On those nights the theatre presents a peculiarly picturesque sight.

Poor workingmen and women with their babies of all ages fill the

theatre. Great enthusiasm is manifested, sincere laughter and tears

accompany the sincere acting on the stage. Pedlers of soda-water,

candy, of fantastic gewgaws of many kinds, mix freely with the

audience between the acts. Conversation during the play is received

with strenuous hisses, but the falling of the curtain is the signal

for groups of friends to get together and gossip about the play or the

affairs of the week. Introductions are not necessary, and the Yiddish

community can then be seen and approached with great freedom. On the

stage curtain are advertisements of the wares of Hester Street or

portraits of the "star" actors. On the programmes and circulars

distributed in the audience are sometimes amusing announcements of

coming attractions or lyric praise of the "stars." Poetry is not

infrequent, an example of which, literally translated, is:

Labor, ye stars, as ye will,

Ye cannot equal the artist;

In the garden of art ye shall not flourish;

Ye can never achieve his fame.

Can you play _Hamlet_ like him?

The _Wild King_, or the _Huguenots_?

Are you gifted with feeling

So much as to imitate him like a shadow?

Your fame rests on the pen;

On the show-cards your flight is high;

But on the stage every one can see

How your greatness turns to ashes,

Tomashevsky! Artist great!

No praise is good enough for you;

Every one remains your ardent friend.

Of all the stars you remain the king.

You seek no tricks, no false quibbles;

One sees Truth itself playing.

Your appearance is godly to us;

Every movement is full of grace;

Pleasing is your every gesture;

Sugar-sweet your every turn;

You remain the King of the Stage;

Everything falls to your feet.

On the playboards outside the theatre, containing usually the portrait

of a star, are also lyric and enthusiastic announcements. Thus, on the

return of the great Adler, who had been ill, it was announced on the

boards that "the splendid eagle has spread his wings again."

The Yiddish actors, as may be inferred from the verses quoted, take

themselves with peculiar seriousness, justified by the enthusiasm,

almost worship, with which they are regarded by the people. Many a

poor Jew, man or girl, who makes no more than $10 a week in the

sweat-shop, will spend $5 of it on the theatre, which is practically

the only amusement of the Ghetto Jew. He has not the loafing and

sporting instincts of the poor Christian, and spends his money for the

theatre rather than for drink. It is not only to see the play that the

poor Jew goes to the theatre. It is to see his friends and the actors.

With these latter he, and more frequently she, try in every way to

make acquaintance, but commonly are compelled to adore at a distance.

They love the songs that are heard on the stage, and for these the

demand is so great that a certain bookshop on the east side makes a

specialty of publishing them.

The actor responds to this popular enthusiasm with sovereign contempt.

He struts about in the cafés on Canal and Grand Streets, conscious of

his greatness. He refers to the crowd as "Moses" with superior

condescension or humorous vituperation. Like thieves, the actors have

a jargon of their own, which is esoteric and jealously guarded. Their

pride gave rise a year or two ago to an amusing strike at the People's

Theatre. The actors of the three Yiddish companies in New York are

normally paid on the share rather than the salary system. In the case

of the company now at the People's Theatre, this system proved very

profitable. The star actors, Jacob Adler and Boris Thomashevsky, and

their wives, who are actresses--Mrs. Adler being the heavy realistic

tragedienne and Mrs. Thomashevsky the star soubrette--have probably

received on an average during that time as much as $125 a week for

each couple. But they, with Mr. Edelstein, the business man, are

lessees of the theatre, run the risk and pay the expenses, which are

not small. The rent of the theatre is $20,000 a year, and the weekly

expenses, besides, amount to about $1,100. The subordinate actors, who

risk nothing, since they do not share the expenses, have made amounts

during this favorable period ranging from $14 a week on the average

for the poorest actors to $75 for those just beneath the "stars." But,

in spite of what is exceedingly good pay in the Bowery, the actors of

this theatre formed a union, and struck for wages instead of shares.

This however, was only an incidental feature. The real cause was that

the management of the theatre, with the energetic Thomashevsky at the

head, insisted that the actors should be prompt at rehearsals, and if

they were not, indulged in unseemly epithets. The actors' pride was

aroused, and the union was formed to insure their ease and dignity

and to protect them from harsh words. The management imported actors

from Chicago. Several of the actors here stood by their employers,

notably Miss Weinblatt, a popular young ingénue, who, on account of

her great memory is called the "Yiddish Encyclopedia," and Miss

Gudinski, an actress of commanding presence. Miss Weinblatt forced her

father, once an actor, now a farmer, into the service of the

management. But the actors easily triumphed. Misses Gudinski and

Weinblatt were forced to join the union, Mr. Weinblatt returned to his

farm, the "scabs" were packed off to Philadelphia, and the wages

system introduced. A delegation was sent to Philadelphia to throw

cabbages at the new actors, who appeared in the Yiddish performances

in that city. The triumphant actors now receive on the average

probably $10 to $15 a week less than under the old system. Mr. Conrad,

who began the disaffection, receives a salary of $29 a week, fully $10

less than he received for months before the strike. But the dignity of

the Yiddish actor is now placed beyond assault. As one of them

recently said: "We shall no longer be spat upon nor called 'dog.'"

The Yiddish actor is so supreme that until recently a regular system

of hazing playwrights was in vogue. Joseph Latteiner and Professor M.

Horowitz were long recognized as the only legitimate Ghetto

playwrights. When a new writer came to the theatre with a manuscript,

various were the pranks the actors would play. They would induce him

to try, one after another, all the costumes in the house, in order to

help him conceive the characters; or they would make him spout the

play from the middle of the stage, they themselves retiring to the

gallery to "see how it sounded." In the midst of his exertions they

would slip away, and he would find himself shouting to the empty

boards. Or, in the midst of a mock rehearsal, some actor would shout,

"He is coming, the great Professor Horowitz, and he will eat you"; and

they would rush from the theatre with the panic-stricken playwright

following close at their heels.

The supremacy of the Yiddish actor has, however, its humorous

limitations. The orthodox Jews who go to the theatre on Friday night,

the beginning of Sabbath, are commonly somewhat ashamed of themselves

and try to quiet their consciences by a vociferous condemnation of the

actions on the stage. The actor, who through the exigencies of his

rôle, is compelled to appear on Friday night with a cigar in his

mouth, is frequently greeted with hisses and strenuous cries of

"Shame, shame, smoke on the Sabbath!" from the proletarian hypocrites

in the gallery.

[Illustration: MR. MOSHKOVITZ]

The plays at these theatres vary in a general way with the varying

audiences of which I have spoken above. The thinking socialists

naturally select a less violent play than the comparatively illogical

anarchists. Societies of relatively conservative Jews desire a

historical play in which the religious Hebrew in relation to the

persecuting Christian is put in pathetic and melodramatic situations.

There are a very large number of "culture" pieces produced, which,

roughly speaking, are plays in which the difference between the Jew of

one generation and the next is dramatically portrayed. The pathos or

tragedy involved in differences of faith and "point of view" between

the old rabbi and his more enlightened children is expressed in many

historical plays of the general character of _Uriel Acosta_, tho in

less lasting form. Such plays, however, are called "historical

plunder" by that very up-to-date element of the intellectual Ghetto

which is dominated by the Russian spirit of realism. It is the demand

of these fierce realists that of late years has produced a supply of

theatrical productions attempting to present a faithful picture of the

actual conditions of life. Permeating all these kinds of plays is the

amusement instinct pure and simple. For the benefit of the crowd of

ignorant people grotesque humor, popular songs, vaudeville tricks, are

inserted everywhere.

Of these plays the realistic are of the most value,[1] for they often

give the actual Ghetto life with surprising strength and fidelity. The

past three years have been their great seasons, and have developed a

large crop of new playwrights, mainly journalists who write

miscellaneous articles for the east side newspapers. Jacob Gordin, of

whom we shall have frequent occasion to speak, has been writing plays

for several years, and was the first realistic playwright; he remains

the strongest and most prominent in this kind of play. Professor

Horowitz, who is now the lessee of the Windsor Theatre, situated on

the Bowery, between Grand and Canal Streets, represents, along with

Joseph Latteiner, the conservative and traditional aspects of the

stage. He is an interesting man, fifty-six years of age, and has been

connected with the Yiddish stage practically since its origin. His

father was a teacher in a Hebrew school, and he himself is a man of

uncommon learning. He has made a great study of the stage, has written

one hundred and sixty-seven plays, and claims to be an authority on

_dramaturgie_. Latteiner is equally productive, but few of their plays

are anything more than Yiddish adaptations of old operas and

melodramas in other languages. Long runs are impossible on the Yiddish

stage and consequently the playwrights produce many plays and are not

very scrupulous in their methods. The absence of dramatic criticism

and the ignorance of the audience enable them to "crib" with impunity.

As one of the actors said, Latteiner and Horowitz and their class took

their first plays from some foreign source and since then have been

repeating themselves. The actor said that when he is cast in a

Latteiner play he does not need to learn his part. He needs only to

understand the general situation; the character and the words he

already knows from having appeared in many other Latteiner plays.

[Illustration: YIDDISH PLAYWRIGHTS DISCUSSING THE DRAMA]

The professor, nevertheless, naturally regards himself and Latteiner

as the "real" Yiddish playwrights. For many years after the first

bands of actors reached the New York Ghetto these two men held

undisputed sway. Latteiner leaned to "romantic," Horowitz to

"culture," plays, and both used material which was mainly historical.

The professor regards that as the bright period of the Ghetto stage.

Since then there has been, in his opinion, a decadence which began

with the translation of the classics into Yiddish. _Hamlet_,

_Othello_, _King Lear_, and plays of Schiller, were put upon the stage

and are still being performed. Sometimes they are almost literally

translated, sometimes adapted until they are realistic representations

of Jewish life. Gordin's _Yiddish King Lear_, for instance, represents

Shakespeare's idea only in the most general way, and weaves about it a

sordid story of Jewish character and life. Of _Hamlet_ there are two

versions, one adapted, in which Shakespeare's idea is reduced to a

ludicrous shadow, the interest lying entirely in the presentation of

Jewish customs.

