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Yekl

A Tale of the New York Ghetto


By

A. Cahan


New York
D. Appleton and Company
1896

COPYRIGHT, 1896,
BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.




CONTENTS.


CHAPTER                                    PAGE


   I.--JAKE AND YEKL                          1

  II.--THE NEW YORK GHETTO                   25

 III.--IN THE GRIP OF HIS PAST               50

  IV.--THE MEETING                           70

   V.--A PATERFAMILIAS                       82

  VI.--CIRCUMSTANCES ALTER CASES            112

 VII.--MRS. KAVARSKY'S COUP D'ETAT          136

VIII.--A HOUSETOP IDYL                      158

  IX.--THE PARTING                          175

   X.--A DEFEATED VICTOR                    185




YEKL.




CHAPTER I.

JAKE AND YEKL.


The operatives of the cloak-shop in which Jake was employed had been
idle all the morning. It was after twelve o'clock and the "boss" had
not yet returned from Broadway, whither he had betaken himself two
or three hours before in quest of work. The little sweltering
assemblage--for it was an oppressive day in midsummer--beguiled their
suspense variously. A rabbinical-looking man of thirty, who sat with
the back of his chair tilted against his sewing machine, was intent
upon an English newspaper. Every little while he would remove it from
his eyes--showing a dyspeptic face fringed with a thin growth of dark
beard--to consult the cumbrous dictionary on his knees. Two young lads,
one seated on the frame of the next machine and the other standing,
were boasting to one another of their respective intimacies with the
leading actors of the Jewish stage. The board of a third machine, in a
corner of the same wall, supported an open copy of a socialist magazine
in Yiddish, over which a cadaverous young man absorbedly swayed to and
fro droning in the Talmudical intonation. A middle-aged operative, with
huge red side whiskers, who was perched on the presser's table in the
corner opposite, was mending his own coat. While the thick-set presser
and all the three women of the shop, occupying the three machines
ranged against an adjoining wall, formed an attentive audience to an
impromptu lecture upon the comparative merits of Boston and New York by
Jake.

He had been speaking for some time. He stood in the middle of the
overcrowded stuffy room with his long but well-shaped legs wide apart,
his bulky round head aslant, and one of his bared mighty arms akimbo.
He spoke in Boston Yiddish, that is to say, in Yiddish more copiously
spiced with mutilated English than is the language of the metropolitan
Ghetto in which our story lies. He had a deep and rather harsh voice,
and his r's could do credit to the thickest Irish brogue.

"When I was in Boston," he went on, with a contemptuous mien intended
for the American metropolis, "I knew a _feller_,[1] so he was a
_preticly_ friend of John Shullivan's. He is a Christian, that feller
is, and yet the two of us lived like brothers. May I be unable to move
from this spot if we did not. How, then, would you have it? Like here,
in New York, where the Jews are a _lot_ of _greenhornsh_ and can not
speak a word of English? Over there every Jew speaks English like a
stream."

        [1] English words incorporated in the Yiddish of the characters
        of this narrative are given in Italics.

"_Say_, Dzake," the presser broke in, "John Sullivan is _tzampion_ no
longer, is he?"

"Oh, no! Not always is it holiday!" Jake responded, with what he
considered a Yankee jerk of his head. "Why, don't you know? Jimmie
Corbett _leaked_ him, and Jimmie _leaked_ Cholly Meetchel, too. _You
can betch you' bootsh!_ Johnnie could not leak Chollie, _becaush_ he is
a big _bluffer_, Chollie is," he pursued, his clean-shaven florid face
beaming with enthusiasm for his subject, and with pride in the
diminutive proper nouns he flaunted. "But Jimmie _pundished_ him. _Oh,
didn't he knock him out off shight!_ He came near making a meat ball of
him"--with a chuckle. "He _tzettled_ him in three _roynds_. I knew a
feller who had seen the fight."

"What is a _rawnd_, Dzake?" the presser inquired.

Jake's answer to the question carried him into a minute exposition of
"right-handers," "left-handers," "sending to sleep," "first blood," and
other commodities of the fistic business. He must have treated the
subject rather too scientifically, however, for his female listeners
obviously paid more attention to what he did in the course of the
boxing match, which he had now and then, by way of illustration, with
the thick air of the room, than to the verbal part of his lecture. Nay,
even the performances of his brawny arms and magnificent form did not
charm them as much as he thought they did. For a display of manly
force, when connected--even though in a purely imaginary way--with acts
of violence, has little attraction for a "daughter of the Ghetto." Much
more interest did those arms and form command on their own merits. Nor
was his chubby high-colored face neglected. True, there was a
suggestion of the bulldog in its make up; but this effect was lost upon
the feminine portion of Jake's audience, for his features, illuminated
by a pair of eager eyes of a hazel hue, and shaded by a thick crop of
dark hair, were, after all, rather pleasing than otherwise. Strongly
Semitic naturally, they became still more so each time they were
brightened up by his good-natured boyish smile. Indeed, Jake's very
nose, which was fleshy and pear-shaped and decidedly not Jewish
(although not decidedly anything else), seemed to join the Mosaic
faith, and even his shaven upper lip looked penitent, as soon as that
smile of his made its appearance.

