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That the most neglected and unhappy portions of the slums of
the city number among their
inhabitants men and women who under different conditions and
happier fortunes might have been counted among the great names
of the world in art, poetry and music is a fact not unknown to
the outside world. Almost proverbial are the stories of
musicians, scholars and artists who are buried under the slum
life of each great city. Yet there is in the East Side of
New-York a realm of unexplored extent peopled by those who may
well be numbered among the buried geniuses of the slums. The
lost journalists of the Ghetto, those authors and scholars
whose immigration to a strange land has dried their springs of
genius, numbed their finer senses and reduced them to the
unhappy necessity of earning a living through "jargon" papers,
one of the most interesting phases of Ghetto life.
In the far off country from which they come there is a proverb
which characterizes much of the spirit of journalism in those
lands.
"It is as true as if it were printed in the newspaper," says
one citizen to another, when desiring to emphasize the
veracity of a statement. Different in fact and in fancy is
this from the current American conception. But it is not only
this difference that marks the Ghetto journalism. These
masters of Yiddish public opinion are scholars learned in
Talmudic lore, their philosophy is that of Maimonides, their
science that of the medieval world. The discoveries of Galileo
and Bacon are referred to by a certain member of this
fraternity in a fashion that suggests that they are, like
those of Edison and Marconi, the work of yesterday. Ages and
ages behind the modern American spirit are these moulders of
public opinion through the Yiddish papers of the East Side.
To understand this journalism one must know something of the
world for which the papers exist. It is a world of the past,
made up of the vanishing memories of long ago. It represents
the expression in a dying language of race ideals and race
spirits which are destined ere long to vanish. The first
generation of the immigrants are wandering confused and
appalled through the hubbub of American life. Out of the
semidarkness of the Ghettos of Czernowitz, Warsaw and Lemberg
they have come suddenly over the gulf of centuries into the
hurly-burly of twentieth century American life, in which their
learning and their ideals are valueless; they see their
children in the second generation growing up to a world and
imbued with a civilization they cannot understand. This is the
world to which the buried journalists of the Ghetto speak, and
it is of this world that they themselves are a bewildered and
disappointed part.
Of the American world and the American press this first
generation know nothing; for them it does not exist. There is
a story told by a well-known East Side resident which
represents the distance that separates the thousands who dwell
on one side of the Bowery from the rest of the city. A
well-known Jewish citizen went to an East Side rabbi and
besought him to abstain from granting rabbinical divorces.
This form of divorce is granted legally by the rabbis in
Russia, Rumania and Galicia, and they continue it when they
come to this country, with the result that the people who
remarry under it find themselves in prison for bigamy.
"This practice ought to be abandoned," said the remonstrant,
"for it brings the race into disrepute. The newspapers get
hold of it, especially the American press, and it will hurt
the Jewish race."
"Why should we now be allowed to do it here?" was the
passionate answer. "Are we not permitted that liberty even in
autocratic Russia? If it is denied us in free America, then it
is worse tyranny for us here than in persecuting Russia.
Besides, if it is printed in the English press, who will ever
see it? Who ever reads the English press or cares what they
print?" Almost in sight of Park Row, then, exists a world in
which the American press does not penetrate. Here live
thousands of people for whom all the things one commonly
associates with everyday life do not exist.
"You wonder at this statement," said a well-known Jewish
worker on the East Side, "I remember once a Hebrew who was
courting a certain woman, and wanted to meet her in secret to
say the last decisive words. Where do you think he chose as
the best place in which to propose? Out in a public park,
crowded with thousands of people! But these thousands were
Gentiles, and they simply did not exist in his world.
Unfortunately for the romance, I , too, wandered through that
park, and when he saw me he buried his beard in his hand and
hastened stealthily away. For him he and I, with his
sweetheart, were the only persons in that crowded park." Such
incidents, and they might be multiplied, typify the world for
which this class of buried journalists write, forever
reproducing Europe in America, Russia in the United States,
Cracow in New-York City--always vaguely conscious that the
real world is escaping them.