The first act of the Yiddish version represents the wedding feast of

Hamlet's mother and uncle. In the Yiddish play the uncle is a rabbi in

a small village in Russia. He did not poison Hamlet's father but broke

the latter's heart by wooing and winning his queen. Hamlet is off

somewhere getting educated as a rabbi. While he is gone his father

dies. Six weeks afterwards the son returns in the midst of the wedding

feast, and turns the feast into a funeral. Scenes of rant follow

between mother and son, Ophelia and Hamlet, interspersed with jokes

and sneers at the sect of rabbis who think they communicate with the

angels. The wicked rabbi conspires against Hamlet, trying to make him

out a nihilist. The plot is discovered and the wicked rabbi is sent to

Siberia. The last act is the graveyard scene. It is snowing violently.

The grave is near a huge windmill. Ophelia is brought in on the bier.

Hamlet mourns by her side and is married, according to the Jewish

custom, to the dead woman. Then he dies of a broken heart. The other

version is almost a literal translation. To these translations of the

classics, Professor Horowitz objects on the ground that the ignorant

Yiddish public cannot understand them, because what learning they have

is limited to distinctively Yiddish subjects and traditions.

Another important step in what the professor calls the degeneration of

the stage was the introduction a few years ago of the American

"pistol" play--meaning the fierce melodrama which has been for so long

a characteristic of the English plays produced on the Bowery.

But what has contributed more than anything else to what the good man

calls the present deplorable condition of the theatre was the advent

of realism. "It was then," said the professor one day with calm

indignation, "that the genuine Yiddish play was persecuted. Young

writers came from Russia and swamped the Ghetto with scurrilous

attacks on me and Latteiner. No number of the newspaper appeared that

did not contain a scathing criticism. They did not object to the

actors, who in reality were very bad, but it was the play they aimed

at. These writers knew nothing about _dramaturgie_, but their heads

were filled with senseless realism. Anything historical and

distinctively Yiddish they thought bad. For a long time Latteiner and

I were able to keep their realistic plays off the boards, but for the

last few years there has been an open field for everybody. The result

is that horrors under the mask of realism have been put upon the

stage. This year is the worst of all--characters butchered on the

stage, the coarsest language, the most revolting situations, without

ideas, with no real material. It cannot last, however. Latteiner and I

continue with our real Yiddish plays, and we shall yet regain entire

possession of the field."

At least this much may fairly be conceded to Professor Horowitz--that

the realistic writers in what is in reality an excellent attempt often

go to excess, and are often unskilful as far as stage construction is

concerned. In the reaction from plays with "pleasant" endings, they

tend to prefer equally unreal "unpleasant" endings, "onion" plays, as

the opponents of the realists call them. They, however, have written a

number of plays which are distinctively of the New York Ghetto, and

which attempt an unsentimental presentation of truth. A rather

extended description of these plays is given in the next section.

Professor Horowitz's plays, on the contrary, are largely based upon

the sentimental representation of inexact Jewish history. They herald

the glory and wrongs of the Hebrew people, and are badly constructed

melodramas of conventional character. Another class of plays written

by Professor Horowitz, and which have occasionally great but temporary

prosperity, are what he calls _Zeitstucke_. Some American newspaper

sensation is rapidly dramatized and put hot on the boards, such as

_Marie Barberi_, _Dr. Buchanan_ and _Dr. Harris_.

The three theatres--the People's, the Windsor and the Thalia, which is

on the Bowery opposite the Windsor--are in a general way very similar

in the character of the plays produced, in the standard of acting and

in the character of the audience. There are, however, some minor

differences. The People's is the "swellest" and probably the least

characteristic of the three. It panders to the "uptown" element of the

Ghetto, to the downtown tradesman who is beginning to climb a little.

The baleful influence in art of the _nouveaux riches_ has at this

house its Ghetto expression. There is a tendency there to imitate the

showy qualities of the Broadway theatres--melodrama, farce, scenery,

etc. No babies are admitted, and the house is exceedingly clean in

comparison with the theatres farther down the Bowery. Three years ago

this company were at the Windsor Theatre, and made so much money that

they hired the People's, that old home of Irish-American melodrama,

and this atmosphere seems slightly to have affected the Yiddish

productions. Magnificent performances quite out of the line of the

best Ghetto drama have been attempted, notably Yiddish dramatizations

of successful up-town productions. Hauptman's _Versunkene Glocke_,

_Sapho_, _Quo Vadis_, and other popular Broadway plays in flimsy

adaptations were tried with little success, as the Yiddish audiences

hardly felt themselves at home in these unfamiliar scenes and

settings.

The best trained of the three companies is at present that of the

Thalia Theatre. Here many excellent realistic plays are given. Of late

years, the great playwright of the colony, Jacob Gordin, has written

mainly for this theatre. There, too, is the best of the younger

actresses, Mrs. Bertha Kalisch. She is the prettiest woman on the

Ghetto stage and was at one time the leading lady of the Imperial

Theatre at Bucharest. She takes the leading woman parts in plays like

_Fedora_, _Magda_ and _The Jewish Zaza_. The principal actor at this

theatre is David Kessler, who is one of the best of the Ghetto actors

in realistic parts, and one of the worst when cast, as he often is, as

the romantic lover. The actor of most prominence among the younger men

is Mr. Moshkovitch, who hopes to be a "star" and one of the

management. When the union was formed he was in a quandary. Should he

join or should he not? He feared it might be a bad precedent, which

the actors would use against him when he became a star. And yet he did

not want to get them down on him. So before he joined he entered

solemn protests at all the cafés on Canal Street. The strike, he

maintained, was unnecessary. The actors were well paid and well

treated. Discipline should be maintained. But he would join because of

his universal sympathy with actors and with the poor--as a matter of

sentiment merely, against his better judgment.

[Illustration: DAVID KESSLER]

The company at the Windsor is the weakest, so far as acting is

concerned, of the three. Very few "realistic" plays are given there,

for Professor Horowitz is the lessee, and he prefers the historical

Jewish opera and "culture" plays. Besides, the company is not strong

enough to undertake successfully many new productions, altho it

includes some good actors. Here Mrs. Prager vies as a prima-donna with

Mrs. Karb of the People's and Mrs. Kalisch of the Thalia. Professor

Horowitz thinks she is far better than the other two. As he puts it,

there are two and a half prima-donnas in the Ghetto--at the Windsor

Theatre there is a complete one, leaving one and a half between the

People's and the Thalia. Jacob Adler of the People's, the professor

thinks, is no actor, only a remarkable caricaturist. As Adler is the

most noteworthy representative of the realistic actors of the Ghetto,

the professor's opinion shows what the traditional Yiddish playwright

thinks of realism. The strong realistic playwright, Jacob Gordin, the

professor admits, has a "biting" dialogue, and "unconsciously writes

good cultural plays which he calls realistic, but his realistic plays,

properly speaking, are bad caricatures of life."

The managers and actors of the three theatres criticise one another

indeed with charming directness, and they all have their followers in

the Ghetto and their special cafés on Grand or Canal Streets, where

their particular prejudices are sympathetically expressed. The actors

and lessees of the People's are proud of their fine theatre, proud

that no babies are brought there. There is a great dispute between the

supporters of this theatre and those of the Thalia as to which is the

stronger company and which produces the most realistic plays. The

manager of the Thalia maintains that the People's is sensational, and

that his theatre alone represents true realism; while the supporter of

the People's points scornfully to the large number of operas produced

at the Thalia. They both unite in condemning the Windsor, Professor

Horowitz's theatre, as producing no new plays and as hopelessly behind

the times, "full of historical plunder." An episode in _The Ragpicker

of Paris_, played at the Windsor when the present People's company

were there, amusingly illustrates the jealousy which exists between

the companies. An old beggar is picking over a heap of moth-eaten,

coverless books, some of which he keeps and some rejects. He comes

across two versions of a play, _The Two Vagrants_, one of which was

used at the Thalia and the other at the Windsor. The version used at

the Windsor receives the beggar's commendation, and the other is

thrown in a contemptuous manner into a dust-heap.

REALISM, THE SPIRIT OF THE GHETTO THEATRE

The distinctive thing about the intellectual and artistic life of the

Russian Jews of the New York Ghetto, the spirit of realism, is

noticeable even on the popular stage. The most interesting plays are

those in which the realistic spirit predominates, and the best among

the actors and playwrights are the realists. The realistic element,

too, is the latest one in the history of the Yiddish stage. The Jewish

theatres in other parts of the world, which, compared with the three

in New York, are unorganized, present only anachronistic and fantastic

historical and Biblical plays, or comic opera with vaudeville

specialties attached. These things, as we have said in the last

section, are, to be sure, given in the Yiddish theatres on the Bowery

too, but there are also plays which in part at least portray the

customs and problems of the Ghetto community, and are of comparatively

recent origin.

[Illustration: JACOB ADLER]

There are two men connected with the Ghetto stage who particularly

express the distinctive realism of the intellectual east side--Jacob

Adler, one of the two best actors, and Jacob Gordin, the playwright.

Adler, a man of great energy, tried for many years to make a theatre

succeed on the Bowery which should give only what he called good

plays. Gordin's dramas, with a few exceptions, were the only plays on

contemporary life which Adler thought worthy of presentation. The

attempt to give exclusively realistic art, which is the only art on

the Bowery, failed. There, in spite of the widespread feeling for

realism, the mass of the people desire to be amused and are bored by

anything with the form of art. So now Adler is connected with the

People's Theatre, which gives all sorts of shows, from Gordin's plays

to ludicrous history, frivolous comic opera, and conventional

melodrama. But Adler acts for the most part only in the better sort.

