Leo Wiener

“ The greatest curse of the Jewish community in Russia had ever been the meat and candle tax, which all had to pay, nominally to support communal institutions, but the greater part of which went into the pockets of the representatives of the kahal to whom the tax was farmed out. No meat and no candle could be purchased without that arbitrary imposition by the members of the kahal, who in their fiendish craving for money increased the original cost of meat several fold, and who spared no means, however criminal, to silence any opposition to their doings. ”

“ An arm flies up and down,—that's all you may see, and you hear all kinds of voices, and all kinds of tunes are poured forth, all melancholy, sad, so that it tears out your heart, draws out your soul, takes away your life. The people grow faint, the people grow weak in all their limbs; the heart is full to overflowing, and tears appear in the eyes. Men sigh, men groan, women weep ... and Stempenju? ”

“ She is bewailing and lamenting her beautiful daughter who had once been her blessing, a girl, as pure as gold, who had been misled as if by witchery, and of whom it would be hard and bitter to say what she is doing now; and the ever-true mother prays now with tears, as hot as fire, not for health, not for long years for her child, but for quick death, which would be better for the child even than for the mother. ”

“ But once he falls in with a girl who takes his words in earnest, and in a prosaic way, without any idea of love on her part, compels him to marry her. She takes him in her hands and would have him lead a settled, prosaic life also. But he finds relief from his sordid existence every time he journeys away with his band to play at some wedding. Once he notices upon such an occasion a young married woman who awakes in him the first inkling of a real, romantic love. ”

“ America drives us back to Russia,
"To Russia, whence we have run away, to Russia, because we have no money. What is there left for us to expect, to hope for? Of what good is life, and the gloomy world to us? ”

“ No important occurrence in life, no birth, marriage, or death, can take place without the approval of him who wears that fur-cap. It is the cap, not the man, and his wisdom, that sanctions and legalizes his various acts. Were it not for the cap, it would not be possible to tell right from wrong. This fine bit of sarcasm is not a mere attack at the sect of the Khassidim; it is also meant as an accusation of our whole social system, with its conventional lies. Perez does not show by his writings to what particular party he belongs, but he is certainly not with the conservatives. ”

“ The tradition of the Haskala came down to Abramowitsch in an uninterrupted succession, from Mendel Lefin through Ettinger and Gottlober. He, too, started out with the set purpose of spreading enlightenment among his people, and in his first two works we find a sharp demarkation between the two kinds of character, the ideal and the real. But he was too much of an artist by nature to persevere in his didactic attitude, and before long he abandoned entirely that field, to devote his undivided energy to the production of purely artistic works. ”

“ Have you no fatherland, no country, no home where to go to, no friendly house, that you bear such a contempt for life, and are waiting for the dark grave?
"Have you no one in heaven above to whom to cry when you are in trouble? Have you no nation, have you no faith? Miserable ones, what is your fate?"
The abyss yawns, the waves bellow, the shipladders crack, the storm rages madly, the winds whistle,—and finally one says in tears:
"The black cemetery is not our mother, the grave has not been our cradle ”

“ In one of Abramowitsch's novels a woman, purchasing a prayer from an itinerant bookseller, gives the following reason for being so addicted to them: "For us poor women, the Tchines are the only remedy for hearts full of sores and wounds; they furnish us with the only means of weeping to our hearts' content, and of finding relief for our saddened spirits in a warm stream of tears.... It is truly aggravating and painful to see men who do not understand and who do not wish to understand our hearts make light of women's Tchines and begrudge us the only consolation we have. ”

“ Not even the eloquent advocate of the people generally cares to enter that unfamiliar sphere as Perez has done. His affection for the meanest of his race is not merely platonic. He not only knows whereof he speaks: he feels it; and thus we get the saddest, the tenderest, the sweetest stories from the life of the lowliest of the Jews that have ever been written.
In 1894 Perez published a collective volume, 'Literature and Life,' which contains, like his periodical, mostly productions of his own. ”

“ Since it was the badchen's business to amuse, it was natural for Zunser to adopt the manner of Ehrenkranz and Berel Broder, rather than that of his countrymen, Gordon and Goldfaden. But to the Russian Jew, that is amusing which gives him food for reflection, and nature and its manifestations are interesting to him only in so far as they interpret man in all his aspects of life and vicissitudes of fortune. It is this facile power of dissolving external facts in the alembic of his introspective imagination, that has brought Zunser so near to the people, and that has made him so popular. ”

