Sunday calls on brother Harry and pretending that all was as before,
that America and education had changed nothing, that I was still one
of them. I had taken a room in a remote quarter of Brooklyn, where
there were few immigrants, under the pretense that it was nearer to
the railway barns. But I was deceiving no one but myself. Most of my
relatives, who had received me so heartily when I arrived, seemed to be
avoiding Harry’s house on Sundays, and on those rare occasions when I
ran into one of them he seemed frigid and ill at ease. Once Paul said
to me: “You are very funny. It looks as if you were ashamed of the
family. You aren’t really, are you? You know they said you would be
when you went away. There is a lot of foolish talk about it. Everybody
speaks of Harry and me as the doctor’s brothers. Can’t you warm up?”
I poured out my heart in a letter to Harvey. If a year ago I had been
told that I would be laying my sorrows and my disappointments in my own
kindred before any one out there, I would have laughed at the idea. But
that barbarian in Missouri was the only human being, strangely enough,
in whom I could now confide with any hope of being understood. I tried
to convey to him some idea of the agonizing moral experience I was
going through. I told him that I was aching to get back to Columbia
(how apt the name was!), to take up again where I had left off the
process of my transformation, and to get through with it as soon as
might be.
And in the fall I went back--this time a week _before_ college
opened--and was met by Harvey at the station, just as those
rural-looking boys had been met by their friends the year before. When
I reached the campus, I was surprised to see how many people knew me.
Scores of them came up and slapped me on the back and shook hands in
their hearty, boisterous fashion, and hoped that I had had a jolly
summer. I was asked to join boarding-clubs, to become a member in
debating societies, to come and see this fellow or that in his room.
It took me off my feet, this sudden geniality of my fellows toward me.
I had not been aware how, throughout the previous year, the barriers
between us had been gradually and steadily breaking down. It came
upon me all at once. I felt my heart going out to my new friends. I
had become one of them. I was not a man without a country. I was an
American.
ELIZABETH G. STERN
The pathos of the readjustment of the foreign-born to the new life in
America has nowhere been more touchingly presented than in the story,
“My Mother and I,” by Mrs. E. G. Stern, who was born in Russian
Poland.
Anyone who has gone on a long journey to make his home far from
friends and relatives knows something of the pain of separating from
loved ones; but the pain of such a separation cannot compare with
the travail of taking a far spiritual journey. That one may still
have deep reverence for the past, though breaking away from it, is
the conviction of the author, who says: “And I shall always remember
that, though my life is now part of my land’s, yet, if I am truly
part of America, it was mother, she who does not understand America,
who made me so. I wonder if, as the American mother I strive to be, I
can find a finer example than my own mother!”
THE PATHOS OF READJUSTMENT
AUTHOR’S PURPOSE IN WRITING
The mere writing of this account is a chain, slight, but never to be
broken; one that will always bind me to that from which I had thought
myself forever cut off. For I am writing not only of myself. In myself
I see one hundred thousand young men and women with dark eyes aflame
with enthusiasm, or blue eyes alight with hope. In myself, as I write
this record, I see the young girl whose father plucked oranges in
Italian gardens, the maiden whose mother worked on still mornings in
the wide fields of Poland, the young man whose grandmother toiled in
the peat bogs of Ireland. I am writing this for myself and for those
who, like me, are America’s foster children, to remind us of them,
through whose pioneer courage the bright gates of this beautiful land
of freedom were opened to us, and upon whose tumuli of gray and weary
years of struggle we, their children, rose to our opportunities.
I am writing to those sons and daughters of immigrant fathers and
mothers who are now in America, and to those who will come after this
devastating war to America, and to those who will receive them.
MARRIAGE AND AFTER
My friends are now my husband’s friends. My home is that kind of a home
in which he has always lived. With my marriage I entered into a new
avenue. We have traveled. We have worked at tasks we believed in and
loved. We have our little son. I have not written much to mother about
my life. My letters have been--just letters. Her own letters have been
growing briefer these last years. She never came to see me in my home.
It was our little son who was the real cause of her coming finally.
I thought of his birth as the tearing down of that barrier that had
come between us. Mother was intoxicated with the delight of her first
grandchild, the first child of her first child. “Now we understand each
other better, now that we both are mothers, my daughter,” she wrote to
me, not knowing how much more than she meant to say her letters told.