He is an actor of unusual power and vividness. Indeed, in his case, as

in that of some other Bowery actors, it is only the Yiddish dialect

which stands between him and the distinction of a wide reputation.

In almost every play given on the Bowery all the elements are

represented. Vaudeville, history, realism, comic opera, are generally

mixed together. Even in the plays of Gordin there are clownish and

operatic intrusions, inserted as a conscious condition of success. On

the other hand, even in the distinctively formless plays, in comic

opera and melodrama, there are striking illustrations of the popular

feeling for realism,--bits of dialogue, happy strokes of

characterization of well-known Ghetto types, sordid scenes faithful to

the life of the people.

It is the acting which gives even to the plays having no intrinsic

relation to reality a frequent quality of naturalness. The Yiddish

players, even the poorer among them, act with remarkable sincerity.

Entirely lacking in self-consciousness, they attain almost from the

outset to a direct and forcible expressiveness. They, like the

audience, rejoice in what they deem the truth. In the general lack of

really good plays they yet succeed in introducing the note of realism.

To be true to nature is their strongest passion, and even in a

conventional melodrama their sincerity, or their characterization in

the comic episodes, often redeems the play from utter barrenness.

And the little touches of truth to the life of the people are

thoroughly appreciated by the audience, much more generally so than in

the case of the better plays to be described later, where there is

more or less strictness of form and intellectual intention, difficult

for the untutored crowd to understand. In the "easy" plays, it is the

realistic touches which tell most. The spectators laugh at the exact

reproduction by the actor of a tattered type which they know well. A

scene of perfect sordidness will arouse the sympathetic laughter or

tears of the people. "It is so natural," they say to one another, "so

true." The word "natural" indeed is the favorite term of praise in the

Ghetto. What hits home to them, to their sense of humor or of sad

fact, is sure to move, altho sometimes in a manner surprising to a

visitor. To what seems to him very sordid and sad they will frequently

respond with laughter.

One of the most beloved actors in the Ghetto is Zelig Mogalesco, now

at the People's Theatre, a comedian of natural talent and of the most

felicitous instinct for characterization. Unlike the strenuous Adler,

he has no ideas about realism or anything else. He acts in any kind of

play, and could not tell the difference between truth and burlesque

caricature. And yet he is remarkable for his naturalness, and popular

because of it. Adler with his ideas is sometimes too serious for the

people, but Mogalesco's naïve fidelity to reality always meets with

the sympathy of a simple audience loving the homely and unpretentious

truth. About Adler, strong actor that he is, and also about the

talented Gordin, there is something of the doctrinaire.

But, altho the best actors of the three Yiddish theatres in the Ghetto

are realists by instinct and training, the thoroughly frivolous

element in the plays has its prominent interpreters. Joseph Latteiner

is the most popular playwright in the Bowery, and Boris Thomashevsky

perhaps the most popular actor. Latteiner has written over a hundred

plays, no one of which has form or ideas. He calls them _Volksstücke_

(plays of the people), and naïvely admits that he writes directly to

the demand. They are mainly mixed melodrama, broad burlesque, and

comic opera. His heroes are all intended for Boris Thomashevsky, a

young man, fat, with curling black hair, languorous eyes, and a rather

effeminate voice, who is thought very beautiful by the girls of the

Ghetto. Thomashevsky has a face with no mimic capacity, and a

temperament absolutely impervious to mood or feeling. But he

picturesquely stands in the middle of the stage and declaims

phlegmatically the rôle of the hero, and satisfies the "romantic"

demand of the audience. Nothing could show more clearly how much more

genuine the feeling of the Ghetto is for fidelity to life than for

romantic fancy. How small a part of the grace and charm of life the

Yiddish audiences enjoy may be judged by the fact that the romantic

appeal of a Thomashevsky is eminently satisfying to them. Girls and

men from the sweat-shops, a large part of such an audience, are moved

by a very crude attempt at beauty. On the other hand they are so

familiar with sordid fact, that the theatrical representation of it

must be relatively excellent. Therefore the art of the Ghetto,

theatrical and other, is deeply and painfully realistic.

[Illustration: JACOB GORDIN]

When we turn to Jacob Gordin's plays, to other plays of similar

character and to the audiences to which they specifically appeal, we

have realism worked out consciously in art, the desire to express life

as it is, and at the same time the frequent expression of revolt

against the reality of things, and particularly against the actual

system of society. Consequently the "problem" play has its

representation in the Ghetto. It presents the hideous conditions of

life in the Ghetto--the poverty, the sordid constant reference to

money, the immediate sensuality, the jocular callousness--and

underlying the mere statement of the facts an intellectual and

passionate revolt.

The thinking element of the Ghetto is largely Socialistic, and the

Socialists flock to the theatre the nights when the Gordin type of

play is produced. They discuss the meaning and justice of the play

between the acts, and after the performance repair to the Canal Street

cafés to continue their serious discourse. The unthinking Nihilists

are also represented, but not so frequently at the best plays as at

productions in which are found crude and screaming condemnation of

existing conditions. The Anarchistic propaganda hired the Windsor

Theatre for the establishment of a fund to start the _Freie Arbeiter

Stimme_, an anarchistic newspaper. The _Beggar of Odessa_ was the play

selected,--an adaptation of the _Ragpicker of Paris_, a play by Felix

Piot, the Anarchistic agitator of the French Commune in 1871. The

features of the play particularly interesting to the audience were

those emphasizing the clashing of social classes. The old ragpicker, a

model man, clever, brilliant, and good, is a philosopher too, and says

many things warmly welcomed by the audience. As he picks up his rags

he sings about how even the clothing of the great comes but to dust.

His adopted daughter is poor, and consequently noble and sweet. The

villains are all rich; all the very poor characters are good. Another

play, _Vogele_, is partly a satire of the rich Jew by the poor Jew.

"The rich Jews," sang the comedian, "toil not, neither do they spin.

They work not, they suffer not, why then do they live on this earth?"

This unthinking revolt is the opposite pole to the unthinking

vaudeville and melodrama. In many of the plays referred to roughly as

of the Gordin-Adler type--altho they were not all written by Gordin

nor played by Adler--we find a realism more true in feeling and cast

in stronger dramatic form. In some of these plays there is no problem

element; in few is that element so prominent as essentially to

interfere with the character of the play as a presentation of life.

One of the plays most characteristic, as at once presenting the life

of the Ghetto and suggesting its problems, is _Minna_, or the Yiddish

Nora. Altho the general idea of Ibsen's _Doll's House_ is taken, the

atmosphere and life are original. The first scene represents the house

of a poor Jewish laborer on the east side. His wife and daughter are

dressing to go to see _A Doll's House_ with the boarder,--a young man

whom they have been forced to take into the house because of their

poverty. He is full of ideas and philosophy, and the two women fall in

love with him, and give him all the good things to eat. When the

laborer returns from his hard day's work, he finds that there is

nothing to eat, and that his wife and daughter are going to the play

with the boarder. The women despise the poor man, who is fit only to

work, eat, and sleep. The wife philosophizes on the atrocity of

marrying a man without intellectual interests, and finally drinks

carbolic acid. This Ibsen idea is set in a picture rich with realistic

detail: the dialect, the poverty, the types of character, the humor of

Yiddish New York. Jacob Adler plays the husband, and displays a vivid

imagination for details calculated to bring out the man's beseeching

bestiality: his filthy manners, his physical ailments, his greed, the

quickness of his anger and of resulting pacification. Like most of the

realistic plays of the Ghetto, _Minna_ is a genuine play of manners. It

has a general idea, and presents also the setting and characters of

reality.

_The Slaughter_, written by Gordin, and with the main masculine

character taken by David Kessler, an actor of occasionally great

realistic strength, is the story of the symbolic murder of a fragile

young girl by her parents, who force her to marry a rich man who has

all the vices and whom she hates. The picture of the poor house, of

the old mother and father and half-witted stepson with whom the girl

is unconsciously in love, in its faithfulness to life is typical of

scenes in many of these plays. It is rich in character and _milieu_

drawing. There is another scene of miserable life in the second act.

The girl is married and living with the rich brute. In the same house

is his mistress, curt and cold, and two children by a former wife. The

old parents come to see the wife; she meets them with the joy of

starved affection. But the husband enters and changes the scene to one

of hate and violence. The old mother tells him, however, of the heir

that is to come. Then there is a superb scene of naïve joy in the

midst of all the sordid gloom. There is rapturous delight of the old

people, turbulent triumph of the husband, and satisfaction of the

young wife. They make a holiday of it. Wine is brought. They all love

one another for the time. The scene is representative of the way the

poor Jews welcome their offspring. But indescribable violence and

abuse follow, and the wife finally kills her husband, in a scene where

realism riots into burlesque, as it frequently does on the Yiddish

stage.

But for absolute, intense realism Gordin's _Wild Man_, unrelieved by a

problem idea, is unrivaled. An idiot boy falls in love with his

stepmother without knowing what love is. He is abused by his father

and brother, beaten on account of his ineptitudes. His sister and

another brother take his side, and the two camps revile each other in

unmistakable language. The father marries again; his new wife is a

heartless, faithless woman, and she and the daughter quarrel. After

repeated scenes of brutality to the idiot, the daughter is driven out

to make her own living. Adler's portraiture of the idiot is a great

bit of technical acting. The poor fellow is filled with the mysterious

wonderings of an incapable mind. His shadow terrifies and interests

him. He philosophizes about life and death. He is puzzled and worried

by everything; the slightest sound preys on him. Physically alert, his

senses serve only to trouble and terrify the mind which cannot

interpret what they present. The burlesque which Mr. Adler puts into

the part was inserted to please the crowd, but increases the horror of

it, as when Lear went mad; for the Elizabethan audiences laughed, and

had their souls wrung at the same time. The idiot ludicrously

describes his growing love. In pantomime he tells a long story. It is

evident, even without words, that he is constructing a complicated

symbolism to express what he does not know. He falls into epilepsy and

joins stiffly in the riotous dance. The play ends so fearfully that it

shades into mere burlesque.

