|His Works|Films|The Jazz Singer|The Day of Atonement

The

Day of Atonement

So Sound and Dramatic Is this Tale That a Manager

Plans to Make a Play of It. The Author Confesses

That He Isn't the Idol of Millions of Readers Now,

but We Predict That He Will Make Friends Fast.

By Sampson Raphaelson (Samson Raphaelson)

“WHAT Jack Robin needs," said David Lee, who owns some of the whitest of Broadway's white lights, "is a wife."

"What our Jakie needs," said Jack Robin's father, old Cantor Rabinowitz, of the Hester Street Synagogue, "is a God."

"What I need," said Jack Robin, "is a song-number with a kick in it. The junk that Tin Pan Alley is peddling these days is rusty—that's all—rusty."

And the sum and substance of it was a sober-faced Jack, engaged fitfully in experiments with pleasure, a worried but watchful David Lee, and a tragically lonely house hold on Hester Street, where dwelt the aged cantor and his wife.

For Jack was no ordinary singer of ragtime. Those dark eyes of his might have been the ecstatic eyes of a poet in the days when the Chosen People lived sedately in the land of Canaan. They might have been prophetic eyes, stern and stirring, in the years of Zedekiah, son of Josiah, King of Judah, when Jerusalem "knew not its God." They might have been deep wells of lamentation even one generation ago had his lyric voice been born to cry the sorrows of Israel in a Russian synagogue.

But he lived in New York, and his slender, well-set-up figure was draped in perfectly fitting suits of Anglo-Saxon severity, and his dark hair was crisply trimmed and parted after the fashion of young America, and the black eyes in his thin, handsome face were restless, cynical and without joy.

That bewilderment, brooding and fitful, which was now so palpable, had vaguely begun to propel Jack in the days when, as Jakie Rabinowitz, he had drifted with a gang of Hester Street hoodlums. He was twelve then, rather tall and sturdy for his age, and for an exciting few weeks he enjoyed the thrills of looting fruit-stands, of stealing milk-bottles and of openly shooting craps. But the bliss of these few weeks came to a hysterical termination when he violated the code of the gang, and it was not until ten years later, when he knew Amy Prentiss, that he felt such happiness again.

The gang's code regarded certain acts of loyalty as religion, and certain epithets could be avenged only in blood—the blood of a bleeding nose or a lacerated lip. Foremost among the firebrand epithets was the term "sheeny." If some one called you a sheeny, only one thing could properly ensue—violent fistic battle. But Jakie, traversing Cherry Street, the Irish domain, received the stigma with indifference.

He and nine-year-old Hymie Cohen were on their way home from an East River salt water swimming-shack, where for a dime they had received the use of faded trunks and the privileges of a moldy wooden tank. A barefoot young "mick," slighter than Jakie but of truculent demeanor, had united ten fingers with his nose in a trestle of vilification and cried: "Yah! Lookit the sheeny! Go back where yah came from, yah sheeny!"

Jakie shrugged his shoulders and passed on. Neither righteous indignation nor the tremors of fear had risen within him.

Little Hymie told his brother Joe of the humiliating incident, and that night Joe asked Jakie about it.

"Yah didn't fight, did yah?" he demanded. "Yah didn't do nothin?"

"Why should I fight? I wasn't mad."

Joe stepped close to Jakie.

"You're yeller! Yah got a yeller streak a mile wide right t'rough to your liver! Yah can't hang around wit' de gang no more. Go 'way before I paste yah one on the jaw!"

This was disturbing. Jakie was not minded to obedient alacrity. He responded with a show of spirit,

"I’ll go when I feel like it!"

Joe's response was a contemptuous slap over the eyes—a slap which stung and infuriated. Sobbing and seeing red, he fell upon Joe and blindly pommeled away with his fists.

AFTER it was over and Jakie lay on the curb with a "shiner," a bleeding nose, and a perforated dental display, sobbing breathlessly and cursing in richly filthy East Side argot, Joe came up to him.

"I take it back, Jakie," he said, proffering his hand. "Y'ain't yeller. I—"

"Go to hell," Jakie panted, "you dirty sheeny!"

