Yekl Part 1

Yekl.

by Abraham Cahan.

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 a.s.semblage--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 c.u.mbrous 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' boots.h.!.+_ 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 s.h.i.+ght!_ 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 ill.u.s.tration, 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 "_p.a.w.nch_" 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 a.s.sumed 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 p.r.o.nunciation 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 f.a.n.n.y. 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 to _baseball_? All _college boys_ and _tony peoplesh_ play it," he concluded triumphantly. Bernstein remained silent, his eyes riveted to his newspaper. "Ah, you don't answer, _shee_?" said Jake, feeling put out.

The awkward pause which followed was relieved by one of the playgoers who wanted to know whether it was true that to pitch a ball required more skill than to catch one.

"_Sure!_ You must know how to _peetch_," Jake rejoined with the cloud lingering on his brow, as he lukewarmly delivered an imaginary ball.

"And I, for my part, don't see what wisdom there is to it," said the presser with a shrug. "I think I could throw, too."

"He can do everything!" laughingly remarked a girl named Pesse.

"How hard can you hit?" Jake demanded sarcastically, somewhat warming up to the subject.

"As hard as you at any time."

"_I betch you a dullar to you' ten shent_ you can not," Jake answered, and at the same moment he fished out a handful of coin from his trousers pocket and challengingly presented it close to his interlocutor's nose.

"There he goes!--betting!" the presser exclaimed, drawing slightly back. "For my part, your _pitzers_ and _catzers_ may all lie in the earth. A nice entertainment, indeed! Just like little children--playing ball! And yet people say America is a _smart_ country. I don't see it."

"_'F caush_ you don't, _becaush_ you are a bedraggled _greenhorn_, afraid to budge out of Heshter Shtreet." As Jake thus vented his bad humour on his adversary, he cast a glance at Bernstein, as if anxious to attract his attention and to re-engage him in the discussion.

"Look at the Yankee!" the presser shot back.

"More of a one than you, _anyhoy_."

"He thinks that _shaving_ one's mustache makes a Yankee!"