This horrible element in so many of these plays marks the point where

realism passes into fantastic sensationalism. The facts of life in the

Ghetto are in themselves unpleasant, and consequently it is natural

that a dramatic exaggeration of them results in something poignantly

disagreeable. The intense seriousness of the Russian Jew, which

accounts for what is excellent in these plays, explains also the

rasping falseness of the extreme situations. It is a curious fact that

idiots, often introduced in the Yiddish plays, amuse the Jewish

audience as much as they used to the Elizabethan mob.

One of the most skillful of Gordin's Yiddish adaptations is _The

Oath_, founded on Hauptman's _Fuhrmann Henschel_. In the first act a

dying peasant is exhibited on the stage. In Hauptman's play it is a

woman; in Gordin's it is a man. He is racked with coughing. A servant

clatters over the floor with her heavy boots. Another servant feeds

the sick man from a coarse bowl and the steward works at the

household accounts. The dying man's wife, and their little boy, enter

and it is apparent that something has been going on between her and

the steward. They and the servants dine realistically and coarsely and

neglect the dying man. When they leave, the dying man teaches his son

how to say "Kaddish" for his soul when he is dead. When he dies he

makes his wife swear that she will never marry again. In the second

act she is about to marry the steward, and the Jewish customs are here

used, as is often the case with the Yiddish playwright, to intensify

the dramatic effect of a scene. It is just a year from the time of her

husband's death, and the candles are burning, therefore, on the table.

According to the orthodox belief the soul of the dead is present when

the candles burn. The little boy, feeling that his mother is about to

marry again, blows out the candles. The mother, horror-stricken,

rushes to him and asks him why he did it. "I did not want my father to

see that you are going to marry again," says the little fellow. It was

an affecting scene and left few dry eyes in the audience.

At the beginning of the third act the wife and servant are living

together, married. He comes on the stage, sleepy, brutal, calling

loudly for a drink, abuses the little boy and quarrels with his wife;

he is a crude, dishonorable, coarse brute. He drives away a faithful

servant and returns to his swinish slumber. An old couple, the woman

being the sister of the dead man, who are always torturing the wife

with having broken her vow, hint to her that her new husband is too

attentive to the maid-servant. She is angry and incredulous, and calls

the maid to her, but when she sees her in the doorway, before a word

is spoken, she realizes it is true, and sends her away. The husband

enters and she passionately taxes him. He admits it, but justifies

himself: he is young, a high-liver, etc., why shouldn't he? Just then

the child is brought in, drowned in the river nearby.

In the beginning of the fourth and last act the husband again appears

as a riotous, jovial fellow. He has played a joke and turned a driver

out of his cart, and he nearly splits his sides with merriment. Drunk,

he admirably sings a song and dances. His wife enters. She hears her

vow repeated by the winds, by the trees, everywhere. Her dead child

haunts her. Her husband has stolen and misspent their money. She talks

with the faithful servant about the maid's baby. She wanders about at

night, unable to sleep. Her brute husband calls to her from the house,

saying he is afraid to sleep alone. Another talk ensues between them.

He asks her why she is old so soon. She burns the house and herself,

the neighbors rush in, and the play is over.

Some of the more striking of the realistic plays on the Ghetto stage

have been partly described, but realism in the details of character

and setting appears in all of them, even in comic opera and melodrama.

In many the element of revolt, even if it is not the basis of the

play, is expressed in occasional dialogues. Burlesque runs through

them all, but burlesque, after all, is a comment on the facts of life.

And all these points are emphasized and driven home by sincere and

forcible acting.

Crude in form as these plays are, and unpleasant as they often are in

subject and in the life portrayed, they are yet refreshing to persons

who have been bored by the empty farce and inane cheerfulness of the

uptown theatres.

THE HISTORY OF THE YIDDISH STAGE

The Yiddish stage, founded in Roumania in 1876 by Abraham Goldfaden,

has reached its highest development in the city of New York, where

there are seventy or eighty professional actors; not far from a dozen

playwrights, of whom three have written collectively more than three

hundred plays; dramas on almost every subject, produced on the

inspiration of various schools of dramatic art; and an enormous

Russian Jewish colony, which fills the theatres and creates so strong

a demand that the stage responds with a distinctive, complete, and

interesting popular art.

The best actor now in the Ghetto, with one exception, was in the

original company. That exception, with the help of a realistic

playwright, introduced an important element in the development of the

stage. With the lives of these three men the history of the Yiddish

stage is intimately connected. The first actor was a singer in the

synagogue of Bucharest, the first playwright a composer of Yiddish

songs. The foundation of the Yiddish stage might therefore be said to

lie in the Bucharest synagogue and the popular music-hall performance.

Zelig Mogalesco, the best comedian in the New York Ghetto, has seen,

altho not quite forty years of age, the birth of the Yiddish stage,

and may survive its death. He was born in Koloraush, a town in the

province of Bessarabia, near Roumania. His father was a poor

shop-keeper, and Mogalesco never went to school. But he was endowed by

nature with a remarkable voice and ear, and composed music with easy

felicity. The population of the town was orthodox Jewish, and

consequently no theatre was allowed. It was therefore in the synagogue

that the musical appetite of the Jews found satisfaction. It was the

habit of the poor people to hire as inexpensive a cantor as possible,

and this cantor might very well be ignorant of everything except

singing. Yet these cantors were so popular that the famous ones

travelled from town to town, in much the same way that the visiting

German actor--_Gast_--does to-day, and sometimes charged admission

fees.

When Mogalesco was nine years old, Nissy of the town of Bells, the

most famous cantor in the south of Russia, visited Mogalesco's town.

The boy's friends urged him to visit the great man and display his

voice. Little Mogalesco, with his mezzo-soprano, went to the inn, and

Nissy was astounded. "My dear boy," he said, "go home and fetch your

parents." With them the cantor signed a contract by which Zelig was

bound to him as a kind of musical apprentice for three years. The boy

was to receive his board and clothing, five rubles, the first year,

ten the second, and fifteen the third--fifteen dollars for the three

years.

Soon Mogalesco became widely known among the cantors of South Russia.

In six months he could read music so well that they called him "Little

Zelig, the music-eater." At the end of the first year the leading

cantor of Bucharest, Israel Kupfer, who, by the way, has been cantor

in a New York synagogue of the east side, went to Russia to secure the

services of Mogalesco. To avoid the penalties of a broken contract,

Kupfer hurried with little Zelig to Roumania, and the boy remained in

Bucharest for several years. At the age of fourteen he conducted a

choir of twenty men under Kupfer. He also became director of the

chorus in the Gentile opera. While there he began "to burn," as he

expressed it, with a desire to go on the stage, but the Gentiles would

not admit the talented Jew.

It was when Mogalesco was about twenty years old that the Yiddish

stage was born. In 1876 or 1877, Abraham Goldfaden went to Bucharest.

This man had formerly been a successful merchant in Russia, but had

failed. He was a poet, and to make a living he called that art into

play. In Russia he had written many Yiddish songs, set them to music,

and sung them in private. In the society in which he lived he deemed

that beneath his dignity, but when he lost his money he went to

Bucharest and there on the stage sang his own poems, the music for

which he took from many sources. He became a kind of music-hall

performer, but did not long remain satisfied with this modest art. His

dissatisfaction led him to create what later developed into the

present Yiddish theatre. The Talmud prohibited the stage, but at the

time when Goldfaden was casting about for something to do worthy of

his genius, the gymnasia were thrown open to the Jews, and the result

was a more tolerant spirit. Therefore, Goldfaden decided to found a

Yiddish theatre. He went to Kupfer, the cantor, and Kupfer recommended

Mogalesco as an actor for the new company. Goldfaden saw the young man

act, and the comedy genius of Mogalesco helped in the initial idea of

a Yiddish play. Mogalesco at first refused to enter into the scheme. A

Yiddish drama seemed too narrow to him, for he aspired to the

Christian stage. But when Goldfaden offered to adopt him and teach him

the Gentile languages Mogalesco agreed and became the first Yiddish

actor. Other singers in Kupfer's choir also joined Goldfaden's

company.

Thus the foundation of the Yiddish stage lay in the Bucharest

synagogue. The beginnings, of course, were small. Several other actors

were secured, among them Moses Silbermann, who is still acting on the

New York Ghetto stage. No girls could at that time be obtained for

the stage, for it is against the Talmudic law for a man even to hear a

girl sing, and men consequently played female rôles, as in Elizabethan

times in England. The first play that Goldfaden wrote was _The

Grandmother and her Grandchild_; the second was _The Shwendrick_ and

Mogalesco played the grandmother in one and a little spoiled boy in

the other. His success in both was enormous, and he still enacts on

the Bowery the part of the little boy. The first performances of

Goldfaden's play were given in Bucharest, at the time of the

Russian-Turkish war, and the city was filled with Russian contractors

and workmen. They overcrowded the theatre, and applauded Mogalesco to

the echo. From that time the success of the Yiddish stage was assured.

Goldfaden tried to get a permit to act in Russia, without success at

first; but he played in Odessa without a license, in a secret way, and

in the end a permit was secured. Other Yiddish companies sprang up.

Girls were admitted to the chorus, and women began to play female

rôles. The first woman on the Yiddish stage was a girl who is now Mrs.

Karb, and who may be seen in the Yiddish company at present in the

People's Theatre on the Bowery. She is the best liked of all the

Ghetto's actresses, has been a sweet singer, and is now an actress of

considerable distinction. In Bucharest, before she went on the stage,

she was a tailor-girl, and used to sing in the shop. She appeared in

1878 in _The Evil Eye_, and made an immediate hit. That was the third

Yiddish play, and, in the absence of Goldfaden, it was written by the

prompter, Joseph Latteiner, who, with the possible exception of

Professor Horowitz, who began to write about the same time, was for

many years the most popular playwright in the New York Ghetto.

