And now since Perez's death, on Asch's shoulders has fallen the responsibility of being the greatest Jewish writer living to-day. He is assuming the added duty of revolutionist as well as artist. For the serious Jewish writer is a sort of rabbi to his people. Ethically he stands for the old Jewish ideals. To these Asch has added the beauty of paganism and the vision of anarchistic communism.
In Paris once he came to a meeting of Zionists. He spoke against the Zionist idea and was not listened to with great deference. Another writer, Abraham Raisin, coming in shouted, "Hear! Listen to a great Jew." Asch was given the floor and finished the speech.
Asch feels that only now is he beginning to drop his Jewish past as material for his work. He is going out into the future: he is becoming impressed with a vision of the America to be—the ideal democracy. And his work is showing it. He is planning a poetic industrial drama, he is finishing a gripping war play. His deep understanding of the industrial slavery of our times is shown wonderfully in his novel, Motke the Scamp, which is now appearing in serial form in the New York Yiddish Forward. He begins with Motke's infancy. His mother's milk is sold to the rich man's baby; Motke is cheated of everything. Picture after picture of sordid Polish ghetto life follows—intermixed with wood and river sunshine as only Asch can do it. One feels the sun resting eternally over all, while man with his laughter and tenderness and pain struggles toward perfection.
ASCH is becoming an exposer and a prophet, but with great beauty of style and purity of emotion. He is decidedly modern, decidedly Russian, decidedly Hebraic, and eternally universal. He is bringing the message of beauty and freedom to the American Yiddish working man. Asch is not a socialist; he is a real individualist. With a sincere contribution to the happiness of the world he believes that every human being is entitled to all the joy of the world, no matter what form his contribution may assume; shirts, street cleaning, cooking, a painting, dishes, a poem. He does not preach eight hours and a dollar more, he demands joy in labor. He wants people to play—to be happy at their work. He demands freedom in one's personal life and beauty in mind and body. He is an industrialist plus an artist.
Asch has traveled through Russia talking on various subjects to Jewish gatherings, not for money but for love of his race. He has visited Palestine, but with a keen interest in the growth and development of the Jew—not from a nationalistic standpoint but from a world point of view.
And this is why he admires America—because it brings to him a vision of a perfect race, the result of the mixture of all races, perpetuating the fine traits of all. He is immensely interested in the public school. He believes in democracy and thinks we have it in America.
For artists, however, he says this country is not good. The newspapers in Europe, he says, print what Tolstoi eats and how he sleeps. Here Rockefeller is the national hero. The artist here lacks artistic obstinacy; he succumbs to money, he leaves starvation and his Kunst.
ASCH loves Shakespere above all other writers; he is his master. For months he went each night to the Berlin theatres and often, with his eyes shut, would listen to the words and cadences of Shakespere's lines. Hamlet he considers the greatest play ever written. Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet are two of his favorites. From the ghost scene in Hamlet he can trace Maeterlinck and all the modern mystics. He says that Shakespere is universal in his appeal and that his work in translation, when done by a master like Schlegel, takes on the peculiar flavor of the tongue and people into which it is translated and loses none of its intrinsic worth.