I, too, felt that in my own motherhood I saw the explanation now for
mother’s unquestioning, unceasing striving and toiling and hoping and
planning and achieving for her children. “Now I can find the joy of all
mothers again. I can find my lost young motherhood in your child,” she
wrote. “I am coming to my grandson.”
Mother had not traveled since she took that long trip, twenty-five
years ago, from Poland to America, to come to her husband. And now
she was preparing to come from Soho--to us, to her first grandchild.
We were excited as the letters from home told us that they were. Day
after day, my sisters wrote to us, women came to mother, giving her
messages to take to me, whom they had known so well as a child. They
brought mother cake and jellies and wines, as if she were about to
travel a year instead of one night. My aunts came to help her sew her
clothes, my uncles came to pack her suitcases. It was as if all Soho
were coming here to us in the person of mother. Father hurried back and
forth securing mileages, a berth. He carefully explained to mother what
a berth was, and warned her above all not to forget to give the black
man, when he gave her her hat, a quarter. My sisters wrote such dear
letters, describing it all there at home.
We could hardly wait. Our little boy asked every day for “grammy.”
There came a deluge of telegrams to us, which clearly told us the haste
and nervousness in the little home in Soho, and we knew that mother was
on her way to us.
She came in the morning. She did not stop to kiss me, nor to look about
her, but as soon as she entered my home she cried breathlessly, “Where
is my grandchild?” And she held him to her, and the tears filled her
eyes. “Such a boy! But a boy!” she cried. We had written to her that
our boy was speaking now. She sat down beside him, and she crooned
love-words to him.
Son is a friendly little lad. I felt that, if I left them alone
together, he and mother would grow close in a day or two. I peeped one
morning into the nursery. Mother was standing, looking dully at the
spotless baby cot, the white wicker chairs, the little washable rugs on
the floor, the gay pictures on the white walls. Her worn plump hands
were folded one upon the other in a gesture that I know. Little son
was in a corner, gravely building a tower. Little son has been taught
that he must play without demanding help or attention from adults about
him, that “son must help himself.” In Soho little boys are spanked and
scolded and carried and physicked and loved and fed all day and all
night.
Mother called to little son a quaint love name, and he turned to her
with his bright smile, understanding her love tone. Then he quietly
turned away from her to his toys again. And mother stood there in that
strange white baby world which was her grandson’s. Perhaps she was
thinking of what she had thought to find him, like one of the children
of her own young motherhood, dear burdens that one bore night and day.
She was afraid to touch the crib, to soil the spotless rugs. Here was
her grandchild, they were together, it is true. And her grandchild had
no need of her. She felt alien, unnecessary.
I felt the tears in my eyes. I ran in, called son to come to play with
grammy and mother. He came readily, laughingly, speaking his baby
phrases that are so adorably like the words we adults, his parents,
use. I had been anticipating, even before she came, how much mother and
I would enjoy his baby talk. But mother said in a very low voice, “You
say he speaks, daughter. I do not understand the words he means to say
now. And--he will never learn--learn my language.”
And mother’s first tears fell.
We had planned for every hour of her visit to us, even for the hours of
needed rest between whiles. In those rest spaces she would come into
our living room. She is not accustomed to sitting in living rooms. Her
life has been a life of toil. And our living room is to her as strange
a place as was to me the first sitting room I saw long ago.
She looked with a little smile about her. She glanced at the bookcase,
filled with books she cannot read, and about things she does not know.
Finally her gaze rested upon a certain place, and my eyes followed
hers. There stood the old candlesticks which she had known in her
father’s home in Poland, and which had stood in her own kitchen in
Soho. And there, in my living room stands also, with its bronze
curves holding autumn leaves--the copper fish pot! “In America,” said
mother quaintly, with a little “crooked smile” only on her trembling,
questioning lips, “they have all things--so different.”
There is no need for mother’s pot in my kitchen; it has become an
emblem of the past, an ornament in my living room. Mother cannot
understand our manner of cooking, the manner I learned _away_ from
home. She cannot eat the foods we have; her plate at meals was left
almost untouched. She does not understand my white kitchen, used only
for cooking. When she came into my kitchen, my maid asked her quickly,
eager to please her, pleasantly and respectfully, “What can I do for
you?”
