of the language,
with which he was first impressed when he came to America in 1892 and
found stories by Chekhov translated by Abraham Cahan and others into
Yiddish and published in the _Arbeiterzeitung_. It was a long time,
however, before Kobrin definitely identified himself with the literary
calling. He first went through a course somewhat similar to that of
the boy mathematician in the sketch by Libin, described above. He
tried the sweat-shop, but he was a bungler with the machines; then he
turned his hand with equal awkwardness to the occupation of making
cigars; failed as distinctly as a baker, and finally, in 1894, was
forced into literature, and began writing for the _Arbeiterzeitung_.

One of Kobrin's sketches deals with a vulgar tailor of the east side,
who is painted in the ugliest of colors and is as disagreeable an
individual as the hottest anti-Semite could imagine. The man, who is
the "boss" of a sweat-shop, meets the author in a suburban train,
scrapes his acquaintance, fawns upon him, offers him a cigar and tells
about how well he is doing in New York. In Russia, where he had made
clothes for rich people, no young girl would have spoken to him
because of his low social position; but in the new country young women
of good family abroad seek employment in his shop, and are often
dependent on him not only for a living, but in more indescribable
ways. Mr. Kobrin and his wife refer to this sketch as the "pig story."
A subtler tale is the picture of a domestic scene. Jake has returned
from his work and sits reading a Yiddish newspaper. His wife, a
passionate brunette, is working about the room, and every now and then
glances at the apathetic Jake with a sigh. She remembers how it was a
year ago, when Jake hung over her, devoted, attentive; and now he goes
out almost every evening to the "circle" and returns late. She tries
to engage him in conversation, but he answers in monosyllables and
finally says he is going out, whereupon she weeps and makes a scene.
"He is not the same Jake," she cries bitterly. After some words
intended to comfort her, but really rubbing in the wound, her husband
goes to the "circle," and the wife burns the old love-letters one by
one; they are from another man, she feels, and are a torture to her
now. As she burns the letters the tears fall and sizzle on the hot
stove. It is a simple scene, but moving: what Mr. Kobrin calls "a
small slice out of life." An amusing couple of sketches, in which
satire approaches burlesque, represent the infelicities of an old
woman from Russia who had recently arrived in New York. One day,
shocked at her children's neglect of a religious holiday and at their
general unholiness, she goes to visit an old neighbor, at whose house
she is sure to have everything "kosher" and right. She has been
accustomed to find the way to her friend by means of a wooden Indian,
called by her a "Turk," which stood before a tobacco shop. The Indian
has been removed, however, and she, consequently, loses her way.
Seeing a Jew with big whiskers, who must, therefore, she thinks, be
orthodox, she asks him where the "Turk" is, and repeats the question
in vain to many others, among them to a policeman, whom she addresses
in Polish, for she thinks that all Gentiles speak that language, just
as all Jews speak Yiddish. On another occasion the old lady goes to
the theatre, where her experiences are a Yiddish counterpart to those
of Partridge at the play.

Some of the best sketches from the life form portions of the plays
which are produced at the Yiddish theatres on the Bowery. In the
dramas of Gordin there are many scenes which far more faithfully than
his newspaper sketches mirror the sordid life and unhappy problems of
the poor Russian Jew in America; and the ability of the actors to
enforce the theme and language by realistic dress, manner and
intonation makes these scenes frequently a genuine revelation to the
Gentile of a new world of social conditions. Kobrin and Libin, too,
have written plays, very few and undramatic as compared with those of
Gordin, but abounding in the "sketch" element, in scenes which give
the setting and the _milieu_ of a large and important section of
humanity. Some of the plays of Gordin have been considered in a
previous chapter, and those of Kobrin and Libin merely add more
material to the same quality which runs through their newspaper
sketches. Libin is the author of two plays, _The Belated Wedding_ and
_A Vain Sacrifice_, for which he was paid $50 apiece. They are each a
series of pictures from the miserable Jewish life in the New York
Ghetto. The latter play is the story of a girl who marries a man she
hates in order to get money for her consumptive father. The theme of
_The Belated Wedding_ is too sordid to relate. Both plays are
unrelieved gloom and lack any compensating dramatic quality. In
Kobrin's plays--_The East Side Ghetto_, _East Broadway_ and the
_Broken Chains_--the problem element is more decided and the dramatic
structure is more pronounced than in those of Libin. In _East
Broadway_ a young man and girl have been devoted to each other and to
the cause of Nihilism in Russia, but in New York the husband catches
the spirit of the American "business man" and demands from his
father-in-law the money promised as a _dot_. The eloquence of the new
point of view is opposed to that of the old in a manner not entirely
undramatic.

The fact that there are a number of writers for the Yiddish newspapers
of New York who are animated with a desire to give genuine glimpses of
the real life of the people is particularly interesting, perhaps,
because of the light which it throws on the character of their Jewish
readers and the breadth of culture which it implies. Certainly, there
are many Russian Jews on the east side who like to read anything which
seems to them to be "natural," a word which is often on their lips. It
would be misleading, however, to reach conclusions very optimistic in
regard to the Ghetto Jews as a whole; for the demand which makes these
sketches possible is practically limited to the Socialists, and grows
less as that political and intellectual movement falls off, under
American influences, in vitality. To-day there are fewer good sketches
published in the Yiddish newspapers than formerly, when the
_Arbeiterzeitung_ was a power for social and literary improvement.
Quarrels among the Socialists, resulting in many weakening splits, and
the growth of a more constant commercial attitude on the part of the
newspapers than formerly are partly responsible for the change. The
few men of talent who, under the stimulus of an editorial demand for
sincere art, wrote in the early days with a full heart and entire
conviction have now partly lost interest. Levin has given up writing
altogether for the more remunerative work of a typesetter, Gorin has
become largely a translator and literary hack on the regular newspaper
staff, and Gordin and Kobrin have turned their attention to the
writing of plays, for which there is a vital, if crude, demand. Libin
alone, the most interesting and in a genuine way the most talented of
them all, remains the poorest in worldly goods and the most devoted to
his art.




Chapter Eight

A Novelist


Altho Abraham Cahan began his literary career as a Yiddish writer for
the Ghetto newspapers his important work has been written and
published in English. His work as a Yiddish writer was of an almost
exclusively educational character. This at once establishes an
important distinction between him and the Yiddish sketch-writers
considered in the foregoing chapter. A still more vital distinction is
that arising from the relative quality of his work, which as opposed
to that of the Yiddish writers, is more of the order of the story or
of the novel than of the sketch. Cahan's work is more developed and
more mature as art than that of the other men, who remain essentially
sketch-writers. Even in their longer stories what is good is the
occasional flash of life, the occasional picture, and this does not
imply characters and theme developed sufficiently to put them in the
category of the novel. Rather than for the art they reveal they are
interesting for the sincere way in which they present a life
intimately known. In fact the literary talent of the Ghetto consists
almost exclusively in the short sketch. To this general rule Abraham
Cahan comes the nearest to forming an exception. Even in his work the
sketch element predominates; but in one long story at least something
more is successfully achieved; in his short stories there is often
much circumstance and development; and he has now finished the first
draft of a long novel. His stories have appeared from time to time in
the leading English magazines, and there are two volumes with which
the discriminating American and English public is familiar, _Yekl_ and
_The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories_. As well as his work
Cahan's life too is of unusual interest. He had a picturesque career
as a Socialist and an editor in the Ghetto.

Abraham Cahan was born in Vilna, the capital of Lithuania, Russia, in
1860. He went as a boy to the Jewish "chaider," but took an early and
overpowering interest in the Russian language and ideas. He graduated
from the _Teacher's Institute_ at Vilna, and was appointed government
teacher in the town of Velizh, Province of Vitebsk. Here he became
interested, altho not active, in the anarchistic doctrines which
filled the intellectual atmosphere of the day; and, feeling that his
liberty and activity were endangered by a longer sojourn in Russia, he
came to America in 1882, when a time of severe poverty and struggle
ensued.

From the first he, like most Russian Jews of intelligence, was
identified with the Socialist movement in the New York Ghetto; he
threw himself into it with extraordinary activity and soon became a
leader in the quarter. He was an eloquent and impassioned speaker,
went twice abroad as the American-Jewish delegate to Socialist
congresses, and was the most influential man connected with the weekly
_Arbeiterzeitung_, of which he became editor in 1893. This paper, as
has been explained in a former chapter, for several years carried on
an aggressive warfare in the cause of labor and Socialism, and
attempted also to educate the people to an appreciation of the best
realistic Russian writers, such as Tolstoi, Turgenieff and Chekhov. It
was under Cahan's editorship of this weekly, and also of the monthly
_Zukunft_, a journal of literature and social science, that some of
the realistic sketch-writers of the quarter discovered their talent;
and for a time both literature and Socialism were as vigorous as they
were young in the colony.

Literature, however, was at that time to Cahan only the handmaiden of
education. His career as an east side writer was that primarily of the
teacher. He wished not merely to educate the ignorant masses of the
people in the doctrines of Socialism, but to teach them the rudiments
of science and literature. For that reason he wrote in the popular
"jargon," popularized science, wrote Socialistic articles, exhorted
generally. Occasionally he published humorous sketches, intended,
however, always to point a moral or convey some needed information. In
literature, as such, he was not at that time interested as an author.
It was only several years later, when he took up his English pen, that
he attempted to put into practice the ideas about what constitutes
real literature to which he had been trying to educate the Ghetto.

The fierce individualism which in spite of Socialistic doctrine is a
characteristic of the intellectual element in the Ghetto soon brought
about its weakening effects. The inevitable occurred. Quarrels grew
among the Socialists, the party was split, each faction organized a
Socialist newspaper, and the movement consequently lost in
significance and general popularity. In 1896 Cahan resigned his
editorship, and retired disgusted from the work.

From that time on his interest in Socialism waned, altho he still
ranges himself under that banner; and his other absorbing interest,
realistic literature, grew apace, until it now absorbs everything
else. As is the case with many imaginative and emotional men he is
predominantly of one intellectual passion. When he was an active
Socialist he wanted to be nothing else. He gave up his law studies,
and devoted himself to an unremunerative public work. When the fierce
but small personal quarrels began which brought about the present
confused condition of Socialism in the Ghetto, Cahan's always strong
admiration for the Russian writers of genius and their literary school
led him to experiment in the English language, which gave a field much
larger than the "jargon." Always a reformer, always filled with some
idea which he wished to propagate through the length and breadth of
the land, Cahan took up the cause of realism in English fiction with
the same passion and energy with which he had gone in for Socialism.
He became a partisan in literature just as he had been a partisan in
active life. He admired among Americans W. D. Howells, who seemed to
him to write in the proper spirit, but he felt that Americans as a
class were hopelessly "romantic," "unreal," and undeveloped in their
literary tastes and standards. He set himself to writing stories and
books in English which should at least be genuine artistic transcripts
from life, and he succeeded admirably in keeping out of his work any
obvious doctrinaire element--which points to great artistic
self-restraint when one considers how full of his doctrine the man is.