Jakie went directly home that night and endured stoically his father's scolding and his mother's running fire of questions. Dwelling in a passion of hatred for the complete order of things, his parents exasperated him into a seething calm beyond the point of articulate resentment. The next day he played truant from Hebrew school.

The Melammed, who was receiving a dollar a month extra for teaching the cantor's son, anxious to prepare him magnificently for the Bar Mitzvah recitative and speech in the synagogue, went out in search of the boy. He found Jakie playing basket-ball in the Hester Street playgrounds, dragged him back to the small, ill-smelling, gas-lit room where a few of the older boys still were singsonging the cadenced subtleties of "Baba Kama," and flogged him until his body was purple.

Jakie came home that night somewhat terrified by the decision he had made, yet completely set in his determination. He was acute enough to speak to his mother first.

"Mamma, that Rebi—he ain't no good. He's so dirty, and he's always hollering, and, anyways, none of us kids ever learns anything. And he nearly killed me to-day, mamma, with a big strap—Look how sore my back is—and I never did nothing at all!"

"I'll tell papa," said his mother, busily applying goose-grease to his tortured back, "and he'll speak to the Rebi he shouldn't hit you no more."

"I don't wanna go to Chaidar," Jakie announced, with low-voiced intensity.

"Jakie! Your papa shouldn't hear you speak like this! How could you ever be a Chazon—a cantor in a big fancy synagogue—if you don't know good your Hebrew? I'll speak to papa he should find you a new Chaidar and a new Rebi."

"I don't want no new Chaidar, and I don't want to be a Chazon when I grow up!"

"Jakie! Eat your supper and don't speak it another word like this! Lucky your papa he's ain't home, or he would kill you."

The boy did not move toward the table. He raised a blazing face to his mother.

"If papa kills me," he said, "then I'll run away from home."

The old cantor did whip Jakie. It had long been a matter of profound distress to the cantor that a youth with so nimble a mind should be so diffident in the presence of the great culture of the noblest of all peoples. For ten generations, in Russia and now in America, the name "Rabinowitz" had stood for devout, impassioned Chazonoth, and Jakie's father was animated by the one desire that his son should become even a greater cantor than himself.

"I can see it comes a day when the Children of Israel will need it more Chazonim," the old father had said once to his young son. "It's too good here in America—too much money—too much telephones and trains and ragstime. A little bit more God ain't a bad thing, Jakie. Music is God's voice, and you make it your papa and mamma happy, Jakie, if you grow up to be a great Chazon like your grandfather in Vilna olav-hasholom."

"Aw, gee," Jakie had responded; "I wish the Rebi would comb his whiskers once in a while!"

Fervently considering his God, the cantor had beaten Jakie soberly, and the boy had been inclined after that to listen in silence, if with resentment, to his pleas and homilies. That beating a year ago was the first Jakie had suffered from his father. The present belaboring was the second and last. That night, while his parents slept, Jakie, true to his word, did run away from home.

A policeman found him, two days later, white with hunger and dragging his feet with weariness. His parents, who had become panic-stricken, overfed him and put him tenderly to bed. In the next few days they argued and pleaded with him, and, before they admitted defeat, wept before him.

"I'll sing in the choir every Sabbath," he said then. "But, honest, pa, honest, I'd quicker die than go every day to a Chaidar."

His father had to find comfort during the several years that followed in hearing the liquid golden tones of Jakie's alto voice in the choir only on Sabbath and on holy days.

"Maybe," he said to his wife, "maybe when he gets older, he'll see how beautiful is Yiddishkeit. Maybe he would stop hanging around music-places and singing these ragstime songs what all the bums they sing."

"I'm afraid, Yosele; I'm afraid," she sighed. "When he grows older, a job he'll get it—in a tailor shop, maybe—and right away with a girl he'll be running around."

"Better he should never marry," the cantor cried, "than with one of these peek-a-boo-waist girls with paint on the faces! Oy, Rivka mine, why ain't it here in America good healthy girls like you was?"

BUT girls were not in Jakie's mind. The few who moved through his life had laughed too much and listened too little. They were shrill creatures, made for anything but love. They were haughty when they should have been humbly eager, and they greedily mimicked things they should austerely have left alone.

He might have sunk to a Russian kind of morbidness if he had not been caught up in the stream of highly seasoned folk-song which poured constantly from Tin Pan Alley.

