Yeshiva University - Masmid Yearbook (New York, NY)

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M A S M I D 21 Leaves and Lives JEWS WITHOUT MONEY By Michael Gold Of all the authors who have written about and tried to catch the spirit of the Jewish East Side, it has remained for Michael Gold to give us what is perhaps the clearest and truest picture of that remnant of the old Ghetto. Jews Without Money is a sordid tale of the sufferings, hopes, fears, despairs, ambitions, prejudices, hates, and passions of the East Side medley of beggars, gangsters, millionaires, ordinary workingmen and small businessmen. Mr. Gold writes here of his own childhood experiences, with a genuine and sympathetic understanding of all the undercurrents which move the East Side. The East Side is what it is because of the people who live there, and as a result the book must of necessity be a study of types of characters. The fiercely loving mother, witii no room in her heart for hate, the bluster- ing, arrogant father, and the parasitic green- horns, pimps, and bums who infest the East Side are brought clearly and vividly before us again. All these types are merely to give us one larger picture — the Jewish Immigrant in America. The East Side is for the fir t generation of immigrants — a vale of tears. It is the scene of his disillusionment; his dreams of a golden land disappear like so many pricked bubbles, and nothing is left for him but a hand-to- hand struggle with wretchedness, poverty, and starvation. Working from dawn to late at night he barely manages to eke out an existence. Finally he succumbs. Instead of a New Promised Land he finds the sweat- shops, the bawdy houses, and Tammany Hall. When he gets together with his fellow immigrants for some fun, the picture we get is of Egypt ' s slaves around the campfire in the shadow of the pyramids. America was not the place for him. America is so rich and fat because it has eaten the tragedy of millions of immigrants. The second generation, however, having no disillusions to depress it, leads in its youth a happy, carefree existence. The boy sees only the romance of the East Side, despite his all too often being hungry. He leads a life of adventure, mysrerious and thrilling, as he prowls the streets with his gang, steal- ing fruit, fighting enemy gangs, and explor- ing the secrets of sex through a keyhole. Only the schools cast a shadow over him. School is a jail for children. One ' s sin is youth, and the jailers punish one for it. Mr. Gold is highly figurative in his char- acter studies, and were it not for the utter baseness and degradation of most of the studies, we would say poetic. Character is placed before us so boldly, and unmistakably: She looked like some vulgar, pretentious prostitute, but was only the typical wife of a Jewish nouveau-riche. The inherent optimism — or hardihood — of the Jew gives him strength to endure in the face of the hardships and atrocities that occur under his very eyes. All these things happened. They were part of our daily lives, not lurid articles in a Sunday news- paper. The book is quite definitely tinged with Communism. Mr. Gold is a Communist, editor of the New Masses, and it was to be expected that he would attempt to preach his doctrines. ' O workers ' Revolution, you brought hope to me, a lonely suicidal boy. You are the true Messiah. He denounces the modern state as the breeder and trainer of gangsters and murderers. It is America that has taught the sons of tubercular tailors how to kill. Mr. Gold has here, with a generous ad- mixture of Yiddish idiom, given us a simple, intimate novel of that motley, colorful, hy- peremotional conglomeration that is called the East Side. He speaks as man to man, not as author to reader. Jews Without Money ' . ' may very likely endure to become the epic of the East Side. : B. G.

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20 M A S M I D Father and Son By Jacob Agushewitz EB ZEIDEL HALEVY was a man of medium stature and of strong build. His pale face was encircled by a black, thick beard. He was always dressed in a black silken gaberdine, long tsitsos dangling through his vest. The self-possessed look in his eyes, the simple manners, and the frank expression of his face, created an atmosphere of tranquility about him. Indeed! Tranquility and simplicity were the chief traits of his character. Reb Zeidel never regarded himself as a path-finder in any sense of the term. He followed strictly in the long-trodden way of his ancestors. His lumber trade as well as his art of living were transmitted to him by his father. Thus Reb Zeidel led a quiet, simple life, respected by the Russian community in which he lived, and undisturbed by new ideas that gradually filtered into the town and occu- pied the minds of the rising generation. He did not concern himself with attempts to solve the riddle of the Universe or his proper place in it. The purpose of the world and the purpose of his life were both clear to him. No doubts ever arose in his mind con- cerning any of his tenets. His topics of dis- cussion invariably centered around the Tal- mud. His mind was content, his conscience clear, and he hoped that when his day would come his soul would return to heaven in as pure a state as when it was given to him. Often he would sit at dusk and brood over the follies of the new generation that refused to follow in God ' s ways and talked of cos- mopolitanism, self-emancipation, re- form and assimilation. His constant hopes and prayers were that the merciful God would pardon the transgressors, change their heart for the better and hasten the com- ing of the Messiah. Mr. Jacob Levy is a middle-aged man. A short, neatly trimmed Vandyke beard covers his chin. His dreamy eyes and broad fore- head betoken an intelligent man. Indeed, Mr. Levy is a self-examining man. Like many of his generation, he has undergone constant intellectual struggles. Though reared in a strictly Jewish spirit, he was often disturbed by the new ideas from the West. Little by little he discarded his old beliefs and looked for new interests. Cosmopolitanism often absorbed all his energies. Why not have peaceable human beings, quoth he, instead of warring na- tions? Why should the killing of people automatically become just, merely because it is being done on a large scale. ' ' For the reali- zation of these ideals of Peace and Progress, the Jews and Gentiles ought to fight shoulder to shoulder against the common enemy, the Empire of Darkness. The Jews, he felt, were lagging behind in the performance of their duty towards this great ideal: when the world will be full of knowledge like water covering the sea. When he entered a Russian University, however, he realized how little co-operation he could expect from the Russians. He found, to his detriment, that racial hatred was too deep-rooted to be eliminated in one or two generations of shoulder-to-shoulder ideals. Disillusioned, he turned to Zionism. In the building of his own fatherland he found absorption for his energy of the ideal. Zealously he plunged into the work of fur- thering this cause. But often, in the quiet of his study, he would sit down and ponder deeply. He would then evaluate his aspirations and their practicability. Looking out to the infinite Universe with its inexorable, severely me- chanical rules, and considering how little these vast transcending forces seemed to care for the furtherance of his and his nation ' s cause, he would suddenly see his cherished ideals fade like a vain dream. The vision of his venerable father treading calmly in the way of his ancestors, quietly hoping, implic- itly believing, always certain, never disillu- sioned, would then rise before him. in full contrast to his own distracted and standard- less life. Then the tranquility radiating from his father ' s confident eyes would tap a foun- tain of faith within Jacob Levy which, rush- ing up, would flood out his pessimism, and enable him Ui find contentment in renewed zeal for the rebuilding of Zion.

