THE NEW YORK GHETTO.
It was after seven in the evening when Jake finished his last jacket.
Some of the operators had laid down their work before, while others
cast an envious glance on him as he was dressing to leave, and fell to
their machines with reluctantly redoubled energy. Fanny was a week
worker and her time had been up at seven; but on this occasion her
toilet had taken an uncommonly long time, and she was not ready until
Jake got up from his chair. Then she left the room rather suddenly and
with a demonstrative "Good-night all!"
When Jake reached the street he found her on the sidewalk, making a
pretense of brushing one of her sleeves with the cuff of the other.
"So kvick?" she asked, raising her head in feigned surprise.
"You cull dot kvick?" he returned grimly. "Good-bye!"
"Say, ain't you goin' to dance to-night, really?" she queried
shamefacedly.
"I tol' you I vouldn't."
"What does _she_ want of me?" he complained to himself proceeding on
his way. He grew conscious of his low spirits, and, tracing them with
some effort to their source, he became gloomier still. "No more fun for
me!" he decided. "I shall get them over here and begin a new life."
After supper, which he had taken, as usual, at his lodgings, he went
out for a walk. He was firmly determined to keep himself from visiting
Joe Peltner's dancing academy, and accordingly he took a direction
opposite to Suffolk Street, where that establishment was situated.
Having passed a few blocks, however, his feet, contrary to his will,
turned into a side street and thence into one leading to Suffolk. "I
shall only drop in to tell Joe that I can not sell any of his ball
tickets, and return them," he attempted to deceive his own conscience.
Hailing this pretext with delight he quickened his pace as much as the
overcrowded sidewalks would allow.
He had to pick and nudge his way through dense swarms of bedraggled
half-naked humanity; past garbage barrels rearing their overflowing
contents in sickening piles, and lining the streets in malicious
suggestion of rows of trees; underneath tiers and tiers of fire
escapes, barricaded and festooned with mattresses, pillows, and
feather-beds not yet gathered in for the night. The pent-in sultry
atmosphere was laden with nausea and pierced with a discordant and, as
it were, plaintive buzz. Supper had been despatched in a hurry, and the
teeming populations of the cyclopic tenement houses were out in full
force "for fresh air," as even these people will say in mental
quotation marks.
Suffolk Street is in the very thick of the battle for breath. For it
lies in the heart of that part of the East Side which has within the
last two or three decades become the Ghetto of the American metropolis,
and, indeed, the metropolis of the Ghettos of the world. It is one of
the most densely populated spots on the face of the earth--a seething
human sea fed by streams, streamlets, and rills of immigration flowing
from all the Yiddish-speaking centres of Europe. Hardly a block but
shelters Jews from every nook and corner of Russia, Poland, Galicia,
Hungary, Roumania; Lithuanian Jews, Volhynian Jews, south Russian Jews,
Bessarabian Jews; Jews crowded out of the "pale of Jewish settlement";
Russified Jews expelled from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kieff, or
Saratoff; Jewish runaways from justice; Jewish refugees from crying
political and economical injustice; people torn from a hard-gained
foothold in life and from deep-rooted attachments by the caprice of
intolerance or the wiles of demagoguery--innocent scapegoats of a
guilty Government for its outraged populace to misspend its blind fury
upon; students shut out of the Russian universities, and come to these
shores in quest of learning; artisans, merchants, teachers, rabbis,
artists, beggars--all come in search of fortune. Nor is there a
tenement house but harbours in its bosom specimens of all the whimsical
metamorphoses wrought upon the children of Israel of the great modern
exodus by the vicissitudes of life in this their Promised Land of
to-day. You find there Jews born to plenty, whom the new conditions
have delivered up to the clutches of penury; Jews reared in the straits
of need, who have here risen to prosperity; good people morally
degraded in the struggle for success amid an unwonted environment;
moral outcasts lifted from the mire, purified, and imbued with
self-respect; educated men and women with their intellectual polish
tarnished in the inclement weather of adversity; ignorant sons of toil
grown enlightened--in fine, people with all sorts of antecedents,
tastes, habits, inclinations, and speaking all sorts of subdialects of
the same jargon, thrown pellmell into one social caldron--a human
hodgepodge with its component parts changed but not yet fused into one
homogeneous whole.