Love of truth, indeed, is the quality which seems to a stranger in the
Ghetto the great virtue of that section of the city. Truth, pleasant
or unpleasant, is what the best of them desire. It is true that, in
the reaction from the usual "affable" literature of the American
book-market, these realists rather prefer the unpleasant. That,
however, is a sign of energy and youth. A vigorous youthful literature
is always more apt to breathe the spirit of tragedy than a literature
more mature and less fresh. And after all, the great passion of the
intellectual quarter results in the consciously held and warmly felt
principle that literature should be a transcript from life. Cahan
represents this feeling in its purest aspect; and is therefore highly
interesting not only as a man but as a type. This passion for truth is
deeply infused into his literary work.

The aspects of the Ghetto's life which would naturally hold the
interest of the artistic observer are predominatingly its
characteristic features--those qualities of character and conditions
of social life which are different from the corresponding ones in the
old country. Cahan came to America a mature man with the life of one
community already a familiar thing to him. It was inevitable therefore
that his literary work in New York should have consisted largely in
fiction emphasizing the changed character and habits of the Russian
Jew in New York; describing the conditions of immigration and
depicting the clash between the old and the new Ghetto and the way the
former insensibly changes into the latter. In this respect Cahan
presents a great contrast to the simple Libin, who merely tells in
heartfelt passionate way the life of the poor sweat-shop Jew in the
city, without consciously taking into account the relative nature of
the phenomena. His is absolute work as far as it goes, as straight and
true as an arrow, and implies no knowledge of other conditions. Cahan
presents an equally striking contrast to the work of men like Gordin
and Gorin, the best part of which deals with Russian rather than New
York life.

If Cahan's work were merely the transcribing in fiction form of a
great number of suggestive and curious "points" about the life of the
poor Russian Jew in New York, it would not of course have any great
interest to even the cultivated Anglo-Saxon reader, who, tho he might
find the stories curious and amusing for a time, would recognize
nothing in them sufficiently familiar to be of deep importance to him.
If, in other words, the stories had lacked the universal element
always present in true literature they would have been of very little
value to anyone except the student of queer corners. When however the
universal element of art is present, when the special conditions are
rendered sympathetic by the touch of common human nature, the result
is pleasing in spite of the foreign element; it is even pleasing
because of that element; for then the pleasure of easily understanding
what is unfamiliar is added to the charm of recognizing the old
objects of the heart and the imagination.

Cahan's stories may be divided into two general classes: those
presenting primarily the special conditions of the Ghetto to which the
story and characters are subordinate; and those in which the special
conditions and the story fuse together and mutually help and explain
one another. These two--the "information" element and the "human
nature" element--struggle for the mastery throughout his work. In the
most successful part of the stories the "human nature" element
masters, without suppressing, that of special information.

The substance of Cahan's stories, what they have deliberately to tell
us about the New York Ghetto, is, considering the limited volume of
his work, rich and varied. It includes the description of much that is
common to the Jews of Russia and the Jews of New York--the picture of
the orthodox Jew, the pious rabbi, the marriage customs, the religious
holidays, etc. But the orthodox foreign element is treated more as a
background on which are painted in contrasting lights the moral and
physical forms resulting from the particular colonial conditions. The
falling away of the children in filial respect and in religious faith,
the consequent despair of the parents, who are influenced only in
superficial ways by their new environment; the alienation of
"progressive" husbands from "old-fashioned" wives; the institution of
"the boarder," a source of frequent domestic trouble; the tendency of
the "new" daughters of Israel to select husbands for themselves in
spite of ancient authority and the "Vermittler," and their ambition to
marry doctors and lawyers instead of Talmudical scholars; the
professional letter-writers through whom ignorant people in the old
country and their ignorant relatives here correspond; the falling-off
in respect for the Hebrew scholar and the rabbi, the tendency to read
in the Astor library and do other dreadful things implying interest in
American life, to eat _treife_ food, talk American slang, and hate
being called a "greenhorn," _i. e._, an old-fashioned Jew; how a
"Mister" in Russia becomes a "Shister" (shoemaker) in New York, and a
"Shister" in Russia becomes a "Mister" in New York; how women lay
aside their wigs and men shave their beards and ride in horse-cars on
Saturday: all these things and more are told in more or less detail in
Cahan's English stories. Anyone who followed the long series of Barge
Office sketches which during the last few years Cahan has published
anonymously in the _Commercial Advertiser_, would be familiar in a
general way with the different types of Jews who come to this country,
with the reasons for their immigration and the conditions which
confront them when they arrive. Many of these hastily conceived and
written newspaper reports have plenty of life--are quick, rather
formless, flashes of humor and pathos, and contain a great deal of
implicit literature. But the salient quality of this division of
Cahan's work is the amount of strange and picturesque information
which it conveys.

Many of his more carefully executed stories which have appeared from
time to time in the magazines are loaded down with a like quantity of
information, and while all of them have marked vitality, many are less
intrinsically interesting, from the point of view of human nature,
than even the Barge Office sketches. A marked instance of a story in
which the information element overpoweringly predominates is "The
Daughter of Reb Avrom Leib," published in the _Cosmopolitan Magazine_
for May, 1900. The tale opens with a picture of Aaron Zalkin, who is
lonely. It is Friday evening, and for the first time since he left his
native town he enters a synagogue. Then we have a succession of
minutely described customs and objects which are interesting in
themselves and convey no end of "local color." We learn that orthodox
Jewish women have wigs, we read of the Holy Ark, the golden shield of
David, the illuminated _omud_, the reading platform in the centre, the
faces of the worshippers as they hum the Song of Songs, and then the
cantor and the cantor's daughter. We follow the cantor in his
ceremonies and prayers. Zalkin is thrilled by the ceremony and
thrilled by the girl. But only a word is given to him before the story
goes back to picturing the scene, Reb Avrom Leib's song and the
actions of the congregation. In the second division of the story
Zalkin goes again the next Friday night to the synagogue, and the
result is that he wants to marry the girl. So he sends a "marriage
agent" to the cantor, the girl's father. Then he goes to "view the
bride," and incidentally we learn that the cantor has two sons who are
"American boys," and "will not turn their tongues to a Hebrew word."
When the old man finds that Zalkin is a Talmudic scholar he is
startled and delighted and wants him for a son-in-law. They try to
outquote one another, shouting and gesticulating "in true Talmudic
fashion." There is a short scene between the two young people, the
wedding-day is deferred till the "Nine Days" are over, for "who would
marry while one was mourning the Fall of the Temple?" And it is
suggested that Sophie is not quite content. Then there is a scene
where Zalkin chants the Prophets, where the betrothal articles, "a
mixture of Chaldaic and Hebrew," are read and a plate is thrown on the
floor to make a severance of the ceremony "as unlikely as would be the
reunion of the broken plate." Then there are more quotations from the
cantor, a detailed picture of the services of the Day of Atonement, of
the Rejoicing of the Law, blessing the Dedication Lights, The Days of
Awe, and the Rejoicing of the Law again. The old man's character is
made very vivid, and the dramatic situation--that of a Jewish girl
who, after the death of her father, marries in compliance with his
desire--is picturesquely handled. But the theme is very slight. Most
of the detail is devoted to making a picture, not of the changing
emotions in the characters and the development of the human story, but
of the religious customs of the Jews. The emphasis is put on
information rather than on the theme, and consequently the story does
not hold the interest strongly.

Many of Cahan's other short stories suffer because of the learned
intention of the author. We derive a great deal of information and we
generally get the "picture," but it often requires an effort to keep
the attention fixed on what is unfamiliar and at the same time so
apart from the substance of the story that it is merely subordinate
detail.

In these very stories, however, there is much that is vigorous and
fresh in the treatment and characterization; and a vein of lyric
poetry is frequent, as in the delightful _Ghetto Wedding_, the story
of how a poor young Jewish couple spend their last cent on an
elaborate wedding-feast, expecting to be repaid by the presents, and
thus enabled to furnish their apartment. The gifts don't turn up,
only a few guests are present, and the young people, after the
ceremony, go home with nothing but their enthusiastic love. The
_naïveté_ and simplicity of the lovers, the implicit sympathy with
them, and a kind of gentle satire, make this little story a gem for
the poet.

_The Imported Bridegroom_ is a remarkable character sketch and
contains several very strong and interesting descriptions. Asriel
Stroon is the central figure and lives before the mind of the reader.
He is an old Jew who has made a business success in New York, and
retired, when he has a religious awakening and at the same time a
great longing for his old Russian home Pravly. He goes back to Pravly
on a visit, and the description of his sensations the day he returns
to his home is one of the best examples of the essential vitality of
Cahan's work. This long story contains also a most amusing scene where
Asriel outbids a famous rich man of the town for a section in the
synagogue and triumphs over him, too, in the question of a son-in-law.
There is in Pravly a "prodigy" of holiness and Talmudic learning,
Shaya, whom Reb Lippe wants for his daughter, but Asriel wants him
too, and being enormously rich, carries him off in triumph to his
daughter in America. But Flora at first spurns him. He is a
"greenhorn," a scholar, not a smart American doctor such as she has
dreamed of. Soon, however, Shaya, who is a great student, learns
English and mathematics, and promises Flora to become a doctor. The
first thing he knows he is a freethinker and an American, and Flora
now loves him. They keep the terrible secret from the old man, but he
ultimately sees Shaya going into the Astor Library and eating food in
a _treife_ restaurant. His resentment is pathetic and intense, but the
children marry, and the old man goes to Jerusalem with his faithful
servant.

The book, however, in which there is a perfect adaptation of
"atmosphere" and information to the dramatic story is _Yekl_. In this
strong, fresh work, full of buoyant life, the Ghetto characters and
environment form an integral part.

