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anew; and as the advertisements kept succeeding one another interminably, the violence of protest from the galleries rose to savage fury. The girl on my right murmured that it was an outrage, and the man in the seat behind agreed with her emphatically, adding with a sneer, "And this is an advanced playhouse!"

In the end the performance did begin, and was followed with a breathless attention that to me was a revelation, except when Mrs. Kalish, as the fascinating, unhappy Etty Friedlander, appeared for the first time, and was greeted with a wild ovation that lasted for several minutes, and except, also, at the end of the play, when the applause and the shouts for the author were so prolonged and insistent that the management was forced to send around the corner to Canal Street, and have Mr. Gordin snatched away from his chess and his coffee, while the throng stood on the chairs and clapped away as at an appointed task, only with a vastly greater enthusiasm.

During the entr'acts, as soon as the inevitable curtain-calls had subsided, the entire audience apparently broke out into animated discussion. Strangers accosted their neighbors, men spoke up to women they had never seen, women even addressed remarks to men they did not know. Every one was in a flutter of excitement about something, I could not quite see what. "Problem," "emancipation," "parental tyranny," "dual morality"—a whole series of unfamiliar words and phrases floated out of the din and reached my ears. I could make neither head nor tail out of it all. And why, I kept wondering, did all these debaters say nothing about the humorous character in the play, the young gentleman who had amused me much with his odd habit of falling asleep at all times and places, except, as I had overheard some one behind me remark, that "Gordin will have his horse-play"? And why did they laugh when there was nothing to laugh at, as when the old union man, having been admonished by the young radical to think for himself, exclaimed, "What is

the use of thinking when you have a constitution?"

On the whole, then, I had not been greatly stirred by the long-awaited masterpiece. In fact, I was a little disappointed. There had been neither disloyal wife nor jealous husband, although the dramatist had made some amends for his omissions by ending his play with a double murder as against the beggarly single one in the novel. I presume that I should have come away as unregenerate as ever if the man on the seat behind me had not seen fit to enter into conversation with me as we were leaving the theater.

"Another Gordin triumph," he said enthusiastically as he fell into step with

"It is amazing how much food for thought that man can cram into a two hours' performance. And just notice how much further than the rest of us he sees. He is not just a philosopher; he is an artist with a philosophy. I know exactly how Gordin stands on the feminist question, but his preferences and his sense of abstract justice do not prevent him from facing the obstacles to progress once he comes to deal with the realities of life.

"You will see," he went on, as I made no move to answer, "the orthodox in the movement will take exception and carp. They resent any disturbing of their cherished notions. Some of our self-styled intellectuals are as bad as the clodpates. If facts are against them, so much the worse for the facts, and they will hear nothing of them. You remember when Gordin tackled the problem of capital in 'God, Man, and Devil,' a tragedy almost as fine as 'Faust' in my estimation,— there was a bitter howl from that quarter, because the dramatist had failed to live up to their pet fancies, and had made the capitalist a human being instead of painting him as black as they like to paint him in the anarchist liturgy. And Gordin's sallies on the stupidity of the working-man, although it is as plain as the nose on your face and is the theme of all our radical lamentations, was almost regarded as treason by the factional press." We swung into East Broadway and

beyond, as we descended half a dozen steps and entered Warschauer's Russian tea-house. With its counter piled high

stopped in front of the "Forward" office. "Where do you live?" he asked suddenly.

"Eleventh Street," I told him, "near with edibles, its huge nickel-plated coffeeAvenue A."

"A little far," he admitted, "but the night is long, and it is rather balmy." He pointed to the newly laid out Seward Park, on the opposite side of the street. "Let us sit down on a bench. If it gets too late, you can come and sleep with me. My bed is big enough, and I live with my parents, so there won't be any difficulty. What was I saying? Yes; I am looking forward to a play on religion from Gordin's hand. I understand he is planning one."

I was getting interested. At last my friend had touched on a subject that I could talk about. But he did not stay there long. He kept hopping back and forth from literature to radicalism and from Gordin to atheism. He was the most restless person I had ever come in contact with.

