Hutchins Hapgood

“ After leaving Levitzky and the Anarchists in the café, Sabina walked slowly towards the Bowery, suffering with love and humiliation, thinking of Levitzky and of the past, the devoted past which now seemed deeply wronged. Her despair can perhaps be understood by the fanatical nun whose years of devotion to her vows are rendered vain by a sudden impulse of the heart which is yielded to; or by the ambitious man of affairs who betrays a governmental trust because of the repeated frenzy of an emotion which wears out his resistance and leads him to the woman who has charmed and deceived him. ”

“ There is no school of literature. Consequently, there is great loss of energy, great waste of material; great richness, but what carelessness, what deplorable carelessness, about the deepest and noblest and most serious things in life! I love you; I love you all; you are clever, good fellows, but you are children, talented, to be sure, but wayward and vagrant children, in the fields of art. Sincerity, realism, purpose and unity are what as a race you need, if you wish ever to have a consistent and genuine art.
"The Russian, the Frenchman, the German, 287 knows what he wants. ”

“ In the midst of the frivolous Bowery, devoted to tinsel variety shows, "dive" music-halls, fake museums, trivial amusement booths of all sorts, cheap lodging-houses, ten-cent shops and Irish-American tough saloons, the theatres of the chosen people alone present the serious as well as the trivial interests of an entire community. Into these three buildings crowd the Jews of all the Ghetto classes—the sweat-shop woman with her baby, the day-laborer, the small Hester Street shopkeeper, the Russian-Jewish anarchist and socialist, the Ghetto rabbi and scholar, the poet, the journalist. ”

“ But in America, even before he begins to go to our public schools, the little Jewish boy finds himself in contact with a new world which stands in violent contrast with the orthodox environment of his first few years. Insensibly—at the beginning—from his playmates in the streets, from his older brother or sister, he picks up a little English, a little American slang, hears older boys boast of prize-fighter Bernstein, and learns vaguely to feel that there is a strange and fascinating life on the street. ”

“ The talk is good, for there assemble, in the late afternoon and evening, the chosen crowd of "intellectuals." The best that is Russian to-day is intensely serious. What is distinctively Jewish has always been serious. The man hunted from his country is apt to have a serious tone in thought and feeling.
It is this combination—Russian, Jewish, and exile—that is represented at these little Canal Street cafés. The sombre and earnest qualities of the race, emphasized by the special conditions, receive here expression in the mouths of actors, socialists, musicians, journalists, and poets. ”

“ Thus talks the Russian prophet. He is a robust, earnest man, who is trying to make head and tail out of contemporary English literature. He finds no great mainspring of impulse or principle behind it, but an infinite pandering to an infinitely diversified public taste. He thinks it is a kind of vaudeville of art, full of compromises, vulgar in its lack of principle. It makes him sad in much the same way that skepticism and profanity sadden a deeply religious person. Wisdom and truth he wants, and doesn't find them. ”

“ The shrewd-faced boy with the melancholy eyes that one sees everywhere in the streets of New York's Ghetto, occupies a peculiar position in our society. If we could penetrate into his soul, we should see a mixture of almost unprecedented hope and excitement on the one hand, and of doubt, confusion, and self-distrust on the other hand. Led in many contrary directions, the fact that he does not grow to be an intellectual anarchist is due to his serious racial characteristics.
Three groups of influences are at work on him—the orthodox Jewish, the American, and the Socialist ”

“ Love of truth, indeed, is the quality which seems to a stranger in the Ghetto the great virtue of that section of the city. Truth, pleasant or unpleasant, is what the best of them desire. It is true that, in the reaction from the usual "affable" literature of the American book-market, these realists rather prefer the unpleasant. That, however, is a sign of energy and youth. A vigorous youthful literature is always more apt to breathe the spirit of tragedy than a literature more mature and less fresh. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As we ascend in the scale of education in the Ghetto we find women who derive their culture and ideas from a double source—from Socialism and from advanced Russian ideals of literature and life. They have lost faith completely in the orthodox religion, have substituted no other, know Russian better than Yiddish, read Tolstoi, Turgenef and Chekhov, and often put into practice the most radical theories of the "new woman," particularly those which say that woman should be economically independent of man. ”

“ The old Jew on arriving in New York usually becomes a sweat-shop tailor or push-cart peddler. There are few more pathetic sights than an old man with a long beard, a little black cap on his head and a venerable face—a man who had been perhaps a Hebraic or Talmudic scholar in the old country, carrying or pressing piles of coats in the melancholy sweat-shop ”

“ He would be like any other practical, ambitious, rather worldly American boy. The struggle is strong because the boy's nature, at once religious and susceptible, is strongly appealed to by both the old and new. At the same time that he is keenly sensitive to the charm of his American environment, with its practical and national opportunities, he has still a deep love for his race and the old things. He is aware, and rather ashamed, of the limitations of his parents. He feels that the trend and weight of things are against them, that they are in a minority ”

“ In the studio and at an exhibition at the Hebrew Institute Epstein had two years ago a number of sketches and a few paintings—the latter very crude as far as the technique of color is concerned, and the sketches in charcoal rough and showing comparatively slight mastery of the craft. But, particularly in the sketches, there is character in every one, and at once a sympathetic and a realistic imagination. He tells the truth about the Ghetto as he sees it, but into the dark reality of the external life he puts frequently a melancholy beauty of spirit. ”

“ The man of form, the lover of the old, the cool man with scholastic tinge has no place in the sympathetic imagination of the Ghetto intellectuals. They leave him to the learned among old 100 fogies. And it is true that Dolitzki's appeal is a limited one, both as a man and as a poet. He is a handsome man of about forty-five years, with a fine profile, an unenthusiastic manner, a native reserve very evident in his way of reading his poetry. He has nothing of the buoyant spontaneity, the impersonal feeling of Zunser. The poet of the people was a part of his verse as he read. ”

“ The failure has left in Schwartzberg's soul a passionate hatred of what he calls the materialism of the Jews in America. Only in Europe, he thinks, does the love of the spiritual remain with them. Of the rabbis of the Ghetto he spoke with bitterness. "They," he said, "are the natural teachers of the people. They could do much for the Hebrew literature and language. Why don't they? Because they know no Hebrew and have no culture. In Russia the Jews demand that their rabbis should be learned and spiritual, but here they are ignorant and materialistic." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 easy to see that the Ghetto boy's growing Americanism will be easily triumphant at once over the old traditions and the new socialism. Whether or not he will be able to retain his moral earnestness and native idealism will depend not so much upon him as upon the development of American life as a whole. What we need at the present time more than anything else is a spiritual unity such as, perhaps, will only be the distant result of our present special activities. We need something similar to the spirit underlying the national and religious unity of the orthodox Jewish culture. ”

“ The boys not only talk together of picnics, of the crimes of which they read in the English newspapers, of prize-fights, of budding business propositions, but they gradually quit going to synagogue, give up "chaider" promptly when they are thirteen years old, avoid the Yiddish theatres, seek the up-town places of amusement, dress in the latest American fashion, and have a keen eye for the right thing in neckties. They even refuse sometimes to be present at supper on Friday evenings. Then, indeed, the sway of the old people is broken. ”

“ Contrasting sharply in many respects with this beautiful old teacher is the man who peddles from tenement-house to tenement-house in the down-town Ghetto, to support himself and his three young children. S. B. Schwartzberg, unlike most of the "submerged" scholars, is still a young man, only thirty-seven years old, but he is already discouraged, bitter, and discontented. He feels himself the apostle of a lost cause—the regeneration in New York of the old Hebrew language and literature. His great enterprise in life has failed. ”