_Yekl_ indeed ought to be well known to the English reading public. It
is a book written and conceived in the English language, is
essentially idiomatic and consequently presents no linguistic
difficulties. It gives a great deal of information about what seems to
me by far the most interesting section of foreign New York. But what
ought to count more than anything else is that it is a genuine piece
of literature; picturing characters that live in art, in an
environment that is made real, and by means of a story that is vital
and significant and that never flags in interest. In its quality of
freshness and buoyancy it recalls the work of Turgenieff. None of
Cahan's later work, tho most of it has vital elements, stands in the
same class with this fundamentally sweet piece of literature. It takes
a worthy place with the best Russian fiction, with that school of
writers who make life actual by the sincere handling of detail in
which the simple everyday emotions of unspoiled human nature are
portrayed. The English classic novel, greatly superior in the rounded
and contemplative view of life, has yet nothing since Fielding
comparable to Russian fiction in vivid presentation of the details of
life. This whole school of literature can, I believe, be compared in
quality more fittingly with Elizabethan drama than anything which has
intervened in English literature; not of course with those maturer
dramas in which there is a great philosophical treatment of human
life, but in the lyric freshness and imaginative vitality which were
common to the whole lot of Elizabethan writers.

_Yekl_ is alive from beginning to end. The virtuosity in description
which in Cahan's work sometimes takes the place of literature, is here
quite subordinate. Yekl is a sweat-shop Jew in New York who has left a
wife and child in Russia in order to make a little home for them and
himself in the new world. In the early part of the book he is becoming
an "American" Jew, making a little money and taking a great fancy to
the smart Jewish girl who wears a "rakish" hat, no wig, talks "United
States," and has a profound contempt for the benighted pious
"greenhorns" who have just arrived. A sweat-shop girl named Mamie
moves his fancy deeply, so that when the faithful wife Gitl and the
little boy Yossele arrive at the Barge Office there is evidently
trouble at hand. At that place Yekl meets them in a vividly told
scene--ill-concealed disquiet on his part and naïve alarm at the
situation on hers. Gitl's wig and her subdued, old-fashioned demeanor
tell terribly on Yekl's nerves, and she is shocked by everything that
happens to her in America. Their domestic unhappiness develops through
a number of characteristic and simple incidents until it results in a
divorce. But by that time Gitl is becoming "American" and it is
obvious that she is to be taken care of by a young man in the quarter
more appreciative than Yekl. The latter finds himself bound to Mamie,
the pert "American" girl, and as the book closes is in a fair way to
regret the necessity of giving up his newly acquired freedom. This
simple, strong theme is treated consistently in a vital presentative
way. The idea is developed by natural and constant incident,
psychological or physical, rather than by talk. Every detail of the
book grows naturally out of the situation.

  [Illustration: A SWEAT-SHOP GIRL MOVES HIS FANCY DEEPLY]

"Unpleasant" is a word which many an American would give to _Yekl_ on
account of its subject. Strong compensating qualities are necessary to
induce a publisher or editor to print anything which they think is in
subject disagreeable to the big body of American readers, most of whom
are women. Without attempting to criticise the "voice of the people,"
it may be pointed out that there are at least two ways in which a book
may be "unpleasant." It may be so in the formal theme, the characters,
the result--things may come out unhappily, vice triumphant, and the
section of life portrayed may be a sordid one. This is the kind of
unpleasantness which publishers particularly object to; and in this
sense _Yekl_ may fairly be called "unpleasant." Turgenieff's _Torrents
of Spring_ is also in this sense "unpleasant," for it tells how a
young man's sincere and poetic first love is turned to failure and
misery by the illegitimate temporary attraction of a fascinating woman
of the world. But Turgenieff's novel is nevertheless full of buoyant
vitality, full of freshness and charm, of youth and grace, full of
life-giving qualities; because of it we all may live more abundantly.
The same may be said of many another book. When there is sweetness,
strength and early vigor in a book the reader is refreshed
notwithstanding the theme. And it is noticeable that youth is not
afraid of "subjects."

Another way in which a book may be "unpleasant" is in the quality of
deadness. Many books with pleasant and moral themes and endings are
unpoetic and unpleasantly mature. Even a book great in subject, with
much philosophy in it, may show a lack of sensitiveness to the vital
qualities, to the effects of spring, to the joy in mere physical life,
which are so marked and so genuinely invigorating in the best Russian
fiction. The extreme of this kind of unpleasantness is shown in the
case of some modern Frenchmen and Italians; not primarily in the
theme, but in the lack of poetry and vigor, of hope; in a sodden
maturity, often indeed combined with great qualities of intellect and
workmanship, but dead to the little things of life, dead to the
feeling of spring in the blood, to naïve readiness for experience. An
American who is the antithesis of this kind of thing is Walt Whitman.
His quality put into prose is what we have in the best Russian novels.
In the latter acceptation of the word unpleasant, too, it cannot be
applied to _Yekl_; for _Yekl_ is youthful and vital. There is buoyant
spring in the lines and robust joy in truth whatever it may be.

  [Illustration: GITL]

_Apropos_ of Cahan's love of truth, and that word "unpleasant," a
discussion which took place a few years ago on the appearance of
Zangwill's play, _The Children of the Ghetto_, is illuminative. That
poetic drama represented the life of the poor Ghetto Jew with sympathy
and truth; but for that very reason it was severely criticised by some
uptown Israelites. Many of these, no doubt, had religious objections
to a display on the stage of those customs and observances of their
race which touched upon the "holy law." But some of the rich German
Jews, practically identified with American life, and desiring for
practical and social purposes to make little of their racial
distinction, deprecated literature which portrayed the life of those
Jews who still have distinctively national traits and customs. Then,
too, there is a tendency among the well-to-do American Jews to look
down upon their Ghetto brethren, to regard the old customs as
benighted and to treat them with a certain contempt; altho they spend
a great deal of charitable money in the quarter. Feeling a little
ashamed of the poor Russian east side Jew, they object to a serious
literary portrayal of him. They want no attention called to what they
deem the less attractive aspects of their race. An uptown Jewish lady,
on the appearance in a newspaper of a story about east side Jewish
life, wrote a protesting letter to the editor. She told the writer of
the sketch, when he was sent to see her, that she could not see why he
didn't write about uptown Jews instead of sordid east side Jews. The
scribe replied that he wrote of the Ghetto Jew because he found him
interesting, while he couldn't see anything attractive or picturesque
about the comfortable Israelite uptown.

Abraham Cahan's stories have been subjected to criticism inspired by
the same spirit. Feeling the charm of his people he has attempted to
picture them as they are, in shadow and light; and has consequently
been accused of betraying his race to the Gentiles.

The attitude of the east side Jews towards writers like Zangwill and
Cahan is in refreshing contrast. The Yiddish newspapers were
enthusiastic about _Children of the Ghetto_, in which they felt the
Jews were truthfully and therefore sympathetically portrayed. In the
literary sketches and plays now produced in considerable numbers in
the "jargon," a great pride of race is manifest. The writers have not
lost their self-respect, still abound in their own sense and are
consequently vitally interesting. They are full of ideals and
enthusiasm and do not object to what is "unpleasant" so strenuously as
do their uptown brethren.




Chapter Nine

The Young Art and its Exponents


On Hester Street, east of the Bowery, the poor Jew is revealed in many
a characteristic way. It is the home of the sweat-shop, of the crowded
tenement-house. Old pedlers, as ragged as the poorest beggars, stand on
street corners. In long uninterrupted lines are the carts--containing
fruit, cake, dry goods, fish, everything that the proletarian Jew
requires. Behind these tower the crowded tenement-houses, with
fire-escapes for balconies. Through the middle of the street
constantly moves a mass of people. No vehicle can go rapidly there,
for the thoroughfare is literally alive. In the least crowded part of
the day, however, tattered little girls may sometimes be seen dancing
with natural grace to the music of a hand-organ, the Italian owner of
which for some strange reason has embedded himself in the very heart
of poverty. Between the lumbering wagons which infest the street at
the less busy part of the day these little children wonderfully sway
and glide and constitute the only gladsome feature of the scene. Just
as Canal Street, with its cafés where the poets, Socialists, scholars
and journalists meet, is the mind of the Ghetto, so Hester Street
represents its heart. This picturesque street has recently become the
study of several young Jewish artists.

The last few years have brought the earliest indications of what may
develop into a characteristic Ghetto art. In the course of their long
civilization the Jews have never developed a national plastic art.
Devoted to the things of the spirit, in an important period of their
history in conflict with the sensuous art of the Greeks, they have
never put into external forms the heart of their life. There have been
occasional painters and sculptors among them, but these have worked in
line with the Gentiles, and have in no way contributed to a typical or
national art. With the slackening of the Hebraic religion, however,
which prohibits images in the temple--that fertile source of
inspiration in Christian art--the conditions have been more favorable,
and the beginning of a distinctive Ghetto art has already made its
appearance in New York.

On the corner of Hester and Forsyth streets is a tumble-down rickety
building. The stairs that ascend to the garret are pestiferous and
dingy. In what is more like a shed than a room, with the wooden ribs
of the slanting roof curtailing the space, is the studio of an east
side artist. A miserable iron bedstead occupies the narrow strip of
floor beneath the descending ceiling. There is one window, which
commands a good view of the pushcart market in Hester Street. Near the
window is a diminutive oil-stove, on which the artist prepares his tea
and eggs. On a peg on the door hang an old mackintosh and an extra
coat--his only additional wardrobe. About the narrow walls on the
three available sides are easels, and sketches and paintings of Ghetto
types.

Jacob Epstein, the name of the artist, has a melancholy wistful face.
He was born in the Ghetto twenty years ago, of poor Jews, who were at
first tailors and afterwards small tradespeople, and who had emigrated
from Poland. He went to the public schools until he was thirteen years
old. Since then he has worked at various jobs. Until recently he was
an instructor in the boys' out-door gymnasium near the corner of
Hester and Essex streets. For one summer, in order to get a vacation,
he became a farm laborer. His art education as well as his education
in general is slight, consisting of two terms at the Art Students'
League. But for so young a man his intellectual, as well as his
artistic activity has been considerable. He belongs to a number of
debating societies, and is now hesitating in his mind whether to
become a Socialist or an Anarchist, altho he is tending towards a
humane socialism.

Two things, however, he seems definitely to have settled--that he will
devote himself to his art, and that that art shall be the plastic
picturing of the life of his people in the Ghetto. He seems to rejoice
at having lost his various pot-boiling positions.

"I was not a gymnast," he said cheerfully, explaining why he left the
last one, "and now they have a gymnast."

Now he lives alone on his beloved Hester Street and the studio, where
he sleeps and eats. For that modest room he pays $4 a month, and as he
cooks his own meals, $12 a month is quite sufficient to satisfy all
his needs. This amount he can usually manage to make through the sale
of his sketches; but when he does not he "goes to bed," as he puts it,
and lies low until one of his various little art enterprises brings
him in a small check. Withal, he is very happy, altho serious, like
his race in general; and full of idealism and ambition. On one
occasion the idea occurred to him and to his friend, Bernard Gussow,
that men ought to live closer to nature than they can in the Ghetto.
It was in the winter time that they were filled with this conviction,
but they nevertheless packed off and hired a farmhouse at Greenwood
Lake, and stayed there the whole winter. When their money gave out
they cut ice in the river to pay the rent.

