Chapter X: Odd Characters 272 (5)

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

"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.

"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.