And so the "stoops," sidewalks, and pavements of Suffolk Street were
thronged with panting, chattering, or frisking multitudes. In one spot
the scene received a kind of weird picturesqueness from children
dancing on the pavement to the strident music hurled out into the
tumultuous din from a row of the open and brightly illuminated windows
of what appeared to be a new tenement house. Some of the young women on
the sidewalk opposite raised a longing eye to these windows, for
floating, by through the dazzling light within were young women like
themselves with masculine arms round their waists.
As the spectacle caught Jake's eye his heart gave a leap. He violently
pushed his way through the waltzing swarm, and dived into the half-dark
corridor of the house whence the music issued. Presently he found
himself on the threshold and in the overpowering air of a spacious
oblong chamber, alive with a damp-haired, dishevelled, reeking
crowd--an uproarious human vortex, whirling to the squeaky notes of a
violin and the thumping of a piano. The room was, judging by its
untidy, once-whitewashed walls and the uncouth wooden pillars
supporting its bare ceiling, more accustomed to the whir of sewing
machines than to the noises which filled it at the present moment. It
took up the whole of the first floor of a five-story house built for
large sweat-shops, and until recently it had served its original
purpose as faithfully as the four upper floors, which were still the
daily scenes of feverish industry. At the further end of the room there
was now a marble soda fountain in charge of an unkempt boy. A stocky
young man with a black entanglement of coarse curly hair was bustling
about among the dancers. Now and then he would pause with his eyes bent
upon some two pairs of feet, and fall to clapping time and drawling out
in a preoccupied singsong: "Von, two, tree! Leeft you' feet! Don' so
kvick--sloy, sloy! Von, two, tree, von, two, tree!" This was Professor
Peltner himself, whose curly hair, by the way, had more to do with the
success of his institution than his stumpy legs, which, according to
the unanimous dictum of his male pupils, moved about "like a _regely_
pair of bears."
The throng showed but a very scant sprinkling of plump cheeks and
shapely figures in a multitude of haggard faces and flaccid forms.
Nearly all were in their work-a-day clothes, very few of the men
sporting a wilted white shirt front. And while the general effect of
the kaleidoscope was one of boisterous hilarity, many of the individual
couples somehow had the air of being engaged in hard toil rather than
as if they were dancing for amusement. The faces of some of these bore
a wondering martyrlike expression, as who should say, "What have we
done to be knocked about in this manner?" For the rest, there were all
sorts of attitudes and miens in the whirling crowd. One young fellow,
for example, seemed to be threatening vengeance to the ceiling, while
his partner was all but exultantly exclaiming: "Lord of the universe!
What a world this be!" Another maiden looked as if she kept murmuring,
"You don't say!" whereas her cavalier mutely ejaculated, "Glad to try
my best, your noble birth!"--after the fashion of a Russian soldier.
The prevailing stature of the assemblage was rather below medium. This
does not include the dozen or two of undergrown lasses of fourteen or
thirteen who had come surreptitiously, and--to allay the suspicion of
their mothers--in their white aprons. They accordingly had only these
articles to check at the hat box, and hence the nickname of
"apron-check ladies," by which this truant contingent was known at
Joe's academy. So that as Jake now stood in the doorway with an
orphaned collar button glistening out of the band of his collarless
shirt front and an affected expression of _ennui_ overshadowing his
face, his strapping figure towered over the circling throng before him.
He was immediately noticed and became the target for hellos, smiles,
winks, and all manner of pleasantry: "Vot you stand like dot? You vont
to loin dantz?" or "You a detectiff?" or "You vont a job?" or, again,
"Is it hot anawff for you?" To all of which Jake returned an invariable
"Yep!" each time resuming his bored mien.
As he thus gazed at the dancers, a feeling of envy came over him. "Look
at them!" he said to himself begrudgingly. "How merry they are! Such
_shnoozes_, they can hardly set a foot well, and yet they are free,
while I am a married man. But wait till you get married, too," he
prospectively avenged himself on Joe's pupils; "we shall see how you
will then dance and jump!"
Presently a wave of Joe's hand brought the music and the trampling to a
pause. The girls at once took their seats on the "ladies' bench," while
the bulk of the men retired to the side reserved for "gents only."
