"YES," Asch was saying, "he was the best Jew I ever met. I always think of him as 'The Light of Damascus.' I was in Damascus last year. The most beautiful city in the world! The houses on the winding streets are centuries old. The people seem older than the houses. For hours I stood in the market-place watching the camels and the asses pass by. Some had the dust of the desert on their feet and some had mud and dirt. Each went slowly on its way with its turbaned rider sitting still as a figure of stone on its back.
"Through the kindness of a friend we entered a house on one of the strange streets. Like most of the old houses its front was plain and unattractive. We went through a court and on to a balcony overlooking an enclosed garden. Such a garden I had never seen! It seemed a picture transported from the 'Thousand and One Nights.' In the center was a fountain of extraordinary workmanship, so inlaid with gems that after the water had gushed out it seemed to splash down again in a shower of ruby and amethyst. About the fountain were palms and fig trees. The flowers were more wondrous than the jewelled water or the many-colored mosaics of the walls and arches.
"On the grass sat a grey-bearded Mohammedan. He smoked his hookah in silence. Suddenly we heard voices. Three young women came from the house and bathed in the fountain. Their lord and husband sat stoically and smoked. They laughed and played in the splashing waters. And as I watched this old man and these beautiful women, I thought myself back in the ancient Damascus, in the city that I had thought was dead for a thousand years.
"THAT evening I was walking in the city. Suddenly I saw a light before me. To my surprise it was an electric bulb—the only one in Damascus. It was fastened to the head of a donkey and illuminated a painted advertisement attached to his back. By following the wires I found they led to a large wholesale warehouse. It hurt me to find this electric light in Damascus. I was still more hurt when I found that the man who had installed it was a Jew, a Russian Jew who had come to the city some years before.
"The next day I visited a shop where hammered gold and silver, for which Damascus is famous, was sold. With the permission of the proprietor I went upstairs to the workroom. What I saw there I shall never forget.
"I found myself in a long but very narrow room, dimly lighted by a few dirty windows. In two long rows in front of two long tables sat fifty or sixty little girls huddled so close together that they touched one another. Each child was bent over the table and each held a little hammer. She was tapping on a piece of metal. The tapping was never-ending—a sharp clicking sound like the falling of hail. The children never spoke nor smiled. Near me sat a little girl. She was not more than eight years old. Her hammer had stopped tapping and her eyes were closed. She was asleep. The girl next to her, evidently her elder sister, seeing the foreman approach, pinched the child sharply. She opened her eyes and dully began her tapping. As I left this room of darkness my eyes were wet with tears.
"I found out that only little girls were employed in this industry: that they began when eight or nine years old. When they were sixteen they usually were dead from the metal that had entered their lungs. The children were mostly Jewish, for you must know that when the Jews become part of a slow Eastern civilization they sink yet lower and become yet more phlegmatic and listless than the people among whom they have settled. I was indignant and asked if nothing was being done to remedy this terrible evil. Then I was told that there was one man who was devoting his life to freeing these children. It was the Jewish merchant who used the only electric light in Damascus. He gave every cent he earned to this work. He maintained an industrial school for Jewish children and was trying to interest the Jews of the world in the movement. And then I blessed this man's electric light. I think of him always as 'The Light of Damascus.'"
AND thus Sholom Asch talked. I cannot reproduce his words; I have only tried to give the spirit of them. He talked in the finished style of a Maupassant, with all the imagination and all the strength of that great master. I saw then, before I had read his work, that his title of "The Jewish Maupassant" was not extravagant. And I saw also that here was an artist with human sympathy immeasurable, and yet not lacking sensuous imagery and elemental strength and beauty.