Emile Zola - "The Three Cities Trilogy: Paris, Vol. 2"

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Annie Hamilton Donnell - "Rebecca Mary"

John Lothrop Motley - "History of the United Netherlands, 1592 94"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: The Rise of David Levinsky

A >> Abraham Cahan >> The Rise of David Levinsky




That the "green one" was to work for low wages was a matter of
course. But then, in justice to myself, I must add that I did my
men favors in numerous cases that could in no way redound to my
benefit. Besides, the fiscal advantages that I did derive from the
Antomir spirit of my shop really were not a primary consideration
with me. I sincerely cherished that spirit for its own sake.
Moreover, if my Antomir employees were willing to accept from
me lower pay than they might have received in other places, their
average earnings were actually higher than they would have been
elsewhere. I gave them steady work. Besides, they felt perfectly at
home in my shop. I treated them well. I was very democratic

Compared to the thoughts of home that had oppressed me during
my first months in America, my new visions of Antomir were like
the wistful lights of a sunset as compared with the glare of
midday. But then sunsets produce deeper, if quieter, effects on the
emotions than the strongest daylight

It was my new homesickness, then, which inclined me to an
American form of the kind of marriage of which I used to dream
in the days of my Talmudic studies. Another motive that led me to
matrimonial aspirations of this kind lay in my new ideas of
respectability as a necessary accompaniment to success. Marrying
into a well-to-do orthodox family meant respectability and
solidity. It implied law and order, the antithesis of anarchism,
socialism, trade-unionism, strikes

I was a convinced free-thinker. Spencer's Unknowable had
irrevocably replaced my God. Yet religion now appealed to me as
an indispensable instrument in the great orchestra of things. From
what I had seen of the world, or read about it in the daily press, I
was convinced that but few people of wealth and power had real
religion in their hearts. I felt sure that most of them looked upon
churches or synagogues as they did upon police-courts; that they
valued them primarily as safeguards of law and order and
correctness, and this had become my attitude. For the rest, I felt
that a vast number of the people who professed Christianity or
Judaism did so merely because to declare oneself an atheist was
not a prudent thing to do from a business or social point of view,
or that they were in doubt and chose to be on the safe side of it,
lest there should be a God, "after all," while millions of other
people were not interested enough even to doubt, or to ask
questions, and were content to do as everybody did. But there were
some who did ask questions and did dare to declare themselves
atheists. I was one of these, and yet I looked upon religion as a
most important institution, and was willing to contribute to its
support

My business life had fostered the conviction in me that, outside of
the family, the human world was as brutally selfish as the jungle,
and that it was worm-eaten with hypocrisy into the bargain. From
time to time the newspapers published sensational revelations
concerning some pillar of society who had turned out to be a
common thief on an uncommon scale. I saw that political
speeches, sermons, and editorials had, with very few exceptions,
no more sincerity in them than the rhetoric of an advertisement.

I saw that Americans who boasted descent from the heroes of the
Revolution boasted, in the same breath, of having spent an
evening with Lord So-and-so; that it was their avowed ambition to
acquire for their daughters the very titles which their ancestors
had fought to banish from the life of their country. I saw that
civilization was honeycombed with what Max Nordau called
conventional lies, with sham ecstasy, sham sympathy, sham
smiles, sham laughter

The riot of prosperity introduced the fashion of respectable women
covering their faces with powder and paint in a way that had
hitherto been peculiar to women of the streets, so I pictured
civilization as a harlot with cheeks, lips, and eyelashes of artificial
beauty. I imagined mountains of powder and paint, a deafening
chorus of affected laughter, a huge heart, as large as a city, full of
falsehood and mischief

The leaders of the Jewish socialists, who were also at the head of
the Jewish labor movement, seemed to me to be the most
repulsive hypocrites of all. I loathed them

I had no creed. I knew of no ideals. The only thing I believed in
was the cold, drab theory of the struggle for existence and the
survival of the fittest. This could not satisfy a heart that was
hungry for enthusiasm and affection, so dreams of family life
became my religion. Self-sacrificing devotion to one's family was
the only kind of altruism and idealism I did not flout

I was worth over a million, and my profits had reached enormous
dimensions, so I was regarded a most desirable match, and
match-makers pestered me as much as I would let them, but they
found me a hard man to suit

