Israel Zangwill

“ He forced open the door; he had a vision of surprised 'hands' stopping their machines, of a beautiful, startled girl holding the ends of a half-laid tablecloth—his Rachel, oh, his Rachel!
'Open the window, one of you!' panted Haigitcha, her shoulders still straining against the door. 'Call a policeman—the man is drunk!'
He staggered back, his pressure relaxed, the door slammed. This repetition of his 'Yvonne Rupert' experience sobered him effectually. What right, indeed, had he to force himself upon this woman, upon these children, to whom he was dead? ”

“ A wealthy Jewish philanthropist had organized a prison prayer-service, and Elkan eagerly grasped at the break in the monotony. Several of the prisoners who posed as Jews with this same motive were detected and reprimanded; but Elkan felt, with the new grim sense of humour that meditation on Yvonne Rupert and the world she fooled was developing in him, that he was as little of a Jew as any of them. This elopement to America had meant a violent break with his whole religious past. Not once had he seen the inside of an American synagogue. Gittel had had no use for synagogues. ”

“ For even to Elkan Mandle, with his Ghetto purview, Yvonne Rupert's fame, both as a 'Parisian' star and the queen of American advertisers, had penetrated. Ever since she had summoned a Jewish florist for not paying her for the hundred and eleven bouquets with which a single week's engagement in vaudeville had enabled her to supply him, the journals had continued to paragraph her amusing, self-puffing adventures. ”

“ As he sat on his hard stool in the whitewashed workshop on the Bowery, clumsily pasting the flamboyant portrait on the boxes of the 'Yvonne Rupert cigar,' he wondered dully—after the first flush of joy at getting a job after weeks of hunger—at the strange fate that had again brought him into connection, however remote, with stageland. ”

“ There she sat, the witching she-devil, perched on the rickety table just contributed to the home, a piquant, dark-eyed, yet golden-haired, mite of eleven, calm and comparatively spruce amid the wailing litter of parents and children.
'Settle this among yourselves,' she seemed to be saying. 'When the chairs are here I will sit on them; when the table is laid I will draw to; when the pious philanthropist provides the fire I will purr on the hearth.'
Ah, he had come forward as the pious philanthropist—pious enough then, Heaven knew. ”

“ In his miserable attic off Hester Street—that recalled the attic he had found her in, though it was many stories nearer the sky—he warmed himself with Gittel's image, smiling, light-darting, voluptuous. Night and sleep surrendered him to grotesque combinations—Gittel Goldstein smoking cigarettes in a bath-room, Yvonne Rupert playing Yiddish heroines in a little chapel. ”

“ He listened impatiently. He had never been caught by Socialism, even at his hungriest. He had once been an employer himself, and his point of view survived.
They talked of the woman through whom Lassalle had met his death. One of them had seen her on the American stage—a bouncing burlesque actress.
'Like Yvonne Rupert?' he ventured to interpose.
'Yvonne Rupert?' They laughed. 'Ah, if Yvonne had only had such a snap!' cried Melchitsedek Pinchas. 'To have jilted Lassalle and been died for! ”

“ Moses Elkan, 'the converted Jew,' preaches eloquently to his blind brethren who never come to hear him. For he has 'found the light.' Exeter Hall's exposition of the Jewish prophecies has opened his eyes, and though his foes have been those of his own household, yet, remembering the terrible text, 'He that loveth son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me,' he has taken up his cross and followed after Christ alone. ”

“ And even if the good souls for whose thousands of pounds he is the annual interest should discover his true past—through this tale-bearer or another—is there not but the more joy over the sinner that repenteth? ”

“ But he did not commit suicide, nor did he starve. There is always one last refuge for the failures of the Ghetto, and Elkan's easy experience with the Jewish philanthropist had prepared the way for dealings with the Christian. ”