"We enjoyed it very much," said Epstein, "but there were no artistic
results. The country, much as I love it, is not stimulating. Clouds
and trees are not satisfying. It is only in the Ghetto, where there is
human nature, that I have ideas for sketches."

With a kind of regret the artist spoke of the beauty of Winslow
Homer's landscape. He called it "epic," and was filled with sorrow
that such an art could not be in the Ghetto.

"There is no nature in the sweat-shop," he said, "and yet it is there
and in the crowded street that my love and my imagination call me. It
is only the minds and souls of my people that fill me with a desire to
work."

It is this ambition which makes Jacob Epstein and the other young
artists to be mentioned of uncommon representative interest. Epstein
is filled with a melancholy love of his race, and his constant desire
is to paint his people just as they are: to show them in their
suffering picturesqueness. So he goes into the sweat-shop and
sketches, induces the old pedlers of Hester Street to pose in his
studio, and draws from his window the push-carts and the old women in
the street. It is thus a characteristic Ghetto art, an art dealing
with the peculiar types of that Jewish community, that Epstein's
interest leads to; a national plastic art, as it were, on a small
scale.

In the studio and at an exhibition at the Hebrew Institute Epstein had
two years ago a number of sketches and a few paintings--the latter
very crude as far as the technique of color is concerned, and the
sketches in charcoal rough and showing comparatively slight mastery of
the craft. But, particularly in the sketches, there is character in
every one, and at once a sympathetic and a realistic imagination. He
tells the truth about the Ghetto as he sees it, but into the dark
reality of the external life he puts frequently a melancholy beauty of
spirit. Portraits of old pedlers, roughly successful as Ghetto types,
in order to retain whom as models the artist was frequently forced to
sing a song, for the pedlers have a Jewish horror of the image, and
it is difficult to get them to pose; one of them with an irregular,
blunted nose and eyes sad and plaintive, but very gentle; an old Jew
in the synagogue, praying "Holy," "Holy"; many sweat-shop scenes,
gaunt figures half-dressed, with enormously long arms and bony
figures; mothers working in the shops with babies in their arms; one
woman, tired, watching for a moment her lean husband working the
machine--that machine of which Morris Rosenfeld sings so powerfully in
"The Sweat-Shop"; a woman with her head leaning heavily on her hands;
Hester Street market scenes, with dreary tenement-houses--a kind of
prison wall--as background; one pedler with a sensitive face--a man
the artist had to catch at odd times, surreptitiously, for, religious
to an extreme, the old fellow would hastily trundle off whenever he
saw Epstein.

  [Illustration: A LITTLE GIRL OF HESTER STREET]

A characteristic of this young artist's work is the seriousness with
which he tries to get the type as it is; the manifest love involved in
the way it takes his imagination. With his whole soul he hates
caricature of his race. Most of the magazine illustrations of Ghetto
characters he finds distorted and untrue, many of them, however, done
with a finish of technique that he envies. A big and ugly nose is not
the enthusiastic artist's idea of what constitutes a downtown Jew. The
Jew, to him, is recognized rather by the peculiar melancholy of the
eyes. In the nose he sees nothing particularly typical of the race. It
is a forcible illustration of how, while really remaining faithful to
the external type, his love for the race leads him to emphasize the
spiritual and humane expressiveness of the faces about him; and so
paves the way to an art imaginative as well as typical, not lacking
even in a certain ideal beauty.

Bernard Gussow, Epstein's friend and fellow-worker in the attempt to
found a distinctive Ghetto art, is in a still earlier stage of
development. His essays in the plastic reproduction of Hester Street
types are not yet as humanly interesting as those of the younger man,
who, however, has been working longer and more assiduously. It is only
for the past year or two that Gussow has definitely espoused this
cause.

Unlike Epstein he was not born in New York. The town of Slutzk, in the
government of Ulinsk, Russia, is his birthplace, where he stayed until
he was eleven years old. His father is a teacher of Hebrew, and young
Gussow consequently received a much better education than Epstein;
and also became much more familiar with the religious life of the
Orthodox Jews. For that reason Epstein urges his friend to take the
New York Orthodox synagogue and the domestic life of the religious Jew
as his distinctive field in the great work in hand. For this, too,
Gussow hopes, but in the present condition of his technique he limits
himself to Hester Street scenes.

In New York Gussow continued to build up an education uncommonly good
in the Ghetto. He went through the High School, entered the City
College, which he left for the Art School, and spent one season at the
League and two at the Academy of Design. He has for many years given
lessons in English; to which occupation he, unlike his more emotional
friend, prudently holds on. But Gussow, also, is deeply if not
emotionally interested in the life of the Ghetto, and in a broader if
less intense form than is Epstein. With the contemporary Yiddish
literature and journalism of New York he is well acquainted. His mind
is more conservative and judicial than that of Epstein; but his
sketches lack, at present at least, the touch of strong sympathy and
imagination which is marked in the art of the younger man.

  [Illustration: THE PUSH-CARTS OF HESTER STREET AND THEIR GUARD AT
   NIGHT]

Gussow lives with his father's family, where he keeps his
sketches--but to work, he goes to a room on the corner of Hester and
Essex streets occupied by a poor Jewish family. Here the artist sits
by the window and watches the poor and picturesque scenes in the big
push-cart market directly beneath him. The subjects of his sketches
are roughly the same as those of Epstein, altho he draws rather more
from the street and Epstein from the sweat-shop. Groups standing about
the push-carts, examining goods and bargaining; an old woman with a
cheese in her hand, and an enormous nose (which Epstein reproachfully
calls a caricature); several sketches representing men or women
holding eggs to the sun, as a test preliminary to buying; carpenters
waiting on the corner near the market for a job; an old Jew critically
examining apples; a roughly indicated, rather attractive Jewish girl;
a woman standing by a push-cart counting her money; a confused Hester
Street crowd, walled in by the lofty tenement-houses; a wall-painter
with an interesting face, who peddles horse-radish when not occupied
with painting; a pedler out of work, just from the hospital, his beard
straggling in again, with the characteristic sad eyes of his race;
this rather small list comprises the greater part of Gussow's work,
and most of it is of a distinctly sketchy nature.

"You see," said Epstein sympathetically, "Bernard has until recently
been working for the tenement-house committee, and has only just got
away from his job." Both of these young men seem to think it a piece
of good luck when they are discharged by their employers.

These artists both recognize that the distinctive Ghetto art is in its
earliest stage; and that whatever has yet been done in that direction
is technically very imperfect. But they call attention even to the
crayon art stores of the Ghetto as crudely pointing in the right
direction. In those chromos, which contain absolutely no artistic
quality, is represented, nevertheless, the religious and domestic life
of the Jews and their physical types. And whatever art there is at
present is supported by the popularity with the people of this crayon
work. On the basis of that the artist proper may work out the type
into more truly interpretative forms.

For this young art, the object of which is to give a realistic picture
of the life of the Ghetto, it is easy to conceive an unduly
sentimental interest. It is not unnatural in this time of great
attention to east side charitable work to give greater value than it
deserves to an art which represents the sordidness and the pathos of
that part of the city. Against this attitude, which they also call
sentimental, Epstein and Gussow earnestly protest, and maintain that
unless the Ghetto art becomes some day technically excellent it will
have no legitimate value. They want it judged on the same basis that
any other art is judged; and they are filled with the faith, or at
least the enthusiastic Epstein is, that the time will come when the
artists of the Ghetto will paint typical Jewish life, and paint it
technically well.

It is true, of course, that the ultimate value of this little art
movement in the Ghetto will depend upon how well the attempt to paint
the life is eventually carried out. But, nevertheless, even if nothing
comes of it, it is important as suggesting an interesting departure
from what is the prevailing limitation of American art. In Epstein's
work something of the typical life of a community is expressed; of
what American painter from among the Gentiles can this be said? Where
is the typical, the nationally characteristic, in our art? Our best
painters experiment with all kinds of subjects; they put talent,
sometimes genius, into their work, but at the basis of it there is no
simple presentation of well-recognized and deeply felt national or
even sectional life; merely essays in art, of more or less skill,
showing no warm interest in any one kind of life.

There are many other artists, besides these two, in the Ghetto, some
of whom also occasionally paint a distinctive Ghetto type. But for the
most part, trained as they have been in the uptown art schools, they
experiment with all sorts of subjects in the approved American style.
They paint girls in white and girls in blue, etc., as Epstein
expressed it scornfully; and put no general Ghetto quality into their
work. They do not seem deeply interested in anything except painting.
Many of them are technically better educated than Epstein and Gussow;
tho it is probably safe to say that no one of them has the sympathetic
imagination of Epstein. It is to this eclectic, experimental tendency
of the artists in the Ghetto in general that Epstein and Gussow
present a contrast--in their love of their people and their desire to
paint them as they are.

A typical representative of this less centred art is Samuel Kalisch,
twenty-six years old, who came to this country from Austria twelve
years ago. Older than the two young enthusiasts, Kalisch has had more
experience and has developed a more efficient technique. He works in
oils to a greater extent than the others and has a number of
comparatively finished pictures; but his studio resembles that of any
rather undistinguished uptown artist in point of diversity of subject
and artistic impulse. There is an Oriental scene of conventional
character; a portrait of himself taken from the mirror; a number of
examples of still-life, apples, flowers, a "cute" scene of children
playing on the beach; a landscape, etc. Of distinctive Ghetto things
there are two old men, one just from the synagogue, with pensive eyes,
a long beard and a Derby hat; the other, ninety-four years old, who
sits in the synagogue, with a long white beard, a black cap on his
head, a cane in one hand and the Talmud in the other. These two
portraits show considerable technical skill, but are faithful rather
than interpretative, and indicate that the artist's sympathy is not
absorbed in the life of the Ghetto. They are merely subjects, like any
other, which might come to his hand.

Now in full sympathy with what may be called the "movement" is
Nathaniel Loewenberg, a little, black-haired, sad-eyed, sensitive and
appealing Russian Jew of twenty-one years of age. It is only recently,
however, that he has turned from landscape to city types, of which he
has a few sketches, very incomplete with one exception, that also
unfinished but unusually promising; it is in oil and represents a Jew
fish pedler of attractive countenance and shabby clothes trying to
sell a fine fish to three Ghetto women; these latter cleverly
distinguished, one who will probably buy, another who apparently would
like to if she could reduce the price, and the third indifferent.