There was a homesick young man in my shop, a native of
Antomir, with whom I often chatted of our common birthplace.
His name was Mirmelstein. He was a little fellow with a massive
head and a neck that seemed to be too slender to support it. I liked
his face for its honest, ingenuous expression, but more especially
because I thought his eyes had a homesick look in them. He was a
poor mechanic, but I found him a steady job in my shipping
department

He could furnish me no information about Reb Sender, of whom
he had never heard before; he knew of the Minsker family, of
course, and he told me that Shiphrah, Matilda's mother, was dead;
that Yeffim, Matilda's brother, had been sent to Siberia some
three years before for complicity in the revolutionary movement,
and that Matilda herself had had a hair-breadth escape from arrest
and was living in Switzerland

He wrote to Antomir, and a few weeks later he brought me the sad
information that Reb Sender had been dead for several years, and
that his wife had married again

CHAPTER VII ONE day in November less than six months after I
had learned of Yeffim Minsker's arrest and of Matilda's escape, as
I was making the rounds of my several departments, little
Mirmelstein accosted me timidly

"Yeffim Minsker and his sister are here," he said, with the smile of
one breaking an interesting surprise

I paused, flushing. I feigned indifference and preoccupation, but
the next moment I cast off all pretense

"Are they really?" I asked

He produced a clipping from a socialist Yiddish daily containing
an advertisement of a public meeting to be held at Cooper
Institute under the auspices of an organization of Russian
revolutionists for the purpose of welcoming Yefflm and another
man, a Doctor Gorsky, both of whom had recently escaped from
Siberia. The revolutionary movement was then at its height in
Russia, and the Jews were among its foremost and bravest leaders
(which, by the way, accounts for the anti-Jewish riots and
massacres which the Government inspired and encouraged quite
openly). As was mentioned in an early chapter of this book, the
then Minister of the Interior was the same man who had been
Director of Police over the whole empire at the time of the
anti-Jewish riots which followed the assassination of Czar
Alexander II. in 1881, and which started the great emigration of
Jews to America. From time to time some distinguished
revolutionist would be sent to America for subscriptions to the
cause. This was the mission of Doctor Gorsky and Yeffim. They
were here, not as immigrants, but merely to raise funds for the
movement at home

As for Matilda, it appeared that Doctor Gorsky was her husband.
Whether he had married her in Russia, before his arrest, or in
Switzerland, where he and her brother had spent some time after
their escape from exile, Mirmelstein could not tell me. Matilda's
name was not mentioned in the advertisement, but my
shipping-clerk had heard of her arrival and marriage from some
Antomir people.

I could scarcely do anything that day. I was in a fever of
excitement. "Do I still love her?" I wondered

I made up my mind to attend the Cooper Institute meeting. It was a
bold venture, for the crowd was sure to contain some socialist
cloak-makers who held me in anything but esteem. But then I had
not had a strike in my shop for several years, and it did not seem
likely that they would offer me an insult. Anyhow, the temptation
to see Matilda was too strong. I had to go.

She was certain to be on the platform, and all I wanted was to take
a look at her from the auditorium. "And who knows but I may
have a chance to speak to her, too," I thought.

It was a cold evening in the latter part of November. I went to the
meeting in my expensive fur coat (although fur coats were still a
rare spectacle in the streets), with a secret foretaste of the
impression my prosperity would make upon Matilda. It was a fatal
mistake

It was twenty minutes to 8 when I reached the front door of the
historical meeting-hall, but it was already crowded to
overflowing, and the policemen guarding the brightly illuminated
entrance tumed me away with a crowd of others. I was in despair.
I tried again, and this time, apparently owing to my mink coat, I
was admitted. Every seat in the vast underground auditorium was
occupied. But few people were allowed to stand, in the rear of the
hall, and I was one of them. From the chat I overheard around me
I gathered that there were scores of men and women in the
audience who had been in the thick of sensational conflicts in the
great crusade for liberty that was then going on in Russia. I
questioned a man who stood beside me about Doctor Gorsky, and
from his answers I gained the impression that Matilda's husband
was considered one of the pluckiest men in the struggle. At the
time of his arrest he was practising medicine

Ranged on the platform on either side of the speaker's desk were
about a hundred chairs, several of which in the two front rows
were kept vacant.

