a dozen of plays. Then there are so many historical novels, guaranteed
to have nothing to do with life, that have not as yet been dramatized.
Such plays would help us to understand our grand history.
"But there is lots of room in Europe for our would-be realists, and our
government would do well by making an appropriation for their
instruction in foreign languages and their deportation to the lands of
burdensome intentions, revolutionary movements and problem plays. This
would mean peace in our own country.
"There are the Germans, who love Schopenhauer and beer and usually drink
the two together. They feel intensely, revel in realism and have the
keenest enjoyment of tragedy. Nothing is too sad, sombre, or too
stirring for their stage. All the unanswered questions that have vainly
troubled the ages are raised in their dramatic and literary works. What
an uncomfortable prospect that is! They always have men who writes plays
that will never die. They have no shame, these Germans. They feel
strongly and openly show it. Altogether they have a passion for the
thoughtful, and give the modern playwright with tendencies a splendid
opportunity. But what is to be said of a country that can produce such
play as Hauptmann's 'Die Weber'--a country that can send fifty Socialist
members to the Reichstag? Yes, we can safely send them to Germany, or
else to Russia. It would be hard for an American to learn that
language, but Russia is the land where they say the most daring, the
boldest things in the most candid manner, or without any manner at all.
I don't know why it is unless it is because free speech is forbidden in
that country. There the play, or the novel, palpitates with life and
vibrates with heart-throbs. All the evil and oppression and ruin of the
country cries out through its literature and drama, and the people
worship such art. Life itself is seen on the Russian stage. This is
where we should send our earnest writers. True, there is a censorship in
Russia, but the radical utterances of an American author will easily
pass the Russian censor.
"There is Norway, where a man like Ibsen, who has made that country the
scene of action of all the tragedies of the world, is allowed at large
after an exile of many years. Ibsen has held up the Land of the Midnight
Sun as a dominion of darkness, yet they like him and are also proud of
him in his country. Belgium is another good market for the serious and
revolutionary drama. In Spain, Echegaray is doing nearly what Ibsen is
doing in Norway, and he has a number of literary companions with similar
sombre intentions. Even in England they are beginning to write such
plays, and an American can easily learn the English language. It's a
good thing that Henry James prefers to live in England, only we ought to
put a tariff on his psychological stories. We need not fear. Any and all
these countries will serve us as places of exile for our earnest
authors.
"But hold on, I've nearly forgotten. Perhaps the expenses of sending
these people to Europe can be saved. Let them learn to write in Yiddish,
for in the Jewish theatres of the New York Ghetto all sorts of serious,
sombre, life-like, problematic and powerful plays are produced."
XVIII
Why Social Reformers Should Be Abolished
"It's quite a problem," said Keidansky, suddenly, after a pensive pause,
as he watched the glimmering lights of the Cambridge bridge across the
gloomy Charles.
"What is?" I asked.
"How to abolish the social reformers," he answered in a tone of
determination.
It was nearly two o'clock in the morning when we left the little café
where we spent part of the evening, and he said it was too early to go
home, which in any case was the last resort. It was so roasting hot up
in his attic, that no matter what time he climbed up there, he would be
"well done" by the time he rose in the morning. But the place he told me
of had this advantage: it was delightfully cool in the winter. Keidansky
was physically exhausted and mentally lazy, and would say but little at
first. He had spent the day in preparing an article for one of the
Jewish papers, and during the evening gave two lessons in English,
visiting his pupils at their homes; for it was thus, he once informed
me, that he learned what English he knew--by teaching it to others.
Incidentally these lessons he gave and his journalistic efforts helped
to pay for the necessities of life, such as rent, laundry, lunches,
symphony concerts ("on the rush"), admissions to picture exhibitions,
books, gallery tickets to the best plays that came to town, etc. He had
worked very hard that day, he said, which was a direct violation of his
principle. He did what he could to keep his ideas out of his article,
and he hoped it would be published. He felt tired, did not want to go
home, and proposed that we walk over to the Charlesbank Park where, on a
night like this, we could at least in imagination conjure up a breeze.
