Yekl and the Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of the New York Ghetto

Abraham Cahan

• Verlag: Dover Publications
• Jahr: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780486122571
• Thema: Literature
• Thema: North American Literary Collections

Yekl (1896), the first novel upon which the much acclaimed film Hester Street was based, was probably the first novel in English that had a New York East Side immigrant as its hero. Reviewing it, William Dean Howells hailed Cahan as `a new star of realism.`

The Importeb Bribesroom

and other stories of the New York Ghetto

The Importeb Bribesroom

I

Flora was alone in the back parlor, which she had appropriated for a sort of boudoir. She sat in her rocker, in front of the parlor stove, absorbed in Little Dorrit. Her well-groomed girlish form was enveloped in a kindly warmth whose tender embrace tinged her interest in the narrative with a triumphant consciousness of the snowstorm outside.

Little by little the rigid afternoon light began to fade into a melancholy gray. Dusk was creeping into the room in almost visible waves. Flora let the book rest on her lap and fixed her gaze on the twinkling scarlet of the stove-glass. The thickening twilight, the warmth of the apartment, and the atmosphere of the novel blended together, and for some moments Flora felt far away from herself.

She was the only girl of her circle who would read Dickens, Scott, or Thackeray in addition to the Family Story Paper and the Fireside Companion, which were the exclusive literary purveyors to her former classmates at the Chrystie Street Grammar School. There were a piano and a neat little library in her room.

She was rather tall and well formed. Her oblong ivory face, accentuated by a mass of unruly hair of a lusterless black, was never deserted by a faint glimmer of a smile, at once pensive and arch. When she broke into one of her hearty, good-natured laughs, her deep, dark, appealing eyes would seem filled with grief. Her nose, a trifle too precipitous, gave an unexpected tone to the extreme picturesqueness of the whole effect, and, when she walked, partook of the dignity of her gait.

A month or two before we make Flora’s acquaintance she had celebrated her twentieth birthday, having been born in this little private house on Mott Street, which was her father’s property.

A matchmaker had recently called, and he had launched into a eulogy of a young Jewish physician; but old Stroon had cut him short, in his blunt way: his only child was to marry a God-fearing business man, and no fellow deep in Gentile lore and shaving his beard need apply. As to Flora, she was burning to be a doctor’s wife. A rising young merchant, a few years in the country, was the staple matrimonial commodity in her set. Most of her married girl friends, American-born themselves, like Flora, had husbands of this class—queer fellows, whose broken English had kept their own sweethearts chuckling. Flora hated the notion of marrying as the other Mott or Bayard Street girls did. She was accustomed to use her surroundings for a background, throwing her own personality into high relief. But apart from this, she craved a more refined atmosphere than her own, and the vague ideal she had was an educated American gentleman, like those who lived uptown.

Accordingly, when the word “doctor” had left the matchmaker’s lips, she seized upon it as a great discovery. In those days—the early eighties—a match of this kind was an uncommon occurrence in the New York Ghetto.

Flora pictured a clean-shaven, high-hatted, spectacled gentleman jumping out of a buggy, and the image became a fixture in her mind. “ I won’t marry anybody except a doctor,” she would declare, with conscious avoidance of bad grammar, as it behooved a doctor’s wife.

But what was to be done with father’s opposition? Asriel Stroon had never been the man to yield, and now that he grew more devout every day, her case seemed hopeless. But then Flora was her father’s daughter, and when she took a resolve she could not imagine herself otherwise than carrying it out, sooner or later.

Flora’s thoughts were flowing in this direction when her father’s gruff voice made itself heard from the dining room below. It was the anniversary of his father’s death. In former years he would have contented himself with obit services, at the synagogue; this time, however, he had passed the day in fasting and chanting psalms at home, in addition to lighting his own candle in front of the cantor’s desk and reciting Kaddish for the departed soul, at the house of prayer. It touched Flora’s heart to think of him fasting and praying all day, and, with her book in her hand, she ran down to meet him.

“Just comin ’ from the synagogue, papa?” she greeted him affectionately, in English. “This settles your fast, don’t it?”

“It is not so easy to settle with Him, my daughter,” he returned, in Yiddish, pointing to the ceiling. “You can never be through serving the Uppermost. Hurry up, Tamara ! ” he added, in the direction of the adjoining kitchen.

“You ain’ goin’ to say more Thilim¹⁷ tonight, are you, pa?

“Why, does it cost you too much?” he snarled good humoredly.

“Yes it does—your health. I won’t let you sing again. You are weak and you got enough.”

“Hush! It is not potato soup; you can never have enough of it.” He fell to tugging nervously at his white beard, which grew in a pair of tiny imperials. “Tamara! It’s time to break the fast, isn’t it?”

“You can wash your hands. Supper is ready,” came the housekeeper’s pleasant voice.

He took off his brown derby, and covered his steel-gray hair with a velvet skullcap; and as he carried his robust, middle-sized body into the kitchen, to perform his ablutions, his ruddy, gnarled face took on an air of piety.

