"Is work slack again?" she asks, her cheek growing paler.
"It's another trouble, not that," he says. "It's a new law, a bitter law." To his little daughter he adds: "Sleep, child, you will soon have time to sleep all day."
His ignorant wife does not understand.
"A new law? What is that? What does it mean?" she asks.
"It means that I can work only ten hours a day."
Then they calculate how much money he can make in ten hours. Now he works nineteen hours, and they have nothing to spare. Under the new law he will be idle seven or eight hours a day. What will they do? She thinks the boss must be responsible for the terrible arrangement, for does not all trouble come from the boss? He is irritated by her simplicity, and she begins to weep. The little girl is overjoyed at the thought that she will no longer have to work, but tries to conceal her pleasure. The laborer, moved by his wife's tears, endeavors to comfort her.
"Ah," he says, "it's only a law! Two years ago there was one like it, but the work went on just the same." But she continues to weep until their evening meal is ready, when the children are aroused from their sleep to obey "the supper law," Libin concludes in a spirit of tragi-comedy.
HE WAS BEWITCHED BY MATHEMATICS
"She Got Her Prize" is the title of a sketch in which unexhilarating comedy predominates. A laborer borrows some clothes to go to a party. In his absence his wife sells a number of rags to the old-clothes man, who innocently takes off her husband's only suit, carelessly put near the bundle he was to carry away. The husband does not notice the loss until the next day, when he has nothing to wear, cannot go to the shop, and so loses his job. "Betty" is the story of a girl who falls sick just before the day set for her wedding, and is taken to the hospital. The sketch pictures her in bed, reading a farewell letter from her lover who has deserted her. "Misery" is a prose poem, written by Libin when his child died. It has no plot, is merely the outcry of a simple, wounded heart, telling of pain, longing and wonder at the sad mystery of the world. A pleasing rhythm runs through the Yiddish, and as the author read it aloud it seemed, indeed, like a "human document." "A Child of the Ghetto," one of the longest and most detailed of all, is full of the sad, tho gently satiric, quality of Libin's art. The author meets a pedler on Ludlow Street, who recognizes him as the man who once saved his life by attracting to himself the snow-balls of a number of urchins who had been plaguing the pedler one cold winter day. They have a chat, and the author asks the ragged push-cart man how he is getting on in the world. The pedler replies that all of his class have their troubles—the fruit quickly spoils, and the "bees" (policemen) come around regularly for some of the "honey." But he has a sorrow all to himself. His oldest son is a mathematician, and no good. When in the Jewish school in Russia the little fellow had learned to figure, and had been figuring ever since. His father had found, much to his disappointment, that in America also the boy would have to spend some time in school. The "monkey business" of learning had ruined the child. He was bewitched by mathematics and studied all day long. Sent successively to a sweat-shop, a grocery, to tend a push-cart, he proved thoroughly incapable of learning any trade; was absent-minded and constantly calculating, and always lost his job. And his old father bemoaned the misfortune all day long as he sold his bananas on Ludlow Street.