SILHOUETTES
"Priests to the world are twe,This is our destiny."
T
OVER his right shoulder, we saw, in his slovenly store window, a card set awry, advertising a ball to be given by the "Sisters of Zion." Then we looked at him...
One of New York’s “white wings,” industriously splashed with dirt, handling an ash barrel, he had the thin, sharp face of the Galician Jew, with the goatee of the professional, or would-be professional man.
A woman remonstrated with him in the "ow, ow" accents of the Roumanian Jargon. He answered in the "ee, ee" of Stanislaw.
They had apparently crossed the ocean on the same vessel, and their sea-born visions of the "goldene medina" had come to earth in East Broadway; for, dragging her ash barrel to the curb, he observed with animation, "One dreams not of ash barrels, but let it be only a bad dream."
Within earshot came two sentences, as we passed by:
"You earn money."
"I earn a living"...
II.
In the newer Ghetto of Harlem, on the west side where brown stone and flat greet each other distantly, with a proper sense of the proprieties.
From the street on a Sabbath morning you can see into a brownstone front window, behind which, unscrewed, all unconscious of the exterior world, old Jews, as of old, are praying, the prayer shawls nodding approval to the reader, the flexi-
ble Jewish spine swaying to and fro, making rythm for the unheard words...
Outside, on the sidewalk, bright specimens of an unrisen generation bend, too, almost to the ground; and nod, too, with a dash of greater excitement. These boys have a leader, too; but no reader. You hear the chink of coin, a cent wobbles on the paving stone, "heads," "tails," sundry cents follow.
"Heads," "tails," and some boy wins, some boy loses.
The service ends. The old people going homewards, wash their hands in invisible soap, perhaps the lather blinds their vision...
The boys' game knows no pause, but goes on to the shrill chink of coins...
III.
The kink in his hair was not short and woolly as in the negro; his posture was superior to that of his two black companions, and there was a shade of olive beneath his dark skin, the eyes were well set, the nose not spatulated, and the lips thin.
As he looked up from his book he grinned as a colored boy will grin, but with a greater flash of intelligence.
A slight lurch of the crowded car, and the strap holder came conveniently next to him, and peering over his shoulder, recognized the "Dreamers of the Ghetto." Zangwill and a child of Ham his reader! Enough to make the dumb assume the rights of conversation!
"Do you like that book?"