Konrad Bercovici

“ Most of the time New York is tuning up. Each voice is practising its part of the score—the little solos for the violins to please the superficial sentimentalists, and the twenty bars for the horn to satisfy the martial spirit in men.
But don't, oh sightseers, don't think you know New York because you have sauntered through a few streets and eaten hot tamales in a Mexican restaurant, or burnt your tongue with goulash in some "celebrated Hungarian palace." Only to very few privileged ones is it given to hear the symphony—and they have to pay dearly for it. ”

“ A thousand tripping feet descending lightly from Heaven—a million voices lifting themselves to the gods, the wedding of everything earthly to everything celestial, the whole universe dancing—man, woman and beast, mountains, oceans and stars—singing the joy of creation.
It was music, the kind of which Fay never heard before—interlaced songs, each one grown out of the hearts of millions of people through thousands of years, songs breathing life, as different from the music she had heard to then as a photograph is to the object it tends to portray. ”

“ From Vasilenko's restaurant spread tales of marvellous recoveries from all kinds of diseases which the healer discovered as soon as he felt the man's pulse. It was as if the holy man from Omsk had himself sent Stephan Ivanoff to New York to save all the poisoned men. And when a man was very severely ill Stephan spoke mysteriously of occult communications with the man "out there" and gave a brew of special herbs grown on the tombs of holy men and ordered Chinese leeches and dry-cupped in a special way until the man was saved. ”

“ And you can hear music streaming out from every window. The sound from a grand piano on which some one is essaying Beethoven's "Appassionata," or Sarasate's undying and hackneyed "Gypsy Airs," played on a violin to a very inadequate accompaniment. Song, music and color, whichever way you turn.
But you only get the fringe of it, until you come down to Moskowitz's cellar on Rivington Street. And though the wine there is not as good as the music, the place is always full—to the glory of the Roumanians who know that no wine could be so good as to surpass the quality of the music one hears there. ”

“ The vender always swears by the heads of his wife and children that the merchandise costs him more than he asks for, and there is play and sport to let the customer go away and watch and recognize in his gait and the way he holds his head whether he expects to be called back. It is sport to watch him stop and turn his head to offer a few cents more. Then, the merchant makes believe he does not hear him. Sure that he had reached the bottom, the customer returns to the pushcart, fingers over the thing he wants to buy, pays, and is happy. One cannot purchase such happiness in a one-price store. ”

“ Hirsh Roth did not remarry; he had a theory for that also. "Marriage is a foolish thing a man should commit only once."
The builder, Feldman, had a daughter the same age as Joseph, Roth's son. Before either of the tots could utter an intelligible word, the parents had already affianced them. Dowry and everything else was settled between the two men, and a special glass of wine drunk to the health and happiness of the future couple. Then each went about his business with the feeling of a man who has cleared his mind of earthly cares.
The Bronx grew up in his arms, so to say. ”

“ The others, college bred most of them, mentioned names of authors and artists the Goldsteins had never heard of before. The others had tapering fine finger-nails, slender wrists, thin ankles, and wore the simplest clothes with distinction.
Sophy and Leah felt that the young men of the new set avoided them. They were always courteous, but cold—cold to the invaders. But of course they could not think of marrying the firm's bookkeepers—twenty-five-dollar-a-week men! Yet they despaired ever to find mates from amongst those other people. ”

“ That doctor who came daily, fee or no fee, to visit the sick one, was he really a good doctor? Was he not a little like Reb Solomon Berman himself? was it not possible that the physician knew as much about medicine as he, Reb Berman, knew Hebrew? just enough for the children of the poor? If he were a good physician would he not be in great demand, charge a big fee and have no time to come daily and help tidy up the room and build the fire? The old man's imagination was sharpened by hunger and worry. ”

“ A few cuts on the faces of customers bore witness to the young man's distraction.
The next day Romano, feeling much better, was in the shop again.
Toward noon there was an idle hour, and the two men sat down to talk music. It soon developed into a quarrel. Romano was an admirer of the old Italian school of Rossini and Donizetti; Salvatore Gonfarone bowed at the shrine of Verdi and Puccini.
"Pah! Rossini was nothing but a——"
"Basta, Signor! Rossini was the greatest master. Your Puccinis are nothing but noise makers."
"And you love Rossini only because you can play his things on the guitar." ”

“ From the river, a few hundred feet away, came the fog blasts of transport ships carrying thousands of men to a vortex of blood in which millions of men had already been crushed, pulverized and liquified to check the rule of aristocracy, but back of that saloon near Eighth Avenue, Babeta, the anarchist-communist philosopher, was expounding the virtues of pure blood as exemplified in Ophelia and Prince, the Dane to which she was to be mated. ”

“ And thus guests, perfect strangers, felt the weight of words hurled at them as from a cannon's mouth.
And the door was never still. The Imperial was the home of all the disappointed, disabused men of the East Side; men and women from the four corners of the earth. Former poets who studied dentistry to earn a living, and who are now completely swallowed up by their profession, came nightly, to hear themselves mock the former music composer who is now a physician, and over the ears in real estate transactions. ”

