BEFORE leaving Die Jüngsten, I cannot refrain from translating two passages concerning Kowalski—the first his longing for the open country after his long stay in St. Petersburg, and the other his remarks on clouds:
"St. Petersburg had become sickening to him. For loneliness he longed, for solitude. Solitude, with his brush behind the mountains, in the deep woods. To see every day sun, mountains, and water! The water that pushes blocks of ice before it, and to see the cloud shadows which camp on the wide snow fields. To live again in the little room with his comrade the Lithuanian peasant with whom he studied in the academy! To have no money. To eat bread; much good black bread with honey which his comrade's father would send from the village. For whole days to wander about and paint clouds!"
Mery discovers him at work, and looking at his painting he says:
"Everything is clouds—the warmth that I feel, the warmth— . . . and do you see the pride that such a cloud has, the pride, the formality? 'The cloud is no small thing,' my fat professor used to say. It is no small thing to paint a cloud, for then one must feel eternity. As lovingly as a girl's body must one model a cloud. And warmth and pride must come to expression. To paint a cloud means to step into Heaven, into the middle of Heaven and to see a new world which we do not know here at all. Such a nobody as I wishes to paint a cloud, a Heaven—wishes to have seen God and create Him anew with his little art! That is an impudence, isn't it?
"There you see what I have painted. It is nothing—it is worthless—something is lacking." He looked amusedly at the picture. "Love is lacking. So it is as my professor with the fat belly loved to say, 'To paint a real cloud one must love.' Yes, yes, to be able to create something good one must be in love or—do you know what? Or to feel a great sin in one's soul. Yes, yes, with a burning sin in one's heart one can create big things. When one has entirely fallen. . . ."
BILDER aus dem Ghetto is a series of sketches dealing with Jewish life. Many Jewish characters are pictured in dramatic situations but with very little plot. The characters are all poor; fishmongers, children of the Ghetto, a Jewish farmer, two mothers, an old married couple. A few typical plots follow.
"Ein Eilbotte" is really a prose poem describing a sunrise, a storm, and the reappearing sun—more properly perhaps a series of paintings, of symphonic word canvases. Let me translate the opening passages:
"Behind the town ruin which stands on a small hill like a national monument, flaming and fiery rises the red of the morning and floods with its glow the gray clouds that hang in the horizon. It brings a son of the sun into the world. The day tears itself from the lap of the mother Night.