Within earshot of the thundering traffic of Broadway I stood gazing at the bowed figures engaged in study and prayer. As I gazed the sordid walls of the poverty-stricken room faded from my sight, and in their stead I saw (in my mind’s eye) the wailing wall of Jerusalem or some ruin of the Holy City—a more fitting background to the rabbinical figures so strangely out of place in hustling America.
The great passion for the dead and gone past reflected in the Rembrandtesque faces of the aged students lends to their lives a religious grandeur which the uptown tourist (hastily passing on a rubber-neck wagon) would never suspect. Behind many a shabby-looking little store, or maybe above some corner saloon, are the societies for the study of Hebrew literature, where congregate the types of Jewish scholars and philosophers that make the heart of the writer and artist glad.
Gray-haired, bewhiskered, sad old men, many of whom have tasted only the bitterness of life—yet such is their faith in the Almighty that they cling to the praying shawl and Bible to blot out the memory of a Kishineff—their lives of study and prayer amid abject poverty giving the lie to the fallacy that the Jew lives but for money.
I have often wandered among these scholars picking up the crumbs of wisdom which fall from the lips of the old men, grateful that my Jewish face and blood gave me the privilege to sit and sketch among them. Somehow or other my ramblings on the East Side are like the calm after the storm of the uptown struggle.
Many times I have felt the heart tug—the longing to be among my people—the real Jews—and, leaving theatrical uptown, the land of make-believe and unrest, I have sought the little schools of study where the wonderful real old men who live by optimism and nourish their souls by faith teach me the lesson of patience and the love of humanity.
There is something restful and inspiring when an old man—long, long past the Biblical three score and ten—places his hand on your shoulder