of whom smiled, sneered, and made his little joke about “greenhorns.” Then I was ushered with many grimaces into the presence of the big man.
Just a minute’s conversation convinced me that he was a Jew in appearance only, and that he had never known anything of the traditions, the romance, the art or the literature of our race. He didn’t exactly know what minyan was, or pretended he didn’t, but recommended me to “one of our people,” as he put it, who ran a very popular chophouse close by. I began to realize that I was a stranger among my own people and that night I walked the streets of great New York with an aching heart. Everywhere in the hurrying crowds I saw the faces of my brethren and sisters, thousands, hundreds of thousands of them, hurrying, pushing, shoving brethren they were, with all the tenderness, the friendship and the Semitic look gone from their eyes.
“Oh, God!” I thought, “are these the children of Israel? Is this the persecuted race—that people who had been scattered to the four corners of the earth?”
Hungry and weary, I made my way as if in a dream to the café of a great hotel. Everything in the huge room was glaringly false—marble pillars, oak beams, flowers, were all imitation: a big orchestra sat in a balcony with an artificial moon and a painted sky as a background; everywhere were lights, lights and more lights.
From table to table I went but I was roughly reminded that “this” was reserved and “that” was reserved. Presently glaringly gowned, bediamonded Jewish women, accompanied by equally vulgar Jewish men, filed in and occupied every seat, and between mouthfuls of food and drink their bodies would sway to the voices of other Jews who sang only of “Mississippi” and “Georgia.” How these people did laugh when they caught sight of my foreign clothes and my pale, poetic face, and how