Ghetto

“ The Sabbath Angels whispered words of hope and comfort to the foot-sore hawker and the aching machinist, and refreshed their parched souls with celestial anodyne and made them kings of the hour, with leisure to dream of the golden chairs that awaited them in Paradise.
The Ghetto welcomed the Bride with proud song and humble feast, and sped her parting with optimistic symbolisms of fire and wine, of spice and light and shadow. All around their neighbors sought distraction in the blazing public-houses, and their tipsy bellowings resounded through the streets and mingled with the Hebrew hymns. ”

“ Is floating in velvety blackness shot with steel-blue lights,
But no breath stirs the heat
Leaning its ponderous bulk upon the Ghetto
And most on Hester street...
The heat...
Nosing in the body's overflow,
Like a beast pressing its great steaming belly close,
Covering all avenues of air...
The heat in Hester street,
Heaped like a dray
With the garbage of the world.
Bodies dangle from the fire escapes
Or sprawl over the stoops... ”

“ The very lowest stratum was of secondary formation—the children of immigrants—while the highest touched the lower middle-class, on the mere fringes of the Ghetto. It was a happy place where young men and maidens met on equal terms and similar subscriptions, where billiards and flirtations and concerts and laughter and gay gossip were always on, and lemonade and cakes never off; a heaven where marriages were made, books borrowed and newspapers read. ”

“ It is estimated that Kent alone requires eighty thousand of the street people to pick her hops. And out they come, obedient to the call, which is the call of their bellies and of the lingering dregs of adventure-lust still in them. Slum, stews, and ghetto pour them forth, and the festering contents of slum, stews, and ghetto are undiminished. Yet they overrun the country like an army of ghouls, and the country does not want them. They are out of place. As they drag their squat, misshapen bodies along the highways and byways, they resemble some vile spawn from underground. ”

“ The folk who compose our pictures are children of the Ghetto; their faults are bred of its hovering miasma of persecution, their virtues straitened and intensified by the narrowness of its horizon. And they who have won their way beyond its boundaries must still play their parts in tragedies and comedies—tragedies of spiritual struggle, comedies of material ambition—which are the aftermath of its centuries of dominance, the sequel of that long cruel night in Jewry which coincides with the Christian Era. If they are not the Children, they are at least the Grandchildren of the Ghetto. ”

“ In the great city around them men jumped on and off electric cars, whizzed up and down lifts, hustled through lobbies, hulloed through telephones, tore open telegrams, dictated to clacking typists, filled life with sound and flurry, with the bustle of the markets and the chink of the eternal dollar; while here, serenely smoking and sipping, ruffled only by the breezes of argument, leisurely as the philosophers in the colonnades of Athens, the talkers of the Ghetto, earnest as their forefathers before the great folios of the Talmud, made an Oriental oasis amid the simoom whirl of the Occident. ”

“ The ghetto, which had been designed as a sort of quarantine to safeguard Christendom against the Jewish heresy, had in fact proved a storage chamber for a portion of the political and social forces which were destined to sweep away the last traces of feudalism from central Europe. In the ghetto, the pastoral Semite, who had been made a wanderer by the destruction of his nationality, was steadily trained, through centuries, to become an urban European, with all the parasitic activities of urban economics, and all the democratic tendencies of occidental industrialism. ”

“ Scarce have you crossed the threshold of the Ghetto when you are seized by the button, dragged helplessly into a small hole stuffed with every imaginable sort of merchandise, and invited to buy a dozen things at once. No sooner have you been let go than you are seized by another and another. ”

“ The dismal irregularly built houses of the Ghetto are now enlivened by thousands of candles, and thousands of happy faces. The Sabbath has begun in the hearts of these people and in their rooms, a common and usual occurrence, and yet a mysterious and blessed influence that drives away all that is poor and mean in everyday life. To-day, every hovel is lighted up, and every heart made glad with sufficiency of food. The teacher of the law has forgotten his hunger, the water-carrier his hard work, the peddler the blows and derision that continually fall to his lot, and the rich usurer his gain. ”

