Abraham Cahan

“ His name was Bender. At first I did not like him. Yet I would hang on his lips, striving to memorize every English word I could catch and watching intently, not only his enunciation, but also his gestures, manners, and mannerisms, and accepting it all as part and parcel of the American way of speaking Sign language, which was the chief means of communication in the early days of mankind, still holds its own. It retains sway over nations of the highest culture with tongues of unlimited wealth and variety. And the gestures of the various countries are as different as their spoken languages. ”

“ It was a great sin, but she had never worn a wig in her life, and putting on one now seemed to be out of the question. This hair of hers was of a dark-brown hue, threaded with silver, and it grew in a tousled abundance of unruly wisps that seemed to be symbolic of her harum-scarum character. She was as pugnacious as she was charitable, and as quick to make up a quarrel as to pick one. Her husband, Michael Minsker, was a "worldly" man, with only a smattering of Talmud, and their younger children were being educated at the Russian schools. ”

“ I am now worth more than two million dollars and recognized as one of the two or three leading men in the cloak-and-suit trade in the United States. And yet when I take a look at my inner identity it impresses me as being precisely the same as it was thirty or forty years ago. My present station, power, the amount of worldly happiness at my command, and the rest of it, seem to be devoid of significance.
When I was young I used to think that middle-aged people recalled their youth as something seen through a haze. I know better now. Life is much shorter than I imagined it to be. ”

“ The American school-girl radiated a subtle influence, a spiritual ozone, which her mother breathed in greedily
"My own life is lost, but she shall be educated"— these words dropped from her lips quite often. On one occasion they came from her with a modification that lent them unusual meaning. It was on a Friday evening. Max was out, as usual, and the children were asleep. "My own life is lost, but Lucy shall be happy," she said
"Why?" I said, feelingly. "Why should you think yourself lost? I can't bear it, Dora." ”

“ I could not go to bed in a Pullman car, walk over the springy "runner" of a hotel corridor, unfold the immense napkin of a hotel dining-room, or shake down my trousers upon alighting from a boot-black's chair, without being conscious of the difference between my present life and my life in Antomir
I was full of energy, full of the joy of being alive, but there was usually an undercurrent of sadness to all this. While on the road I would feel homesick for New York, and at the same time I would feel that I had no home anywhere, that my mother was dead and I was all alone in the world. ”

“ She was hanging on to a strap directly across the car from me. I could not see her face, but the shape of her head and a certain jerk of it, when she laughed, looked strikingly familiar to me. Presently she chanced to turn half-way around, and I recognized her. It was Lucy. I had not seen her for six years. She was completely changed and yet the same. Not yet fully formed, elongated, attenuated, angular, ridiculously too tall for her looks, and not quite so pretty as she had been at nine or ten, but overflowing with color, with light, with blossoming life, she thrilled me almost to tears. ”

“ Presently other voices joined in, all in the same meditative, somewhat doleful rhythm. Gayer strains would have sounded sacrilegiously out of tune with the darkling glint of the river, with the mysterious splash of its waves against the bobbing bulkheads of the pier, with the starry enchantment of the passing ferry-boats, with the love-enraptured solemnity of the spring night.
I had not the heart even to think of business, much less to talk it. We fell silent, both of us, listening to the singing. Poor Gussie! She was not a pretty girl, and she did not interest me in the least. ”

“ One day he looked me over, much as an expert in horseflesh would a colt, and said, with the utmost seriousness: "Do you know, Levinsky, you have an awfully fine figure. You are a good-looking chap all around, for that matter. A fellow like you ought to make a hit with women. Why don't you learn to dance?"
The compliment made me wince and blush. Perhaps, if he had put it in the form of a jest I should even have liked it. As it was, I felt like one stripped in public. Still, I recalled with pleasure that Matilda had said similar things about my figure
"Why don't you learn to dance, Levinsky?" ”

“ Why be saddled with a partner? Why not get rid of Chaikin? I belittled the part which his samples had played in my successful start, and it seemed to be a cruel injustice to myself to share my fortune with a man who had no more brains than a cat. But I instantly saw the other side of the situation: It was Chaikin's models that had made the Manheimers what they were, and if I clung to him until he could afford to let me announce him as my partner the very news of it would be a tremendous boost for my factory. ”

“ The riot of prosperity introduced the fashion of respectable women covering their faces with powder and paint in a way that had hitherto been peculiar to women of the streets, so I pictured civilization as a harlot with cheeks, lips, and eyelashes of artificial beauty. I imagined mountains of powder and paint, a deafening chorus of affected laughter, a huge heart, as large as a city, full of falsehood and mischief
The leaders of the Jewish socialists, who were also at the head of the Jewish labor movement, seemed to me to be the most repulsive hypocrites of all. ”

