IT was in the little parlor of a four-room New York flat. The room was
furnished sparsely: a table and a few chairs of bamboo, a long row of
books on the yellow floor along one wall, some Chinese ornaments and
plants, a few Russian embroideries, a rich Persian covering on the
couch, and candles--many candles burning and flickering on their rest
of saucer or glazed clay candlestick. Our hostess seemed part of her
room; she was a Russian Jewess, decidedly Oriental in type, rare in
her beauty and still more rare in her personality and charm.
Sholom Asch sat opposite me smoking his cigarette and sipping his
coffee--a big man of thirty-five, with broad shoulders and a frame
sturdy and substantial; thick black hair, a high forehead, a
characteristically Jewish nose, a firm mouth, a little black
moustache, and deep brown eyes--eyes that at times would seem to be
unaware of anything surrounding them, yet one felt that they saw
everything and understood everything. His complexion was that of a
ruddy boy, yet his large handsome features had the sensitiveness which
classed him unmistakably as an artist.
He was talking in Yiddish. His voice was soft and his sentences
followed each other in musical cadence and beauty.
* * * * *
"YES," Asch was saying, "he was the best Jew I ever met. I always
think of him as 'The Light of Damascus.' I was in Damascus last year.
The most beautiful city in the world! The houses on the winding
streets are centuries old. The people seem older than the houses. For
hours I stood in the market-place watching the camels and the asses
pass by. Some had the dust of the desert on their feet and some had
mud and dirt. Each went slowly on its way with its turbaned rider
sitting still as a figure of stone on its back.
"Through the kindness of a friend we entered a house on one of the
strange streets. Like most of the old houses its front was plain and
unattractive. We went through a court and on to a balcony overlooking
an enclosed garden. Such a garden I had never seen! It seemed a
picture transported from the 'Thousand and One Nights.' In the center
was a fountain of extraordinary workmanship, so inlaid with gems that
after the water had gushed out it seemed to splash down again in a
shower of ruby and amethyst. About the fountain were palms and fig
trees. The flowers were more wondrous than the jewelled water or the
many-colored mosaics of the walls and arches.
"On the grass sat a grey-bearded Mohammedan. He smoked his hookah in
silence. Suddenly we heard voices. Three young women came from the
house and bathed in the fountain. Their lord and husband sat stoically
and smoked. They laughed and played in the splashing waters. And as I
watched this old man and these beautiful women, I thought myself back
in the ancient Damascus, in the city that I had thought was dead for a
thousand years.
* * * * *
"THAT evening I was walking in the city. Suddenly I saw a light before
me. To my surprise it was an electric bulb--the only one in Damascus.
It was fastened to the head of a donkey and illuminated a painted
advertisement attached to his back. By following the wires I found
they led to a large wholesale warehouse. It hurt me to find this
electric light in Damascus. I was still more hurt when I found that
the man who had installed it was a Jew, a Russian Jew who had come to
the city some years before.
"The next day I visited a shop where hammered gold and silver, for
which Damascus is famous, was sold. With the permission of the
proprietor I went upstairs to the workroom. What I saw there I shall
never forget.
"I found myself in a long but very narrow room, dimly lighted by a few
dirty windows. In two long rows in front of two long tables sat fifty
or sixty little girls huddled so close together that they touched one
another. Each child was bent over the table and each held a little
hammer. She was tapping on a piece of metal. The tapping was
never-ending--a sharp clicking sound like the falling of hail. The
children never spoke nor smiled. Near me sat a little girl. She was
not more than eight years old. Her hammer had stopped tapping and her
eyes were closed. She was asleep. The girl next to her, evidently her
elder sister, seeing the foreman approach, pinched the child sharply.
She opened her eyes and dully began her tapping. As I left this room
of darkness my eyes were wet with tears.
"I found out that only little girls were employed in this industry:
that they began when eight or nine years old. When they were sixteen
they usually were dead from the metal that had entered their lungs.
The children were mostly Jewish, for you must know that when the Jews
become part of a slow Eastern civilization they sink yet lower and
become yet more phlegmatic and listless than the people among whom
they have settled. I was indignant and asked if nothing was being done
to remedy this terrible evil. Then I was told that there was one man
who was devoting his life to freeing these children. It was the Jewish
merchant who used the only electric light in Damascus. He gave every
cent he earned to this work. He maintained an industrial school for
Jewish children and was trying to interest the Jews of the world in
the movement. And then I blessed this man's electric light. I think of
him always as 'The Light of Damascus.'"