"Your whim is law," I said, and we set off for the park. I had been
speaking of a Yiddish melodrama which had been produced in Boston a few
days before. Keidansky had not seen the play, but he intended to write a
review of it for one of the New York papers. He knew all about it and
the species to which it belonged. When capital punishment was abolished,
sitting through one of these plays would be an all-sufficient penalty
for murder, he said. Then this subject gave out and there was a pause,
after which Keidansky made the startling remark concerning social
reformers.
"Abolish them? Do you really mean it?" I asked.
"Yes, though I do say it," he replied.
"What for?" I, being puzzled, queried again, and he answered:
"For the welfare of society, and perhaps also the sure approach of the
millennium." He continued: "The social reformers, as a rule, are a most
unsocial job lot of people. As I have known them, their business has
been to frighten, to scowl, to scare, and to make a mountain of evil out
of a mole-hill that did not exist. They are often the most blinded
zealots, the narrowest-minded, one-sided partisans, with tremendous,
almost Dante-like propensities to conjure up hair-raising horribles, but
with the genius and the poetry of a Dante left out. Their method is to
cut life up piecemeal, pepper it good and heavy, and send you to bed
with a few bitter morsels. After a night of the most excruciating
nightmares, you wake up with a nauseous taste in your mouth, and a
pronounced case of reformania. It is not so much what they say, as how
they emphasize it; the very dictionary groans beneath the weight of
their abuse of adjectives, and after a time they convince you that you
don't know your own address, that you have not, as you imagined, been
living on the planet earth, but in the most devilish, hellish purgatory.
"In order to convert this earth into a heaven, they must needs make it
appear to be the blackest hell. In order to abolish evil, they must
prove that nothing else exists. To convince you of the infinite
possibilities in the development of men, they must prove to you that
they have ever been divided between parasitic capitalists and starving
slaves. Evolution, as they concoct it for you, has been a process of
going from bad to worse, from a mild form of slavery to a more abject
one.
"You see, they are in for effect, and with the aid of the most bombastic
language and turgid phraseology they are bound to make it, no matter how
many people they dishearten, discourage and dismay. To damn humanity,
they think, is but a trifle when their supreme end is to save the world.
Hope is not in heaven, earth sees no gentler star; earth is hell and
hell bows down before the social reformer. The reformer that I mean is a
man ever wandering about with a pail of black paint in one hand, a brush
in the other, and with an expression of heartrending sorrow in his face
because he cannot find a ladder high enough to enable him to put a few
coats of his paint on the skies. The world must be saved at any cost,
say these reformers, and if the world is the cost, why it is dead cheap
at that, when they can become saviors of society and possibly sainted
martyrs. And so they proceed to exaggerate the evils that exist in the
most brazen-faced manner and to magnify the evils they imagine to the
utmost extent. They generously enlarge every iniquity that is and fully
describe those that have never been; they complicate every simple
problem in order to puzzle mankind and to be misunderstood and to appear
great. The world has become so civilized, the reformers reason, or
rather think, that it is hard to find its monstrous wrongs and social
reform are being forgotten, and so out with our telescopes, magnifying
glasses and alarm clocks. The capitalists must be dethroned, the
down-trodden wage-slave must be enthroned, and then our saviors riot and
revel in their never-ending disquisitions. Yes, when there are many
reformers in the world, the world is in sore need of reform.
"These people are pitifully short-sighted and can barely see one side
of life at a time; they dissect life and remove it from reality. Their
solutions are so fine that they have nothing to do with the real
problems. They detach humanity from the world. They abolish the concrete
(for convenience) and get lost in their abstractions like the detective
who disguised himself so much that he could not discover his own
identity. They conceive more evil than exists because they rarely know
the difference between right and wrong. They are visionaries without
breadth of visions; theorists, not knowing the uselessness of all
theories; people who would save the world because they do not know it;
builders without a foundation; saviors without the saving graces of
truth and beauty. They embitter humanity, they darken the world,
painting it blacker than it ever was in the barbaric past and--they make
me weary, the more so because they constantly remind me how foolish I
once was myself.