Presently there was a stir on the platform. A group of men and
women made their appearance and seated themselves on the
unoccupied chairs. They were greeted with passionate cheers and
applause

One of them was Matilda. I recognized her at once. Her curly
brown hair was gray at the temples, and her oval little face was
somewhat bloated, and she was stouter than she had been
twenty-one years before; but all this was merely like a new dress.
Had I met her in the street, I might have merely felt that she
looked familiar to me, without being able to trace her. As it was,
she was strikingly the same as I had known her, though not
precisely the same as I had pictured her, of late years, at least.
Some errors had stolen into my image of her, and now, that I saw
her in the flesh, I recalled her likeness of twenty-one years before,
and she now looked precisely as she had done then. She was as
interesting as ever. I was in such a turmoil that I scarcely knew
what was happening on the platform. Did I still love her, or was it
merely the excitement of beholding a living memory of my youth?
One thing was certain--the feeling of reverence and awe with
which I had once been wont to view her and her parents was
stirring in my heart again. For the moment I did not seem to be the
man who owned a big cloak-factory and was worth over a million
American dollars

The chairman had been speaking for some time before I became
aware of his existence. As his address was in Russian and I had
long since unlearned what little I had ever known of that
language, his words were Greek to me

Matilda was flanked by two men, both with full beards, one fair
and the other rather dark. The one of the fair complexion and
beard was Yeffim, although I recognized him by his resemblance
to Matilda and more especially to her father, rather than by his
image of twenty-one years ago. I supposed that the man on the
other side of her, the one with the dark beard, was her husband,
and I asked the man by my side about it, but he did not know

Several speakers made brief addresses of welcome. One of these
spoke in Yiddish and one in English, so I understood them. They
dealt with the revolution and the anti-Semitic atrocities, and paid
glowing tributes to the new-comers. They were interrupted by
outburst after outburst of enthusiasm and indignation. When
finally Doctor Gorsky was introduced (it was the man with the
dark beard) there was a veritable pandemonium of applause,
cheers, and ejaculations that lasted many minutes. He spoke in
Russian and he seemed to be a poor speaker. I searched his face
for evidence of valor and strength, but did not seem to find any. I
thought it was rather a weak face--weak and kindly and
girlish-looking. His beard, which was long and thin, did not
become him. I asked myself whether I was jealous of him, and the
question seemed so incongruous, so remote. He made a good
impression on me. The fact that this man, who was possessed of
indomitable courage, had a weak, good-natured face interested me
greatly, and the fact that he had gone through much suffering
made a strong appeal to my sympathies (somehow his martyrdom
was linked in my mind to his futility as a speaker). I warmed to
him

He was followed by Yeffim, and the scene of wild enthusiasm was
repeated

When Minsker had finished the chairman declared the meeting
closed. There was a rush for the platform. It was quite high above
the auditorium floor; unless one reached it by way of the
committee-room, which was a considerable distance to the right,
it had to be mounted, not without an effort, by means of the chairs
in the press inclosure. After some hesitation I made a dash for one
of these chairs, and the next minute I was within three or four feet
from Matilda, but with an excited crowd between us. Everybody
wanted to shake hands with the heroes. The jam and scramble
were so great that Doctor Gorsky, Yeffim, and Matilda had to
extricate themselves and to escape into the spacious
committee-room in the rear of the platform

Some minutes later I stood by her side in that room, amid a cluster
of revolutionists, her husband and Yeffim being each the center of
another crowd in the same room

"I beg your pardon," I began, with a sheepish smile. "Do you know
me."

Her glittering brown eyes fixed me with a curious look. "My name
is David Levinsky," I added. "'Dovid,' the Talmudic student to
whom you gave money with which to go to America."

"Of course I know you," she snapped. taking stock of my mink
overcoat. "And I have heard about you, too. You have a lot of
money, haven't you? I see you are wearing a costly fur coat." And
she brutally turned to speak to somebody else

My heart stood still. I wanted to say something, to assure her that I
was not so black as the socialists painted me. I had an impulse to
offer her a generous contribution to the cause, but I had not the
courage to open my mouth again. The bystanders were eying me
with glances that seemed to say, "The idea of a fellow like this
being here!" I was a despicable "bourgeois," a "capitalist" of the
kind whose presence at a socialist meeting was a sacrilege

I slunk out of the room feeling like a whipped cur. "Why, she is a
perfect savage!" I thought. "But then what else can you expect of a
socialist?"