When supper was over and Asriel and Tamara were about to say grace, Flora resumed the reading of her novel.

“ Off with that lump of Gentile nastiness while holy words are being said!” the old man growled.

Flora obeyed, in amazement. Only a few months before she had seldom seen him intone grace at all. She was getting used to his new habits, but such rigor as he now displayed was unintelligible to her, and she thought it unbearable.

“You can read your book a little after. The wisdom of it will not run away,” chimed in Tamara, with good-natured irony. She was a poor widow of forty. Asriel had engaged her for her piety and for the rabbinical learning of her late husband, as much as for her culinary fame in the Ghetto.

Asriel intoned grace in indistinct droning accents. By degrees, however, as he warmed up to the Hebrew prayer, whose words were a conglomeration of incomprehensible sounds to him, he fell to swaying to and fro, and his voice broke into an exalted, heart-rending singsong, Tamara accompanying him in whispers, and dolefully nodding her bewigged head all the while.

Flora was moved. The scene was novel to her, and she looked on with the sympathetic reverence of a Christian visiting a Jewish synagogue on the Day of Atonement.

At last the fervent tones died away in a solemn murmur Silence fell over the cozy little room. Asriel sat tugging at his scanty beard as if in an effort to draw it into a more venerable growth.

“Flora !” he presently growled. “I am going to Europe.”

When Asriel Stroon thought he spoke, and when he spoke he acted.

“Goin’ to Europe! Are you crazy, papa? What are you talkin’ about?”

“Just what you hear. After Passover I am going to Europe. I must take a look at Pravly.”

“But you ain’t been there over thirty-five years. You don’t remember not‘in’ at all.”

“I don’t remember Pravly? Better than Mott Street; better than my nose. I was born there, my daughter,” he added, as he drew closer to her and began to stroke her glossless black hair. This he did so seldom that the girl felt her heart swelling in her throat. She was yearning after him in advance.

Tamara stared in beaming amazement at the grandeur of the enterprise. “ Are you really going?” she queried, with a touch of envy.

“What will you do there?—It’s so far away ! ” Flora resumed, for want of a weightier argument at hand.

“Never mind, my child; I won’t have to walk all the way.”

“But the Russian police will arrest you for stayin ’ away so long. Didn’t you say they would?”

“The kernel of a hollow nut!” he replied, extemporizing an equivalent of “fiddlesticks!” Flora was used to his metaphors, although they were at times rather vague, and set one wondering how they came into his head at all. “The kernel of a hollow nut ! Show a treif¹⁸ gendarme a kosher¹⁹ coin, and he will be shivering with ague. Long live the American dollar ! ”

She gave him a prolonged, far-away look, and said, peremptorily : “Mister, you ain’ goin’ nowheres.”

“Tamara, hand me my Psalter, will you?” the old man grumbled.

When the girl was gone, the housekeeper inquired: “And Flora—will you take her along ? ”

“What for? That she might make fun of our ways there, or that the pious people should point their fingers at her and call her Gentile girl, hey? She will stay with you and collect rent. I did not have her in Pravly, and I want to be there as I used to. I feel like taking a peep at the graves of my folks. It is pulling me by the heart, Tamara,” he added, in a grave undertone, as he fell to turning over the leaves of his Psalter.

II

When Asriel Stroon had retired from business, he suddenly grew fearful of death. Previously he had had no time for that. What with his flour store, two bakeries, and some real estate, he had been too busy to live, much less to think of death. He had never been seen at the synagogue on weekdays; and on the Sabbath, when, enveloped in his praying-shawl, he occupied a seat at the East Wall, he would pass the time drowsing serenely and nodding unconscious approval of the cantor’s florid improvisations, or struggling to keep flour out of his mind, where it clung as pertinaciously as it did to his long Sabbath coat.

The first sermon that failed to lull him to sleep was delivered by a newly landed preacher, just after Asriel had found it more profitable to convert his entire property into real estate. The newcomer dwelt, among other things, upon the fate of the wicked after death and upon their forfeited share in the World to Come. As Asriel listened to the fiery exhortation it suddenly burst upon him that he was very old and very wicked. “I am as full of sins as a watermelon is of seeds,” he said to himself, on coming out of the synagogue. “You may receive notice to move at any time, Asriel. And where is your baggage? Got anything to take along to the other world, as the preacher said, hey?”

Alas! he had been so taken up with earthly title deeds that he had given but little thought to such deeds as would entitle him to a “share in the World-to-Come”; and while his valuable papers lay secure between the fireproof walls of his iron safe, his soul was left utterly exposed to the flames of Sheol.

Then it was that he grew a pair of bushy sidelocks, ceased trimming his twin goatees, and, with his heart divided between yearning after the business he had sold and worrying over his sins, spent a considerable part of his unlimited leisure reading psalms.