"I'll tell you what we'll do," he exclaimed in the middle of a sentence. "Let us go over to Warschauer's on Gouverneur Street. There 'll be folks there, and we'll get the news. I am anxious to know about that Tageblatt purity humbug." Before I had time to make up my mind he already had me under the arm, and we were striding along across lawns and over flower-beds in the direction of the Educational Alliance.

"A fine arsenal of reaction that," he remarked lightly as we passed the structure. "If I am lucky enough to be alive when the revolution comes, I hope they'll let me attend to it with an ax and a torch."

I could not forbear a glance at him. on hearing those violent words. Revolution and sabotage, with those mild, brown. eyes, that rabbinical stoop in the shoulders, and that sallow, idealistic facewhat a queer medley, and what a curious version of the Messianic hope!

It was just one by the clock on the Hoe Building, which towered over the squatting tenements from Grand Street

urns, its bare marble-topped tables, it was a familiar enough sight. The pictures on the walls, however, added a strange touch, and the vivacity of the guests over their tables was altogether novel. Here was an almost life-size lithograph of Tolstoy in peasant dress following a plow. Adjacent to the framed sign announcing that the management was not responsible for hats, coats, and umbrellas, hung a somewhat smaller picture of a group, entitled "Our Dead." I glanced down at the numbered names, and for the first time heard of Marx, Engels, Lassalle, Bakounine, and a variety of others-names that were destined to mean a great deal to me in the near future. A variety of posters gave notice of the coming anniversary of the Commune, of a solemn celebration in honor of the five anarchists martyred at Chicago, the Forward ball, an address by Baboushka, and the like. Photographs of authors of all nations covered the remaining wall space.

came

We had hardly entered when my companion was hailed with shouts of "comrade" and a spirited waving of hands from nearly every corner of the room, and then I learned that his name was Elkin. A middle-aged woman, a girl, and a squat, red-haired young man, seated at the far end of the establishment, called to him to join them. More tea was ordered, which in double-decker tea-pots, was poured by the waiter into glasses, and was drunk out of deep saucers. Then followed the news for which ElkinSasha his friends called him-had brought me here. The red-haired young man immediately launched into it. "Have you seen the "Tageblatt'?" he asked Elkin as soon as we had seated ourselves. "The pigs have somehow got hold of advance information about Gordin's new play, and they are out with a pasquinade in their characteristic style."

"But what is it they want?" the young woman inquired in Russian.

At this our informant smiled.

"You innocent!" he exclaimed. "This is America. Wait awhile; you'll learn. But the logic is this: There is some excuse for a realistic, vital literature in Russia. It is a subtle vehicle of propaganda which has been invented for the express purpose of defeating the censor. But here where the good God has blessed us with everything that reasonable people can expect we ought to be entirely satisfied with Hurwitch's operettas and the Sunday supplement. Where the world is perfect, only churls and fanatics can demand that literature should be a criticism of life. So reasons the 'Tageblatt,' and if you accept its premises, you will have to admit that it is right in attacking Gordin for undermining morals and casting reflections on the purity of the family. Moreover__”

.

But here the middle-aged woman interrupted him.

"Bother my head about such rubbish! What is the use of wasting your precious irony on a beaten foe? Reaction is cornered and gasping its last; so of course it is clawing the air. Leave it alone. You ought to have been with me at Moskowitz's lecture on Oscar Wilde."

"Moskowitz thinks himself a radical," interposed Elkin. "You should know better, Sonya, than to go and listen to his ravings. Why don't you read Wilde for yourself? And if you must have commentaries, investigate Shaw."

"I know both," cried Sonya. "Where is your memory? Only during last year's strike you and I went over 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' and 'Salome' and 'The Duchess of Padua,' you in English and I in Russian, and we compared the translation with the original. But Moskowitz is not a fool. I used to know him quite well on the other side. In fact, he and I were in the same load of hay crossing the frontier into Germany. Well, he is getting Americanized. I had not the slightest idea what he was going to talk about. The announced title was 'A Study in Decadence,' and I can tell you it was a thoroughly masterly exposi

tion of bourgeois morality applied to art. It reminded me of poor Gorky's adventure in New York. You know he never quite got it through his head how the American mind coupled his domestic affairs with his literary achievements."