So mother went out to the porch, and she looked out upon the
tree-shaded street. And an infinite loneliness was hers, a loneliness
at thought of the crowded, homely ghetto street, where every one goes
about in shirt sleeves, or apron and kimono, where every one knows his
neighbor, where every one speaks mother’s speech.
She cannot understand my friends, nor they her. I am the only thing
here that is part of her life. I for whom those hands of hers are hard
and worn, and her eyes weary with the stitching of thousands of seams.
She helped me to come into this house, to reach the quiet peace of this
street. And she has come to see this place whither she toiled to have
me come; and now that she came to see my goal she was afraid, lonely.
She did not understand.
There is nothing that we have in common, it may appear, this mother
of mine, and I, the mother of my son. Her life has lain always within
the four dim walls of her ghetto home. And I have books, clubs, social
service, music, plays. My motherhood is a privilege and an experience
which is meaningful not only to my son and to me, but to my community.
In this short visit of hers, for the first time mother saw me as
that which I had always wished to be, an American woman at the head
of an American home. But our home is a home which, try as I may, we
cannot make home to mother. She has seen come to realization those
things which she helped me to attain, and she cannot share, nor even
understand, them.
But there is one thing we have in common, mother and I. We have this
woman that I am, this woman mother has helped me to become. And I shall
always remember that, though my life is now part of my land’s, yet, if
I am truly part of America, it was mother, she who does not understand
America, who made me so. I wonder if, as the American mother I strive
to be, I can find a finer example than my own mother!
There are many men and women who have gone, as I have, far from that
place where we started. When I think of them lecturing on the platform,
teaching in schools and colleges, prescribing in offices, pleading
before the bar of law, I shall never be able to see them standing
alone. I shall always see, behind them, two shadowy figures who will
stand with questioning, puzzled eyes, eyes in which there will be love,
but no understanding, and always an infinite loneliness.
For those men and women who are physicians and lawyers and teachers
and writers, they are young, and they belong to America. And they
who recede into the shadow, they are old, and they do not understand
America. But they have made their contribution to America--their sons
and their daughters.
ROBERT M. WERNAER
Robert Maximilian Wernaer was born in 1865 in Jena, Germany, where he
received his early education. After coming to the United States in
1884, he took a course in law at the Albany Law School, and attended
Harvard University, from which he received his Ph.D. degree in 1903.
His studies were continued abroad at Leipzig, Heidelberg, Geneva,
and Berlin. He was admitted to the Bar in 1889 and practiced law
in Brooklyn and New York. Later he was instructor in German at the
universities of Wisconsin and Harvard, being also lecturer on German
literature at the latter institution in 1908.
In 1917 there was published his stirring, patriotic poem, “The Soul
of America,” which leaves no doubt concerning his stand on the great
question of the hour. The parts reprinted here are taken chiefly from
the opening cantos of the poem.
THE SOUL OF AMERICA[11]
O America! Land of forests and prairies.
Land of races and peoples,
Land of freedom and tolerance,
Looked-for haven of the nations of the world!
To you I came, and you I adopted.
I have infolded you as a child infolds its mother.
I say to you: “My mother!”
I love you because you hold the torch of liberty in your outstretched
hand.
I love you because your constitution speaks of the people as the
rulers.
(I am a man--I salute you, brother!)
I love you because you are not governed by a king.
I love you because princes and nobles are not met on your streets--
The dignity of man is not lowered.
I love you because of the true red mixture of human blood that flows
in your veins.
Blessed are the dreams of the first settlers!
I love you because, in the beginning of your history,
You gathered together your people;
You girded your loins;
You armed yourself with weapons of steel;
And you fought.
You fought for liberty;
You fought for independence;
O divine freemanship!
You fought for democracy;
You fought for nature’s own laws;
And you won.
Blessed are the noble men in whom the dreams of our fathers still
live!
And since those days, the peoples came from the ends of the earth,
And you increased;
And your stars now count forty and eight.
I love you because of what you did in the middle of the nineteenth
century,--
You liberated some millions of dark-colored people living among you;
You emancipated them.