“ I love music to madness. I yearn for the world of great singers, violinists, pianists. Several of the greatest of them are of my race and country, and I have met them, but all my acquaintance with them has brought me is a sense of being looked down upon as a money-bag striving to play the Maæcenas. I had a similar experience with a sculptor, also one of our immigrants, an East Side boy who had met with sensational success in Paris and London. I had him make my bust. His demeanor toward me was all that could have been desired. ”

“ An epigram occurred to me, something about the discrepancy between the spiritual quality of the sunset and the after-supper satisfaction of the onlookers. I essayed to express it, but was so embarrassed that I made a muddle of my English. Miss Tevkin took no notice of the remark.
The sunset was transformed into a thousand lumps of pearl, here and there edged with flame. In some places the pearl thinned away, dissolving into the color of the sky, while the outline of the lump remained—a map of glowing tracery on a ground of the subtlest blue. Drifts of gold were gleaming, blazing, going out. ”

“ I should then be in my natural element, and if I were doomed to loneliness I should have comforts to which I am now a stranger. That's the way I feel every time I pass the abandoned old building of the City College.
The business world contains plenty of successful men who have no brains.
Why, then, should I ascribe my triumph to special ability? I should probably have made a much better college professor than a cloak-manufacturer, and should probably be a happier man, too. I know people who have made much more money than I and whom I consider my inferiors in every respect. ”

“ The poor old peddler I now saw trying to cross Broadway was Shmerl the Pincher, the man with whom my mother had a pinching and hair-pulling duel after she found the marks of his cruelty on my young body. He had been one of the most heartless of my tormentors, yet it was so thrillingly sweet to see him in New York! In my schooldays I would dream of becoming a rich and influential man and wreaking vengeance upon my brutal teachers, more especially upon Shmerl the Pincher and "the Cossack," the man whose little daughter, Sarah-Leah, had been the heroine of my first romance. ”

“ To be telling a complete, unvarnished truth is in itself a pleasure. It is as though there were a special sense of truth and sincerity in our make-up (just as there is a sense of musical harmony, for example) , and the gratification of it were a source of delight.
Nor was this my only motive for telling Dora all. I had long since realized that the disdain and mockery with which Matilda handled me had been but a cloak for her interest in my person. ”

“ My wild oats were flavored with a sense of my failure as a business man, by my homesickness and passion for Matilda. My push-cart bored me. I was hungry for intellectual interest, for novel sensations. I was restless. Sometimes I would stop from business in the middle of the day to plunge into a page of Talmud at some near-by synagogue, and sometimes I would lay down the holy book in the middle of a sentence and betake myself to the residence of some fallen woman In my loneliness I would look for some human element in my acquaintance with these women. ”

“ The editorial derived its inspiration from the theory of the Struggle for Existence and the Survival of the Fittest. Unlike many of the other editorials I had read, it breathed conviction. It was obviously a work of love. When the central idea of the argument came home to me I was in a turmoil of surprise and elation. "Why, that's just what I have been saying all these days!" I exclaimed in my heart. "The able fellows succeed, and the misfits fail. Then the misfits begrudge those who accomplish things." I almost felt as though Darwin and Spencer had plagiarized a discovery of mine. ”

“ When famished I would sometimes saunter through the streets on the lower East Side which disreputable creatures used as their market-place. It was mildly exciting to watch women hunt for men and men hunt for women: their furtive glances, winks, tacit understandings, bargainings, the little subterfuges by which they sought to veil their purpose from the other passers-by; the way a man would take stock of a passing woman to ascertain whether she was of the approachable class; the timidity of some of the men and the matter-of-fact ease of others ”

“ Yes, I am willing to suffer for you, Levinsky." She spoke with profound, even-voiced earnestness, with peculiar solemnity, as though chanting a prayer. I was somewhat bored. Presently she paused, and, changing her tone, she asked. "Matilda talked to you of education. She wanted you to be an educated man, did she? Yes, but what did she do for you? She drank your blood, the leech, and when she got tired of it she dropped you. A woman like that ought to be torn to pieces. ”

“ Indeed, love-affairs between working-men and working-girls who are employed in the same place are not quite so common as one might suppose. The factory is scarcely a proper setting for romance. It is one of the battle-fields in our struggle for existence, where we treat woman as an inferior being, whereas in civilized love-making we prefer to keep up the chivalrous fiction that she is our superior. The girls of our shop, hard-worked, disheveled, and handled with anything but chivalry, aroused my sympathy, but it was not the kind of feeling that stimulates romantic interest. ”

“ The painful image of poor Rabbi M athia gouging out his eyes supplanted the nude figure of the previous quotation in my mind
Reb Sender pursued his "exhortative talk." He dwelt on the duties of man to man.
"If a man is tongue-tied, don't laugh at him, but, rather, feel pity for him, as you would for a man with broken legs. Nor should you hate a man who has a weakness for telling falsehoods. This, too, is an affliction, like stuttering or being lame. Say to yourself, 'Poor fellow, he is given to lying.' Above all, you must fight conceit, envy, and every kind of ill-feeling in your heart. ”