By the time he was eighteen he moved in an unreal, syncopated world of his own. If he had a sentimental grief, what better relief than sitting in the dark of his bedroom in the tiny Hester Street flat and howling dolefully the strains of "Down by the Old Mill Stream"? If the joys of being alive smote him, what could more sweetly ease the ache of happiness than the plaintive blare of "Alexander's Ragtime Band"? So he haunted the motion-picture shows. Then one night he got a job singing popular songs in the Great Alcazar Palace on Grand Street—one of the new movie-houses with rococo modeling in front, a house penetrating into the bowels of the building to a greater depth than its rickety, makeshift predecessors. And later that night his father told him never to show his face in the Hester Street home again. "Better I shouldn't have it no son at all. Your loafer's talk stabs me in my heart. I couldn't bear to see your face no more—bum! In a synagogue you don't even put your head. For ten generations was every Rabinowitz a God-fearing Chazon, and you—my only son—street-songs you are singing! Go! Be a ragstime singer with the bums!"

How could the old cantor, or, for that matter, Jakie himself, understand that instead of being sinful and self-indulgent, loose and lazy, this grave-eyed boy with the ways of the street was sincerely carrying on the tradition of plaintive, religious melody of his forefathers—carrying on that tragic tradition disguised ironically with the gay trappings of Broadway and the rich vulgarity of the East Side? Instinctively the East Side responded to it, for people came hours early to the Great Alcazar Palace and stood in line twenty deep to hear Jakie, now Jack Robin, sing "Lovey Joe" or "When Dat Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves for Alabam'."

"Chee, but that baby can rag!" they said, as they swayed, hypnotized, to the caressing quavers of his voice. They knew only that he caught at their heart-strings. They failed to perceive that Jakie was simply translating the age-old music of the cantors—that vast loneliness of a race wandering "between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born"—into primitive and passionate Americanese.

One year Jakie spent thus, and then David Lee, on a periodical scouting expedition, drifted into the Great Alcazar Palace. A short, fat man with cold blue eyes in a round pink face, Lee slipped unnoticed into the dark of the last row. He heard Jack Robin render "Underneath the Sugar Moon" by the Keats people as "The World-Famous Dancer of Joyous Dances."

It was in San Francisco. Her act preceded his, and he stood in the wings, waiting his turn. Slender, dark-haired, blue-eyed, she had none of the Oriental instinct for undulation which Jack had understood so easily and to which he was so casually indifferent. Her open, frankly gay movements, her girlishly graceful fluttering pricked him to a breathless interest. She was bafflingly foreign to him—everything about her. Elusive, infinitely desirable to his naturally complex nature because of her simplicity, she was seeing the sunshine which for him did not exist. As he stood there watching, Henrietta Mooney, of the Mooney Ballet, joined him.

Henrietta's name off-stage was Sadie Rudnick. Jack had seen her performance several times in the past few years, and, while it was skilful and had its charm, its qualities were no mystery to him. Nor was Henrietta herself a mystery, for with one glance Jack knew her as baldly as he would a sister. "A clever Grand Street kid—in her second youth."

Henrietta listened in the wings at this Monday matinee while Jack went through his performance. She was there when he came off, and came directly up to him, saying without preliminaries,

"Kiddo, I heard you last September in Chicago, and you're losing the wallop."

Jack smiled without replying.

"What's wrong?" the girl persisted. "Booze?"

"I wonder why," he mused audibly.

Henrietta looked him squarely in the eyes.

"You wonder why? She's a Shiksa; that's why! I've seen Jewish boys fall that way before. It ain't new to me." There was bitterness in her voice.

"But why?" Jack repeated, more to himself than to her. "Why?"

"You come from the Ghetto, and she studied fancy dancing in a private school. You're the son of a poor old Chazon, and she's the daughter of a Boston lawyer. You're—Aw, you make me sick!"

ABRUPTLY Henrietta left him, and during the one remaining day of their stay in San Francisco she avoided him. But her words stayed with him; they pried brutally into his apathy; they jeered him from afar; they came terribly close and stung him. The thought of approaching this lovely dancer with the quiet eyes and the gentle mouth frightened him a little; but his fear angered him. As she came out into the wings Saturday night, she found him in her path.