In 1884 the Yiddish theatre was forbidden in Russia. It was supposed

by the Government to be a hotbed of political plots, but some of the

Yiddish actors think that the jealousy of Gentile actors was

responsible for this idea. Two years before there had been a

transmigration of Russian and Roumanian Jews to America on a large

scale. Therefore the players banished from Russia had a refuge and an

audience in New York. In 1884 the first Yiddish company came to this

country. It was not Goldfaden's or Mogalesco's company, but one formed

after them. In it were actors who still act in New York--Moses Heine,

Moses Silbermann, Mrs. Karb, and Latteiner the playwright.

The first Yiddish theatre was called the Oriental. It was a music-hall

on the Bowery, transformed for the purpose. A year later Mogalesco,

Kessler, Professor Horowitz, and their company came to New York and

opened the Roumania Theatre. From that time they changed theatres

frequently. It is worthy of note that with one exception the actors

identified with the beginnings of the Yiddish stage are still the

best.

That exception is Jacob Adler, who, not counting Mogalesco, is the

best actor in the Ghetto. They are both character actors, but

Mogalesco is essentially a comedian, while Adler plays rôles ranging

from burlesque to tragedy. Mogalesco is a natural genius, with a

spontaneity superior to that of Adler, but he has no general education

nor intellectual life. But the forcible Adler, a man of great energy,

a fighter, is filled with one great idea, which is almost a passion

with him, and which has marked a development in the Yiddish theatre.

To be natural, to be real, to express the actual life of the people,

with serious intent, is what Jacob Adler stands for. Up to the time

when he appeared on the scene in New York there had been no serious

plays acted on the Yiddish stage. Comic opera, lurid melodrama,

adaptations and translations, historical plays representing the

traditions of the Jews, were exclusively the thing. Through the

acting, indeed, which on the Yiddish stage is constantly animated by

the desire for sincerity and naturalness, the real life of the people

was constantly suggested in some part of the play. When Mogalesco took

a comic part, he would interpolate phrases and actions, suggesting

that life, which he instinctively and spontaneously knew, and it was

so with the other actors also. But this element was accidental and

fragmentary previous to the coming of Jacob Adler.

Until then Latteiner and Professor Horowitz, the authors of the first

historical plays of the Yiddish stage, and still the most popular

playwrights in the Ghetto, held almost undisputed sway.

Joseph Latteiner, of whom brief mention has already been made,

represents thoroughly the strong commercial spirit of the Yiddish

stage. He writes with but one thought, to please the mass of the

people, writes "easy plays," to quote his own words. His plays,

therefore, are the very spirit of formlessness--burlesque, popularly

vulgar jokes, flat heroism combined about the flimsiest dramatic

structure. He is the type of the business man of the Ghetto. Altho

successful, he lives in an unpleasant tenement, and seems much poorer

than he really is. He has an unemphatic, conciliatory manner of

talking, and everything he says is discouragingly practical. He is a

Roumanian Jew, forty-six years of age. His parents intended him for a

rabbi, but he was too poor to reach the goal, altho he learned several

languages. These afterwards stood him in good stead, for he often

translates and adapts plays for the Bowery stage. Unable to be a

rabbi, Latteiner cast about for a means of making his living. As a boy

he was not interested in the stage, but one day he saw a German play

in one act and thought he could adapt it with music to the Yiddish

stage. It was successful, and Latteiner, as he put it, "discovered

himself." He has since written over a hundred plays, and is engaged by

the company at the Thalia Theatre as the regular playwright. He calls

himself _Volksdichter_, and maintains that his plays improve with the

taste of the people, but this statement is open to considerable doubt.

In speaking of the popular playwright, and the purely commercial

character and consequent formlessness of the plays before the

appearance of Adler, important mention should be made of Boris

Thomashevsky, already briefly referred to as the idol of the Jewish

matinée girls. He is the most popular actor on the Yiddish stage, and

for him Latteiner particularly writes. Thomashevsky is a large fat

man, with expressionless features and curly black hair, which he

arranges in leonine forms. He generally appears as the hero, and is a

successful tho a rather listless barnstormer. The more intelligent of

his audience are inclined to smile at Mr. Thomashevsky's talent in

romantic parts, of the reality of which, however, he, with a large

section of the community, is very firmly convinced. In fairness,

however, it should be said that when Mr. Thomashevsky occasionally

leaves the rôle of hero for an unsentimental character, particularly

one which expresses supercilious superiority, he is excellent. As time

goes on he will probably take less and less the romantic lead and grow

more and more satisfactory. He is the youngest of the prominent actors

of the Bowery. Before the coming of Heine's company in 1884, he was a

pretty little boy in the Ghetto, who used to play female rôles in

amateur theatricals. But when the professionals came he was eclipsed,

and went out of sight for some time. He grew to be a handsome man,

however; his voice changed, and, with the help of a very different

man, Jacob Adler, Thomashevsky found an important place on the Yiddish

stage. He and Adler are now the leading actors of the People's

Theatre, but they never appear together, Thomashevsky being the main

interpreter of the plays which appeal distinctively to the rabble,

and Adler of those which form the really original Yiddish drama of a

serious nature.

Jacob Adler was born in Odessa, Russia, in 1855, of middle-class

parents. He went to the public school, but was very slow to learn, and

was treated roughly by his teachers, whose favorite weapon was a ruler

of thorns. School, therefore, as he says, "made a bad impression" on

him, and he left it for business, but got along equally badly there,

not being able to brook the brutally expressed authority of his

masters. But while he passed rapidly from one firm to another, through

the kindness of a wealthy uncle he was able to cut a swell figure in

Odessa, and became a dandy and something of a lady-killer. He was then

only eighteen, but the serious ideas which at a later time he

strenuously sought to bring into prominence in New York already began

to assert themselves. Then there was no Yiddish theatre, but of the

Gentile Russian theatre in Odessa he was very fond. The serious

realistic Russian play was what particularly took his fancy. The

Russian tragedians Kozelski and Miloslowski especially helped to form

his taste, and he soon became a critic well known in the galleries. It

was the habit of Russian audiences to express their ideas and

impressions on the spot. The galleries were divided into parties, with

opposing artistic principles. One party hissed while the other

applauded, and then and there they held debates, between the acts and

even during the performance. Adler soon became one of the fiercest

leaders of such a party that Odessa had ever known. He stood for

realism, for the direct expression of the life of the people. All else

he hissed down, and did it so effectively that the actors tried to

conciliate him. One season two actresses of talent, but of different

schools, were playing in Odessa--Glebowa, whom Adler supported because

of her naturalness, and Kozlowski, whose style was affected and

artificial from Adler's point of view. After the strife between the

rival parties had waged for some time very fiercely, one night

Kozlowski sent for Adler, and asked him what she could do to get the

great critic to join her party. Adler replied that so long as Glebowa

played with such wonderful naturalness he should remain faithful to

her colors, and advised Kozlowski, who was a kind of Russian

Bernhardt, to change her style.

Adler's lack of education always weighed on his spirit, and his high

ideals of the stage seemed to shut that art away from him. Yet his

friends who heard him recite the speeches of his favorites, which he

easily remembered, told him he had talent. "I wanted to believe them,"

Adler said, "but I always thought that the actor ought to know

everything in order to interpret humanity."

But just about that time, when Adler was twenty-three years old, he

heard that a theatre had been started in Roumania by a Russian Jew

named Goldfaden, and that the actors spoke Yiddish.

"I was astonished," he said. "How could they act a play in a language

without literature, in the jargon of our race, and who could be the

actors?"

Soon Adler heard that the Jewish singers of hymns who sometimes

visited Odessa, and who moved him so, because "they sang so

pitifully," were the actors of the first Yiddish company, and his

astonishment grew. In 1879 Goldfaden went to Odessa with his company,

and his theatre was crowded with Gentiles as well as Jews; and Adler

saw with his eyes what he had hardly believed possible--a Jewish

company in a Yiddish play. The plays, however, seemed to Adler very

poor--mainly light opera with vaudeville accompaniment--and the acting

was also poor; but Israel Rosenberg, whom Adler describes as a

long-faced Jew with protruding teeth, enormous eyes, and a mouth as

wide as a saucer, amused Adler with the wit which he interpolated as

he acted. Rosenberg, "more ignorant than I," says Adler, "was yet

very successful." The two became intimate, and Rosenberg and Fräulein

Oberländer urged Adler to go on the stage; Rosenberg because Adler at

that time was comparatively rich, and the Fräulein because she loved

(and afterwards married) the vigorous young man from Odessa. And Adler

felt his education to be superior to that of these successful actors,

and decided to make the experiment. To choose the stage, however, was

to choose poverty, as he had begun to succeed in business, but he did

not hesitate and, leaving his friends and family, he went on a tour

with the company.

In the first performance he was so frightened that he did not hear his

own words. He lost all his critical faculty, and played merely

instinctively. It was a long time before he acted better than the

average, which was at that time very low; but, finally, in a small

town named Elizabetgrad, Adler learned his lesson. A critic visited

the theatre every night, and wrote long articles upon it, but Adler

never found his name mentioned therein. He used to get up in the

morning very early, before any one else, to buy the newspaper, but was

always chagrined to find that the great man had overlooked him. At

first he thought that the critic must have a personal spite against

him, then that he was not noticed because he had only small rôles. At

last he was cast for a very long and emotional rôle. He thought that

this part would surely fetch the critic, and the next morning eagerly

bought a paper, but there was no criticism of the play at all.

Rosenberg went to the critic and asked the reason.

"Adler spoiled the whole thing," was the reply. "His acting was

unnatural and loud. I advise him to leave the stage."