Loewenberg was born in Moscow, of parents who were then and are now in
business. He is enthusiastic at present over two things: Russian
literature and the life of the Jews. On his table are two books--one a
history of the Hebrews, the other Tolstoi's "Awakening," in Russian.
His newest interest is the Ghetto; "for," he said, "the Ghetto is full
of character. There the people's life is more exposed than anywhere
else, and the artist can easily penetrate into it."

The type Loewenberg hopes to delineate is of different character from
that of Hester Street, where Gussow and Epstein work. His field is
mainly at the corner of Rivington and Attorney streets, where the Jews
are Hungarians and Poles and have a distinctive type. That is the
location of another push-cart market, and altho the human types are
different from those of Hester Street, the peddling occupations are
identical. Loewenberg's fancy runs largely to the young Jewish girl of
this quarter, and she is represented in several half done sketches.

The New York Ghetto is constantly changing. It shifts from one part of
town to another, and the time is not so very far distant when it will
cease to exist altogether. The sweat-shop will happily disappear with
advancing civilization in New York. The tenement-houses will change in
character, the children will learn English and partly forget their
Yiddish language and peculiar customs. In spite of the fact that the
Jews have been at all times and in all countries tenacious of their
domestic peculiarities and their religion, the special character of
the Ghetto will pass away in favorably conditioned America. The
picturesqueness it now possesses will disappear. Perhaps, however, by
that time an art will have been developed which will preserve for
future generations the character of the present life; which may thus
have historical value, and artistic beauty in addition. Epstein and
Gussow, devoted to this result as they are, are yet quite eager to see
present conditions pass away. To them the art they have selected seems
of trifling importance in comparison with a general improvement of the
people they seem genuinely to love. They would be glad to have the
present picturesqueness of the Ghetto give place to conditions more
analogous to those of happier sections of New York.

But in the meantime these few young artists, two or three particularly
interested in Ghetto types, five or six others, perhaps more, who
occasionally contribute a sketch of the Ghetto, are in a fair way to
get together a considerable body of pictures which shall have the
distinction of portraying the Jewish community of the east side with
fair adequacy. Certainly the interest of that Hester Street life, and
of the tenement-houses that line it, is deep enough to inspire some
serious man of plastic genius. And then it is not improbable that some
great sombre pictures will be painted. The conditions for such a
significant art are ripe, and it may find its master in one or another
of the young men who are passionately "doing" Hester Street.




Chapter Ten

Odd Characters


No matter how "queer" are the numerous persons whom one can meet in
the cafés of the quarter they are mainly redeemed by a genuinely
intellectual vein. It is reserved for this final chapter to tell of
some men who do not well fit into the preceding categories, but whose
lives or works are, in one way or another, quite worthy of record.


AN OUT-OF-DATE STORY-WRITER

Shaikevitch is the author of interminable, unsigned novels, which are
published in daily installments in the east side newspapers. He is so
prolific that he makes a good living. There was a time, however, when
he gladly signed his name to what he wrote. That time is over, and the
reason for it is best brought out by a sketch of his history.

He was born in Minsk, Russia, of orthodox Jewish parents. He began to
write when he was twenty years old, at first in pure Hebrew,
scientific and historical articles. He also wrote a Hebrew novel,
called the _Victim of the Inquisition_, to which the Russian censor
objected on the ground that it dealt with religious subjects.

Compelled to make his own living, young Shaikevitch, whose _nom de
plume_ has always been "Schomer," began to write popular novels in the
common jargon, in Yiddish. At that time the Jews in Russia were, even
more than now, shut up in their own communities, knew nothing of
European culture, had an education, if any, exclusively Hebraic and
mediæval and were outlandish to an extreme. The educated read only
Hebrew, and the uneducated did not read at all. Up to that time, or
until shortly before it, the Jew thought that nothing but holy
teaching could be printed in Hebrew type. A man named Dick, however, a
kind of forerunner of Shaikevitch, had begun to write secular stories
in Yiddish. They were popular in form, intended for the ignorant
populace who never read at all. Shaikevitch followed in Dick's lines,
and made a great success.

He has written over 160 stories, and for many years he was the great
popular Yiddish writer in Russia. The people would read nothing but
"Schomer's" works. The ignorant masses eagerly devoured the latest
novel of Schomer's. It goes without saying that, under the
circumstances, these books could be of very slight literary value.
They were long, sentimental effusions, tales of bad Christians and
good Jews, with a monotonous repetition of stock characters and
situations; and with a melodramatic and sensational element. They
probably corresponded pretty closely to our "nickel" novels, published
in some of our cheapest periodicals, and intended for the most
ignorant element of our population. Some of their titles are _A
Shameful Error_, _An Unexpected Happiness_, _The Princess in the
Wood_, _Convicted_, _Rebecca_.

"Schomer" was so successful that he had many imitators, who never,
however, succeeded so well. The publishers sometimes tried to deceive
the ignorant people into thinking that a new novel of Schomer's had
appeared. On the cover of the book they put the title and the new
author's name in very small letters, and then in very large letters:
"In the style of Schomer." But it did not work. The people remained
faithful to the books of the man whom they had first read.

When Shaikevitch, or "Schomer" himself, describes the purpose and
characters of his work he talks as follows:

"My works are partly pictures of the life of the Jews in the Russian
villages of fifty years ago, and partly novels about the old history
of the Jews. Fifty years ago the Jews were more fanatical than they
are now. They did nothing but study the Talmud, pray and fast, wear
long beards and wigs and look like monkeys. I satirized all this in my
novels. I tried to teach the ignorant Jews that they were ridiculous,
that they ought to take hold of modern, practical life and give up all
that was merely formal and absurd in the old customs. I taught them
that a pious man might be a hypocrite, and that it is better to do
good than to pray. My works had a great effect in modernizing and
educating the ignorant Jews. In my stories I pictured how the Jewish
boy might go out from his little village into the wide, Gentile world,
and make something of himself. In the last twenty-five years, the
Jews, owing to my books, have lost a great deal of their fanaticism.
At that time they had nothing but my books to read, and so my satire
had a great effect."

Shaikevitch is not entirely alone in this good opinion of his work.
Dr. Blaustein, superintendent of the Educational Alliance, said that
he owed his position as an educated and modern man to reading novels
when he was a boy. Dr. Blaustein lived in a small Russian village, and
one day he read a story of "Schomer's" which represented a Jewish boy
going out into the world and criticizing his Hebraic surroundings.
That was the beginning of Dr. Blaustein's "awakening." Other
intelligent Russian Jews probably had this same experience, altho now
as mature men they would all, no doubt, grant only a very small, if
any, artistic quality to the famous Yiddish writer.

A few years after Shaikevitch's great popularity two men began to
write in Yiddish stories which really had value for the intelligent
and educated--Abramovitch and, particularly, his pupil Rabinovitch. It
was this work which, in some sort of form, did intelligently for the
more educated Jews what Shaikevitch had done for the lowest stratum.
Rabinovitch published a book in which he brought Shaikevitch to trial.
He literally "tore him up the back" as far as literature is
concerned--pointed out the tasteless, cheap, sensational character of
his work, and held him up generally to ridicule.

  [Illustration: N. M. SHAIKEVITCH]

As the Jews became better educated this critical feeling about
Shaikevitch's work grew more general. It is significant of the
progress towards modern things made by the Jews that even the very
ignorant no longer admire Shaikevitch's work as much as formerly. He
is "out of date," so much so that he now does not sign the stories
he publishes in the Yiddish newspapers, which, nevertheless, are still
popular among the most ignorant.

The intellectual Socialists of the Jewish quarter in New York also had
their fling at the popular writer, and helped to put him into
obscurity. Now it is a common thing in the Ghetto to hear a Socialist
say that Shaikevitch wielded a more disintegrating and unfavorable
influence on the Jews than any other writer. But, nevertheless, the
calm old man, who has a wife and several grown children, who are
making their way in the new world, still sits quietly at his desk,
drinking Russian tea and doing his daily "stunt" of several thousand
words for the Yiddish newspapers.

The reason given by Mr. Shaikevitch for coming to America is that he
began to be interested in play writing, when the Yiddish stage was
prohibited in Russia. The actors left Russia then and came to America,
and some of them later wrote Shaikevitch, who was one of the earliest
Yiddish playwrights, to join them in New York. He did so, and has
written twelve plays, which have been produced in this city. Some of
the better known of them are: _The Jewish Count_, _Hamann the Second_,
_Rebecca_ and _Dreyfus_. Shaikevitch is interesting mainly as
representing in his work an early stage of the popular Yiddish
consciousness.


A CYNICAL INVENTOR

The "intellectuals" who gather in the Russian cafés delight in
expressing the ideas for which they were persecuted abroad. Enthusiasm
for progress and love of ideas is the characteristic tone of these
gatherings and an entire lack of practical sense.

Very striking, therefore, was the attitude of a Russian-Jewish
inventor, who took his lunch the other day at one of the most literary
of these cafés. Near him were a trio of enthusiasts, gesticulating
over their tea, but he sat aloof, alone. He listened with a cold,
superior smile. He neither smoked nor drank, but sat, with his thin,
shrewd face, chillily thinking.

It is common report in the community of the intellectual Ghetto that
Mr. Okun made a great invention connected with the electric arc lamp.
It resulted in lengthening the time before the carbon is burnt out
from four or five hours to 150 hours or thereabouts. He might have
been a millionaire to-day, both he and his acquaintances maintain,
but, with the usual unpractical nature of the Russian Jew, he was
cheated by unscrupulous lawyers. He was a shirt maker, and for six
years saved from his $10 a week to buy the apparatus necessary for the
task. At last it was completed, but he was robbed of the fortune, of
the fame, of the prestige to which his great idea entitled him. As it
is, he gets only $1,250 a year for the great deed, spends much of his
time silently in the cafés, and dreams of other inventions when not
engaged with criticizing his kind.

An American, who sometimes visited the place for "color" and for the
unpractical enthusiasm which he missed among his own people, sat down
by the inventor, whose face interested him, and entered into
conversation. He spoke of a Yiddish playwright whom he admired.

"I do not know much about him," said the inventor. "I am not a genius,
like the others."

He sneered, but it was so nearly imperceptible that it did not seem
ill-natured.

"But I am told," said the American, "that you are a great inventor.
And that is a kind of genius."

"Yes, perhaps," he replied, carelessly. "It takes talent, too, to do
what I have done. But I am not a genius, like these people."

Again he smiled, sarcastically.

"I find," said the American, "a great many interesting people in these
cafés."

