A CULTIVATED LITERARY MAN
Contrasting definitely with the sketches of Libin and Levin are those of Jacob Gordin, who, altho he is best known in the Ghetto as a playwright, has yet written voluminously for the newspapers. Unlike the other two, Gordin is a well-educated man, knowing thoroughly several languages and literatures, including Greek, Russian and German. His greater resources of culture and his sharper natural wit have made of him by far the most practised writer of the lot. With many literary examples before him, he knows the tricks of the trade, is skilful and effective, has a wide range of subjects and is full of "ideas" in the semi-philosophical sense. The innocent Libin and Levin are children in comparison, and yet their sketches show greater fidelity to the facts than do those of the talented Gordin, who is too apt to employ the ordinary literary devices wherever he can find them, caring primarily for the effect rather than for the truth, and almost always heightening the color to an unnatural and pretentious pitch. In the drama Gordin's tendency toward the sensational is more in place. He has the sense of character and theatrical circumstance, and works along the broad lines demanded by the stage; but these qualities when transferred to stories from the life result in what is sometimes called in the Ghetto "onion literature." So definitely theatrical, indeed, are many of his sketches that they are sometimes read aloud by the actors to crowded Jewish audiences. Another point that takes from Gordin's interest to us as a sketch-writer is that his best stories have Russia rather than New York as a background; that his sketches from New York life are comparatively unconvincing. He has a great contempt for America, which he satirizes in some of his sketches, particularly the political aspect, and intends some day to return to Russia, where he had a considerable career as a short-story writer in the Russian language. He is forty-nine years old, and, compared with the other men, is in comfortable circumstances, as he now makes a good income from his plays, which grow in popularity in the quarter. Before coming to America he taught school and wrote for several newspapers in Russia, where he was known as "Ivan der Beissende," on account of the sharp character of his feuilletons. He came to this country in 1891, and shortly after, his first play, Siberia, was produced and made a great hit among the "intellectuals" and Socialists of the quarter. He began immediately to write for the Socialist newspapers, and also established a short-lived weekly periodical in the Russian language, which he wrote almost entirely himself.
"A Nipped Romance" is a story of two children who are collecting coals on a railway track. The boy of thirteen and the girl of eleven talk about their respective families, laying bare the sordidness, misery and vice in which their young lives are encompassed. They know more than children ought to know, and insensibly develop a sentimental interest in each other, when a train comes along and kills them. "Without a Pass," sometimes recited in the theatre by the actor Moshkovitch, pictures with gruesome detail a girl working in the sweat-shop. The brutal doorkeeper refuses to let her go out for relief without a pass, and she dies of weakness, hunger and cold. "A Tear," one of the best, is the tale of an old Jewish woman who has come to New York to visit her son. He is married to a Gentile, and the old lady is so much abused by her daughter-in-law that she goes back to Russia. The sketch represents her alone at the pier, about to embark. She sees the friends of the other passengers crowding the landing, but no one is there to say good-by to her; and as the ship moves away a tear rolls down her cheek to the deck. "Who Laughs?" satirizes the Americans who laugh at Russian Jews because of their beards, dress and accent. Another sketch denounces the "new woman"—she who apes American manners, lays aside her Jewish wig, becomes flippant and interested in "movements." Still another is a highly colored contrast between woman's love and that of less-devoted man. A story illustrating how the author's desire to make an effect sometimes results in the ludicrous is the would-be pathetic wail of a calf which is about to be slaughtered.