The confectionery stores which are outside of New Greece, are open all the time, at least so long as a customer may be expected, and although these customers are nearly all Americans, the Greeks have few friends among them. They all return to New Greece as often as possible, and there their virtues unfold, and “their soul delights itself in fatness.” They are not exceeded even by the Chinese in that loyalty to native food which I call the patriotism of the stomach, and a Greek grocery store is filled from one end to the other with food from the classic isles. There are dried vegetables whose present form does not betray their natural shape, but which taste luscious, because the flavour of the native soil clings to them; fish, dried, pickled and preserved in some form, and cheese made from the milk of goats whose horns butted broken classic vases instead of modern tin cans.
The smells seem ancient, too; but in these the Greek revels, and here he is at home.
New Greece in Chicago is fortunate in having as one of its boundaries, Hull House, one of the numerous activities of which consists in trying to discover the possible point of contact between the home-born and the stranger.
A Greek play given at Hull House opened the eyes of many American people to the fact that the past is alive in the modern Greek, and at a banquet, also at Hull House, where Americans and Greeks vied with each other in extolling the glory of Athens, the wealth of the past was again richly displayed. How near the American and the Greek have come to each other through these two notable events, it is difficult to tell; but I am sure that they have increased the pride of the Greeks, and have given us an added respect for them.
But after all, they will be judged by the way they live to-day and by the measure in which these small, dark-haired traders and workers exemplify in their lives the virtues of those men of old, whose names they have inherited and whose fame they are eager to preserve.
XX
THE NEW AMERICAN AND THE NEW PROBLEM
THE miracle of assimilation wrought upon the older type of immigration, gives to many of us, at least the hope, that the Slavs, Jews, Italians, Hungarians and Greeks will blend into our life as easily as did the Germans, the Scandinavians and the Irish.
The new immigrant, or the new American, as I call him, is however in many respects, more of an alien than that older class which was related to the native stock by race, speech, or religious ties. Therefore, I recognize the fact that it is easy to be too optimistic about this assimilation, and to regard the Americanizing of the stranger accomplished, when he discards his picturesque native garb and speech, to disappear in the commonplaceness of our attire; or when he has mastered the intricacies of American idioms.
Outwardly the changes will be the same as those which have taken place among the older immigrants, accomplished with the same dispatch, even where the foreigners are segregated in their own quarters. I have in mind a Polish colony of some six thousand souls in a New England town where there are Polish churches, Polish schools, Polish “butchers, bakers, and candlestick-makers”; and yet if you walk through that section of the city you will see the women who a few years ago, when they landed, wore the numberless short skirts and picturesque waists of their own making, now sweeping the dust with long trailing skirts, their ample forms encased in corsets and shirt-waists; while here and there you will hear even the rustle of the silk lining.
The boys who upon landing wore coarse linen trousers and shirts have long ago rebelled against these marks of their Old Country lineage, and their fathers have bought them the short trousers and shirt-waists, which make them look like young Americans.