"I tell you, the world is better to-day than it ever was before, and it
would become still better if we could abolish these disparaging,
discouraging, slanderous social reformers. The true reformers are those
who make us see how good and great the old world is. As you said the
other day, the greatest explorers were those who discovered heaven on
earth. And after we have abolished the reformers we could gradually also
abolish the other evils which afflict our civilization and mar
existence. They would no longer impede our progress and we could little
by little wipe out the wrongs that oppress us and institute more just
conditions for all members of society. These things could be done
gradually, reasonably, with good cheer, and with the best results. For
another trouble with the vaudeville social reformers that I did not
mention is their overweening, overwhelming conceit, which makes them so
ludicrously unreasonable and prevents them from seeing that the world is
just a trifle bigger than one of their numbers."
It was nearing dawn, and I asked him how he was going to do away with
the reformers.
"Well, there's the rub," he said. "I do not know exactly, but I've been
thinking that perhaps the only and best way of abolishing the social
reformers would be by finding the true solution of the social problem
and abolishing all the wrongs and iniquities of our civilization. Let us
destroy, annihilate the evils of unjust laws, governments and
monopolies, and institute a just system of society and the social
reformers will disappear.
"Let us have a society wherein all will share equally in all the joys
and sorrows of life, wherein none shall be starved and none shall be
pampered to death, wherein none shall have too much of the goods of the
world and all shall have enough, wherein no hungry babes will wallow in
the gutters to become candidates for the prisons and insane asylums, and
no children shall be ruined by riches; a world wherein there will be no
temperance movements to drive men to drink, no trust to destroy men's
souls, and no churches to harbor infidels; a world without the constant
clouds of harrowing, sad thoughts, without the rains of tears, and with
more and more of sunshine. Let us do that and we will abolish the
obnoxious reformers. Let us abolish the monstrous crime of poverty,
which has not the shadow of a reason for existence in a world that is
overwhelmed with wealth, and the occupation of the reformers will be
gone, and they will vanish. Really, we ought to be willing and ready to
do anything for their abolition."
XIX
Buying a Book in Salem Street
"I am going to buy a book on Salem street," said my friend, when we
suddenly encountered on Tremont Row. "Do you wish to come along?"
I was bent on any adventure, and so we started for the quarter, down
through Hanover street. It was but a short distance, and before we had
done much chatting in the way of exchanging ideas, we were at the head
of the street, facing the pawnshop of No. 1, with the welcome legend of
"Money to Loan."
We passed safely the bedecked and bedraggled second-hand clothing
stores, though the pullers-in were out in full force. As my companion
explained, it is only the seeming strangers who are approached and asked
to buy, or sell, but familiar figures and persons in their company are
never molested. One of these attendants, a dark, sad-eyed, kind-faced
young man, was leaning against the door-post of a store and intently
reading a Jewish magazine. We were across the street and we stopped to
look. This fellow, who was engaged in the most sordid business, was
reading the "Zukunft," the magazine of dreams, ideals and Utopias,
published by the New York radicals. An elderly, bearded and stout man
came down the street. Without looking up from his booklet the youth
mechanically asked: "Any clothing to-day?"
"No," the man shouted, "no clothing to-day, and you'll never sell
anything if this is the way you'll attend to your business." It was the
proprietor of the store. For a moment the puller-in seemed dazed. Then
he shoved his "Zukunft" into his coat pocket. He began to cast his eyes
about for customers. He looked a model of sorrow. I was told that it was
his idealism, his striving for the impossible, beautiful, that reduced
him to the ugly position he was in. We moved on. There were other men
reading, if only in snatches, but they apparently owned their stores and
had their assistants. One of the pullers pointed out to me is one of the
most enthusiastic Zionists in this city. Children were playing on
sidewalks and doorsteps, sedately but happily. A school-teacher from one
of the neighboring institutions passed through the street. Several
little girls recognized and flocked about her. One took the teacher's
umbrella, the other asked for the privilege of carrying the young lady's
Boston bag. They took hold of her arms and went along dancing and
smiling as she talked to them. Above the rumbling of wagons were heard
the pleasing notes of a piano and the singing of a sweet-voiced daughter
of the tenements.