I thought of the scenes that had passed between her and myself in
her mother's house and I sneered. "A socialist, a good, pure soul,
indeed!" I mused, gloatingly. "That's exactly like them. A bunch
of hypocrites, that's all they are."

At the same time I was nagging myself for having had so little
sense as to sport my prosperity before a socialist, of all the people
in the world

A few days later the episode seemed to have occurred many years
before. It did not bother me. Nor did Matilda

CHAPTER VIII IT was an afternoon in April. My chief
bookkeeper, one of my stenographers, Bender, and myself were
hard at work at my Broadway factory amid a muffled turmoil of
industry. There were important questions of credit to dispose of
and letters to answer. I was taking up account after account,
weighing my data with the utmost care, giving every detail my
closest attention. And all the while I was thus absorbed, seemingly
oblivious to everything else, I was alive to the fact that it was
Passover and the eve of the anniversary of my mother's death; that
three or four hours later I should be solemnizing her memorial day
at the new Synagogue of the Sons of Antomir; that while there I
should sit next to Mr. Kaplan, a venerable-looking man to whose
daughter I had recently become engaged, and that after the service
I was to accompany Mr. Kaplan to his house and spend the
evening in the bosom of his family, by the side of the girl that was
soon to become my wife. My consciousness of all this grew
keener every minute, till it began to interfere with my work.

I was getting fidgety. Finally I broke off in the middle of a
sentence

I washed myself, combed my plentiful crop of dark hair, carefully
brushed myself, and put on my spring overcoat and derby
hat--both of a dark-brown hue

"I sha'n't be back until the day after to-morrow," I announced to
Bender, after giving him some orders

"Till day after to-morrow!" he said, with reproachful amazement

I nodded

"Can't you put it off? This is no time for being away," he grumbled

"It can't be helped."

"You're not going out of town, are you?"

"What difference does it make?" After a pause I added: "It isn't on
business. It's a private matter."

"Oh!" he uttered, with evident relief. Nothing hurt his pride more
than to suspect me of having business secrets from him.

He was a married man now, having, less than a year ago, wedded a
sweet little girl, a cousin, who was as simple-hearted and
simple-minded as himself, and to whom he had practically been
engaged since boyhood. His salary was one hundred and
twenty-five dollars a week now. I was at home in their
well-ordered little establishment, the sunshine that filled it having
given an added impulse to my matrimonial aspirations

I betook myself to the new Antomir Synagogue. The congregation
had greatly grown in prosperity and had recently moved from the
ramshackle little frame building that had been its home into an
impressive granite structure, formerly a Presbyterian church. This
was my first visit to the building.

Indeed, I had not seen the inside of its predecessor, the little old
house of prayer that had borne the name of my native town, years
before it was abandoned. In former years, even some time after I
had become a convinced free-thinker, I had visited it at least twice
a year-on my two memorial days--that is, on the anniversaries of
the death of my parents. I had not done so since I had read
Spencer. This time, however, the anniversary of my mother's
death had a peculiar meaning for me. Vaguely as a result of my
new mood, and distinctly as a result of my betrothal, I was lured
to the synagogue by a force against which my Spencerian
agnosticism was powerless

I found the interior of the building brilliantly illuminated. The
woodwork of the "stand" and the bible platform, the
velvet-and-gold curtains of the Holy Ark, and the fresco paintings
on the walls and ceiling were screamingly new and gaudy. So
were the ornamental electric fixtures. Altogether the place
reminded me of a reformed German synagogue rather than of the
kind with which my idea of Judaism had always been identified.
This seemed to accentuate the fact that the building had until
recently been a Christian church. The glaring electric lights and
the glittering decorations struck me as something unholy. Still, the
scattered handful of worshipers I found there, and more
particularly the beadle, looked orthodox enough, and I gradually
became reconciled to the place as a house of God

The beadle was a new incumbent. Better dressed and with more
authority in his appearance than the man who had superintended
the old place, he comported well with the look of things in the
new synagogue. After obsequiously directing me to the pew of my
prospective father-in-law, who had not yet arrived, he inserted a
stout, tall candle into one of the sockets of the "stand" and lit it. It
was mine. It was to burn uninterruptedly for my mother's soul for
the next twenty-four hours. Mr.

