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At the age of seventeen his first story in Yiddish, entitled "She Laughed," appeared in Vörwarts. At that time he studied English diligently, and prepared himself for college. For a number of years he was a frequent contributor to the Jewish press. His first English story, entitled "Free," appeared in The Outlook, July 4, 1903.
Setting out from one or other of the score of garrets and cheap lodgings we had in our time inhabited, we had wandered together, day after day, night after night, far down East, where, as we had threaded our way among the barrels of soused herrings and the stalls and barrows of unleavened bread, he had taught me scraps of Hebrew and Polish and Yiddish; up into the bright West, where he could never walk a quarter of a mile without meeting one of his extraordinary acquaintances furred music-hall managers, hawkers of bootlaces, commercial magnates of his own Faith, touts, crossing-sweepers, painted women; into Soho, where he had names for the very horses on the cab-ranks and the dogs who slumbered under the counters of the sellers of French literature; out to the naphtha-lights and cries of the Saturday night street markets of Islington and the North End Road; into City churches on wintry afternoons, into the studios of famous artists full of handsomely dressed women, into the studios of artists not famous, at the ends of dark and break-neck corridors; to tea at the suburban homes of barmaids and chorus girls, to dinner in the stables of a cavalry-barracks, to supper in cabmen's shelters.
"We are plain Yiddish folk," he generalized, good-humoredly A few minutes later, as Mrs. Margolis placed a glass of Russian tea before me, he drew her to him and pinched her white cheek "What do you think of my wifey, Levinsky?" She smiled a grave, deprecating smile and took to pottering about the house "And what do you think of these little customers?" he went on.
This was apt to irritate Dora or even lead to a disagreeable scene If I happened to be around I would explain things to her, but she seemed to accept my explanations with a grain of salt. She bowed before my intellectual status in a general way, but since she had good reason to doubt the quality of my English enunciation, she doubted my Yiddish interpretations as well.
At least there were several Yiddish Theatres, each claiming this supreme position, but the poet felt that the production of his play at Goldwater's Theatre settled the question among them. 'It is the greatest play of the generation, he told the young socialists and free-thinkers who sat around him this Friday evening imbibing chocolate.
The soul of the East Side expressed itself in the Yiddish press, daily, weekly, and monthly, and in Yiddish literature, and in the spoken word of the propagandist whose ideal, though limited in literary expression, made him a flame of living fire. It was this soul of the East Side that drove me against my will to study the relation of politics to the condition of the people.
But then these fellows spoke Russian instead of Yiddish and altogether they belonged to a world far removed from mine. Many of these "modern" young Jews went to high school and wore pretty uniforms with silver-plated buttons and silver lace. To me they were apostates, sinners in Israel. And yet I could not think of them without a lurking feeling of envy.
To those who visit "Charley's Mount" for the first time all this is as Yiddish, but soon he or she, when initiated into the games of roulette and trente-et-quarante, quickly gets bitten by the fever and enters into the spirit of the discussions.
O yes, they have sharp ears, those drill-masters. As you know, speaking Yiddish was considered a great breach of discipline, which never passed unpunished. It always meant a whipping. So I had made myself guilty of two offenses. On that day I did not go home empty-handed: I got an order to report the next morning to receive my twenty lashes.
Brodix, Dagmar's mother, good, kind mother that she was, spent her time wringing her hands and rolling her big black eyes, otherwise in extolling the hitherto undiscovered virtues of the lost daughter. In her distress she forsook the English tongue, and lapsed into a conglomeration of Polish and Yiddish made intelligible only through the plentiful interpretation of dramatic gesticulation.
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