I love you because you gave your blood for the Cubans.
You fought for them, but took no soil.
You made them free.
The Filipinos will be free also.
I love [you] because you are a nation of givers.
Above all else, I love you because of your Soul,
The infinite vistas opening out from your Soul.
Blessed be that Soul!
And since I love you,
Since my life is entwined with your life,
My ideals with your ideals,--
Gray matter and red blood have sealed the pledge,--
I wish you to guard the beacon fires lit on your mountains,
I wish you to grow,
And increase in the strength of body,
In the strength of Soul,
The things unseen,
Your birthrights, O America!
III
America, my country!
Brothers all!
What is that Liberty of which you sing?
Which impelled the first settlers to seek your soil?
For which they offered up their blood?
Which you sent abroad in your calls of love?
Which brought the nations of the earth to you?
Singing, singing, singing!
Which you have stamped upon your documents and silver coins?
The sunlight spread out over the States?--
What is that Liberty?
You say it is your life-principle.
Yes: it is your life-principle;
The igniting spark that keeps your fires, O America!
That feeds your Soul, your Spirit, your Being:
As your Liberty is, so is your Soul;
As your Soul is, so is your Liberty.
You are not merely dwellers on this continent;
You are no longer a province;
No longer in the leading strings of a parent land.
Not now!
You are a new land,--
New, because of a new era started;
New, because you are not a land of just one race,
But a company of races,
Held together by a secret bond,
By a _sacred_ bond,
Sacred as a consecrated altar,
The link between you and your destiny,--
Your very Soul, your Spirit, your Being.
Are you conscious of that?
Do you feel it as you feel the pulsing of your heart?
Do you feel it strike the tablet of your mind as a conviction?
Do you feel it quiver through your body when the word “American” is
uttered?
What then is Liberty?
What does the uplifted torch mean?
The wreath about her brow?
What is this Soul I am speaking about?
Brother, ask yourself that question.
Ask yourself at night in the hour of rest.
And in the morning when a new day dawns.
Ask yourself now!
For it is the time of a new consecration.
To-day! To-day!
Ask yourself a thousand times,
For America’s To-morrow depends upon your answer!
Yea, the world’s To-morrow depends upon your answer!
IV
I know a man who years ago
Departed from his native land,
With treasures, wife and child;
And settled in the kingdom of the sea.
Rich he was, and, in due time, the king made him a lord.
He was born in America, and had breathed her
Principle of life, yet never known her Soul;
Was born in America, yet had not been American.
I know a woman of leisure who lived in Paris;
Ten happy, fleeting years she had spent there;
Then she returned to the land of her birth--
For a visit.
She made the visit shorter than she had intended;
She thought of the arts she had left behind;
She thought of the boulevards and lighted cafes;
She thought of the Countess de C. and her _cercle_ of friends;
Our streets and cities she no longer liked;
Our people seemed bourgeois to her;
Our life was too busy, and fulsome of noise;
She longed for leisure and fashion;
She scorned our ways.
She, too, had not known the Soul of our land,
Though born under the Stars and Stripes.
My brothers, there are many of these.
VII
My brother, what is Liberty?
What is Democracy?
I feel a quiver run
Through our nation--
What is it we have left undone
In faith and consecration?
Our faith of old--
Has it grown cold?
Is it the search for gold
That made us turn from pledges of the past,
Forgetful of the things that last?
To play?
To chase the shadows in the sun?
To count the trifles won?
My brother,
What is it we have left undone?
What is it we must do?
How can we see things through,
In this New Age?
There is the flesh of body, in which the life of man is rooted;
There is the light of the soul, which makes that life a child of God.
There is the flesh of body, in which the life of a people is rooted;
There is the light of her soul, which makes that life a nation.
What is our nation’s Soul?
America’s Light?
Her entity as a nation among nations?
Her Being, I mean, her Heart, the glow
Of her Spirit whereby she grows;
Her mind whereby she knows
Herself; her Entity
Among the nations, free
Or bound;--this Soul, do you know?
My brother, I tell you no new truth,
Though a deep and wondrous truth.
You may have forgotten--forgotten it!
You, who have been here too long--
My brother, know it again, again!
Or you, newcomer, no one may have told you--
Hear me, then!
