I felt still cheaper when I heard that the literary liquor-dealer generously contributed to the maintenance of The Pen, the Hebrew weekly with which Tevkin was connected, and that he, the liquor-dealer, wrote for that publication
It appeared that Tevkin had an office which was a short distance from the bohemian café. I asked to see it, and he yielded reluctantly
"You can take it for granted that your office is a more imposing one than mine," he jested
"Ah, but there was a time when all my office amounted to was an old desk. So there will be a time when yours will occupy a splendid building on Wall Street."
"That's far more than I aspire to. All I want is to make a modest living, so that my daughters should not have to go to work. They don't work in a shop, of course. One is a stenographer in a fine office and the other a school-teacher. But what difference does it make?"
His office proved to be the hall bedroom of an apartment occupied by the family of a cantor named Wolpert. We first entered the dining-room, a door connecting it with Tevkin's "office" being wide open. It was late and the gas-light was burning. Seated at a large oval table, covered with a white oil-cloth, was Wolpert and two other men, all the three of them with full beards and with the stamp of intellectual life on their faces
"There are some queer people in the world who will still read my poetry," Tevkin said to them, by way of introducing me. "Here is one of them. Mr.
Levinsky, David Levinsky, the cloak-manufacturer."
The announcement made something of a stir.
Mrs. Wolpert brought us tea. From the ensuing conversation I gleaned that these people, including Tevkin, were ardent Zionists of a certain type, and that they were part of a group in which the poet was a ruling spirit. When I happened to drop a remark to the effect that Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament, was a dead language, Wolpert exclaimed: "Oh no! Not any longer, Mr. Levinsky. It has risen from the dead."