"Then," said Adler, "I began to think. I cut my hair, which I had

allowed to grow long after the fashion of actors, and was at first

much discouraged. But thereafter I studied every rôle with great care,

and read the classic plays, and never played a part until I understood

it. Before that it was play with me; but after that it was serious

work."

For a number of years Adler continued to act in the cities of Russia,

and became the head of a company. In 1883, when Russia was closed to

the Jewish stage, Adler took his company to London, where he nearly

starved. There was no Ghetto there, and the company gave occasional

performances at various Yiddish clubs scattered through the city.

Adler lost all his money, and got into debt. His wife and child died,

and at one time in despair he thought of leaving the stage. But it was

too late to go back to Odessa, for he had once for all cut himself off

from his family and friends. He was falsely informed by a Jew who had

been to America that to succeed there he would have to sing, dance,

and speak German. So he stayed some time longer in London. The

Rothschilds, Dr. Felix Adler, and others, took an interest in him, and

told him that as the Jewish theatre could have no future, since

Yiddish must ultimately be forgotten, he had better give it up.

It was in 1887 that Adler came to New York, where he found two Yiddish

companies already well started. To avoid conflict with them, he went

to Chicago, where, however, a Yiddish theatre could get no foothold.

Some rich Chicago people tried to induce Adler to learn English and go

on the American stage; but Adler, always distrustful of his education

and ability to learn, declined their offers, now much to his regret.

He returned to New York, where Mogalesco and Kessler urged him to

stay, but the Ghetto actors in general were hostile to him, and he

went back to London. The next year, however, he was visited by four of

the managers of the New York Ghetto companies (among them Mogalesco),

vying with one another to secure Adler, whose reputation in the

Jewish community was rapidly growing. He went back to New York in

1889, where he appeared first at the Germania Theatre. He was

advertised in advance as a Salvini, a Barrett, a Booth, as all stars

combined. When he found how extravagantly he had been announced he was

angry, and wanted to go back to London, feeling that it was impossible

to live up to what his foolish managers had led the people to expect.

He consented to stay, but refused to appear in _Uriel Acosta_ for

which he was billed, preferring to begin in comedy, in order not to

appear to compete with the reputation of Salvini. The play, which was

called _The Ragpicker_, can still be seen in the Ghetto. In it Adler

tried to score as a character actor. But the people, expecting a

tragedy, took _The Ragpicker_ seriously, and did not laugh at all. The

play fell flat, and the managers rushed before the curtain and told

the audience that Adler was a poor actor, and that they had been

deceived in him. Through the influence of the management, the whole

company treated him with coldness and contempt, except the wife of one

of the directors. She is now Mrs. Adler, and is one of the capable

serious actresses at present at the People's Theatre. Finally, the

lease of the theatre passed into Adler's hands, and he dismissed the

whole company and formed a new one. Soon after began the struggle

which brought about the latest development of the Yiddish stage.

For some time Adler was successful, but he grew more and more

dissatisfied with his repertory. He could find no plays which

seriously portrayed the life of the people or contained any serious

ideas. Only the translated plays were good from his point of view; he

wished something original, and looked about for a playwright. One

night in a restaurant he was introduced to Jacob Gordin, who

afterwards wrote the greater part of the only serious original Yiddish

plays which exist.

Gordin at that time had written no plays, but he was a man of varied

literary activity, of a rarely good education, a thorough Russian

schooling, and of uncommon intelligence and strength of character. He

is Russian in appearance, a large broad-headed man with thick black

hair and beard. As he told me in his little home in Brooklyn, the

history of his life, he omitted all picturesque details, and

emphasized only his intellectual development. He was born in the same

town as Gogol, Ubigovrod in southern Russia, of rich parents. As a boy

he frequented the theatre, and like Adler, became a local critic and

hissed down what he did not approve. Like Adler, too, he was often

carried off to the police station and fined. He married early, became

a school-teacher and then a journalist (in Russian), writing every

sort of article, except political, and often sketches and short

stories for newspapers and periodicals in Odessa, where he finally

controlled a newspaper--the _Odessakianovosti_. He was a great admirer

of Tolstoi, and desiring to live on a farm to put into practice the

Count's ideas, he came to America in 1891, and nearly starved. He

became an editor of a Russian newspaper in New York and contributed to

other journals. In his own paper he wrote violent articles against the

Russian Government, as well as literary sketches. In Russia, Gordin

had never been in a Yiddish theatre, and when he met Adler in the New

York restaurant he knew little of the conventional Yiddish play. So he

wrote his first play in a fresh spirit, with only the character of the

people and his own ideals to work from. _Siberia_, produced in 1892,

was a success with the critics and actors, and may fairly be called

the first original Yiddish play of the better type.

The play struck a new note. It fell into line with the Russian spirit

of realism now so marked in intellectual circles in the Ghetto. Life

and types are what Gordin tried for, and Jacob Adler had found his

playwright. Since then Gordin has written about fifty plays, some of

which have been successful, and many have been marked by literary and

dramatic power. Some of the better ones are _Siberia_, the _Jewish

King Lear_, _The Wild Man_, _The Jewish Priest_, _Solomon Kaus_, _The

Slaughter_, and the _Jewish Queen Lear_. Jacob Adler has been until

recently his chief interpreter, altho Mogalesco, Kessler, and

Thomashevsky take his plays.

[Illustration: MADAM LIPTZEN]

For several years an actress, Mrs. Liptzen, was the main interpreter

of Gordin's plays. She is one of the most individual, if not one of

the most skillful, actresses on the stage of New York's Ghetto, and is

sometimes spoken of in the quarter as the Yiddish Duse. She is the

only actress of the east side who is thus compared, by a sub-title,

with a famous Gentile artist, altho in many directions there is a

great tendency in the Ghetto to adopt foreign names and ideas. As a

matter of fact, her art is exceedingly limited, but she has the

unusual distinction of appearing only in the best plays, steadfastly

refusing to take part in performances which she deems to be

dramatically unworthy. She consequently appears very seldom, usually

only in connection with the production of a new play by Jacob Gordin,

who at present writes many of his plays with the "Yiddish Duse" in

mind.

Mrs. Liptzen was born in Zitomir, South Russia, and was interested

exclusively in the stage from her childhood. The founder of the

Yiddish stage, Abraham Goldfaden, and Jacob Adler, played in her town

for a few nights when she was about eighteen years old. Her parents

were orthodox Jews, and to go to the theatre she was forced to resort

to subterfuge. She became acquainted with Goldfaden and Adler, and ran

away from home in order to accompany them as an actress. At first she

sang and acted in such popular operatic plays as _Der Schmendrik_, and

continued for three years in Russia, until the Yiddish theatre was

forbidden there. Then she went with a new company to Berlin, where the

whole aggregation nearly starved. They were reduced to selling all

their stage properties, the proceeds of which were made away with by a

dishonest agent. During the time their performances in Berlin

continued Mrs. Liptzen received, it is said, the sum of ten pfennige

(two and one-half cents) a day, on which she lived. She paid five

pfennige for lodging and five pfennige for bread and coffee; and there

is left in her now a correspondingly amazing impression of the

cheapness with which she could live in Germany in those days.

Jacob Adler was at that time in London with a company, eking out a

miserable existence. He wrote to Mrs. Liptzen's husband, an invalid in

Odessa, to send his wife to London to play in his company. About 1886

Mrs. Liptzen went to London and played in _Esther von Engedi_ (the

Yiddish _Othello_), _Leah the Forsaken_, _Rachel_, _The Jews_, etc. In

London she stayed three years, when, the theatre burning down, she

went with Adler to Chicago. They tried to find a place in New York,

but the Yiddish company, with Kessler and Mogalesco at its head,

already in New York, froze them out, and they tried to get a foothold

in Chicago. A little later Mrs. Liptzen left Chicago for New York,

called by the Yiddish company there to play leading parts. She began

in New York with _Leah the Forsaken_, and received only $10 for the

first three performances. It is said that she now receives from $100

to $200 for every performance, a fact indicating not only her growth

in popularity but also the great financial success of the Yiddish

theatres in New York.

Twelve years ago Mrs. Liptzen retired for a time from the stage, the

reason being that there were no new plays in which she desired to

appear, since the demand was entirely supplied by the romantic and

historical operatic playwrights, Prof. Horowitz and Mr. Latteiner.

It was not until Jacob Gordin came into prominence as a realistic

playwright, that Mrs. Liptzen came out of her dignified retirement.

Jacob Adler was the first to play Gordin's pieces; but he played many

others, too, trying in a practical way gradually to make the cause of

realism triumphant. Mrs. Liptzen, however, made no compromise, and

kept quiet until she was able to get the plays she wanted, which soon

were written by Gordin.

Mrs. Liptzen's first success with a Gordin play was in _Medea_, for

which Gordin received, it is said, the enormous sum of $85--having

sold plays previous to that time for the well-fixed price of $35.

_Medea's Youth_, written by Gordin for Mrs. Liptzen, was a failure,

altho the author thought so well of it as a literary production that

he had it translated into English. The next of Mrs. Liptzen's

successes was the _Jewish Queen Lear_, for which Gordin received

$200--an enormous sum for a Yiddish playwright in those days. _The

Slaughter_ was produced two years ago, and last year Mrs. Liptzen

appeared in Gordin's _The Oath_, a Yiddish production of _Fuhrmann

Henschel_. Of late Mr. Gordin's plays have been produced by a younger

actress of more varied talent than Mrs. Liptzen--Mrs. Bertha Kalisch,

on the whole a much worthier interpreter than the older woman.