Several apparent post-graduates nonchalantly overstepped the boundary
line, and, nothing daunted by the professor's repeated "Zents to de
right an' ladess to the left!" unrestrainedly kept their girls
chuckling. At all events, Joe soon desisted, his attention being
diverted by the soda department of his business. "Sawda!" he sang out.
"Ull kin's! Sam, you ought ashamed you'selv; vy don'tz you treat you'
lada?"
In the meantime Jake was the centre of a growing bevy of both sexes. He
refused to unbend and to enter into their facetious mood, and his
morose air became the topic of their persiflage.
By-and-bye Joe came scuttling up to his side. "Goot-evenig, Dzake!" he
greeted him; "I didn't seen you at ull! Say, Dzake, I'll take care dis
site an' you take care dot site--ull right?"
"Alla right!" Jake responded gruffly. "Gentsh, getch you partnesh,
hawrry up!" he commanded in another instant.
The sentence was echoed by the dancing master, who then blew on his
whistle a prolonged shrill warble, and once again the floor was set
straining under some two hundred pounding, gliding, or scraping feet.
"Don' bee 'fraid. Gu right aheat an' getch you partner!" Jake went on
yelling right and left. "Don' be 'shamed, Mish Cohen. Dansh mit dot
gentlemarn!" he said, as he unceremoniously encircled Miss Cohen's
waist with "dot gentlemarn's" arm. "Cholly! vot's de madder mitch
_you_? You do hop like a Cossack, as true as I am a Jew," he added,
indulging in a momentary lapse into Yiddish. English was the official
language of the academy, where it was broken and mispronounced in as
many different ways as there were Yiddish dialects represented in that
institution. "Dot'sh de vay, look!" With which Jake seized from Charley
a lanky fourteen-year-old Miss Jacobs, and proceeded to set an example
of correct waltzing, much to the unconcealed delight of the girl, who
let her head rest on his breast with an air of reverential gratitude
and bliss, and to the embarrassment of her cavalier, who looked at the
evolutions of Jake's feet without seeing.
Presently Jake was beckoned away to a corner by Joe, whereupon Miss
Jacobs, looking daggers at the little professor, sulked off to a
distant seat.
"Dzake, do me a faver; hask Mamie to gib dot feller a couple a
dantzes," Joe said imploringly, pointing to an ungainly young man who
was timidly viewing the pandemonium-like spectacle from the further end
of the "gent's bench." "I hasked 'er myself, but se don' vonted. He's a
beesness man, you 'destan', an' he kan a lot o' fellers an' I vonted
make him satetzfiet."
"Dot monkey?" said Jake. "Vot you talkin' aboyt! She vouldn't lishn to
me neider, honesht."
"Say dot you don' vonted and dot's ull."
"Alla right; I'm goin' to ashk her, but I know it vouldn't be of naw
used."
"Never min', you hask 'er foist. You knaw se vouldn't refuse _you_!"
Joe urged, with a knowing grin.
"Hoy much vill you bet she will refushe shaw?" Jake rejoined with
insincere vehemence, as he whipped out a handful of change.
"Vot kin' foon a man you are! Ulleways like to bet!" said Joe,
deprecatingly. 'F cuss it depend mit vot kin' a mout' you vill hask,
you 'destan'?"
"By gum, Jaw! Vot you take me for? Ven I shay I ashk, I ashk. You knaw
I don' like no monkey beeshnesh. Ven I promish anytink I do it shquare,
dot'sh a kin' a man _I_ am!" And once more protesting his firm
conviction that Mamie would disregard his request, he started to prove
that she would not.
He had to traverse nearly the entire length of the hall, and,
notwithstanding that he was compelled to steer clear of the dancers, he
contrived to effect the passage at the swellest of his gaits, which
means that he jauntily bobbed and lurched, after the manner of a
blacksmith tugging at the bellows, and held up his enormous bullet head
as if he were bidding defiance to the whole world. Finally he paused in
front of a girl with a superabundance of pitch-black side bangs and
with a pert, ill natured, pretty face of the most strikingly Semitic
cast in the whole gathering. She looked twenty-three or more, was
inclined to plumpness, and her shrewd deep dark eyes gleamed out of a
warm gipsy complexion. Jake found her seated in a fatigued attitude on
a chair near the piano.