“ I remember another street, with quiet buildings on either side, and the panic that smote me into consciousness as again I saw the people of the abyss, but this time in a stream that flowed and came on. And then I saw there was nothing to fear. The stream moved slowly, while from it arose groans and lamentations, cursings, babblings of senility, hysteria, and insanity; for these were the very young and the very old, the feeble and the sick, the helpless and the hopeless, all the wreckage of the ghetto. ”

“ People who have been living in a Ghetto for a couple of centuries, are not able to step outside merely because the gates are thrown down, nor to efface the brands on their souls by putting off the yellow badges. The isolation imposed from without will have come to seem the law of their being. But a minority will pass, by units, into the larger, freer, stranger life amid the execrations of an ever-dwindling majority. ”

“ How holy the stars seemed up there in the quiet sky, like so many Sabbath lights shedding visible consecration and blessing!
Yes, she would go back to her loved ones, back from this dainty room, with its white laces and perfumed draperies, back if need be to a Ghetto garret. And in the ecstasy of her abandonment of all worldly things, a great peace fell upon her soul.
In the morning the nostalgia of the Ghetto was still upon her, blent with a passion of martyrdom that made her yearn for a lower social depth than was really necessary. ”

“ We found the supposed unhappy children, well dressed and well fed, dancing to the notes of the hurdy-gurdy grinder, as happy as children naturally are, who do not have many “manners to mind,” whose playground is the street, and who have music from morning till nightfall. We walked through endless rows of tenements and saw men engaged in lawful pursuits; from the garret to the cellars the Ghetto was a beehive of industry. ”

“ The army swallows all the young men, precisely as in France; but women slip less readily into responsible positions, and thus earn in less degree than in either France or Germany.
In the Ghetto swarm the crowds that have filled it for hundreds of years, and its narrow ways hold every trade known to man's hands, as well as every form of drudgery which here reaches its climax. ”

“ The shadow of a large [243] mysterious destiny seemed to hang over these poor superstitious zealots, whose lives she knew so well in all their everyday prose, and to invest the unconscious shuffling sons of the Ghetto with something of tragic grandeur. The grey dusk palpitated with floating shapes of prophets and martyrs, scholars and sages and poets, full of a yearning love and pity, lifting hands of benediction. ”

“ In that vicinity lies the Ghetto, where thousands of Jews are crowded within a narrow compass, and lead a close, unclean, and multitudinous life, resembling that of maggots when they over-populate a decaying cheese. ”

“ The trouble with us is that the ghetto of the Middle Ages and the children of the twentieth century have to live under one roof, and—”
A sound of crashing dishes came from the kitchen, and the voice of Hanneh Breineh resounded through the dining-room as she wreaked her pent-up fury on the helpless servant. ”

“ This is a little bit of the Ghetto that the Jews have not yet taken from the Christians. It is the street of common lodging-houses where strange murders have been done. We pass quickly by the group of loafing tramps who have come out of the lodging-house kitchens to gossip, and make our way up a narrow, tortuous passage to another street of evil fame, where lodging-houses of the lowest class still remain. Battered wrecks of lost humanity, male and female, flit to and fro in the darkness. ”

“ These bright boys and girls that you meet in the Ghetto, and who do so much towards the education of slum students and settlement workers—they are what they are, not because, but rather in spite of, their parents. They struggle and strive upward alone and unaided, and also act as missionaries of civilization in their homes. They beautify their little rooms with pictures and books and trifles of art, and they play sweet music—but what is the use, I ask you, of a thought, a work of art, a poem, a piece of music, if you cannot share it with those who are near and, somehow, are dear to you. ”