Kaplan's pew was in a place of honor--that is, by the east wall, near
the Holy Ark. To see my memorial candle I had to take a few
steps back. I did so, and as I watched its flame memories and
images took possession of me that turned my present life into a
dream and my Russian past into reality.

According to the Talmud there is a close affinity between the
human soul and light, for "the spirit of man is the lamp of God,"
as Solomon puts it in his Parables. Hence the custom of lighting
candles or lamps for the dead. And so, as I gazed at that huge
candle commemorating the day when my mother gave her life for
me, I felt as though its light was part of her spirit. The gentle
flutter of its flame seemed to be speaking in the sacred whisper of
a grave-yard

"Mother dear! Mother dear!" my heart was saying. And then:
"Thank God, mother dear! I own a large factory. I am a rich man
and I am going to be married to the daughter of a fine Jew, a man
of substance and Talmud. And the family comes from around
Antomir, too. Ah, if you were here to escort me to the wedding
canopy!"

The number of worshipers was slowly increasing. An old woman
made her appearance in the gallery reserved for her sex. At last
Mr. Kaplan, the father of my fiancée, entered the synagogue--a
man of sixty, with a gray patriarchal beard and a general
appearance that bespoke Talmudic scholarship and prosperity. He
was a native of a small town near Antomir, where his father had
been rabbi, and was now a retired flour merchant, having come to
America in the seventies. He had always been one of the pillars of
the Synagogue of the Sons of Antomir. In the days when I was a
frequenter at the old house of prayer the social chasm between
him and myself was so wide that the notion of my being engaged
to a daughter of his would have seemed absurd. Which, by the
way, was one of the attractions that his house now had for me

"Good holiday, Mr. Kaplan!" some of the other worshipers saluted
him, as he made his way toward his pew

"Good holiday! Good holiday!" he responded, with dignified
geniality

I could see that he was aware of my presence but carefully avoided
looking at me until he should be near enough for me to greet him.
He was a kindly, serious-minded man, sincerely devout, and not
over-bright. He had his little vanities and I was willing to humor
them

"Good holiday, Mr. Kaplan!" I called out to him

"Good holiday! Good holiday, David!" he returned, amiably. "Here
already? Ahead of me? That's good! Just follow the path of
Judaism and everything will be all right." "How's everybody?" I
asked

"All are well, thank God."

"How's Fanny?"

"Now you're talking. That's the real question, isn't it?" he chaffed
me, with dignity. "She's well, thank God."

He introduced me to the cantor--a pug-nosed man with a pale face
and a skimpy little beard of a brownish hue

"Our new cantor, the celebrated Jacob Goldstein!" he said. "And
this is Mr.

David Levinsky, my intended son-in-law. An Antomir man. Was a
fine scholar over there and still remembers a lot of Talmud."

The newly arrived synagogue tenor was really a celebrated man, in
the Antomir section of Russia, at least. His coming had been
conceived as a sensational feature of the opening of the new
synagogue. While "town cantor" in Antomir he had received the
highest salary ever paid there. The contract that had induced him
to come over to America pledged him nearly five times as much.
Thus the New York Sons of Antomir were not only able to parade
a famous cantor before the multitude of other New York
congregations, but also to prove to the people at home that they
were the financial superiors of the whole town of their birth. So
far, however, as the New York end of the sensation was
concerned, there was a good-sized bee in the honey. The imported
cantor was a tragic disappointment. The trouble was that his New
York audiences were far more critical and exacting than the people
in Antomir, and he was not up to their standard. For one thing,
many of the Sons of Antomir, and others who came to their
synagogue to hear the new singer, people who had mostly lived in
poverty and ignorance at home, now had a piano or a violin in the
house, with a son or a daughter to play it, and had become
frequenters of the Metropolitan Opera House or the Carnegie
Music Hall; for another, the New York Ghetto was full of good
concerts and all other sorts of musical entertainments, so much so
that good music had become all but part of the daily life of the
Jewish tenement population; for a third, the audiences of the
imported cantor included people who had lived in much larger
European cities than Antomir, in such places as Warsaw, Odessa,
Lemberg, or Vienna, for example, where they had heard much
better cantors than Goldstein. Then, too, life in New York had
Americanized my fellow-townspeople, modernized their tastes,
broadened them out. As a consequence, the methods of the man
who had won the admiration of their native town seemed to them
old-fashioned, crude, droll