"I am still reading his last volumeI mean 'Mother'," said the young woman. "Have you read it, Sonya? I wonder whether it was Baboushka who furnished him the inspiration? Have you read it, Herman?"

The squat young man with the red hair nodded affirmatively.

"But I don't know anything about Baboushka's early history. Did she come from the peasantry? Anyhow, if you want to see the difference between factual journalism and genius, compare Stepniak's 'Career of a Nihilist' with 'Mother.'

I was making a mental note of all these authors and titles when Sasha Elkin changed the subject.

"I understand," he said, "that the 'Freie Arbeiter Stimme' is preparing for a daily edition, and Yanoffsky has refused a raise in his salary. That's devotion. gone to seed. The fellow is everlastingly hard up. What is more, he has donated a week of his wages toward the new fund. I wish it were not slack at caps, so I could make a decent contribution. Fanny," he said, turning to the young woman, "I know you don't read Yiddish, but you have brought some money with you from home. You ought to do your share. It is the best paper in the movement, I don't care what your politics are."

"I am going to read Yiddish," said Fanny. "I am ashamed of myself to have to learn about my own literature in translation. I wonder whether you know here how our men are taking hold. When I stopped in Vienna 'Ost und West' was bringing out Gordin's 'Das Geld.' What is the original title?"

"God, Man, and Devil," volunteered Sonya.

"That is it. And in Berlin I went to the Hoftheater and saw Sholom Asch's 'God of Revenge."

"I know, I know," interrupted Herman, with enthusiasm. "Our Maamè Loshen [mother tongue] will soon take rank among the world's literary languages. Of course we have not any Ibsens or Chekhovs or Hauptmanns, but it would not surprise me in the least if the Reclam publishers would in the near future bring out Peretz and Frug and Hirschbein, to say nothing of the older fellows. It is too bad that Abramovitch and Sholem Aleichem are so what shall I call it?— local in their background, or we should long ago have been heard from."

Sonya burst out laughing at this.

"Oh, you incorrigible nationalists! Working for the social revolution with your right hand and plotting against it with your left. Herman, you poor hankering, dreamerish soul, will you tell me what good your dotard Abramovitch is going to do the cause of exploited labor?"

"Sonya, you make me tired with your notions. Honestly, you are as narrow as a Dukhobor. Yes, I will tell you what good Abramovitch can do, not to 'exploited labor,' but to the greater cause of world emancipation. It will do just what the rest of the literary masterpieces in the Reclam series will do. It will contribute to the mutual understanding of races. If there is any people that needs to be understood and that is suffering from prejudice it is our own poor race. You have eyes for the sorrows of the Chinese coolie, but you can't see what is in front of your own nose."

"Oh, that is it," retorted Sonya. "My dear boy, you don't belong in the movement at all. You are a full-fledged Zionist. Why don't you look into the platform of the territorialists?"

"Be still, both of you!" said Elkin, putting his hand on Sonya's mouth. "If you fellows are going to get into a personal quarrel, I'll clear out and go to bed. Good heavens! Look at the time! Why, we are left all alone. Let us be off. Comrade," this to me,-"you stay with me to-night."

And so I found myself in the move

ment.

Within the ensuing week I revisited Warschauer's several times, and it was seldom I did not run into Sasha. For the most part, he and I wandered about together. I used to ask myself frequently what he found in me to interest. him, but months later, at a little party in Sonya's flat on Henry Street, where the program began with chopped herring and boiled potatoes with sour cream and ended with "the Marseillaise," he enlightened me. He had at once realized, he said, what were my antecedents and my associations, largely from the way I behaved at the play; but he had made up his mind that my visit to the Thalia was a good omen and should not go to waste. So he had tackled me on all sorts of subjects, and had found me wanting until he touched on religion and discovered that I was promising material. "One good convert in these times of preparation," he concluded, "is worth a whole. army after the revolution arrives. Go and do likewise, old fellow. There is lots of opportunity among your countrymen."

