"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.
AMERICAN LIFE THROUGH RUSSIAN EYES
In connection with Gordin, two other writers of talent who work on the Yiddish newspapers may be briefly mentioned, altho one of them has written as yet nothing and the other comparatively little that is based on the life of New York. They are, as is Gordin in his best sketches, Russian not only in form, but also in material. David Pinsky, who did general translating and critical work on the Abendblatt until a few months ago, when that newspaper died, has been in New York only a little more than a year, and has written very little about the local quarter. He has not even as yet approached near enough to the New York life to realize that there are any special conditions to portray. He is the author, however, of good sketches in German and is somewhat different in the character of his inspiration from the other men. They are close adherents of the tradition of Russian realism, while he is under the influence of the more recent European faith that disclaims all "schools" in literature. His stories, altho they remain faithful to the sad life portrayed, yet show greater sentimentality and some desire to bring forward the attractive side.
The other of these two writers, B. Gorin, knew his Russian-Jewish life so intimately before he came to New York, seven years ago, that he has continued to draw from that source the material of his best stories; altho he has written a good deal about Yiddish New York. His sketches have the ordinary Russian merit of fidelity in detail and unpretentiousness of style. Compared with the other writers in New York, he is more elaborate in his workmanship. More mature than Libin, he is free from Gordin's artistic insincerity. He has been the editor of several Yiddish papers in the quarter, and has contributed to nearly all of them.
Of Gorin's stories which touch the Russian-Jewish conditions in New York, "Yom Kippur" is one of the most notable. It is the tale of a pious Jewish woman who joins her husband in America after he has been there several years. The details of the way in which she left the old country, how she had to pass herself off on the steamer as the wife of another man, her difficulties with the inspecting officers, etc., give the impression of a life strange to the Gentile world. On arriving in America, she finds her husband and his friends fallen away from the old faith. He had shaved off his beard, had grown to be slack about the "kosher" preparation of food and the observance of the religious holidays, no longer was careful about the morning ablutions, worked on the Sabbath and compelled her to take off the wig which every orthodox Jewish woman must wear. She soon fell under the new influence and felt herself drifting generally into the ungodly ways of the New World. On the day of the great "White Feast" she found herself eating when she should have fasted. On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the sense of her sins overpowered her quite.
"Yom Kippur! Now the children of Israel are all massed together in every corner of the globe. They are congregated in synagogues and prayer-houses, their eyes swollen with crying, their voices hoarse from wailing and supplicating, their broken hearts full of repentance. They all stand now in their funeral togas, like a throng of newly arisen dead."
She grows delirious and imagines that her father and mother come to her successively and reproach her for her degeneracy. In a series of frightful dreams, all bearing on her repentance, the atmosphere of the story is rendered so intense that her death, which follows, seems entirely natural.
The theme of one of Gorin's longer stories on Jewish-American life is of a young Jew who had married in the old country and had come to New York alone to make his fortune. If he had remained in Russia, he would have lived happily with his wife, but in America he acquired new ideas of life and new ideals of women; and, therefore, felt alienated from her when she joined him in the New World. Many children came to them, his wages as a tailor diminished and his wife grew constantly less congenial. He remained with her, however, from a sense of duty for eleven years, when, after insuring his life, he committed suicide.
A SATIRIST OF TENEMENT SOCIETY
Leon Kobrin stands midway between Libin and Levin, on the one hand, and Gordin on the other. He carries his Russian traditions more intimately with him than do Libin and Levin, but more nearly approaches to a saturated exposition in fiction form of the life of Yiddish New York than does Gordin. Unlike the latter, he has the pretence rather than the reality of learning, and the reality rather than the pretence of realistic art. Yet he never quite attains to the untutored fidelity of Libin. Many of his sketches are satirical, some are rather burlesque descriptions of Ghetto types, and some suggest the sad "problem" element which runs through Russian literature. He was born in Russia in 1872 of poor parents, orthodox Jews, who sent him to the Hebrew school, of which the boy was never very fond, but preferred to read Russian at night surreptitiously. He found some good friends, who, as he put it, "helped me to the light through Ghetto darkness." Incidentally, it may be pointed out that the intellectual element of the Ghetto—the realists and Socialists—think that progress is possible only in the line of Russian culture, and that to remain steadfast to Jewish traditions is to remain immersed in darkness. So Kobrin struggled from a very early age to master the Russian language, and even wrote sketches in that tongue. He, like Gordin, refers to the fact of his being a writer in Yiddish apologetically as something forced upon him by circumstances. Unlike Gorin, however, he believes in the literary capacity of the language, with which he was first impressed when he came to America in 1892 and found stories by Chekhov translated by Abraham Cahan and others into Yiddish and published in the Arbeiterzeitung. It was a long time, however, before Kobrin definitely identified himself with the literary calling. He first went through a course somewhat similar to that of the boy mathematician in the sketch by Libin, described above. He tried the sweat-shop, but he was a bungler with the machines; then he turned his hand with equal awkwardness to the occupation of making cigars; failed as distinctly as a baker, and finally, in 1894, was forced into literature, and began writing for the Arbeiterzeitung.