A glimpse at the personality of some of these journalists is
not without interest, and it is proposed to present the exact
portraits of a few who well represent many, refraining from
the mention of names, to keep faith with certain East Side
residents who furnished the following information.
Confined in the dingy quarters of a Yiddish newspaper on the
East Side is a novelist, whose books, published in Russia many
years ago, are still read there. Educated under the rigorous
Talmudic system, his own hunger for literature early led him
into the forbidden paths of secular reading. There are stories
of his school days, when he slept with a volume of Victor Hugo
or Heine under his pillow, and in the hour of daylight, while
his companions still slept, read he charmed pages, and as the
first sleeper awoke hastily slid the forbidden volume under
his head. But his education is Talmudic to-day. When her
refers to the Turks, they exist for him as the descendants of
Ishmael, and he deduces the traits of these Mahometans from
this supposed ancestor. His philosophy, science and
mathematics belong to the medieval age. To-day this citizen of
a far off age, even in Europe, is turning out feuilletons for
a Jewish paper at the rate of three columns a day. This is one
of he most important features of the Yiddish press; a few
columns of news, gleaned from the English press and referring
entirely to Semitic interests, are all that make the paper
really a daily newspaper; for the rest, there is the
feuilleton, satirically treating the manners and the customs
of this strange America, and contrasting with it the golden
age that has departed.
This journalist sees in the new life just far enough to
recognize that it means the disintegration of the old. Imbued
with ancient conceptions, with Old World race pride, he sees
the breakdown or the race. This is all he sees. Ask this
journalist, who moulds the opinion of thousands, for his
opinion of imperialism or of any public question of the day,
and he will look at you in wonder. It simply does not reach
him. He lives in America the life of Bessarabia, he has no
solution to offer his people, no aspiration for himself, and
so, from the career of a successful novelist, he has drifted
back into the living tomb of a "Jargon" feuilleton writer.
But this represents only a single type of many. Somewhere in
the heart of the Ghetto there lives a man who in the
universities of Russia is still known as a famous though
vanished scholar. Languages, literature and sciences were
equally his field. So eminent were his attainments that he
overcame the race prejudice and became known widely. An
idealist, he seemed destined to make a European reputation for
himself, and then suddenly he drifted out of the Old and into
the New World. In his university days he had laid aside the
Yiddish of the Ghetto, but on the threshold of a new world he
suddenly found himself alone, friendless, and in his search
for human assistance he drifted back into the "Jargon." To-day
that man, whose reputation might have been Continental, sits
at a crude desk, pouring out column after column of comment in
Yiddish. The master of a dozen languages, he has converse only
in the corrupt patois of one. Enthusiasm, hope, ambition have
all vanished, and he still toils on painfully, his mind fixed
on the past.
This buried savant has become a radical; his articles belong
to the familiar class of "whines" for labor in which the
workingman is always depicted as wronged. Occasionally, when
agitations are over, he turns out an article on popular
science. In a word, he has become a hack, a space grubber,
seeking only a chance to write in Yiddish for a living, all
his brilliant scholarly prospects forgotten. In his
feuilletons he rails at America with a bitterness expressive
of his own disappointed and unhappy career. The land of hope
as it is pictured in the fancy of the immigrant, America has
been for him the tomb of all that he once dreamed of.
To turn from these shipwrecked scholars to a man of more
actual practical standing in the world of the press furnished
yet another glimpse of the journalism in which the workers are
buried. There is on the East Side to-day, writing busily and
prolifically, one who is known far and wide as the father of
Jewish journalism in America. To him belongs the credit of
having made Yiddish a possible vehicle for newspaper use in
this country. For many years it did not yield to the present
needs; it was inflexible as a form of expression for a new
civilization. Then this journalist started in to coin new
expressions. His method was employing old Biblical phrases to
describe new things. A sample of the method, though not an
actual instance, was furnished by one of the Ghetto's best
known scholars.
Suppose he was searching for a phrase to describe an
automobile, he might do something like this. First he would
call it in Hebrew, "The chariot on which the Prophet Elijah
ascended to Heaven." Presently the expression would become
fixed in the public mind, and he would shorten it to "chariot
of Elijah," and in the end it would become simply "chariot."