Sasha and his relations to his parents were to me a source of never-failing wonder. der. Right on the morning after my night in his house I observed that his was not the kind of family I had been used to seeing on the East Side. His father, for instance, though he retained his orthodox beard, sat down to breakfast without going through the ceremonial ablutions and without putting on his skull-cap. It was Saturday, but I noticed that old Mrs. Elkin lighted the gas herself, and made no pretense of keeping the Sabbath. After the meal both father and son smoked cigarettes, Russian things, with long, stiffpaper mouthpieces, and the older man. asked the younger to tell him what the play had been about. Even his shortskirted little sister listened attentively, and made numerous comments of a kind that would have been considered highly shocking in my family. The Elkin clan Iwere all in the movement.

One of the things that puzzled me about Sasha was that although he read English

fluently and professed admiration for a great number of English and even American authors,-Shakspere, Shelley, Huxley, Whitman, Shaw, Ruskin, he seldom looked at English newspapers and never went to the English theater. Once he and I spent an entire afternoon standing in line in front of the Metropolitan Opera House in an effort to obtain tickets to a performance of "Aïda," and another time (and that in the midst of a prolonged slack season) we paid an extortionate price for seats at the New Theater, where we listened to something or other by Pinero. But these occurrences were the exception rather than the rule.

"Let us go and see the new play at the Republic," I said to him on one occasion. To which he answered:

"Oh, rubbish! Did you ever see an American play?" I had not. "There is no such thing as a theater in this country," he added, "not in the sense that we have a theater, or that Germany and Russia have it. I used to go to them, and I still look through the reviews in the papers now and then. It is water. It will kill a man's soul. It is just an expensive Atlantic Garden."

"But we went to the opera and to the New Theater?"

"Oh, yes; but the opera is not American, and Pinero is a dilution of Ibsen. I tell you there is no thought life in America. What do you think of an institution that has a panicky dread of tragedy, finds Ibsen immoral, and plays Shakspere for the sole benefit of its children, as if 'Hamlet' and 'Othello' were text-books in grammar? And the press. Outside of the what-do-you-call-it, which has brains, but no soul, there is not a newspaper in New York an intelligent man can read. You know the "Tageblatt.' How would you like twenty-four pages of that for one cent? My God! I am not an orthodox Marxian, you know. I can see the point of view of the devil when he has a point of view. But the American is a clodpate who thinks he is a philosopher."

I thought Sasha was exaggerating. At the book-shop in the basement of the

Manhattan School on East Broadway I frequently saw men and women who were unmistakably Americans and who were very far removed from the category of the clodpate. Some of them, I had learned, were editors, others were lecturers, artists, lawyers. They appeared to be in the movement. They knew the things of the Ghetto and unaffectedly admired them. They talked seriously of books and modern social problems. Some even went to our theaters, where, with the help of a little German they had learned in college, they managed to follow the thread of the play. I knew of one who had laboriously acquired enough Yiddish to read some of our books. How did all this tally with Sasha's ungenerous criticism? I kept wondering until one day I heard one of these strangers within our gates say something that gave me a clue.

"What are you doing down here?" the bookseller's wife asked him.

"The usual thing, Mrs. Rabinow. I got lonesome for a bit of good talk, and I needed some books." And then, with a jovial twinkle in his eye, he added: "I reside in Prussia. This is my monthly excursion to Weimar."

We got more flattery, I am afraid, than was good for our heads. These exceptional, intellectual Americans were not the only ones who fled to the East Side as to a Mecca of their souls. Hardly a European of note ever came to America but he devoted the better part of his visit and his energies to the quarter, and shared his ideas with us, and told us what fine fellows we were. This was true not only of Gorky, who in a way was dependent on us, because he could speak only in Russian, but also of Kropotkin and of scores of others who were lionized by Fifth Avenue. They seemed to feel spiritually at home with us. Orlieneff took up his headquarters in the Ghetto, and let the rest of America come to Grand Street if they wished to see his Russian actors. And Sonnenthal not only covered the East Side with his posters in Yiddish, but gave several performances in our own theaters.

Not all of us were as fortunate as

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