"Nice fun that!" observed the side-whiskered man, who had stopped
sewing to follow Jake's exhibition. "Fighting--like drunken moujiks in
Russia!"

"Tarrarra-boom-de-ay!" was Jake's merry retort; and for an exclamation
mark he puffed up his cheeks into a balloon, and exploded it by a
"_pawnch_" of his formidable fist.

"Look, I beg you, look at his dog's tricks!" the other said in disgust.

"Horse's head that you are!" Jake rejoined good-humoredly. "Do you mean
to tell me that a moujik understands how to _fight_? A disease he does!
He only knows how to strike like a bear [Jake adapted his voice and
gesticulation to the idea of clumsiness], _an' dot'sh ull_! What does
he _care_ where his paw will land, so he strikes. _But_ here one must
observe _rulesh_ [rules]."

At this point Meester Bernstein--for so the rabbinical-looking man was
usually addressed by his shopmates--looked up from his dictionary.

"Can't you see?" he interposed, with an air of assumed gravity as he
turned to Jake's opponent, "America is an educated country, so they
won't even break bones without grammar. They tear each other's sides
according to 'right and left,'[2] you know." This was a thrust at
Jake's right-handers and left-handers, which had interfered with
Bernstein's reading. "Nevertheless," the latter proceeded, when the
outburst of laughter which greeted his witticism had subsided, "I do
think that a burly Russian peasant would, without a bit of grammar,
crunch the bones of Corbett himself; and he would not _charge_ him a
cent for it, either."

        [2] A term relating to the Hebrew equivalent of the letter
        _s_, whose pronunciation depends upon the right or left
        position of a mark over it.

"_Is dot sho?_" Jake retorted, somewhat nonplussed. "_I betch you_ he
would not. The peasant would lie bleeding like a hog before he had time
to turn around."

"_But_ they might kill each other in that way, _ain't it_, Jake?" asked
a comely, milk-faced blonde whose name was Fanny. She was celebrated
for her lengthy tirades, mostly in a plaintive, nagging strain, and
delivered in her quiet, piping voice, and had accordingly been dubbed
"The Preacher."

"Oh, that will happen but very seldom," Jake returned rather glumly.

The theatrical pair broke off their boasting match to join in the
debate, which soon included all except the socialist; the former two,
together with the two girls and the presser, espousing the American
cause, while Malke the widow and "De Viskes" sided with Bernstein.

"Let it be as you say," said the leader of the minority, withdrawing
from the contest to resume his newspaper. "My grandma's last care it is
who can fight best."

"Nice pleasure, _anyhull_," remarked the widow. "_Never min'_, we shall
see how it will lie in his head when he has a wife and children to
_support_."

Jake colored. "What does a _chicken_ know about these things?" he said
irascibly.

Bernstein again could not help intervening. "And you, Jake, can not do
without 'these things,' can you? Indeed, I do not see how you manage to
live without them."

"Don't you like it? I do," Jake declared tartly. "Once I live in
America," he pursued, on the defensive, "I want to know that I live in
America. _Dot'sh a' kin' a man I am!_ One must not be a _greenhorn_.
Here a Jew is as good as a Gentile. How, then, would you have it? The
way it is in Russia, where a Jew is afraid to stand within four ells of
a Christian?"

"Are there no other Christians than _fighters_ in America?" Bernstein
objected with an amused smile. "Why don't you look for the educated
ones?"

"Do you mean to say the _fighters_ are not _ejecate_? Better than you,
_anyhoy_," Jake said with a Yankee wink, followed by his Semitic smile.
"Here you read the papers, and yet _I'll betch you_ you don't know that
Corbett _findished college_."

"I never read about fighters," Bernstein replied with a bored gesture,
and turned to his paper.

"Then say that you don't know, and _dot'sh ull_!"

Bernstein made no reply. In his heart Jake respected him, and was now
anxious to vindicate his tastes in the judgment of his scholarly
shopmate and in his own.

"_Alla right_, let it be as you say; the _fighters_ are not _ejecate_.
No, not a bit!" he said ironically, continuing to address himself to
Bernstein. "But what will you say