"Yes, they are what you call characters, I suppose," he said,
dispassionately; "but I find them interesting only for one reason--no,
no, I won't tell you what that reason is."

"You don't seem to be as enthusiastic about the people as I am," said
the American, "but whenever I come into a café down here I find
serious men who will talk seriously. They are different from the
Americans who amuse themselves in bars, at horse races and farces."

The inventor smiled coldly.

"I do not call serious, what you call serious," he said. "It is not
necessary to talk seriously to be serious. Serious men do things. The
Russians don't do things. If they were gay and did things, they would
be more serious than they are. But they are solemn and don't do
anything."

"I don't agree with you," said the American, warmly. "Doesn't Blank,
who writes so many excellent novels, do anything? Don't the actors,
who act so truthfully, without self-consciousness, do anything? Don't
the journalists, who spread excellent ideas, do anything?"

The inventor nodded judicially and remarked that there were some
exceptions.

"But," he added, "you are deceived by the surface. There are many men
in our colony who seem to be stronger intellectually than they really
are. In Russia a few men, really cultivated and intellectual, give the
tone, and everybody follows them. In America, however, the public
gives the tone, and the playwright, the literary man, simply expresses
the public. So that really intellectual Americans do not express as
good ideas as less intellectual Russians. The Russians all imitate the
best. The Americans imitate what the mass of the people want. But an
intellectual American is more intellectual than these geniuses around
here whom you like. Of course, they have some good things in them, as
everybody has."

"What is it that you find to like in this Russian colony?" asked the
American.

"I find," replied the inventor, "that when they come over here they
lose what is best in the Russian character and acquire what is worst
in the American character."

"And what do you deem best in the Russian character?"

"Well, in Russia they are warm hearted and friendly. They are envious
even there, but not nearly so envious as they are here."

"And what do you find that is worst in the American character?"

"Oh, you know; they do everything for money. But yet there is more
greatness in the American character. They are mechanical. They are
practical. They don't get cheated by unscrupulous lawyers.

"Are you married?" asked the American, sympathetically.

"No, thank God!" he replied, with more energy than he had yet shown.

"But you have no friends?"

"No."

"Some men," commented the American, "find a friend in a wife."

"That depends on a man's character. It increases the loneliness of
some men," replied the inventor, smiling in spite of what he was
saying.

"You seem to me to be rather pessimistic," remarked the American.

"No, I am not pessimistic. I understand that a pessimist thinks life
is worse than it is, but I see things just as they are; that is all.
When I came to New York I was enthusiastic, too; I was an optimist. I
saw life as it is not. But the mists have passed from before my eyes,
and I see things just as they are."


AN IMPASSIONED CRITIC

He loves literature with an absorbing love, and is pained constantly
by what he deems the chaos of art in the United States. The Americans
seem to him to be trivial and immature in their art, lacking in
serious purpose.

"It is a vast and fruitful land," he will say, "but there is no order
and little sincerity as far as art is concerned. Your writers try to
amuse the readers, to entertain them merely, rather than to give them
serious and vital truth. Why is it that a race which is clever and
progressive in all mechanical and industrial matters, which in such
things has no overpowering respect for the past, is weighed down in
art by a regard for all the literary ghosts of bygone times? Look at
the books put forth in any one year in the United States! What a
senseless hodgepodge it is! Variety of all kinds, historical novels,
short stories, social plays, costume plays, bindings, illustrations,
_editions de luxe_, new editions of books written in all ages
alongside of the latest productions of the day. The Americans have
great tact in most things. They are the cleverest people in the world,
and yet they are very backward in literature.

"Indeed the whole Anglo-Saxon race, great economically and practically
as it is, is curiously at sea and chaotic in all that pertains to
literary art. There are men of genius, great artists among them, but
they are artists only in part, fragmentarily, artists without being
aware of it, with no consistent and clear understanding of what art
is. Your great men are hindered by their environment. America and
England are the most difficult countries in the world for real art to
get a hearing, for all the people insist on being amused by their
authors. They treat them as they do their actors, merely as public
servants whose duty it is to amuse the public when it is tired. But
art is a serious thing, instinct with sincerity, and should never be
lightly approached either by the artist or the reader.

"Another indication of what I mean is the way you all talk about style
over here, as if the style had anything to do with art. Some of the
great Russian realists have no style, but they are great artists.
There was a time when to write well was an exception, and people who
did it were supposed to be great. Now so many write well that it
constitutes no longer any particular distinction. Real art consists in
the presentation of ideas in images, and in the power of seeing in
images, and of reproducing imaginatively; what is thus seen is wholly
independent of style. And, more, words often stand in the way of art.
A man writes a pretty style. There may be no idea or image beneath it,
but you Anglo-Saxons say: 'Ha! Here is a man with a style, a great
artist!' But he is no artist. He is a mere decorator, trivial and
empty. He doesn't seize earnestly upon life and tell the truth about
it. Now and then, indeed, I see indications of real art in your
writers--great images, great characters, great truth, but all merely
in suggestion. You don't know when you do anything good, and most of
you don't like it when you see it. You prefer an exciting plot to a
great delineation of character. Sometimes you throw off, often in
newspapers, something that indicates great talent, real art, but you
cover it up with an indistinguishable mass of rubbish. You don't know
what you are after. You have no method. Every writer goes his single
way, confused, at cross purposes. There is no school of literature.
Consequently, there is great loss of energy, great waste of material;
great richness, but what carelessness, what deplorable carelessness,
about the deepest and noblest and most serious things in life! I love
you; I love you all; you are clever, good fellows, but you are
children, talented, to be sure, but wayward and vagrant children, in
the fields of art. Sincerity, realism, purpose and unity are what as a
race you need, if you wish ever to have a consistent and genuine art.

"The Russian, the Frenchman, the German, knows what he wants. He is
after the truth. He is serious about life. He doesn't try to dodge the
facts for the sake of a little false cheerfulness and optimistic
inanity."

Thus talks the Russian prophet. He is a robust, earnest man, who is
trying to make head and tail out of contemporary English literature.
He finds no great mainspring of impulse or principle behind it, but an
infinite pandering to an infinitely diversified public taste. He
thinks it is a kind of vaudeville of art, full of compromises, vulgar
in its lack of principle. It makes him sad in much the same way that
skepticism and profanity sadden a deeply religious person. Wisdom and
truth he wants, and doesn't find them. What he finds is haste, greed,
incompleteness and waste, and his soul abhors anything which takes
away from the deepest nature of the soul. He is really a religious
man, profound and sincere, sad at the wasteful, foolish lightness in
art of the Anglo-Saxon world. Like his great countryman, Tolstoy, he
writes stories, and, again like Tolstoy, as he grows older the more he
sees in art and life which he would like to reform and deepen. Economy
of the heart, soul and brain, the direction of them to a constant
end--the feeling of the necessity of this is now an altruistic passion
with this man. Like all reformers, he is sad, but, again like all
reformers, he is robust and calm, self-sufficient.


THE POET OF ZIONISM

Naptali Herz Imber is known to all Jews of any education as the man
who has written in the old Hebrew language the poems that best express
the hope of Zion and that best serve as an inspiring battle cry in the
struggle for a new Jerusalem. Zangwill has translated into English the
Hebrew "Wacht Am Rhein," the most popular of Imber's poems, which is
called _The Watch on the Jordan_. It is in four stanzas, the first of
which is:

     Like the crash of the thunder
     Which splitteth asunder
     The flame of the cloud,
     On our ears ever falling,
     A voice is heard calling
     From Zion aloud;
     "Let your spirits' desires
     For the land of your sires
     Eternally burn
     From the foe to deliver
     Our own holy river,
     To Jordan return."
     Where the soft flowing stream
     Murmurs low as in dream,
     There set we our watch.
     Our watchword, "The sword,
     Of our land and our Lord,"
     By the Jordan then set we our watch.

Mr. Imber is a peculiar character and is said to be the original of
the poet Pinchas in Zangwill's _Children of the Ghetto_.

At a Russian-Jewish café on Canal Street he may often be found. Not
long ago I met him there and discovered that the dignified Hebrew poet
had as a man many of the more humorous and less impressive
peculiarities of the character in Mr. Zangwill's book. It is difficult
to take him seriously. He was sitting opposite an old "magid," or
wandering preacher, whose specialty is to attack America, and he
consented to tell about his work and to confide some of his ideas.

"I am the origin of the Zionistic movement," he said. "It is not
generally known, but I am. Many years ago I went to Jerusalem, saw the
misery of the people, felt the spirit of the place and determined to
bring my scattered people again together. For twelve years I struggled
to put the Zionistic movement on foot, and now that I have started it
I will let others carry it on and get the glory. For long I was not
recognized, but when my Hebrew poems were published our whole race
were made enthusiastic for Zion.

"If you wish to know what the spirit and purpose of my Hebrew poems is
I will tell you. For two thousand years Hebrew poetry has been
nothing but lamentations--nothing but literature expressing the spirit
of Jeremiah. There have been no love songs, no wine songs, no songs of
joy, nothing pagan. There have been no poets, only critics in rhyme.
Now what I did in my Hebrew verses was to do away with lamentations.
We have had enough of lamentations. I introduced the spirit of love
and wine, the pagan spirit. My theme, indeed, is Zion. I am an
individualist. It is the only 'ist' I believe in, and I want my nation
to be individual, too. I want them to be joyously themselves, and so I
am a Zionist. Therefore I did away with critical poetry and with
lamentations and led my people on to an individual and a joyous life."

Altho Mr. Imber's best work is in Hebrew poetry, he is yet a very
voluminous writer on science, economics, medicine, mysticism, history
and many other subjects.

"I have written on everything," said the poet, "everything. I know
almost nothing about the subjects on which I write. I don't believe in
reading. I believe in knowing myself. In that way we learn to know
others. Psychology is the only science. All others are fakes, and I
can fake as well as anybody. Why read, or why seek amusement in the
theatres or elsewhere, when one can sit in a café and talk to a man
like that?"

He pointed in the old "magid" opposite him.

"Whenever I want to amuse myself," he said, "I talk to a man like
that, and I cannot amuse myself without learning more about
psychology."

With the exception of his poems most of the poet's work was written in
the English language.

