The greater number of the following chapters deal with the men of this "intellectual" class, their personalities, their literary work and the light it throws upon the life of the people in the New York Ghetto.
Chapter Two
Prophets without Honor
SUBMERGED SCHOLARS
A ragged man, who looks like a peddler or a beggar, picking his way through the crowded misery of Hester Street, or ascending the stairs of one of the dingy tenement-houses full of sweat-shops that line that busy mart of the poor Ghetto Jew, may be a great Hebrew scholar. He may be able to speak and write the ancient tongue with the facility of a modern language—as fluently as the ordinary Jew makes use of the "jargon," the Yiddish of the people; he may be a manifold author with a deep and pious love for the beautiful poetry in his literature; and in character an enthusiast, a dreamer, or a good and reverend old man. But no matter what his attainments and his quality he is unknown and unhonored, for he has pinned his faith to a declining cause, writes his passionate accents in a tongue more and more unknown even to the cultivated Jew; and consequently amid the crowding and material interests of the new world he is submerged—poor in physical estate and his moral capital unrecognized by the people among whom he lives.
HE IS UNKNOWN AND UNHONORED
Not only unrecognized by the ignorant and the busy and their teachers the rabbis, who in New York are frequently nearly as ignorant as the people, he is also (as his learning is limited largely to the literature of his race) looked down upon by the influential and intellectual element of the Ghetto—an element socialistic, in literary sympathy Russian rather than Hebraic, intolerant of everything not violently modern, wedded to "movements" and scornful of the past. The "maskil," therefore, or "man of wisdom"—the Hebrew scholar—is called "old fogy," or "dilettante," by the up-to-date socialists.
Of such men there are several in the humble corners of the New York Ghetto. One peddles for a living, another has a small printing-office in a basement on Canal Street, a third occasionally tutors in some one of many languages and sells a patent medicine, and a fourth is the principal of the Talmud-Thora, a Hebrew school in the Harlem Ghetto, where he teaches the children to read, write, and pray in the Hebrew language.
Moses Reicherson is the name of the principal. "Man of wisdom" of the purest kind, probably the finest Hebrew grammarian in New York, and one of the finest in the world, his income from his position at the head of the school is $5 a week. He is seventy-three years old, wears a thick gray beard, a little cap on his head, and a long black coat. His wife is old and bent. They are alone in their miserable little apartment on East One Hundred and Sixth Street. Their son died a year or two ago, and to cover the funeral expenses Mr. Reicherson tried in vain to sell his "Encyclopædia Britannica." But, nevertheless, the old scholar, who had been bending over his closely written manuscript, received the visitor with almost cheerful politeness, and told the story of his work and of his ambitions. Of his difficulties and privations he said little, but they shone through his words and in the character of the room in which he lived.
Born in Vilna, sometimes called the Jerusalem of Lithuania or the Athens of modern Judæa because of the number of enlightened Jews who have been born there, many of whom now live in the Russian Jewish quarter of New York, he has retained the faith of his orthodox parents, a faith, however, springing from the pure origin of Judaism rather than holding to the hair-splitting distinctions later embodied in the Talmud. He was a teacher of Hebrew in his native town for many years, where he stayed until he came to New York some years ago to be near his son. His two great intellectual interests, subordinated indeed to the love of the old literature and religion, have been Hebrew grammar and the moral fables of several languages. On the former he has written an important work, and of the latter has translated much of Lessing's and Gellert's work into pure Hebrew. He has also translated into his favorite tongue the Russian fable-writer Krilow; has written fables of his own, and a Hebrew commentary on the Bible in twenty-four volumes. He loves the fables "because they teach the people and are real criticism; they are profound and combine fancy and thought." Many of these are still in manuscript, which is characteristic of much of the work of these scholars, for they have no money, and publishers do not run after Hebrew books. Also unpublished, written in lovingly minute characters, he has a Hebrew prayer-book in many volumes. He has written hundreds of articles for the Hebrew weeklies and monthlies, which are fairly numerous in this country, but which seldom can afford to pay their contributors. At present he writes exclusively for a Hebrew weekly published in Chicago, Regeneration, the object of which is to promote "the knowledge of the ancient Hebrew language and literature, and to regenerate the spirit of the nation." For this he receives no pay, the editor being almost as poor as himself. But he writes willingly for the love of the cause, "for universal good"; for Reicherson, in common with the other neglected scholars, is deeply interested in revivifying what is now among American Jews a dead language. He believes that in this way only can the Jewish people be taught the good and the true.