It is a faith,--
A faith on which hangs all the law and the singer’s prophecy;
Which cuts down to the life-roots of our Being;
Which lays bare the red-flowing blood,--the sap of life;
And the white-shining Light,--the blossoms of life;
Which makes us stand before our grave, and face to face with God.
Blessed are the men of the past who saw the Light, who had the faith!
It is a faith,--
The faith that through our democracy,
A government and a people sprung from American soil,
Many peoples, peoples sprung from the races of the world--
Through this democracy--
The high-held promises that sleep in man,
Infinite stretches of powers potential,
Social, intellectual, moral,
In embryo traced in lines of beauty,
Can into vital life be quickened,
Strike deep their roots,
Fed in this wondrous soil,
And gather mighty powers of growth,
Unfolding wing on wing of nascent life,
Nearing the stature of ideal selfhood
God has destined they should be,
Through this democracy,
Through a democracy of many peoples,
The great American Experiment,
The new hope-anointed start,
A nation in which the people are the rulers,
A free people of peoples free,
Living in concord one with another,
Striving steadfast for a high humanity,
Reaching out to the ends of the world,
Making an end of Race for the sake of Man,
A humanity, great because it is a race of races,
Great because pledged to advance the statehood of man,
Crowned with the crown of freedom,
Won with eyes and ears, and swords and plows,
And creative brother-will,
And love for noble deeds, and noble song, and noble art,
Calling all men “brothers.”--
That is America’s Soul!
Her Soul in the making.
WE MUST BE TRUE
We must be true, with faith renew
Our solemn vows, forever true!
True as the very prairie grass,
The woods and fields and soil and mass
Of rock, which sun and air have wrought,--
Growing without a thought,
Truly American!
True to historic days, the flow
And national ebb of times ago!
True to the very drops of life,
The battles fought, the stress and strife
Of anguished years to make man free,--
Loving our Liberty,
Truly American!
True to the Lincoln man, the love-chart
Of a great impassioned human heart!
True to the very cry of our Soul
For better days, the far-out goal
Of struggling man,--knowing no race,
Lighted by a brother’s face,
Truly American!
We must be true, with faith renew
Our solemn vows, forever true!
True to the very stars above,
To truth, to freedom, justice, love
For right; yea, unfaltering,--with the brave,
Ready for a freeman’s grave,
Truly American!
FOOTNOTE:
[11] Copyright, 1917, by The Four Seas Company. By permission of the
publishers.
ANGELO PATRI
The country which gave Dante and Garibaldi and Mazzini and Madame
Montessori to the world saw the birth, in 1877, of Angelo Patri,
teacher in the public schools of New York City and author of “A
Schoolmaster of the Great City.” This book recounts his endeavors
to realize his educational ideals. That he has been triumphantly
successful does not seem to be entirely to the credit of contemporary
pedagogical methods, and his arraignment of much current educational
theory and practice is as severe as his passionate, Christ-like love
of childhood is touching and beautiful. The World War has convinced
educators rather generally of the need of vitalizing the work of the
schools through contact with life itself, and for this none pleads
more eloquently than he.
The following selections under altered titles are taken from chapters
one, seven and eight.
AN IMMIGRANT AND HIS FATHER
I remember sitting with the family and the neighbors’ families about
the fireplace, while father, night after night, told us stories of the
Knights of the Crusades or recounted the glories of the heroes of proud
Italy.
How he could tell a story! His voice was strong and soft and soothing,
and he had just sufficient power of exaggeration to increase the
attractiveness of the tale. We could see the soldiers he told us about
pass before us in all their struggles and sorrows and triumphs. Back
and forth he marched them into Asia Minor, across Sicily, and into the
castles of France, Germany and England. We listened eagerly and came
back each night ready to be thrilled and inspired again by the spirit
of the good and the great.
Then came the journey over the sea, and the family with the neighbors’
families were part of the life of New York. We were Little Italy.
I was eleven before I went to a city school. All the English I knew had
been learned in the street. I knew Italian. From the time I was seven I
had written letters for the neighbors. Especially the women folk took
me off to a corner and asked me to write letters to their friends in
Italy. As they told me the story, I wrote it down. I thus learned the
beat of plain folks’ hearts.