unpenetrable forest! And once she took us to the labyrinth of human misery, she did not dare to omit even a single passage, she felt it her sacred duty to lead us to every nook and corner of it. Orzeszko unrolled before our eyes the gigantic panorama of wretched life but not being a pessimist she naturally did not stop at that. Her expedition in the valley of tears being ended, she led us to breathe the air of a new region, she showed us the onrushing of new streams, the coming of new men and a better order of things.
The most characteristic feature of Eliza Orzeszko will be, however, brought out, when we take into consideration the many novels and romances she wrote on Jew- ısh life, each of them vibrating with the truest and purest love of the Jewish nation. This is the most candid and decisive ımanifestation of the broadness and great- ncss of Orzeszko’s nature and talent: she bore in her soul not only the sorrow of her own nation, but that of humanity in general. She was international in the highest, most attainable degree. Notwithstanding her great number of national Polish productions, Orzeszko never absorb. ed the great national tragedy of the Poles to the bottom and there would have always remained in the domain of Polish life some unearthed pearls for her literary genius. Nevertheless, she gave away a most valuable part of her creative forces to a strange nation, to the Jews.. Why? Because Orzeszko was born with a great universal nature, because her heart responded and moved to every touch that came from abroad. She happened to observe the life of the Jews, these most humiliated, persecuted, tortured and down-trodden people and she could not pass it by. Her heart moved and gave vent to bitter tones...... She studied the great tragedy of the Jewish nation, the downfall of the Jews, the Goluth, and depicted it with a masterful hand and a warm sympathy. Here again we must run a demarcation line between Orzeszko and the bulk of Gentile apologists and philo-semites. While these are mostly persons who defend the Jews on the ground of rationalism and logical liberalism, while these elements always begin with the head and end with the heart, Orzeszko never had in her mental eye the ‚doctrine of liberalism: she began with the
soul and ended with the soul, and her relation to the Jews was the character of a great nature, the essence of an infinite love in its heart.
Long before Orzeszko entered the literary arena the Jew had occupied a comparatively important place in minor Polish fiction. But was that the Jew in his actual habilaments? It was a comic and detestful figure, a living heap of rags, a dog of the "pan," a laughable creature with a nose as long as his "kaftan," in short, a kind of a domestic "hippopotamus." Orzeszko also revealed many detestable features of the Jewish factor and usurer, but in the first place she pictured these types in accordance with their reality and she sent them into the world not with a cynical laugh, but with a tear and a sob; in the second place she made a psychological search in the soul of this "factor" and came to the conclusion that his degrading and humbling behavior in the presence of his "pan" was not true to his nature, but a result of certain economic and social conditions. Under these conditions he is Moshka; under other conditions he is Moses. Orzeszko knew that the spark of human self-respect was not extinct even in that most humble servant of the "pan"—the "factor." In her brilliant romance, "Meir Ezofowich," she tells us, by the way, how a Jewish "factor" Chaim took revenge upon his "pan." The nobleman wanted to make fun of his "dog" Chaim, and he had the following conversation with him:
"Chaim, have you ever been in Krakow?" asked the 'pan.'
"No, your excellency, I never was there," answered Chaim, with a deep bow.
"Now then, you must be very narrowminded," replied the 'pan.'
Chaim listened attentively to this reply and bowed.
"Now, have you ever been in Rome?" again asked the 'pan.'
"I never was there, your excellency," was Chaim's reply.
"Then you are a fool!" came the answer of the nobleman.
Chaim again bowed, waited in silence a few minutes and then addressed the pan: "Pardon me, your excellency, have you ever been in Shicoff?"
"No, I never was there," answered the nobleman.