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22 M A S M I D BOTTOM DOGS By Edward Dahlberg In his hapless, hunger-beset struggle the squalid and the sickly degradation of moral- ity crawl out of the bottom-dog like the evils out of Pandora ' s chest. And, as in Pando- ra ' s chest, there is one redeemer, one cure — the hope of betterment. That hope is not ex- pressed in the novel itself — for it is a hope- less tale of a degenerating spirit — but in an excellent introduction by D. H. Lawrence. His stand is of the socialization of suffering. Now himself shriveled by death, his intro- duction is of vigorous compassion for the souls shriveled by death in life and for the misguided bodies that instinctively stumble through complacent wretchedness. Bottom Dogs dwells depressingly on the festering of moral decay. In the novel human beastliness and carnality have not even the vigor of animality. There exists only an insensate perversion of impotent characters. The hero, Lorry, has spent a guileless childhood as a street gamin and as an in- mate of a torturous orphan asylum. First he is subjected to the loose ways of street- prowling, and then to the stifling effect of a rigid discipline in the asylum. This dis- torted childhood could bring no essence of manliness: only a listless pessimism, defeat- ist ' s ambitions, and squelched vitality. Lorry, the victim of meted incompetence, hoboes it to the coast. The wanderlust in him seems to be a spirit drawing him away from his constant frustrations. This sensi- bility is the voice of a rebelling conscience and the last stronghold of virtue. This last redeemer, too. is killed and there begins in Los Angeles the period of fertile immorality The book abruptly ends with this initiation. For its style and substance Bottom-Dogs has an enervating shabbiness. The novel is typical of that ever-expressivencs, or style- lessness, of the scourged and of the blasphem- ous accuracy of the depraved and the pessi- mist. In one place Mr. Dahlberg distorts the expression History was repeating its faults again ' into History was vomiting over it- self. This is typical of the sulleness of his style — or lack of style which is very often just another form of expressiveness. Throughout there are vivid pictures of the colorlessness and morbidness of the bottom-dog, a morbidness that is a callous against all external abuse and yet contains the virus of an inward rotting. The pic- tures are done vividly — just as a grunt is a vivid expression of distaste. Its boast a genuine picture of the bottom- dog may be true, but its realism, we often feel, is carried far into coarseness. It has the same awkward realism of the energetic Frenchman who rubbed sand over his paint- ing of a beach. Mr. Dahlberg rubs too much mud over his picture — and the effect leaves us in a sense befouled. Bottom-Dogs and its human realism is another of those reeking ogres among well- groomed literature. The unkempt sufferers have a real cause — but they cannot success- fully plead it by denying the existence of the qualities that alone will bring their pitiable state to an end. H. G. THE WOMAN OF ANDROS By Thornton Wilder R. M. W. The trials and tribulations of to-day are the same as those of two-thousand years ago. Youth — today — doubts the purpose of lite, but no differently from the youth of twv ' ' thousand years ago. The tragedy of life is universal — and the same in all ages. So, preaches Thornton Wilder, whether we live, doubt, dspair and suffer in this twentieth century or twenty centuries ago, the story of our eventful, tearstained existence on this earth is of no more importance than to war- rant being commented upon as casually as the description of a sunset. What has hap- pened — of so much consequence to certain individuals — will repeat itself as long as Man breathes. And so the author describes a sunset over Spain, over Africa, over Palestine and over Greece. Incidentally, then, is unfolded the