Yekl

CHAPTER PAGE


I.--JAKE AND YEKL 1

II.--THE NEW YORK GHETTO 25

III.--IN THE GRIP OF HIS PAST 50

IV.--THE MEETING 70

V.--A PATERFAMILIAS 82

VI.--CIRCUMSTANCES ALTER CASES 112

VII.--MRS. KAVARSKY'S COUP D'ÉTAT 136

VIII.--A HOUSETOP IDYL 158

IX.--THE PARTING 175

X.--A DEFEATED VICTOR 185




YEKL.




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
assemblage--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 cumbrous 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' bootsh!_ 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 shight!_ 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 illustration, 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.