* * * * *
AND thus Sholom Asch talked. I cannot reproduce his words; I have only
tried to give the spirit of them. He talked in the finished style of a
Maupassant, with all the imagination and all the strength of that
great master. I saw then, before I had read his work, that his title
of "The Jewish Maupassant" was not extravagant. And I saw also that
here was an artist with human sympathy immeasurable, and yet not
lacking sensuous imagery and elemental strength and beauty.
Sholom Asch was born and brought up in a little town in Poland,
Kuttnow, near Lodz. His father was a merchant on a small scale. He
bought sheep and oxen from the peasants and shipped them to be
marketed in Lodz, in Germany, in France. He rode about the country and
sometimes took Sholom with him, whom he loved especially because he
studied so well. Sholom liked the sheep and the cattle, and he loved
the melancholy Polish landscape--mystic, fearful.
His father was a healthy, normal, honorable Jew; not fanatical but
deeply religious. He was philosophic toward life, he cared nothing for
money and was content without it. His mother, on the other hand, was
nervous and worldly. She was dependent on the externals of life and to
her no money was misery. There was a big house with much food, many
new clothes, much hospitality, and many big brothers and sisters;
something like eleven children. The ceremonies of the Jewish faith
were observed beautifully, the holidays kept happily. There was
substance and spirit.
* * * * *
AND Sholom absorbed this atmosphere of the old religious rites, and
the paganism of the cattle and nature, and spoke little. When he was
six he was sent to the Jewish school. This was in session from eight
in the morning until five in the evening. He and the other children
used to watch the sun shine on certain spots and know the time. How
they waited for the moment of freedom, little knowing how well one of
their number was to picture for the world each intimate emotion and
thought of their imprisoned souls.
One day a peasant came to his house and Sholom went with him on his
wagon. That was a wonderful day; he played hookey. The next day the
rabbi, who believed in corporal punishment, expressed his views on the
matter of absence.
Asch was extremely clever at learning the Talmud and the old history
and philosophy of the Jews. He learned to reason from the Talmud and
to-day he says, "Art is logic. There must be an 'Urkraft' (elemental
strength) behind a man's work." And if there is one outstanding
characteristic of Asch's work, it is this elemental, this passionately
strong and elemental vein.
Max Reinhardt, whom Asch calls "Ein Dichter im Theater," loves Asch
dearly. In his Deutsches Theater, the most artistic and best equipped
theatre in the world, he produced Asch's _God of Vengeance_. This was
a marked success and is still a most popular play in Germany, Russia,
and in the Yiddish theatres of New York. Asch was only twenty-four
years at this time. From this play he made much money and a whole
village was made happy an entire summer.
Since then his income from his writings has increased steadily. Much
of his work is now translated into Russian and German, but as yet not
into English. The income from his translations far exceeds that from
his Yiddish publications, and he is able to support his wife and four
children in ease and comfort. Although he has been to America a few
times during the last six years, it is only several months ago that
his wife and children arrived from Poland and he settled here
permanently.
* * * * *
AN important happening in the history of Jewish literature occurred in
the beginning of April. Perez, the intellectual father of the new
movement, died. Asch and Perez were deep friends. Of all living
writers Perez has had most influence on Asch, both as writer and as
man. When Asch brought him his first story, Perez gave him a volume of
his poems. He said of Asch, "A bird is breaking through the shell--who
knows, is it an eagle or a crow?" It proved to be an eagle. Perez was
a revolutionist, a poet, a dramatist, the defender of the weak, the
inspiration of the talented. A little story of his, "Bonchi the
Silent," about a Jewish workingman who never complained and who took
all his misfortunes as a matter of course, whose desires and hopes
were so thoroughly crushed out of him that on reaching Heaven and
being asked by God to request what he desired most, he said, "I want a
piece of white bread every Friday"--that story, more than any one
influence, caused the formation of the "Bund of the Russian
Revolution." It made the _intelligenzia_ of Russia feel that it was
their duty to teach the workingman to demand the earth.
And now since Perez's death, on Asch's shoulders has fallen the
responsibility of being the greatest Jewish writer living to-day. He
is assuming the added duty of revolutionist as well as artist. For the
serious Jewish writer is a sort of rabbi to his people. Ethically he
stands for the old Jewish ideals. To these Asch has added the beauty
of paganism and the vision of anarchistic communism.