"Good-evenig, Mamie!" he said, bowing with mock gallantry.
"Rats!"
"Shay, Mamie, give dot feller a tvisht, vill you?"
"Dot slob again? Joe must tink if you ask me I'll get scared, ain't it?
Go and tell him he is too fresh," she said with a contemptuous grimace.
Like the majority of the girls of the academy, Mamie's English was a
much nearer approach to a justification of its name than the gibberish
spoken by the men.
Jake felt routed; but he put a bold face on it and broke out with
studied resentment:
"Vot you kickin' aboyt, anyhoy? Jaw don' mean notin' at ull. If you
don' vonted never min', an' dot'sh ull. It don' cut a figger, shee?"
And he feignedly turned to go.
"Look how kvick he gets excited!" she said, surrenderingly.
"I ain't get ekshitet at ull; but vot'sh de used a makin' monkey
beesnesh?" he retorted with triumphant acerbity.
"You are a monkey you'self," she returned with a playful pout.
The compliment was acknowledged by one of Jake's blandest grins.
"An' you are a monkey from monkey-land," he said. "Vill you dansh mit
dot feller?"
"Rats! Vot vill you give me?"
"Vot should I give you?" he asked impatiently.
"Vill you treat?"
"Treat? Ger-rr oyt!" he replied with a sweeping kick at space.
"Den I von't dance."
"Alla right. I'll treat you mit a coupel a waltch."
"Is dot so? You must really tink I am swooning to dance vit you," she
said, dividing the remark between both jargons.
"Look at her, look! she is a _regely_ getzke[4]: one must take off
one's cap to speak to her. Don't you always say you like to _dansh_
with me _becush_ I am a good _dansher_?"
[4] A crucifix.
"You must tink you are a peach of a dancer, ain' it? Bennie can dance a
---- sight better dan you," she recurred to her English.
"Alla right!" he said tartly. "So you don' vonted?"
"O sugar! He is gettin' mad again. Vell, who is de getzke, me or you?
All right, I'll dance vid de slob. But it's only becuss you ask me,
mind you!" she added fawningly.
"Dot'sh alla right!" he rejoined, with an affectation of gravity,
concealing his triumph. "But you makin' too much fush. I like to shpeak
plain, shee? Dot'sh a kin' a man _I_ am."
The next two waltzes Mamie danced with the ungainly novice, taking
exaggerated pains with him. Then came a lancers, Joe calling out the
successive movements huckster fashion. His command was followed by less
than half of the class, however, for the greater part preferred to
avail themselves of the same music for waltzing. Jake was bent upon
giving Mamie what he called a "sholid good time"; and, as she shared
his view that a square or fancy dance was as flimsy an affair as a
stick of candy, they joined or, rather, led the seceding majority. They
spun along with all-forgetful gusto; every little while he lifted her
on his powerful arm and gave her a "mill," he yelping and she squeaking
for sheer ecstasy, as he did so; and throughout the performance his
face and his whole figure seemed to be exclaiming, "Dot'sh a kin' a man
_I_ am!"
Several waifs stood in a cluster admiring or begrudging the antics of
the star couple. Among these was lanky Miss Jacobs and Fanny the
Preacher, who had shortly before made her appearance in the hall, and
now stood pale and forlorn by the "apron-check" girl's side.
"Look at the way she is stickin' to him!" the little girl observed with
envious venom, her gaze riveted to Mamie, whose shapely head was at
this moment reclining on Jake's shoulders, with her eyes half shut, as
if melting in a transport of bliss.
Fanny felt cut to the quick.
"You are jealous, ain't you?" she jerked out.
"Who, me? Vy should I be jealous?" Miss Jacobs protested, colouring.
"On my part let them both go to ----. _You_ must be jealous. Here,
here! See how your eyes are creeping out looking! Here, here!" she
teased her offender in Yiddish, poking her little finger at her as she
spoke.
"Will you shut your scurvy mouth, little piece of ugliness, you? Such a
piggish apron check!" poor Fanny burst out under breath, tears starting
to her eyes.
"Such a nasty little runt!" another girl chimed in.