It is Adler, however, who has been the belligerent promoter of the

original and serious Yiddish drama. In 1893 he tried to introduce

Gordin's plays and the new spirit of realism and literature into his

company at the Windsor Theatre. But the old style is still strong in

popular affection, and Adler's company rebelled. Whereupon Adler went

to Russia to form a new company which would be more amenable to his

ideas. He came back with the new troupe, and ordered a new play from

Gordin, who produced _The Jewish King Lear_. At the first reading of

the play the company protested, but Adler begged for a trial, telling

them that they did not know what a good play was. The play proved a

great and deserved success, and is now frequently repeated. It

contains several scenes of great power, and portrays with faithful art

the life of the Russian Jew. In 1894 Adler tried the experiment of

leasing a small theatre, the Roumania, in which nothing but plays

which expressed his ideas should be presented. A number of Gordin's

plays were given, but the theatre had much the same fate that would

befall a theatre up town which should play only the ideally best. It

failed completely. After that both Adler and Gordin were compelled to

compromise. Adler is now associated with a company which presents

every kind of play known to the Ghetto, and Gordin has had to

introduce horseplay and occasional vaudeville and comic opera into his

plays. Even the best of the Yiddish plays contain these excrescences.

But both Adler and Gordin, while remaining practical men, with an eye

to the box-office receipts, are working to eliminate more and more

what is distasteful to them and impertinent to art. A year ago last

autumn Gordin succeeded in having his latest play, _The Slaughter_,

performed without any vaudeville accompaniment. He deemed it a

triumph, particularly as it was successful, and felt a debt of

gratitude to Mrs. Liptzen, who produced the play without insisting on

unworthy interpolations.

Gordin now hopes that the days of compromise for him are past, and

Adler expects to secure, some day, a theatre in which he can

successfully produce only the serious plays of Jewish life. But both

these men are pessimistic about the future of dramatic art in the

Ghetto. They feel not only the weight of the commercial spirit, but

also the imminent death of their stage. For the Jews of the Ghetto as

they become Americanized are liable to lose their instinctive Yiddish,

and then there will be no more drama in that tongue. The only Yiddish

stage, worthy of the name, in the world will probably soon be no more.

Jacob Adler consequently regrets that his "jargon" confines him to the

Bowery stage, and Jacob Gordin longs to have his plays translated and

produced on the English stage.

Mogalesco, the actor, who has, perhaps, the greatest talent of them

all, whose dramatic art was born with the Yiddish stage, and who is

equally happy in a comedietta by Latteiner or a character-play by

Gordin, is, like the true actor, without ideas, but always felicitous

in interpretation, and enthusiastically loved by the Jewish

play-goers. He and Adler, if they had been fortunate enough to have

received a training consistently good, and had acted in a language of

wider appeal, would easily have taken their places among those

artistically honored by the world. Even as it is they have, with

Gordin, with Kessler, with Mrs. Liptzen, Mrs. Kalisch and the rest,

the distinction of being prominent figures in the short career of the

Yiddish stage, which, founded by Goldfaden in 1876, in Roumania, has

received to-day, in New York, its highest and almost exclusive

development.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] See text, section on "Realism."

Chapter Six

The Newspapers

Yiddish newspapers have, as compared with their contemporaries in the

English language, the strong interest of great freedom of expression.

They are controlled rather by passion than by capital. It is their joy

to pounce on controlling wealth, and to take the side of the laborer

against the employer. A large proportion of the articles are signed, a

custom in striking contrast with that of the American newspaper; the

prevalence of the unsigned article in the latter is held by the

Yiddish journals to illustrate the employer's tendency to arrogate

everything to himself, and to make the paper a mere organ of his own

policy and opinions. The remark of one of the Jewish editors, that the

"Yiddish newspaper's freedom of expression is limited by the Penal

Code alone," has its relative truth. It is, of course, equally true

that the new freedom of the Jews, who in Russia had no journal in the

common Yiddish, runs in these New York papers into an emotional

extreme, a license which is apt to distort the news and to give over

the editorial pages to virulent party disputes.

Nevertheless, the Yiddish press, particularly the Socialistic branch

of it, is an educative element of great value in the Ghetto. It has

helped essentially to extend the intellectual horizon of the Jew

beyond the boundaries of the Talmud, and has largely displaced the

rabbi in the position of teacher of the people. Not only do these

papers constitute a forum of discussion, but they publish frequent

translations of the Russian, French, and German modern classics, and

for the first time lay the news of the world before the poor Jewish

people. An event of moment to the Jews, such as a riot in Russia,

comes to New York in private letters, and is printed in the papers

here often before the version "prepared" by the Russian Government

appears in the Russian newspapers. Thus a Jew on the east side

received a letter from his father in Russia asking why the reserves

there had been called out, and the son's reply gave him the first

information about the war in China.

The make-up of the Yiddish newspaper is in a general way similar to

that of its American contemporary. The former is much smaller, however,

containing only about as much reading matter as would fill six or

eight columns of a "down-town" newspaper. The sporting department is

entirely lacking, the Jew being utterly indifferent to exercise of any

kind. They are all afternoon newspapers, and draw largely for the news

upon the morning editions of the American papers. The staff is very

limited, consisting of a few editors and, usually, only one reporter

for the local news of the quarter. They give more space proportionately

than any American paper to pure literature--chiefly translations, tho

there are some stories founded on the life of the east side--and to

scientific articles of popular character. The interesting feature of

these newspapers, however, consists in their rivalries and their

differences in principle. This can be presented most simply in a short

sketch of their history.

THE CONSERVATIVE JOURNALS

Yiddish journalism in New York began about thirty years ago, and

continued in unimportant and unrepresentative newspapers until about

twelve years ago, when the _Tageblatt_, the first daily newspaper, and

the _Arbeiterzeitung_, an important Socialistic weekly, now defunct,

but from which developed the present Socialist dailies, came into

existence. The _Tageblatt_, which has maintained its general character

from the beginning, is the most conservative, as well as the oldest,

of the daily newspapers of the Ghetto. It is national and orthodox,

and fights tooth and nail for whatever is distinctively Jewish in

customs, literature, language, and religion. It hates the reform sects

in religion and the Socialistic tendencies in politics and economics.

It is called a "capitalist" paper by its opponents, and is so in the

sense that it is more dependent upon its advertisements than the

Socialistic papers, which are partly supported by frequent

entertainments and balls, to which all their friends go. And yet how

little capitalistic is even this paper is shown by the fact that while

it takes a non-committal attitude towards strikes in the Ghetto it

supports those which occur outside.

Sympathetic with workingmen and not antagonistic to the employers of

the Ghetto, the _Tageblatt_ conventionally unites all the Jewish

interests it consistently can, and has admittedly the largest

circulation of any daily paper in the Ghetto. The Socialists call it

"bourgeois" as well as "capitalistic" (which is the most horrid of all

words in the quarter). Some call it chauvinistic because of its strong

Nationalist tendency, and fanatic because it upholds the religion of

the Jews; the Jew who wants first of all to be an American and

up-to-date hates the _Tageblatt_ as tending to strengthen the

distinction between Jew and Gentile. This paper goes so far in its

conservatism that, according to its enemies, it condemns all rabbis

who mention the name of Christ in their sermons, and holds to a strict

interpretation of Talmudic law in regard to habits of life. "It is

only the old-fashioned greenhorns," said the editor of one of the

other papers, "coming from the old country, who will stand for it."

THE SOCIALIST PAPERS

The Socialist weekly, the _Arbeiterzeitung_, marked the beginning of

the most vital journalism of the east side, and stood in striking

contrast to the _Tageblatt_. In the circumstances attending its

development into the two existing rival Socialistic papers, the

_Vorwärts_ and the _Abendblatt_,[2] a picture of the progressive and

passionate character of the Russian-Jewish Socialists of the Ghetto is

presented, and some of the most important and picturesque personages.

The most educated and intelligent among the Jews of the east side

speak Russian, and are reactionary in politics and religion. Coming

from Russia, as they do, they have a fierce hatred of government and

capitalism, and a more or less Tolstoian love for the peasant and the

workingman. The purpose of the organizers of the _Arbeiterzeitung_

Publishing Association was to educate the people, promulgate the

doctrines of Socialism, and be altogether the organ of the workman

against the employer. From the outset, beginning in 1890, the

_Arbeiterzeitung_ was a popular and influential paper.

All the older journals had affected a Germanized Yiddish, which the

people did not understand; but the new paper, aiming at the modern

heart of the Ghetto, carried on its propaganda in the common jargon of

the Jew, the pure Yiddish; and, growing enormously in circulation,

forced the language down the throats of the conservative journals. In

this popular tongue, the _Arbeiterzeitung_ carried on for five years a

most energetic campaign for a broad Socialism, admitting all allied

movements in favor of common ownership, directing and encouraging

strikes, printing popular scientific articles, realistic stories,

dramatic criticisms, and expressing and leading generally the best

intelligence of the Yiddish community. With the constituency of which

this journal was the organ, Socialism had almost the force and passion

of a religious movement. An example of the paper's power was in

connection with the Bakers' Union. That organization imposed a label

on all bread made in the Ghetto, and insisted that all the bakers

should handle only bread of that brand. The _Arbeiterzeitung_

supported the Union so effectively that no other bread could possibly

be obtained in the quarter. At the first _Yahresfest_ of the journal,

Cooper Union overflowed with enthusiastic workingmen, and long lines

of the excluded stretched out down the Bowery to Houston Street.

[Illustration: IN THE OFFICE OF THE "VÖRWARTS"]

The man whose name is most intimately connected with the

_Arbeiterzeitung_ is its former editor, Abraham Cahan, now known

outside of the Ghetto as a writer in English of novels and short

stories of Jewish life. He is of the best type of the ethical

agitator; a convincing and impassioned speaker; he has held hundreds

of workingmen by his clear and strongly expressed ideas, whether

written in his paper or spoken at nightly meetings in some poor hall

on the east side, where the men gathered after the labors of the day.