“ Even every witty tale and mere witticism teaches something useful. I am sure a great number of my readers do not suspect my good intentions, and read my stories, just as they read Bovo, for pastime only, and will accuse me, the writer of the same, as being a mere babbler who distracts the attention from serious studies, and as writing them for the money that there is in them. I know all that full well, and yet I keep on doing my duty, for even greater men than I have been treated in no better way by our nation ”

“ Rosenfeld does not scoff, or scorn, or hate. He is one with the oppressor and the oppressed; if he sings more of the latter, it is only because he sees more of that side of life. He is a sensitive plate that reproduces the pictures that arise before his mental vision, and the gloom of his poems is rather that which he sees{127} than that which he feels; for he has also written songs of spring and happiness in the few intervals when the sky has looked down unclouded on the Ghetto in which he has lived so long. ”

“ Let it be as they say that I, man, am the highest aim, the perfection of all creation, that only for me and for my wants and pleasures they all live upon this world. Let it be that I, man, am the king, the supreme lord of all the animals who must serve me, must walk under the yoke and sacrifice their lives for me, nevertheless, it seems to me that even to that dobbin, who is my lowest subject, I have certain duties, and I must, in accordance with the law if not with humanity, do what is right by her.... ”

“ The bridegroom will send you a pot full of horseradish, and that will make you snivel unto your very teeth,
inviting her to weep instead of smiling, and he follows this doggerel with a discussion of the vanities of life and the sadness of woman's lot. Even if her marital happiness should be unmarred by any unfaithfulness of her husband,—and Jewish men for the greater part are good husbands and fathers,—there are the cares of earning the daily bread, which frequently fall on the woman, while the stronger vessel is brooding over some Talmudical subtleties ”

“ Whether he writes of the sweat-shop, or of the storm on the ocean, or of the Jewish soldier who rises nightly from his grave, we in every instance get a drama and yet a lyric, not as separate developments, but inextricably combined into one whole. Thus, for example, 'In the Sweat-shop' is a lyrical poem, if Hood's 'Song of the Shirt' is one, but in so far as the poet, or operative, is turned into a machine and is subjected to the exterior forces which determine his moods and his destiny, we have the evolution of a tragedy before us. ”

“ If the followers of the Haskala had not accepted blindly Mendelssohn's verdict against the Judeo-German language, which was true only of the language spoken by the Jews of Germany, but had furnished a literature of enlightenment in the vernacular of the people instead of the language of the select few, their efforts would have been crowned with far greater success. By subscribing unconditionally to the teachings of their leader, they retarded the course of events by at least half a century and widened the chasm between the learned and the people, which it had been their desire to bridge. ”

“ Such are the thoughts that fall upon the women, and Stempenju keeps on playing his way: he directs the whole band, and his violin talks eloquently. Stempenju is now playing a sad tune, and his musicians support him. All is quiet, there is no noise, not a sound! All, all want to hear Stempenju. Men fall to musing, women are grown silent. Boys and girls have climbed on benches and tables,—all want to hear Stempenju! ”

“ All of a sudden new ideals begin to animate the younger generation. Jentke's lover no longer calls himself Fyodor Sebastyanovitch, but his visiting card bears the homely Jewish name Peessach ben Schabsi, of which the former was only a Russified form. He becomes an ardent defender of his race. Later he marries Jentke, and a new career begins for them. They forget all their ideals of the period before the riots, to which they so readily subscribed; they do not persevere in their intention to devote their energies to their people. They live only for themselves. ”

“ The holy Law written upon parchment has been our consolation in our poverty! All in the world we have lost: the Temple has been laid in ruins, in ruins the land which we have inhabited; even our tongue we have forgotten,—we have lost our kingdom and our priesthood, only our faith is left to us. ”

“ Every new one is an additional gem in the crown he is making for himself. They are all characterized by the same tender pathos, the same excellence of style, the same delicacy of feeling. He generally prefers the tragic moments in life as fit objects for his sympathetic pen, but he has also treated in a masterly manner the gentle sentiment of love. ”