“ The Ghetto is an arrangement first contrived by Jews for keeping infidels out of a sacred precinct. When the infidels were strong enough they turned the tables and forbade the Jews to leave their Ghetto except at certain hours. For the misery, poverty and squalor of the Ghetto the Jew is not to blame—if he could, he would have the Ghetto a place of opulence, beauty and all that makes for the good. Every undesirable thing he would bestow on the outsider. ”

“ In the good old times, when pestilence avenged the poor and oppressed upon their oppressors, what grim and dismal plagues may not have stalked by night and noonday out of those hideous streets, and passed the marble bounds of patrician palaces, and brought to the bedsides of the rich and proud the filthy misery of the Ghetto turned to poison! Thank God that the good old times are gone and going. One learns in these aged lands to hate and execrate the past. ”

“ The pleasures and the hopes which Jews might not share they came by slow degrees to hate and to despise, and the men with the yellow badges on their garments learnt to cringe and stoop under their load, and the dark-eyed women with the blue stripes to their veils lifted them only to look upon their children. Undeniably, by every outward test, the poor pariahs of the Ghetto were degenerate, and their sad and sordid lives must have looked both repellent and unpicturesque to the passer-by. ”

“ The New York Ghetto looks remarkably decent from the outside, but pharisaic landlords have beautified the “outside of the cup and platter,” while within, the house is poorly prepared for human habitation. A good example is the house into which I lead my friend. It is an old fashioned front and rear tenement with fifty families as residents, and on climbing the stairway to the fifth story to which our address directs, our nostrils are greeted by a fragrance which, compared with the well remembered smells of the steerage, is like unto the odours of Araby the blest. ”

“ It would need volumes to give any idea of the mere outer picturesqueness of Roman scenes, much more of the varied beauties that do not at once catch the eye. The Ghetto, or Jews’ quarter, affords one of the most peculiar street-sights. The streets here are narrower, darker, filthier than elsewhere, the stalls are dingier, the poverty more apparent. Rags everywhere and in every stage of dilapidation—rags hung out over your head like banners; rags spread on the knees of the industrious women, who with deft fingers are mending and darning them ”

“ I know a young artist, a boy born in the Ghetto, who began his conscious American life with contempt for the old things, but who with growing culture has learned to perceive the beauty of the traditions and faith of his race. He puts into his paintings of the types of Hester Street an imaginative, almost religious, idealism, and his artistic sympathy seems to extend particularly to the old people. He, for one, has become reconciled to the spirit of his father without ceasing to be an American. ”

“ Its narrow streets have no specialty of architecture; its dirt is not picturesque. It is no longer the stage for the high-buskined tragedy of massacre and martyrdom; only for the obscurer, deeper tragedy that evolves from the pressure of its own inward forces, and the long-drawn-out tragi-comedy of sordid and shifty poverty. Natheless, this London Ghetto of ours is a region where, amid uncleanness and squalor, the rose of romance blows yet a little longer in the raw air of English reality ”

“ Urban slum conditions created tremendous economic, social, and psychological strains. Ghetto life added a new dimension of social disorganization to an already oppressed community. The anonymity of life in large urban centers tended to remove many of the social constraints to individual behavior. ”

“ So the denizens of the New York Ghetto, heaped as thick as the splinters on the table of a glass-blower, had each, like the fine glass particle, his or her individual share of the whole hard glitter of Israel. This diffused intensity, as I have called it, causes any array of Jews to resemble (if I may be allowed another image) some long nocturnal street where every window in every house shows a maintained light. The advanced age of so many of the figures, the ubiquity of the children, carried out in fact this analogy ”

“ Poets, philosophers, novelists, dramatists, artists, editors, agitators and other idle and useless beings, they form a great galaxy in the New York Ghetto. For several years, ever since I left New York, I had been receiving instruction and inspiration from them through the medium of the Yiddish and the Socialist press, where my own things often appeared beside their spirited outpourings, and now I was overcome by an overpowering desire to meet them again, talk matters over and fight it all out. ”