WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY JOHN REED
NEW YORK ALFRED A. KNOPF MCMXVII
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
To my Naomi
INTRODUCTION
There is a literary power which might be called Russian—a style of bald narration which carries absolute conviction of human character, in simple words packed with atmosphere. Only the best writers have it; this book is full of it. I read the manuscript more than a year ago, and I remember it chiefly as a series of vivid pictures—a sort of epic of our City of Dreadful Day. Here we see and smell and hear the East Side; its crowded, gasping filth, the sour stench of its grinding poverty, the cries and groans and lamentations in many alien tongues of the hopeful peoples whose hope is broken in the Promised Land. Pale, undersized, violent children at play in the iron street; the brown, steamy warmth of Jewish coffee-houses on Grand Street; sick tenement rooms quivering and breathless in summer heat—starkly hungry with the December wind cutting through broken windows; poets, musicians, men and women with the blood of heroes and martyrs, babies who might grow up to be the world's great—stunted, weakened, murdered by the unfair struggle for bread. What human stories are in this book! What tremendous dramas of the soul!