"I began to write English late in life," he said. "Israel Zangwill
helped me to begin. He said he would correct what I wrote, but I wrote
so much that Mr. Zangwill stopped reading it and told me to go ahead
on my own hook. So I did. I have written infinitely in English, some
of which has been published--_Music of the Psalms_; _Education and the
Talmud_, which was issued by the United States government in the
report of the commissioner of education; many articles on mysticism
and other subjects in the magazine _Ariel_; _The Mystery of the Golden
Calf_, _The Music of the Ghetto_, and many other works on the
cabalistic mysticism. I have also written, _Who Was Crucified?_
wherein I prove that it was not Jesus. If I kept on all day I could
not tell you the names of all I have written. I have published many
articles in the Jewish-American papers satirizing the rabbis, who
consequently hate me. Much of my work, indeed, is satirical. The
world needs cleaning up a little, particularly the rabbis. Put the
reformed and orthodox rabbis together and some good might come of
them. I am not afraid of these people, whom I call silk-chimney
rabbis, because they wear tall hats instead of knowing the Talmud. It
was my own invention--'silk-chimney rabbis.'"

Mr. Imber is evidently very fond of this phrase, for he repeated it
many times. Indeed, he does not seem to be a very pious Jew. He
himself admits it, for he said:

"I do not think they will say 'Kaddish' for my soul when I am dead.
And yet I am not a skeptic, exactly. I have a principle, Zionism. And
beyond Zionism I have another great interest. I have now perfected
Zionism, so I am free to pass on to Mysticism, in which I am deeply at
work. The mystics are all bluffers. I am a mystic, but my mysticism is
simple and plain. My aim is to present a perfectly simple view of
occultism. It is difficult to persuade Americans to become mystics.
They care nothing for Hegel and Kant. Their philosophy I call
Barnumism."

  [Illustration: NAPTALI HERZ IMBER]

Mr. Imber has largely given up writing Hebrew now, but lately he wrote
a Hebrew poem comprising 200 closely printed pages. He did it, he
said, to spite a man who said the poet had forgotten Hebrew because of
his penchant for English.

Not long ago Mr. Imber wrote a _Last Confession_ in Hebrew. He was
very sick in a St. Louis hospital with blood poisoning, and thought he
was going to die. They wanted him to confess his sins. So he did it,
in Hebrew verse, which he translated to me, evidently on the spur of
the moment, thus:

     When my day will come
       To wander in distress,
     Call the priest to my room,
       My sins to confess.

     The sins which I have committed
       With deliberation,
     They will by the Lord be omitted,
       Who promised us salvation.

     The evils I have done,
       Not conscious of the action,
     Have passed away and gone
       Without satisfaction.

     I see near me the green table:
       The gamblers play aloud,
     And I am sick and unable
       To mix up with the crowd.

     There are still beautiful roses,
       With aroma blessed;
     There are still handsome maidens,
       Whose lips I have not pressed.

     This has me affected,
       I am full of remorse,
     That of late I have neglected
       The girl and the roses.

Written on what the poet thought was his deathbed, this satirical poem
is almost as heroic as _The Watch on the Jordan_.

Mr. Imber has also written many original poems in English, which,
however, he fears will not live. Many of them are satirical poems
about American life and politics. When in Denver before the Spanish
war he wrote some verses beginning:

     Our flag will soon be planted
     In a land where we do not want it.

It was, the poet said, through the simple, clear character of his
mystical attainments that he was able to predict the results of the
war with Spain.

Mr. Imber looks upon America as the "land of the bluff" and as such
admires it. But he disapproves of our reform movements. He thinks the
recent attempt to reform the east side was due to the desire of the
rich to divert attention from their own vices. He doesn't approve of
reform any way.

"We have been trying to reform human nature," he said, "for 2,000
years, and have not done it yet. The only way to make a man good is
to remove his stomach, for so long as he is hungry he will steal, and
so long as he has other desires he will commit other wicked actions.
Moses and Jesus were smart men and knew that evil could not be rooted
out, and so they tolerated it."

Mr. Imber has recently made his last will and testament. It is in
Hebrew prose and runs thus in English:

"To the rabbis I leave what I don't know; it will help them to a
longer life. To my enemies I leave my rheumatism. Between the
Republican and Democratic parties I divide the boodle which they have
not yet touched. To the Jewish editors I leave my broken pen, so that
they can write slowly and avoid mistakes. My books--those intended for
beginners--I leave to the eight professors, so that they can learn to
read. As an executor there shall be appointed a man who knows Barnum's
philosophy through and through. Written on my deathbed. Witness, Mr.
Pluto of the Underground and his Famulus, the doctor. As an
afterthought I leave to my publishers the last bill unpaid by me. They
can frame it and keep it as an amulet to ward away that class of
authors."

"Is it sarcastic?" asked Mr. Imber, chuckling delightedly.

Some time ago Mr. Imber sent the news of his own death to the various
Hebrew and Yiddish publications. Many long obituaries--"very fine
ones," said the poet--appeared.

"In that way," said Mr. Imber, "I learned who were my enemies. It had
one evil consequence, however. When I afterward asked the editor to
publish one of my articles he said:

"'You are officially dead, and as such cannot rush into print.'

"That reply really gave me a grievous moment," said the poet, with a
shrewd, Voltairian smile.


AN INTELLECTUAL DEBAUCHEE

Four men sat excitedly talking in the little café on Grand Street
where the Socialists and Anarchists of the Russian quarter were wont
to meet late at night and stay until the small hours. An American, who
might by chance have happened there, would have wondered what
important event had occurred to rasp these men's voices, to cause them
to gesticulate so wildly, to give their dark, intelligent faces so
fateful, so ominous an expression. In reality, however, nothing out of
the ordinary had happened. It was the usual course of human affairs
which kept these men in a constant glow of unhappy emotion; an
emotion which they deeply preferred to trivial optimism and the
content founded on Philistine well-being. They were always excited
about life, for life as it is constituted seemed to them very unjust.

It was nearly midnight, and the men in the café, altho they had drunk
nothing stronger than Russian tea, talked on, seemingly intoxicated
with ideas. One was the editor of a Yiddish newspaper in the quarter
and a contributor to the Anarchistic monthly. He was a man of about
forty years of age, lighter in complexion than his companions, but yet
dark. Like them he was dressed carelessly and poorly. In his
melancholy eyes shone a gentle idealism. He spoke in a voice lower and
softer than those of his fellows. He was deeply liked by them, for he
was capable of sweet and beautiful ideas about the perfect humanity,
some of which he had put into a play which had a short life on the
Bowery, but lived in the hearts of these warm intellectuals.
Non-resistance to evil was the favorite principle of this gentle
Anarchist, whose name was Blanofsky.

His companions were younger and more heated and violent in speech, tho
their attenuated bodies and thoughtful and sensitive faces did not
suggest reliance on physical force. On the Bowery the Irish tough
fights after a word, but an all day dispute between two Jews on Canal
or Hester Street is unaccompanied by the clenching of a fist. A dark,
thin young man, whose closely shaven face seemed somehow to fit his
spirit, given over entirely to the "movement," sat at Blanofsky's
right hand. At almost any hour of the day or night Hermann Samarovitch
could be found at the Anarchist headquarters on Essex Street, poring
over the books of the propaganda and engaging in talk with other
bright spirits of the "movement." Now, as he talked or listened in the
café on Grand Street, his pale, smooth face seemed dead to all the
ordinary interests of youth. The spirit of life was represented in him
only by the passion for the cause, which burned in his black eyes. He
had no other function than to worship at the shrine. How he lived,
therefore, was a mystery.

Of the other two men, one, Jacob Hessler, a labor leader in the
Ghetto, an eloquent speaker, of more commanding presence, but less
sensitive and impressive at short range than either Blanofsky or
Samarovitch, was silent, for the most part. He talked only to crowds,
partly because it was exciting, but mainly because his limited
intelligence put him at a disadvantage in intimate talk with men of
concentrated intellectual character. The fourth man in the café,
Abraham Gudinsky, was a simple admirer of Blanofsky. He was born in
Jerusalem, had studied law in Constantinople, had lived in Paris as a
bohemian, and, after a few years passed in the commonplace, dissipated
gayety of youth, had come to New York, where his sympathetic and
idealistic character had come under the influence of the quiet charm
of Blanofsky. He had small, live, eyes and a high forehead, and his
body perpetually moved nervously.

"I do not believe," said Blanofsky, in Russian, "that anything can be
accomplished by force. Our cause is too sacred to tarnish it with
blood, and it is too strong in logic and justice not to conquer
peaceably in the end; and that, too, without leaving behind it the
ill-breeding weeds of a violent course. I have nothing but pity for
the misguided wretch who took the life of King Humbert, thinking he
was acting for the cause. It is the acts of such madmen as he that
make us appear to the public as merely irrational monsters."

"Nevertheless," said Samarovitch, his dark eyes glowing, "it is
natural that the crimes of society against the individual should
irritate us sometimes into violent acts. I am not sure but that it is
good that it should be so. Those devoted men, in the great movement
in Russia, at the time the Czar was killed, were as clearheaded as
they were devoted; and they felt that the governmental evil pressing
in Russia could be relieved only by a kind of terrorism. And they were
right," he concluded, with gloomy emphasis.

  [Illustration: A YOUNG MAN AND A YOUNG WOMAN JUST ENTERED THE CAFÉ]

Blanofsky shook his head, and was about to speak of Tolstoy, whom he
regarded as the great interpreter of genuine anarchy, when he was
interrupted by the approach of a young man and a young woman who had
just entered the café. Sabina, as she was familiarly known to the
faithful, dark and slender, with very large, emotional eyes and a
mobile mouth, had just come from her lecture to a crowd of workingmen,
to whom she had spoken eloquently of their right to lead a life with
greater light and beauty in it. The emotions expressed by her
eloquence, and stirred by it, still lay in her deep eyes as she
entered the café. Her companion, who had walked with her from the
lecture, was a young poet, whose words followed one another with
turbulent energy. His head was set uncommonly close to his compact,
stout shoulders, seeming to have a firmer rest than usual on the
trunk, and thus better to support the strain of his thick-coming
fancies. His habitual attitude was to hold his closed fist even with
his shoulder, and punctuate with it the transitions of his thought.
Even in winter the perspiration rolled down his face as he spoke, for
thought with him was intense to the point of pain. He was the perfect
type of the intellectual debauchee of the Russian-Jewish colony. He
drank nothing but tea and coffee, but within him burned his ideas. He
made his living by writing an occasional poem or article for a Yiddish
paper, and when he had gathered together a few dollars he repaired
again to the cafés, seeking companions to whom he could confide his
exuberant thoughts, which were always expressed in poetic images. He
slept whenever and wherever he was tired, but he slept seldom, and
unwillingly. Unrest was his quest and unhappiness his dearest
consolation. The type of his mind was as Russian as his name, which
was Levitzky. The girl looked and listened to him, fascinated. They
sat down at the table with the others, and while the waiter was
bringing their tea and lemon, Levitzky continued his discourse:

"No, I do not like America. The people here are satisfied. Things seem
frozen here--finished. Great deeds have been done, great things have
been created. Wall Street and Broadway fill me with wonder. The
outside is great, showing energy that has been. But at the core, all
is dead. The imagination and the heart are extinguished. Content and
comfort eat up the nation. New York seems to me an active city of the
dead, where there is much movement, but no soul. Russia, which I love,
is just the opposite. There nothing is done, nothing finished. One
sees nothing, but feels warmth and vitality at the heart. In love it
is the same way. The American wants a legal wife and a comfortable
home, but the Russian wants a mistress behind a mountain to whom he
can not penetrate but towards whom he can strive, for whom he can long
and dream. It is better to hope than to attain."