“ THE HOLY HEALER FROM OMSK
From Fourth Street to the confines of 14th Street below First Avenue and the East River is one of the Russian districts in New York. It is inhabited to a great extent by Russian laborers. The Russian "Inteligentsia" of New York is so busy talking about the people, the "narod," it has had no time to go and see and talk with the people.
The odor of cooked cabbage and burned fats dissolves into the stronger odors of the oiled high boots and the numerous Russian steam baths of the district. ”

“ Between two sips of tea the literature of a century is ruled out of existence, or some tenth-rate poet is crowned as the world's unequalled singer. Editors of dailies discuss yesterday's editorial with their political antagonists and give their verbal verdicts to story writers about a manuscript read between the soup and the dessert. The very latest in the world's politics is pressed through the finest of sieves at every table. In such discussion the office boy of the newspaper, Joe, the waiter, and the owner of the place have equal rights with the editors and philosophers. ”

“ Some day some one should chart New York—some one who does not know a thing about statistics, who will study every section just for the love of it, without even thinking of selling the story to a newspaper. ”

“ Gagliano, the poet, was worked harder and harder. He grew bitter and frequently made caustic remarks. He also grew thinner and thinner. He made real contributions, money from his own pocket, to the innumerable war charities. The prices of food advanced in the restaurants.
On an evening as the whole cream of the colony was assembled at Rinaldini's, the banker, to make an impression on his guests, began to brag about his possessions.
"That chandelier in the vestibule cost me a thousand dollars. Yonder carved table costs five hundred. Some of the bric-a-brac on the mantelpiece costs thousands." ”

“ As the shoemaker's children walk barefooted, so was Leah left without a husband because her father was a marriage broker. There was not much hope for a dowry. The best matches fizzled out because of that modern institution—love. It was Aaronson's greatest enemy. No matter how much he combatted it by saying that all love matches were failures, love matches multiplied daily.
A new element invaded old Harlem. Men without reverence for old customs. People whose antecedents nobody knew. They lit no candles on Friday night and rode in cars on Saturday. ”

“ Any casual courtesy paid to her by another dog during those walks was firmly and instantly checked by Babeta. She was a Dane, a pure blue Dane, and Babeta, the anarchist, the enemy of aristocracy, did not allow his dog to meet the common people, the free, common people of dogdom. Ophelia pulled at the leash once or twice, but, after severe reprimands, she made a virtue of necessity and passed haughtily by unobservant of any amorous advances. ”

“ Go now, you my listener, to the store of Luleika, Kurguz Mehmed's rich widow. Buy rugs. The richer she will become the greater her punishment will be. It will poison her mind and poison the souls of her wooers. ”

“ The theatre in the Bowery had the greater reputation because of the genius of the lamented playwright, Jacob Gordin, presiding there, and the host of actors he had developed. It was the ambition of every London actor to play in New York. One of Samuels's confreres had already achieved fame on the Bowery when Samuels, who like all actors knew in his heart of hearts that he was better than any other living actor, decided to try his luck over here. ”

“ Not one woman in a thousand could wear a diamond-studded comb in her hair as well as Luleika could; not one in a million could carmine her nails as well; and not another in the whole world could make the lines of her mouth harmonize so well with the curves of her eyebrows. ”

“ LULEIKA, THE RICH WIDOW
You hear people talk about the disadvantages of living in New York. Personally, I cannot think of greater happiness than being in this great metropolis, if only for the reason that I can be all over Europe in one night. Five cents carfare lands you in the French district. Five more minutes reading of the "Subway Sun" lands you in Hungary; from whence you can tramp in fifteen minutes to Italy or Greece or Turkey, as the spirit moves you or inclination dictates. You can eat your breakfast in a Russian restaurant on East Fifth Street, have caviar and Bolshevik talk ”

“ The best proof that bookkeepers are not business men is that they are working for somebody else."
The next day, and the next, and the next, Sofia's eyes were red from crying.
"What should be the matter with her?" Mrs. Goldberg asked her husband.
"The Talmud says, that a young couple are like a new wagon and a new horse. They must adjust themselves," was his answer. ”

“ He loved her, he adored her, and as time went by, he became more dull. Some people's tongues are loosened by love as by wine, and others are stricken dumb.
Marco lost speech whenever he faced Fay, lost it more and more as his love for the girl grew.
"What's the matter with your Roumanian savage?" friends asked the girl.
"I don't know. He is getting duller every day," the girl answered.
Then, one day, as Fay and a party of friends planned a merry evening, Marco flared up enthusiastically. ”

“ Little boys and girls shake their hands. A young woman drops her marketing bag, claps her hands and cries "Vive l'Amerique," to which one gallant boy in khaki answers with "Vive la France!" Windows and doors open. Women and children bend over the sills as much as they dare. A hundred, a thousand hands applaud, a hundred, a thousand voices cheer, from a dozen phonographs "The Marseillaise" is heard.
Voila! you are in New York, in the French quarter, on Eighth Avenue between Twenty-eighth and Thirty-sixth Streets.
In the evenings the neighborhood still gathers at Clement's. ”

“ They are of Yorga and his gypsy wife—and with them we have great trouble, for our ways are not their ways. Their souls are like the soul of Yorga's mother, the boyar's daughter. Some day they will run away and settle in some village—stolid, stale peasants. ”