In Paris once he came to a meeting of Zionists. He spoke against the
Zionist idea and was not listened to with great deference. Another
writer, Abraham Raisin, coming in shouted, "Hear! Listen to a great
Jew." Asch was given the floor and finished the speech.
Asch feels that only now is he beginning to drop his Jewish past as
material for his work. He is going out into the future: he is becoming
impressed with a vision of the America to be--the ideal democracy. And
his work is showing it. He is planning a poetic industrial drama, he
is finishing a gripping war play. His deep understanding of the
industrial slavery of our times is shown wonderfully in his novel,
_Motke the Scamp_, which is now appearing in serial form in the New
York Yiddish _Forward_. He begins with Motke's infancy. His mother's
milk is sold to the rich man's baby; Motke is cheated of everything.
Picture after picture of sordid Polish ghetto life follows--intermixed
with wood and river sunshine as only Asch can do it. One feels the sun
resting eternally over all, while man with his laughter and tenderness
and pain struggles toward perfection.
* * * * *
ASCH is becoming an exposer and a prophet, but with great beauty of
style and purity of emotion. He is decidedly modern, decidedly
Russian, decidedly Hebraic, and eternally universal. He is bringing
the message of beauty and freedom to the American Yiddish working man.
Asch is not a socialist; he is a real individualist. With a sincere
contribution to the happiness of the world he believes that every
human being is entitled to all the joy of the world, no matter what
form his contribution may assume; shirts, street cleaning, cooking, a
painting, dishes, a poem. He does not preach eight hours and a dollar
more, he demands joy in labor. He wants people to play--to be happy at
their work. He demands freedom in one's personal life and beauty in
mind and body. He is an industrialist plus an artist.
Asch has traveled through Russia talking on various subjects to Jewish
gatherings, not for money but for love of his race. He has visited
Palestine, but with a keen interest in the growth and development of
the Jew--not from a nationalistic standpoint but from a world point of
view.
And this is why he admires America--because it brings to him a vision
of a perfect race, the result of the mixture of all races,
perpetuating the fine traits of all. He is immensely interested in
the public school. He believes in democracy and thinks we have it in
America.
For artists, however, he says this country is not good. The newspapers
in Europe, he says, print what Tolstoi eats and how he sleeps. Here
Rockefeller is the national hero. The artist here lacks artistic
obstinacy; he succumbs to money, he leaves starvation and his _Kunst_.
* * * * *
ASCH loves Shakespere above all other writers; he is his master. For
months he went each night to the Berlin theatres and often, with his
eyes shut, would listen to the words and cadences of Shakespere's
lines. _Hamlet_ he considers the greatest play ever written.
_Midsummer Night's Dream_ and _Romeo and Juliet_ are two of his
favorites. From the ghost scene in _Hamlet_ he can trace Maeterlinck
and all the modern mystics. He says that Shakespere is universal in
his appeal and that his work in translation, when done by a master
like Schlegel, takes on the peculiar flavor of the tongue and people
into which it is translated and loses none of its intrinsic worth.
He loves Gogol and Tolstoi. _Faust_ is one of his favorite dramas. He
loves the old masters Greco and Rembrandt; among the moderns, Cézanne,
Puvis de Chavannes, Manet. In opera he does not care for Wagner, but
he is very fond of _The Magic Flute_, of _Madame Butterfly_, of
_Pagliacci_. He loves music and the theatre. Asch reads in many
languages, German, French, Russian, Polish, Hebrew, and a little
English. But to everybody he talks in Yiddish. He has no ear for other
languages except English, which he says is like his mother tongue!
In the spring Asch goes out to the country and works, in the summer he
loafs, in the winter he lives among his friends. He writes all the
time, being chock full of energy--for work, for love, for friendship,
for happiness. As he says, "I am thankful to God for three things:
first that he gave me life, second that he gave me my talent, third
for my love for you" (this to whomever the lady happens to be).
Like all the artists he is erratic, original, attractive, all-seeing.
But unlike most he has much strength of character and a brilliant
logical faculty that makes him check up his personal relations. He has
much affection in him and a great honesty and integrity which wins him
admiration and respect, and he has many friends among many kinds of
people in many parts of the world.
Sholom Asch is a philosopher, a novelist, a poet, and a dramatist. He
loves the clouds and the sea, he truly loves mankind. Always through
all he writes one feels a deep and elemental strength, an elemental
belief in nature and truth. He is not ahead of his time; he is rather
an interpreter and inspirer of his own day. This makes him the happy
person that he is. He is greatly honored in Russia and in Germany, and
by all writers in Europe.