What a delight it was to wind off chapter after chapter! And how smoothly it now came off, in his father’s (peace upon him !) singsong, of which he had not even thought for more than thirty years, but which suddenly came pouring out of his throat, together with the first verse he chanted! Not that Asriel Stroon could have told you the meaning of what he was so zestfully intoning, for in his boyhood he had scarcely gone through the Pentateuch when he was set to work by his father’s side, at flax heckling. But then the very sounds of the words and the hereditary intonation, added to the consciousness that it was psalms he was reciting, “made every line melt like sugar in his mouth,” as he once described it to the devout housekeeper.

He grew more pious and exalted every day, and by degrees fell prey to a feeling to which he had been a stranger for more than three decades.

Asriel Stroon grew homesick.

It was thirty-five years since he had left his birthplace; thirty years or more since, in the whirl of his American successes, he had lost all interest in it. Yet now, in the fifty-eighth year of his life, he suddenly began to yearn and pine for it.

Was it the fervor of his religious awakening which resoldered the long-broken link? At all events, numerous as were the examples of piety within the range of his American acquaintance, his notion of genuine Judaism was somehow inseparably associated with Pravly. During all the years of his life in New York he had retained a vague but deep-rooted feeling that American piety was as tasteless an article as American cucumbers and American fish—the only things in which his ecstasy over the adopted country admitted its hopeless inferiority to his native town.

III

On a serene afternoon in May, Asriel drove up to Pravly in a peasant’s wagon. He sat listlessly gazing at the unbroken line of wattle-fences and running an imaginary stick along the endless zigzag of their tops. The activity of his senses seemed suspended.

Presently a whiff of May aroma awakened his eye to a many-colored waving expanse, and his ear to the languorous whisper of birds. He recognized the plushy clover knobs in the vast array of placid magnificence, and the dandelions and the golden buttercups, although his poor mother tongue could not afford a special name for each flower, and he now addressed them collectively as tzatzkes—a word he had not used for thirty-five years. He looked at the tzatzkes, as they were swaying thoughtfully hither and thither, and it somehow seemed to him that it was not the birds but the clover blossoms which did the chirping. The whole scene appealed to his soul as a nodding, murmuring congregation engrossed in the solemnity of worship. He felt as though there were no such flowers in America, and that he had not seen any since he had left his native place.

Echoes of many, many years ago called to Asriel from amid the whispering host. His soul burst into song. He felt like shutting his eyes and trusting himself to the caressing breath of the air, that it might waft him whithersoever it chose. His senses were in confusion: he beheld a sea of fragrance; he inhaled heavenly music; he listened to a symphony of hues.

“ What a treat to breathe! What a paradise!” he exclaimed in his heart. “The cholera take it, how delicious! Do you deserve it, old sinner you? Ten plagues you do! But hush! the field is praying—”

With a wistful babyish look he became absorbed in a gigantic well-sweep suspended from the clear sky, and then in the landscape it overhung. The woody mass darkling in the distance was at once racing about and standing still. Fleecy clouds crawled over a hazy hilltop. And yonder—behold! a long, broad streak of silver gleaming on the horizon! Is it a lake? Asriel’s eyes are riveted and memories stir in his breast. He recalls not the place itself, but he can remember his reminiscences of it. During his first years in America, at times when he would surrender himself to the sweet pangs of homesickness and dwell, among other things, on the view that had seen him off to the unknown land, his mind would conjure up something like the effect now before his eyes. As a dream does it comes back to him now. The very shadows of thirty-five years ago are veiled.

Asriel gazes before him in deep reverence. The sky is letting itself down with benign solemnity, its measureless trough filled with melody, the peasant’s wagon creaking an accompaniment to it all—to every speck of color, as well as to every sound of the scene.

At one moment he felt as though he had strayed into the other world; at another, he was seized with doubt as to his own identity. “Who are you ? ” he almost asked himself, closing and reopening his hand experimentally. “Who or what is that business which you call life? Are you alive, Asriel? ” Whereupon he somehow remembered Flora’s photograph, and, taking it out of his bosom pocket, fell to contemplating it.

The wagon turned into a side road, and the Polish peasant, leaning forward, cursed and whipped the animal into a peevish trot. Presently something gray hove in sight. Far away, below, hazy blotches came creeping from behind the sky. The wagon rolls downhill. Asriel is in a flurry. He feels like one on the eve of a great event, he knows not exactly what.

The wagon dashes on. Asriel’s heart is all of a flutter. Suddenly—O Lord of the Universe! Why, there glistens the brook —what do you call it? “‘Repka?’” he asks the driver.

“Repka!” the other replies, without facing about.

“Repka, a disease into her heart! Repka, dear, may she live long! Who could beat Asriel in swimming?” Over there, on the other side, it was where Asriel’s father once chased him for bathing during Nine Days. He bumped his head against the angle of a rock, did the little scamp, and got up with a deep, streaming gash in his lower lip. The mark is stil...