A Menorah Prize Essay
By Percy B. Shostac
PERCY B. SHOSTAC, born in 1892, in New York City, where he attended the Ethical Culture School and High School; graduate of the University of Wisconsin (1915), where he was an active member of the Wisconsin Dramatic Society and contributed frequently to the Wisconsin Play-Book. He is now teaching English at the University of Kansas. The present Essay was awarded the Wisconsin Menorah Prize for 1915.
I
The Man and His Work
IT was in the little parlor of a four-room New York flat. The room was furnished sparsely: a table and a few chairs of bamboo, a long row of books on the yellow floor along one wall, some Chinese ornaments and plants, a few Russian embroideries, a rich Persian covering on the couch, and candles—many candles burning and flickering on their rest of saucer or glazed clay candlestick. Our hostess seemed part of her room; she was a Russian Jewess, decidedly Oriental in type, rare in her beauty and still more rare in her personality and charm.
Sholom Asch sat opposite me smoking his cigarette and sipping his coffee—a big man of thirty-five, with broad shoulders and a frame sturdy and substantial; thick black hair, a high forehead, a characteristically Jewish nose, a firm mouth, a little black moustache, and deep brown eyes—eyes that at times would seem to be unaware of anything surrounding them, yet one felt that they saw everything and understood everything. His complexion was that of a ruddy boy, yet his large handsome features had the sensitiveness which classed him unmistakably as an artist.
He was talking in Yiddish. His voice was soft and his sentences followed each other in musical cadence and beauty.