Farther up the street was more crowded. It was Thursday afternoon. The
stores were all activity and bustle, and the pedlers with their wagons
and pushcarts were crying their foods and wares for "the Holy Sabbath"
in quaint and singing Yiddish phrases. I was reminded by my friend that
Abraham Goldfoden, the father of the Jewish stage, in one of his
operettas uses a swarming, eve-of-Sabbath market-scene like this very
effectively, and makes his hucksters sing beautifully of the things they
have to sell. Said my guide: "Of course, in the operetta of 'The Witch'
the pedlers are not so ragged and besmeared, and you cannot hear the
smell of the meat and the fish, but neither can you buy and eat these
things. After all, if art is beautiful, real life is quite useful.
"To our people," said Keidansky, casting his eyes about, "everything
here is a matter of course, and there is nothing unusual about it all.
The strangest things are the strangers, who come to stare, study and
wonder. In fact, the self-concentration of the Jew, probably the secret
of his survival, makes this the only place in the world, the temporary
Palestine, the centre of the universe. There are other places in this
city, but they are only the outskirts, the suburbs of the Ghetto. There
are other peoples and religions, but we are the people and ours is the
faith. The flattery that children receive from their parents afterwards
helps them to bear the brunt of the battle. The consciousness of his
being chosen helped Israel to find his way through the dark labyrinth of
the centuries. Everything here is as it should be, only a little more on
the exclusive and pious European plan. This is more of the old fashioned
view, but it is still extant, inasmuch as the Ghetto remains."
Now we were near Bersowsky's book-store which was on the other side of
the street and we stopped, facing it. A street-organ was playing in
front of the strange emporium and a band of children were dancing gayly
to its music. We could see the books and periodicals, phylacteries and
newspapers, holy fringe-garments and sheets of Jewish music in the
windows from the other side of the street. And as we came nearer we
could see the very aged woman, bewigged and kerchiefed, wan, wrinkled
and wry--the most familiar figure in the Ghetto--we could see her
sitting on her high stool, drinking a glass of tea and selling
newspapers. There were several simple prints and chromos in the window,
reproductions from pictures of Jewish life. Parents blessing their
children on the Day of Atonement, the Feast of Passover, high priests
lighting the candles in the temple--these were their subjects. In the
windows were also brass candlesticks, such as are being lighted and
blessed on the eve of each Sabbath. We stood outside and mused.
"This," Keidansky explained, "is the leading Jewish book-store in
Boston, and it is in a sense also the spiritual centre of this Ghetto.
If any one were to ask me what is to-day the moral condition of the
Jews, their spiritual state, what are their intellectual status and
religious aspirations, if any one should ask me--I would take them into
this store and let them see what it contains. Religion, history,
literature--it is all in here--at least in all its physical
manifestations. Pentateuchs, Bibles, prayer-books, all books of
religious instruction, books of piety and penance, volumes of the
Talmud and of Mishna, phylacteries and holy scrolls, covers for the
scrolls and curtains for the Holy Ark, ram's horns to sound on New
Year's, knives wherewith to kill cattle according to a merciful ritual,
candle-sticks and show-threads which the Jews were commanded to wear at
the bottom of their garments (and some of them now wear under their
garments)--in a word, all that stands to preserve the old faith is here.