But the allusion would still be preserved complete.
This man, whose service to his people and whose work for his
language have made him the best known figure in Jewish
journalism, is today at work for a salary not exceeding $15 a
week. He founded he first Yiddish paper in the country; he
worked on every one of he ten daily and thirty weekly papers
that followed, and such is his present status. He, too, is a
buried journalist, but, unlike the others, he is buried under
the very structure he has raised himself.
From a failure to a success furnishes a pleasant step. In
contrast with the forgoing unsuccessful worker, there is
to-day as editor-in-chief of one of the most prominent Jewish
papers in the country a converted Jew. "Meshumed" is the
contemptuous name his brothers apply to such, whom they regard
as renegades. For most Jews such a step would mean absolute
ruin, and yet he has prospered under it. Certain East Side
residents have seen the certificate of baptism issued to him,
and yet the world for which he writes regards him as a
faithful Jew. Moreover, he is not merely a converted Hebrew
writing for thousands of the orthodox, he is also a radical,
writing for the most conservative Jewish paper in the country.
Perhaps it is unfair to class this man among the buried
journalists, and yet he belongs in that world existing far
beyond the glance of he busy metropolitan world.
The poet seems, most naturally of all, to belong with the
neglected journalists of the East Side, and there are several
who claim membership in this craft. There is one in particular
who stands forth as the representative of a type. He is a poet
and an author. In Europe he wrote songs that are still sung in
the Ghettos of far off Russian cities. He wrote sketches also
which survive among the literature of his people. But to-day
this "Sweet Singer of Zion," deserted by his muse, is no
longer the poet of his people. From the Olympian height of the
poet he has descended to the grinding toll of translating news
stories from the English press to the paper for which he
works. Besides this, he turns out a daily romance for the
Yiddish paper. This romance is the most essential part of the
paper, and so, week after week and month after month, this
buried poet, whose songs are still the admiration of
thousands, turns out a couple of columns of romance. Laying
his stories in China or India, he pitches them in romantic
vein beyond the possibility of reality. Bu never does he write
a story placing the scene in the city in which he and his
readers live. The world in which he exists does not exist for
him or for his readers; it is a fog inexplicable and
impenetrable.
It would be possible to present many other journalists of the
Ghetto. But for a closing word nothing can better show the
pathos of their situation than a glance at the rising tide of
a second generation destined to sweep away their poor work.
Their work is read by the thousands of immigrants who, born in
a foreign world, cling passionately to its customs and
language. But there is rising another generation, more
American than the American., neither interested nor even
patient with the Yiddish press. The public school has simply
wiped out the old notions with these younger children of
Israel, and the fate of the journalism which lies in their
hand is easy to read. Perceiving their children permeated with
a new civilization which is a blank to them, with ideas they
cannot grasp, these buried journalists see the grave already
prepared for all with which they have labored; the very
learning that one generation of Hebrews has handed down to
another since the very dawn of history seems suddenly
overwhelmed with a wave of destruction.
"I marvel myself at this new generation," said a well-known
Jewish educator. "To me all the great change is typified
by a little child that came to me to read Hebrew. his mother
brought him, and I wanted to test him before admitting him to
a class. I gave him a book and he began to read. I looked at
him in surprise; what he read made absolutely no sense. I
asked his mother, and she declared that the boy read in Hebrew
twice each day. Finally I looked over his shoulder and watched
his finger marking the lines that he was reading, and then I
found that he was reading from left to right. For him even the
Hebrew language seemed subject to the law of Americanism, and
there he was reading away backward. So it is with the new
generation; their fathers are overwhelmed with the new, but
they in their turn grasp the new with a certain grip and throw
out the old or mould it on the lines of the new.
Thus amid such a rising tide of new Americanism, a tide which
is sure to sweep away all they loved or understood, these
scholars, poets and authors of European fame are furnishing
the "copy" of the Ghetto in a "jargon" itself soon to be a
perishing anachronism. |