“ One of the most puzzling problems to the Judeo-German writers of modern times has been the treatment of love in the Jewish novel. They all agree that they have to follow Western models in that class of literature, and they are all equally sure that that passion does not exist among their people in any of the phases with which one meets elsewhere. The young woman's education in a Jewish home is such as to exclude a blind self-abandonment, with the consequent tragic results. Her desire to form family ties is greater than the natural promptings of her heart ”

“ It is a love story from the world of the lame and the halt that constitute the profession of mendicants in the Jewish part of every Russian town in the West. But it is not merely the love of Fischke the Lame for a beggar girl and the jealousy of his blind wife, who tyrannizes over him in spite of her affliction, that we are made acquainted with in that remarkable book. We are introduced there to a class of people with entirely different motives, different aims in life, from those we are accustomed to see about us. They hide from daylight and have a morality of their own ”

“ As in all the early productions of Judeo-German literature, there are in that drama two distinct classes of characters: the ideal persons, the uncle, Marcus Redlich and Hinde, and the real men and women who are taken out of actual life. On the side of the first is all virtue, while among the others are to be found the ugliest forms of vice. A worse shrew than Serkele has hardly ever been depicted. Her speeches are composed of a series of curses, in which the Jargon is peculiarly inventive, interrupted by a stereotyped complaint of her ever failing health. ”

“ The masses were too downtrodden and ignorant to develop out of themselves any other forms of literature than the one of ethical instruction and stories current in the previous century. In the meanwhile the Haskala, as the German school was called, had found its way into Russia through Galicia, and such men as J. B. Levinsohn, A. B. Gottlober, M. Gordon, Dr. S. Ettinger, had become its warmest advocates. They threw themselves with all the ardor of their natures upon the new doctrine, and tried to correct the neglected education of their childhood by a thorough study of German culture. ”

“ Rothschild very nearly lost there ten or fifteen millions; but God came to his rescue a few weeks later: the people felt, as they say, in high spirits; all was alive upon the highest bench; the bathing brooms were dancing over their backs, and they all at once gave him a clean gain of one hundred and fifty million roubles.
Nearly all the inhabitants of Parasiteville are, may it be no evil omen to you, nothing but poor people and quite destitute. But the truth must be told, they are merry beggars, joyful mendicants, possessed of unbounded hope. ”

“ Our women have no ear and no feeling for pure ethical instruction. They want to hear only of miracles and wonderful deeds whether invented or true; they find delight in the story of Joseph de la Reyna, or of Elijah's appearance in the form of an old man to be the tenth in the Minyan on the eve of the Atonement day; they are even satisfied with the story of Bevys of Hamptoun and the Greyhound, with the Horse Drendsel and the Sword Familie, and with the beautiful Princess Deresna, or merely with a story of a Bride and Bridegroom. ”

“ I am proud to be able to say that I am not making my living from my writings, and I should have been repaid tenfold better if I had passed my time in some more profitable work. But I do it only out of love for my nation, of whom the most do not know how far they are removed from mankind at large, and what a miserable position we occupy in these enlightened days among the civilized nations.... ”

“ Poverty, hunger, misery, and want have always the same face, the same appearance, and the same place at the door. Just as oppressive and as bitter as the weeping that issues from the downtrodden has been before, it will eternally be. All desires and longings will change and are actually changing, but the want of the hungry will eternally remain a piece of bread ”

“ Abramowitsch foresaw that the turning-point in the inner life of his race was near at hand, that the call to progress of the early writers had availed them little in righting them with the world without, that his own productions acquainting them with their weak points from within were now out of place, and that soon they would need only words of consolation such as are uttered when a great calamity overtakes a people. ”

“ On the same spot where thirty years ago the unfortunate mother had been standing and mourning her beloved daughter who had departed so young from this world, there is to-day also standing a mother and dissolving her heart in hot tears. ”

“ The first dressmaker contrasts the luxury of the bride's bed with her straw bed on the floor, the bride's splendor of light in her parlor with the two candles at her head when she is dead. The modiste, oppressed by the sad songs that portray their own unhappiness, bids them sing of other people's happiness. To this the choir responds by singing the happiness of the bride, but the modiste sees in this only the girls' jealousy, whereupon the choir tells of the obedient daughter who is advised by her mother to scorn sweetness, getting the promise of a gilded nut if she behaves properly. ”