Yekl | Page 6

had taken, as usual, at his lodgings, he went out
for a walk. He was firmly determined to keep himself from visiting Joe
Peltner's dancing academy, and accordingly he took a direction
opposite to Suffolk Street, where that establishment was situated.
Having passed a few blocks, however, his feet, contrary to his will,
turned into a side street and thence into one leading to Suffolk. "I shall
only drop in to tell Joe that I can not sell any of his ball tickets, and
return them," he attempted to deceive his own conscience. Hailing this
pretext with delight he quickened his pace as much as the overcrowded
sidewalks would allow.
He had to pick and nudge his way through dense swarms of bedraggled
half-naked humanity; past garbage barrels rearing their overflowing
contents in sickening piles, and lining the streets in malicious
suggestion of rows of trees; underneath tiers and tiers of fire escapes,
barricaded and festooned with mattresses, pillows, and featherbeds not
yet gathered in for the night. The pent-in sultry atmosphere was laden
with nausea and pierced with a discordant and, as it were, plaintive
buzz. Supper had been despatched in a hurry, and the teeming
populations of the cyclopic tenement houses were out in full force "for
fresh air," as even these people will say in mental quotation marks.
Suffolk Street is in the very thick of the battle for breath. For it lies in
the heart of that part of the East Side which has within the last two or
three decades become the Ghetto of the American metropolis, and,
indeed, the metropolis of the Ghettos of the world. It is one of the most

densely populated spots on the face of the earth--a seething human sea
fed by streams, streamlets, and rills of immigration flowing from all the
Yiddish-speaking centers of Europe. Hardly a block but shelters Jews
from every nook and corner of Russia, Poland, Galicia, Hungary,
Roumania; Lithuanian Jews, Volhynian Jews, south Russian Jews,
Bessarabian Jews; Jews crowded out of the "pale of Jewish settlement";
Russified Jews expelled from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kieff, or
Saratoff; Jewish runaways from justice; Jewish refugees from crying
political and economical in justice; people torn from a hard-gained
foothold in life and from deep-rooted attachments by the caprice of
intolerance or the wiles of demagoguery--innocent scapegoats of a
guilty Government for its outraged populace to misspend its blind fury
upon; students shut out of the Russian universities, and come to these
shores in quest of learning; artisans, merchants, teachers, rabbis, artists,
beggars--all come in search of fortune. Nor is there a tenement house
but harbors in its bosom specimens of all the whimsical metamorphoses
wrought upon the children of Israel of the great modern exodus by the
vicissitudes of life in this their Promised Land of today. You find there
Jews born to plenty, whom the new conditions have delivered up to the
clutches of penury; Jews reared in the straits of need, who have here
risen to prosperity; good people morally degraded in the struggle for
success amid an unwonted environment; moral outcasts lifted from the
mire, purified, and imbued with self-respect; educated men and women
with their intellectual polish tarnished in the inclement weather of
adversity; ignorant sons of toil grown enlightened--in fine, people with
all sorts of antecedents, tastes, habits, inclinations, and speaking all
sorts of subdialects of the same jargon, thrown pellmell into one social
caldron--a human hodgepodge with its component parts changed but
not yet fused into one homogeneous whole.
And so the "stoops," sidewalks, and pavements of Suffolk Street were
thronged with panting, chattering, or frisking multitudes. In one spot
the scene received a kind of weird picturesqueness from children
dancing on the pavement to the strident music hurled out into the
tumultuous din from a row of the open and brightly illuminated
windows of what appeared to be a new tenement house. Some of the
young women on the sidewalk opposite raised a longing eye to these

windows, for floating by through the dazzling light within were young
women like themselves with masculine arms round their waists.
As the spectacle caught Jake's eye his heart gave a leap. He violently
pushed his way through the waltzing swarm, and dived into the
half-dark corridor of the house whence the music issued. Presently he
found himself on the threshold and in the overpowering air of a
spacious oblong chamber, alive with a damp-haired, dishevelled,
reeking crowd--an uproarious human vortex, whirling to the squeaky
notes of a violin and the thumping of a piano. The room was, judging
by its untidy, once-whitewashed walls and the uncouth wooden pillars
supporting its bare ceiling, more accustomed to the whir of sewing
machines than to the noises which filled it at the present moment. It
took up the whole of