All the symbolism of our old faith is here incarnated. And yet side by
side with these are the things which tend towards the transformation or
dissolution of the ancient religion--the publications of the radicals,
the destroying utterances of the revolutionists. Here come the orthodox
for prayer-books and the anti-religious for free-thought pamphlets. Here
you find the organs of the patriots and Zionists, who wish to preserve
and regenerate the Jewish people, and also the organs of the Socialists
and Anarchists who are fighting against all national ideas and for an
assimilated humanity. Come in and I'll show you. There is the 'Zukunft'
(Future), the best literary and scientific monthly we ever had, which is
published by the Socialists. It was formerly edited by Abe Cahan, now
Dr. Caspe has charge of it. And look! 'Die Freie Arbeiter Stimme,' the
Anarchist weekly, ably edited by S. Yanofsky, one of the cleverest
Yiddish writers.
"And," my friend whispered, "this old lady, who stands for all that is
pious and ancient, handing out the 'Freie Arbeiter Stimme' and the
Socialist 'Vorwärts,' is to me as strongly dramatic and as profoundly
symbolic a picture as any thing in life and literature. Mr. Bersowsky,
who started this store, now sells books, it is hoped, in a better world.
Look at this young old woman--his widow--and see if hearts ever break
around here. The aged lady is his mother, and she would not be in any
other place in the world, except where her husband, and afterwards her
son spent their last days. So she stays here all the time the store is
open, and sells papers and books in spite of protests.
"The Jew is so practical that he always looks ahead; he is chronically
optimistic, and his imagination creates everything that the world denies
him. Dreamer he has been ever since the prophets, and even before their
time. It must have been superb idealism and beautiful faith which
enabled him to loan money to his neighbors during the Middle Ages. It
still requires fine imagination to do it to-day.
"Between the sordid and the sublime stands the Jew, who is either one or
the other, or both, as circumstances shape his destiny. You can see this
in all his literature, from the stories of Motke Chabad to the plays of
Jacob Gordin.
"Is it not strange how quickly we adapt ourselves, and how soon we come
up to date and ahead of date? But yesterday we had no literature except
our religious guides, our only beacon lights in the old-world Ghettos;
and now we have splendid modern works, both in Hebrew and Yiddish, all
breathing the modern spirit. Many standard works from all European
tongues have been translated for us; but we have a number of great
masters of our own. It is such a short time ago that we had no fiction
to speak of us (except the sermons of our preachers); and now there is
Abromowitz and Peretz, Spector and Rubenowitz, and so many others. There
is a whole group of modern poets, who have also grown up in no time. And
the struggle between the old and the new, which this literature
represents, the striving for the modern, and the longing for the
ancient--that is what makes it so painful and pleasant--so stirring, and
therefore such good art. All grades of feeling and believing, thinking
and non-thinking, are in the books and periodicals that you find in this
store. And the men and women who come here, living in the same Ghetto,
are often millions of miles apart in their ideas."
My guide asked for his book, a Hebrew story, by L. M. Lillenblum. The
elderly man, who is a relative of the family and a partner in the
business, knew all about it, found it after a long search, and made my
friend happy. The story, I was told, was written about twenty years ago
by a native of Keidan. At that time there was a general literary
awakening, and many talented men wrote profane and useful books in the
holy language, and shocked the orthodox Jews of Russia. In Keidan, they
wanted to excommunicate the author of "The Follies of My Youth"; but
the rabbi of Kovno telegraphed, saying that the infidel was a great man,
and should be left alone--with his book. An old man came in, and after
much bargaining, bought a silk praying-shawl. Several persons came in
for papers. A young man bought the "Zukunft" and "The Merchant of
Venice" translated in blank verse, by Joseph Bovshover.
He wore glasses, long hair, carried an umbrella and a green bag; in
fact, one might have met him in a vegetarian restaurant. He was pointed
out to me as a noted radical, a dreamer, who writes for the "Vorwärts,"
works as a tailor in a sweat-shop, and is said to be writing a book. A
comely young maiden, with a madonna-like face, came near the store. She
had a few mayflowers in her hand--and gave them to a ragged little child
standing there. She came in and bought a paper. She did not read
Yiddish; but it was for her father. She was a college student, I was
told, of advanced ideas, but deeply in love with the people of the
Ghetto and their beliefs--was planning to devote her life to settlements
and social reform work--one of the many dreamers who came into this
store.