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Updated: June 10, 2025
For all my theorizing about the "survival of the fittest" and the "dying off of the weaklings," I could not help feeling that, in an abstract way, the socialists were not altogether wrong. I must confess, too, that the defeat with which I had met at Tevkin's house had greatly intensified my hostility to socialists.
I MADE it my business to visit a well-known Hebrew book-store on Canal Street. I asked for Tevkin's works. It appeared that before he emigrated to America he had published three small volumes of verse and prose, that they had once aroused much interest, but that they were now practically out of print. I tried two other stores, with the same result.
"Still, your letter was a surprise to her. She had not thought you capable of writing such things." What really had occurred between father and daughter concerning my desire to call I never learned Tevkin's house was apparently full of Socialism. Indeed, so was the house of almost every intellectual family among our immigrants.
From what followed I learned that Miss Tevkin's father had once been a celebrated Hebrew poet and that he was no other than the hero of the romance of which Naphtali had told me a few months before I left my native place to go to America, and that her mother was the heroine of that romance. "It was her father, then, who wrote those love-letters!" I exclaimed, excitedly.
Two of Tevkin's three little volumes were made up of poetry, while the third consisted of brief essays, prose, poems, "meditations," and epigrams. I came across a "meditation" entitled "My Children," and took it up eagerly. It contained but three sentences: "My children love me, yet my heart is hungry. They are mine, yet they are strangers.
As I soon gathered from a bit of pleasantry by the lawyer, she was a school-teacher At Miss Tevkin's suggestion we all went to see the crowd waiting for the last "husband train." As we rose to go I made a point of asking Miss Tevkin for the name of the best Ibsen play, my object being to be by her side on our walk down to the village.
Miss Tevkin's voice seemed to have something to do with it Presently we reached the crowd at the station. The train was late. The children were getting restless. At last it arrived, the first of two sections, with a few minutes' headway between them. There was a jam and a babel of voices.
I asked the librarian whether Tevkin wrote for those papers, and he brought me several clippings containing some of Tevkin's Yiddish contributions. It appeared, however, that the articles he wrote in his living mother-tongue lacked the spirit and the charm that distinguished his style when he used the language of the prophets.
One of the men I met at Tevkin's was Volodsky, the old-time street peddler, the man of the beautiful teeth whose push-cart had adjoined mine in those gloomy days when I tried to sell goods in the streets, and who had told me of the dower-money which his sister had lent him for his journey to America.
He handled me as a gambler's wife does her husband. He would seek me out in front of some unfinished building, at Tevkin's, or at some "boom" café, and make me sign some checks, consult me on something or other, or wheedle me into accompanying him to my factory for an hour or two. But the next day he would have to go hunting for me again
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