Sabina looked at him, her bosom heaving. His last words seemed to
trouble her, but she sat in silence and appeared to listen to the
conversation, which turned on a recent strike in the Ghetto. Finally
she got up to go home, refusing Levitzky's offer to accompany her.
Leaving the Anarchists still engaged in talk, she went into the
street, which, altho it was after one o'clock, was still far from
deserted.

Instead of going to her poor room in the tenement-house on Hester
Street she walked slowly along Grand Street, towards the Bowery, deep
in reflection. She was thinking of Levitzky and of her life. Ten
years before, as a child of twelve, she had come to New York from
Russia, with her father, a tailor, who had worked for several years in
the sweat-shops. He had died two years before, and since then Sabina
had worked in the sweat-shops in the day time and in the evening had
devoted herself to the cause. At first she had gone to the Socialistic
and Anarchistic meetings merely because they were attended by the only
society in the east side which at all satisfied her growing
intellectual activity. These rough workingmen sometimes seemed to her
inspired, and her ardor and youth were soon deeply interested in the
cause of Socialism, partly because of the pity inspired by the sordid
poverty about her, but mainly because of the strong attraction any
earnest movement has for a young and emotionally intellectual person.
As was quite inevitable, she went from an unreserved love for the
group of ideas called Socialistic to the quite contrary ones of
Anarchy. And this change was not founded on intellectual conviction,
but was due to the simple fact that the Anarchistic cause was more
extreme and gave greater apparent opportunity for self-sacrifice; and
for the reason, too, that the most interesting man she had met,
Levitzky, was at that time an Anarchist. These two made, very often,
passionate speeches on the same evening to a crowd of attentive
laborers, and after the meeting walked the street together or sat over
their tea in the café discussing high ideals, not only Anarchy, but
all noble subjects that detach the soul from the sordid business of
life.

Of course, Sabina loved Levitzky. His robust intellect and exuberant,
poetical nature, a nature constant to passion, but inconstant to
persons, made her beloved ideas seem real, gave a concrete seal to the
creations of her imagination.

Neither Levitzky nor Sabina were conscious of the strong feeling that
he was arousing in the girl's soul. He poured his mind out to her. His
rich nature unfolded in her sympathetic presence. She loved him for
the mental crises he had passed; and he loved merely the mental images
his words aroused in him when she was present.

It was not until the evening of the scene in the café that she had
fully understood that she was eternally in love with Levitzky. On the
walk from the lecture to the Grand Street café they had for the first
time spoken of love between man and woman, and Levitzky had launched
forth into an eloquent tirade against satisfied desire, a speech which
was concluded in the café, with the remark about how a Russian loves
an inaccessible mistress, a beautiful creature separated from her
lover by a mountain, while the despised American wants a legal wife
whom he can enjoy and be sure of.

The sentiment fitted in beautifully with Sabina's habitually
enthusiastic habit of mind. But to-night she was ashamed of herself
because his words filled her with fear and pain. Irrational emotion
drove her theories from her head, and struck her dumb with grief for
what she looked upon as a betrayed ideal. She, who had devoted herself
to the "movement"; she, who had chosen an intellectual career, a life
devoted to the cause of humanity; she, who had been proud of her
independence and had confidently looked forward to a life of celibacy;
this superior person was in love, and loved as passionately and as
personally as any commonplace woman. She devoutly believed in the
worth of Levitzky's ideas against human love between the sexes, and
the fact that her nerves and imagination went against her head
overwhelmed her with remorse. She was unfaithful not only to her own
ideals, but to the ideals of the man she loved. She knew that Levitzky
felt no love for her. If he had, she would not have loved him. She
longed to tear this feeling, which she felt to be unworthy of her and
in the nature of an insult to him, from her heart; but she knew she
could not.

After leaving Levitzky and the Anarchists in the café, Sabina walked
slowly towards the Bowery, suffering with love and humiliation,
thinking of Levitzky and of the past, the devoted past which now
seemed deeply wronged. Her despair can perhaps be understood by the
fanatical nun whose years of devotion to her vows are rendered vain by
a sudden impulse of the heart which is yielded to; or by the ambitious
man of affairs who betrays a governmental trust because of the
repeated frenzy of an emotion which wears out his resistance and leads
him to the woman who has charmed and deceived him.

As Sabina passed through the street her attention was mechanically
caught by the notice in a shop window, which was still dimly lighted,
of an important labor meeting, to take place in a couple of days, at
which a famous German Anarchist was to speak--a man who was coming
from Europe to join the "Movement" in New York, whose books she had
read and loved. Such notices always arrested her eager attention, and
even now habit led her to stop by the window and dully read the entire
poster. The thought of the coming event, which would once have been of
palpitating interest to her, increased her remorse and despair. Of
such great activity as this she had rendered herself incapable. To go
to any such meeting now would be hypocrisy, she felt. The cause she
wanted to love and serve and still did love she could yet never again
be wholehearted about. She bore with her a burden. She seemed to
herself to be a sinful creature, and the devoted life she had led
seemed poisoned by this terrible passion which controlled her. She
felt she never again could look Levitzky in the face; for a terrible
impulse in her was about to drag her from the pedestal where he had
helped to place her; and to drag with her the man she loved from the
impersonal height at which he stood.

Her passionate nature rebelled at the thought of any compromise with
the ideal. She could not endure life otherwise than as her imagination
dictated--and here was a passion which threatened the existence of all
she approved. What in a colder nature would have been a mere
intellectual phase was with her an unbearably emotional upheaval; and
on the spot she made a resolution conceived in despair but carried out
with logical coolness. As the rebellious thought surged over her and
filled her being with hot emotion she became aware that the shop was
that of an apothecary on East Broadway, whither she had unconsciously
wandered. With set lips she entered, aroused the sleeping clerk, a
Socialist whom she knew, and bought that which soon allayed her
problem without solving it. Early the next morning the clerk found her
lying near the doorway, with an expression of impulsive energy on her
dark face.

About three days later Blanofsky and his three friends were sitting in
the café on Grand Street, drinking their eternal Russian tea and
talking about Levitzky.

"I never saw a man so broken," said Blanofsky in his soft voice, "as
Levitzky was by the death of that girl. For a week I feared for his
life, he was so desperate. It seems he met Lefeitkin's clerk, who told
him. He disappeared from the quarter for several days, and no one knew
where he went. Four days ago he came to my room looking like a madman.
His hair was full of mud and his clothes torn and filthy. His eyes
burned in his pale face, and his speech, more voluminous than ever,
was broken and incoherent. He stayed all day, refused to eat, but
talked all the time of Sabina, of her mind, of her rare personality,
of her devotion to the cause. He was interrupted by fits of sobbing. I
did not know that this man of intellect was capable of so great
personal feeling."

"Levitzky is weak," said Herman Samarovitch, "and inconstant. He has
vivid ideas, and imagination, but he never really cared for the cause.
He was a Socialist before he was an Anarchist. Before that he was an
atheist, which followed a period of religious mysticism. At one time
he was a conventional capitalist in principle, with the English
government as his model. He is easily moved by an idea or an emotion,
but he easily passes to another. He will soon forget this girl's
death, to which he should have been superior. He has no steadfastness,
and is not one of us."

At this point, Levitzky entered the café. With him was the new
arrival, the German Anarchist. To him Levitzky was talking with great
animation. His words rolled over one another with enthusiasm.

"Do you know," he said eagerly, his face beaming, to Blanofsky and his
companions, "that our distinguished friend here has consented to
debate to-morrow night with our Socialist friend, Jacob Matz, that
mistaken but able man, on the nature of individual right as
interpreted by the Anarchist on one side and the Socialist on the
other. I have written a poem on liberty which I intend to read at the
meeting. Do you wish to hear it?"

He drew a manuscript from his pocket and read enthusiastically a poem
in which a turbulent love for man and nature, for social equality and
foaming cataracts was expressed in rich imagery. His face glowed and
he seemed transported. He had forgotten Sabina.

  [Illustration]




_Charles Dana Gibson says_: "It is like a trip to Paris."

THE REAL LATIN QUARTER OF PARIS

By F. Berkeley Smith


Racy sketches of the innermost life and characters of the famous
Bohemia of Paris--its grisettes, students, models, balls, studios,
cafes, etc.

_John W. Alexander_: "It is the real thing."

_Frederick Remington_: "You have left nothing undone."

_Ernest Thompson Seton_: "A true picture of the Latin Quarter as I
knew it."

_Frederick Dielman_, President National Academy of Design: "Makes the
Latin Quarter very real and still invests it with interest and charm."

_Evening Telegraph_, Philadelphia: "A captivating book."

_Boston Times_: "A genuine treat."

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Latin Quarter made famous by Henry Murger and Du Maurier."

_The Mail and Express_, New York: "When you have read this book you
know the 'Real Latin Quarter' as well as you will ever come to know it
without living there yourself."

_Boston Herald_: "It pictures the Latin Quarter in its true light."


_Water-Color Frontispiece by F. Hopkinson Smith. About 100 original
drawings and camera snap shots by the Author, and two caricatures in
color by the celebrated French caricaturist Sancha. Ornamental Covers.
12mo, Cloth, Price, $1.20, net. Postage, 13 Cents._




LOVE AND THE SOUL HUNTERS

By John Oliver Hobbes

_Author of "The Gods, Some Morals, and Lord Wickenham," "The Herb
Moon," "Schools for Saints," "Robert Grange," etc., etc._


In this new novel Mrs. Craigie (John Oliver Hobbes) has made,
according to her own statement, the great effort of her life. It is
the most brilliant creation of an author whose talent and versatility
have surprised readers and critics in both Europe and America for
several years. It treats of unique examples of human nature as they
are, and not merely as they ought to be. Swayed by complex motives,
they are always attractive, but often do what is least expected of
them. The story is graphically told, and is full of action. Each
personage is distinctively drawn to the life.

"There is much that is worth remembering in her writings."--_Mail and
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