"Such a little cricket already knows what 'jealous' is!" a third of the
bystanders put in. "You had better go home or your mamma will give you
a spanking." Whereat the little cricket made a retort, which had better
be left unrecorded.
"To think of a bit of a flea like that having so much _cheek_! Here is
America for you!"
"America for a country and '_dod'll do_' [that'll do] for a language!"
observed one of the young men of the group, indulging one of the
stereotype jokes of the Ghetto.
The passage at arms drew Jake's attention to the little knot of
spectators, and his eye fell on Fanny. Whereupon he summarily
relinquished his partner on the floor, and advanced toward his
shopmate, who, seeing him approach, hastened to retreat to the girls'
bench, where she remained seated with a drooping head.
"Hello, Fanny!" he shouted briskly, coming up in front of her.
"Hello!" she returned rigidly, her eyes fixed on the dirty floor.
"Come, give ush a tvisht, vill you?"
"But you ain't goin' by Joe to-night!" she answered, with a withering
curl of her lip, her glance still on the ground. "Go to your lady,
she'll be mad atch you."
"I didn't vonted to gu here, honesht, Fanny. I o'ly come to tell Jaw
shometin', an' dot'sh ull," he said guiltily.
"Why should you apologize?" she addressed the tip of her shoe in her
mother tongue. "As if he was obliged to apologize to me! _For my part_
you can _dance_ with her day and night. _Vot do I care?_ As if I
_cared_! I have only come to see what a _bluffer_ you are. Do you think
I am a _fool_? As _smart_ as your Mamie, _anyvay_. As if I had not
known he wanted to make me stay at home! What are you afraid of? Am I
in your way then? As if I was in his way! What business have I to be in
your way? Who is in your way?"
While she was thus speaking in her voluble, querulous, harassing
manner, Jake stood with his hands in his trousers' pockets, in an
attitude of mock attention. Then, suddenly losing patience, he said:
"_Dot'sh alla right!_ You will finish your sermon afterward. And in the
meantime _lesh have a valtz_ from the land of _valtzes_!" With which he
forcibly dragged her off her seat, catching her round the waist.
"But I don't need it, I don't wish it! Go to your Mamie!" she
protested, struggling. "I tell you I don't need it, I don't----" The
rest of the sentence was choked off by her violent breathing; for by
this time she was spinning with Jake like a top. After another moment's
pretense at struggling to free herself she succumbed, and presently
clung to her partner, the picture of triumph and beatitude.
Meanwhile Mamie had walked up to Joe's side, and without much
difficulty caused him to abandon the lancers party to themselves, and
to resume with her the waltz which Jake had so abruptly broken off.
In the course of the following intermission she diplomatically seated
herself beside her rival, and paraded her tranquillity of mind by
accosting her with a question on shop matters. Fanny was not blind to
the manoeuvre, but her exultation was all the greater for it, and she
participated in the ensuing conversation with exuberant geniality.
By-and-bye they were joined by Jake.
"Vell, vill you treat, Jake?" said Mamie.
"Vot you vant, a kish?" he replied, putting his offer in action as well
as in language.
Mamie slapped his arm.
"May the Angel of Death kiss you!" said her lips in Yiddish. "Try
again!" her glowing face overruled them in a dialect of its own.
Fanny laughed.
"Once I am _treating_, both _ladas_ must be _treated_ alike, _ain'
it_?" remarked the gallant, and again he proved himself as good as his
word, although Fanny struggled with greater energy and ostensibly with
more real indignation.
"But vy don't you treat, you stingy loafer you?"
"Vot elsh you vant? A peench?" He was again on the point of suiting the
action to the word, but Mamie contrived to repay the pinch before she
had received it, and added a generous piece of profanity into the
bargain. Whereupon there ensued a scuffle of a character which defies
description in more senses than one.
Nevertheless Jake marched his two "ladas" up to the marble fountain,
and regaled them with two cents' worth of soda each.
An hour or so later, when Jake got out into the street, his breast
pocket was loaded with a fresh batch of "Professor Peltner's Grand
Annual Ball" tickets, and his two arms--with Mamie and Fanny
respectively.
"As soon as I get my wages I'll call on the installment agent and give
him a deposit for a steamship ticket," presently glimmered through his
mind, as he adjusted his hold upon the two girls, snugly gathering them
to his sides.