“ But I knew that he misinterpreted it into grim resentment of Dora's sally, as though I said, "Your wife's conduct had better be left undiscussed."
"What nonsense! She charged you too much, did she? Is that the way it all began? Did she insult you? Well, women-folk are liable to flare up, you know. Tell me all about it. I'll straighten it out between you. The children miss you awfully. Come, don't be a fool, Levinsky. Who ever took the words of a woman seriously? ”

“ I am always more or less conscious of my good clothes, of the high quality of my office furniture, of the power I wield over the men in my pay. As I have said in another connection, I still have a lurking fear of restaurant waiters.
I can never forget the days of my misery. I cannot escape from my old self.
My past and my present do not comport well. David, the poor lad swinging over a Talmud volume at the Preacher's Synagogue, seems to have more in common with my inner identity than David Levinsky, the well-known cloak-manufacturer. ”

“ Russia is a better country than America, anyhow, even if she is oppressed by a czar. It's a freer country, too—for the spirit, at least.
There is more poetry there, more music, more feeling, even if our people do suffer appalling persecution. The Russian people are really a warm-hearted people. Besides, one enjoys life in Russia better than here. Oh, a thousand times better. There is too much materialism here, too much hurry and too much prose, and—yes, too much machinery. It's all very well to make shoes or bread by machinery, but alas! ”

“ But then German-American Jews curry favor with Portuguese-American Jews, just as we all curry favor with Gentiles and as American Gentiles curry favor with the aristocracy of Europe
I often long for a heart-to-heart talk with some of the people of my birthplace. I have tried to revive my old friendships with some of them, but they are mostly poor and my prosperity stands between us in many ways
Sometimes when I am alone in my beautiful apartments, brooding over these things and nursing my loneliness, I say to myself: "There are cases when success is a tragedy." ”

“ I showed him the quarter I had received from the cloak contractor
"Poor fellow! Is that all you have? There are places where you can get a night's lodging for fifteen cents, but what are you going to do afterward? I am simply ashamed of myself."
"'Hospitality,'" he quoted from the Talmud, "'is one of the things which the giver enjoys in this world and the fruit of which he relishes in the world to come.' To think that I cannot offer a Talmudic scholar a night's rest! Alas! America has turned me into a mound of ashes." ”

“ It produced a bewitching effect on me. Here were highly respectable young women who would let men encircle their waists, each resting her arm on her partner's shoulder, and then go spinning and hopping with him, with a frank relish of the physical excitement in which they were joined. As I watched one of these girls I seemed to see her surrender much of her womanly reserve. I knew that the dance—an ordinary waltz—was considered highly proper, yet her pose and his struck me as a public confession of unseemly mutual interest. ”

“ I cannot sing myself, but some tunes give me thrills of pleasure, keen and terrible as the edge of a sword. Some haunt me like ghosts. But then this is a common trait among our people.
She was a wiry little woman, my mother, with prominent cheek-bones, a small, firm mouth, and dark eyes. Her hair was likewise dark, though I saw it but very seldom, for like all orthodox daughters of Israel she always had it carefully covered by a kerchief, a nightcap, or—on Saturdays and holidays—by a wig. ”

“ With all his illiteracy and crudity of language he had rare insight into the human heart and was full of subtle sympathy. He was the only person in America with whom I often indulged in a heart-to-heart confab. He was keenly aware of my loneliness. It seemed as though it disturbed him
"You are not a happy man, Levinsky," he once said to me. "You feel more alone than any bachelor I ever knew. You're an orphan, poor thing. You have a fine business and plenty of money and all sorts of nice times, but you are an orphan, just the same. You're still a child. You need a mother. ”

“ Let Lucy find out some day that her mother was a bad woman? I should take poison first."
"A bad woman!" I protested. "A better woman could not be found anywhere in the world. You are a saint, Dora."
"No, I am not. I am a bad, wicked, nasty woman. I hate myself." ”

“ I lived in clover. "Now I can work," I thought to myself, with the satisfaction of a well-filled stomach. "And work I will. I'll show people what I can do."
I applied myself to my task with ardor, but it did not last long. My former interest in the Talmud was gone. The spell was broken irretrievably. Now that I did not want for food, my sense of loneliness became keener than ever. ”

“ I chimed in, with a laugh, by way of showing off my understanding of things American. "It's Jewish votes he is after."
"Still, he's not a bad fellow," the man by my side remarked. "If you have a trial in his court he'll decide it in your favor."
"How is that?" I asked, perplexed. "And how about the other fellow? He can't decide in favor of both, can he?"
"There is no 'can't' in America," the man by my side returned, with a sage smile
I pondered the riddle until I saw light. "I know what you mean," I said. "He does favors only to those who vote for his party." ”