



Produced by Suzanne Shell and the Online Distributed
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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_,