Twice he went abroad to speak at international labor conferences. At

the same time that he supported the definite cause of the Social

Democracy, he put the same energy and passion into the education of

the people in scientific and literary directions. He spoke and wrote

for directness, simplicity, and humanity. In art, therefore, the

realistic school of Russian writers, of whom in our generation there

have been so many great men, received his fighting allegiance. For

five years Cahan put all his intelligence and devotion into this work,

and the power of the _Arbeiterzeitung_ was partly his power. To-day,

in the Ghetto, where fierce jealousies are rampant, Cahan is admitted

to be the man, among many men of energy, intelligence, and devotion,

who has wielded most influence in the community.

A literary and dramatic event happened in 1892 which showed the power

of Cahan and his Socialist associates in influencing the taste of the

Ghetto. It was the production of Gordin's drama _Siberia_. Up to that

time, nothing but conventional opera, melodrama, and historical plays

had been given on the Bowery, but the day after the performance of

_Siberia_ the _Arbeiterzeitung_ contained a long review of the play by

Cahan, welcoming it enthusiastically as an event breaking the way for

realistic art in the colony. Since then this type of play has taken a

prominent place in the repertory at the Yiddish theatres. For five

years the _Arbeiterzeitung_ continued its influence, but then came a

split among the Socialists, which resulted in two daily papers--the

_Abendblatt_ and the _Vorwärts_.

[Illustration: BUYING A NEWSPAPER]

Cahan, Miller and others of the men who had started the

_Arbeiterzeitung_ gradually lost control through the share system

which had been inaugurated. They desired to maintain a liberal policy

towards all labor movements, and to allow the literary and Socialistic

societies to be represented in the paper, but the other faction wanted

the newspaper to be exclusively an organ of Socialism in its narrow

sense. The result was that, soon after the publication of the

_Arbeiterzeitung_ as the _Daily Abendblatt_, Cahan resigned the

editorship and turned disgusted to English newspapers and to realistic

fiction, in which he was absorbed until recently. A few months ago he

resumed the editorship of the _Vorwärts_ after an absence of several

years from participation in Yiddish journalism. Louis Miller, a witty

and energetic Socialist and writer, who had from the first been active

in the management of the weekly, was one of the most prominent of the

men who continued the fight against the narrower Socialistic

element--a fight which resulted in the establishment in 1897 of the

other Socialist daily now existing, the _Vorwärts_.

These two papers were, until recently, when the _Abendblatt_ died,

bitter rivals. The _Abendblatt_ was devoted to the interests of the

Socialist Labor Party while the _Vorwärts_ supports in a general way

the Social Democracy; altho it is not so distinctively a party paper

as was the _Abendblatt_. The adherents of the latter paper looked upon

the _Vorwärts_ as unreliable and the _Vorwärts_ people thought the

_Abendblatt_ intolerant. The _Abendblatt_ prided itself on its

uncompromising character, and the _Vorwärts_ is content to adapt

itself to what it deems the present needs of the Jewish community.

Thus the _Vorwärts_ is willing to join hands with reform movements in

general, with trades unions, etc., while the _Abendblatt_ stiffly

demanded that allied organizations should enter the socialist camp.

The triumph of the _Vorwärts_ was therefore a triumph of the more

liberal spirits.

Two other daily publications are more distinctively mere newspapers

than the two Socialistic organs, and make no consistent attempt to

influence public opinion, at least in the definite direction of a

"movement." The _Abend-Post_ seems to have no very distinctive policy

or character; it is neither Socialistic nor conservative Jewish; the

distinction it aims at is to be a newspaper simply, to reflect events

and not to determine opinion. In the editor's words, the _Abend-Post_

"is not chauvinistic, like the _Tageblatt_; the Jew does not resound

in it. It aims to Americanize the Ghetto, and diminish or ignore the

chasm between Jew and Gentile." The editor of one of the Socialist

papers calls this sort of thing by another name. "The _Abend-Post_,"

he said, "is an imitation of American yellow journalism." A fifth

daily, the _Herald_, is even less distinctive than the _Abend-Post_.

It has no party and is not as sensational as the other. It might,

perhaps, be called the Jewish "mugwump."

Recently a sixth daily, _The Jewish World_, has been organized under

favorable auspices. Its avowed policy is to bridge the chasm which

exists between sons and fathers in the Ghetto; to make the sons more

Hebraic and the fathers more American; the sons more conservative and

the fathers more progressive. Connected with its management is H.

Masliansky, one of the most impassioned orators of the Ghetto.

The question of the circulation figures of these five dailies is a

difficult one. About the only thing that seems certain is that the

_Tageblatt_ leads in this respect. Even the editors of the other

papers admit that, altho they differ as to the absolute figures. The

editor of the _Tageblatt_ places his paper's circulation at 40,000,

the _Abend-Post_ at 14,000, the _Herald_ next, and the two Socialistic

papers last, which ending is a felicitous consummation for the editor

of the most conservative newspaper in the Ghetto. The editor of the

_Abend-Post_ says the _Tageblatt_ leads with a daily issue of about

30,000, the _Abend-Post_ coming next with 23,700, the _Herald_ and the

Socialist papers stringing out in the rear. The editors of the

Socialist sheets naturally give a somewhat different order. Mr. Miller

of the _Vorwärts_ puts the actual circulation of the _Tageblatt_ at

about 17,000; his own paper, the _Vorwärts_, next, with about 14,000

daily except on Saturday, the Jewish Sunday, when the number ranges

between 20,000 and 25,000, owing to the fact that the conservative

newspapers (_i. e._, those that are not Socialistic) do not appear on

that day. The circulation of the rival Socialistic paper, the

_Abendblatt_, he puts at about 8,000. In these figures there is no

attempt at entire accuracy.

THE ANARCHIST PAPERS

There are several Yiddish weekly and monthly journals published in New

York. The _Tageblatt_, _Abend-Post_ and _Herald_ have weekly editions,

but by far the most interesting of the papers which are not dailies

are the two Anarchistic sheets, the _Freie Arbeiter-stimme_, a weekly,

and the _Freie Gesellschaft_, a monthly.

[Illustration: A "GHETTO" NEWSPAPER OFFICE]

Contrary to the general impression of the character of these people,

in which bombs play a large part, the Anarchists of the Ghetto are a

gentle and idealistic body of men. The abnormal activity of the

Russian Jews in this country is expressed by the Socialists rather

than the Anarchists. The latter are largely theorists and aim rather

at the education of the people by a journalistic exploitation of their

general principles than by a warlike attitude towards specific events

of the time. Their attitude is not so partisan as that of the

Socialists. They quarrel less among themselves, and are characterized

by dreamy eyes and an unpractical scheme of things. They believe in

non-resistance and the power of abstract right, and are trying to work

out a peaceful revolution, maintaining that the violence often

accompanying the movement in Europe is due to the fact that many

Anarchists are passionate individuals who in their indignation do not

live up to their essentially gentle principles. The Socialists aim at

a more strictly centralized government, even than any one existing,

since they desire the whole machinery of production and distribution

to be in the hands of the community; the Anarchists desire no

government whatever, believing that law works against the native

dignity of the individual, and trusting to man's natural goodness to

maintain order under free conditions. A man's own conscience only can

punish him sufficiently, they think. The Socialists go in vividly for

politics, while the Anarchists have nothing to do with them. The point

on which these two parties agree is the common hatred of private

property.

[Illustration: S. JANOWSKY]

The weekly Anarchistic paper, the _Freie Arbeiter-stimme_, prints

about 7,000 copies. Out of this circulation, with the assistance of

balls, entertainments, and benefits at the theatres, the paper is

able to exist. It pays a salary to only one man, the editor, S.

Janowsky, who receives the sum of $13 a week. He is a little

dark-haired man, with beautiful eyes, and soft, persuasive voice. He

thinks that government is so corrupt that the Anarchists need do

little to achieve their ends; that silent forces are at work which

will bring about the great day of Anarchistic communism. In his

newspaper he tries to educate the common people in the principles of

anarchy. The aim is popular, and the more intelligent exploitation of

the cause is left to the monthly. The _Freigesellschaft_, with the

same principles as the _Freie Arbeiter-stimme_, has a higher literary

and philosophical character. The editors and contributors are men of

culture and education, and work without any pay. It is still gentler

and more pacific in its character than the weekly, of whose

comparatively contemporaneous and agitatory method it disapproves

calmly; believing, as the editors of the monthly do, that a weekly

paper cannot exist without giving the people something other than the

ideally best. With reference to the ideally best, a number of

serious, contemplative men gather in a basement opposite the Hebrew

Institute, the headquarters of the monthly, and there talk about the

subjects often discussed within its pages, such as Slavery and

Freedom, Darwinism and Communism, Man and Government, the Purpose of

Education, etc.,--any broad economic subject admitting of abstract

treatment.

[Illustration: KATZ]

The talk of these Anarchists is distinguished by a high idealism, and

the unpractical and devoted attitude. One of the foremost among them

(they say they have no leaders, as that would be against individual

liberty) is Katz, literary editor of the _Vorwärts_, a contributor to

the Anarchistic monthly, a former editor of the Anarchistic weekly,

and a recently successful playwright in the Ghetto. His play, the

_Yiddish Don Quixote_, was produced at the Thalia Theatre on the

Bowery. Not since Gordin's _Siberia_ has a play aroused such

intelligent interest. The hero is a Quixotic Jew, full of kindness,

devotion, and love for his race and for humankind.

SOME PICTURESQUE CONTRIBUTORS

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.

[Illustration: A. FRUMKIN]

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.

[Illustration: A TYPE OF LABORING MAN]

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

[Illustration: S. LIBIN]

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.

[Illustration: HE IS TIRED, DISTRESSED AND IRRITATED]

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.

[Illustration: HE WAS BEWITCHED BY MATHEMATICS]

"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.

[Illustration: HE LEAVES HER WITH THE CART AND RUNS TO THE

TENEMENT-HOUSE]

"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.