"Say—" he began. She stopped, smiling uncertainly. Jack, to her, was a pleasingly debonair figure with a handsome face, glowing eyes. His manner she hadn't the time or the gift to analyze.

"I have to hand it to you," he went on, self-consciously, flushing to the roots of his hair. "You—you dance with more real class—I mean to say—you're darn good—" He paused, floundering.

It is a curious fact that often the only signs of yearning, of sincere and painful humbleness, of profound anxiety to express line things consist of awkwardness—of a stilted nonchalance. His confusion served simply to embarrass her. She strove, not in vain, for poise to cover her embarrassment. Her only recourse was to smile vaguely and say, "Glad you liked—uh—" And then, fearing that he might gurgle more badly still, she passed on.

Jack hated her for having made it so hard for him.

"I know she don't care a damn about me," he told himself savagely. "But she didn't have to make a fool of me. She could have said a few civil words, even if I don't mean anything in her life."

In San Diego, in Dallas, in San Antonio, in New Orleans and in the other cities he made on the long swing back to New York, his eyes seemed to seek morbidly for further evidences of the simple, unruffled Anglo-Saxon quality of temperament. He found plenty of them, and, as the weeks passed, they served to beat him down into a soothing numbness, which was bad for the audiences, who sat stonily through his performances. Henrietta's words would constantly drum into his ears: "You come from the Ghetto, and she's the daughter of a Boston lawyer."

IT WAS slowly, because he was fundamentally temperate, that he learned to seek self-respect in barrooms. No one else would have called it that. It had too little of the nature of peace. It brought back the invigorating uncertainty, the inspiring restlessness of his adolescent days. It eliminated, for the moment, this new numbness which had come upon him, this queer sensation of being softly strangled. And, since it substituted his old Weltschmerz for the feeling of being slowly buried into a grave of inarticulateness by the Amy Prentisses of the world, his ragtime singing got back some of its old lilting plaintiveness.

Jack saw his parents occasionally. His mother's furtive pride in the adulation which younger Hester Street gave to her son had even begun to reflect itself in a way in the old cantor.

"Every actor he's ain't a loafer, Yosele," she would say. "Look—is Jacob Adler a loafer? A finer man you couldn't find it if you should search a whole lifetime."

"But he's a Yiddisher actor, Leben. He feels the Yiddishe heart. And our Jakie sings ragstime—like a Shagetz!"

"I know—I know," she soothed him. "But he's an American boy. And he's a good boy. He's sending you and me presents only last month from New Haven. He lives a clean life, Yosele. Maybe soon he makes enough money and he goes into business and gets married and comes regular every Sabbath and holy day to the synagogue."

When he visited them in the summer, Jack's dumb unhappiness became apparent to them. They took it for a good sign—for indication of a new, more mature thoughtfulness. His booking for the year ended, he took a month's vacation and spent two weeks of it in New York. For two consecutive Sabbath days he attended the synagogue, and the old cantor, singing from the pulpit, exulted in the conviction that his son was returning to his God.

Indeed, Jack himself found a certain solace in it. As he sat on the old familiar wooden bench, clothed in the silk Talis—the prayer-shawl which his father had so solemnly presented to him on the occasion of his Bar Mitzvah—with good old Yudelson, the cobbler, on one side of him, and stout, hearty, red-bearded Lapinsky, the butcher, on the other, he felt a singular warmth and sweetness. And the voice of his father, still clear and lyric, rising in the intricacies of the familiar old lamenting prayers—prayers which he remembered perfectly, which he would never forget—the dissonant rumble of response from the congregation, the restive shufflings of youngsters—all these were to him blessedly familiar and blissful.

In the murmurous peacefulness of those two weeks his father talked to him constantly of the austere beauties of the ancient ways of his people, and it began to appear to Jack that there was indeed something to be said for them. He could not and did not dismiss his father's world as he used to—with a sneer and the words: "Dead! I tell you that stuff's behind the times." For he began to feel that if it was a dead or a dying world, still it possessed some reality, an orderly nobility; while the world he was alive to was chaotic, crassly unreal.

During the two weeks which followed in Atlantic City he thought a good deal on this, but the nearness of violins and cocktails, the flash of women and the glamour of moonlight on the sea made it easy for him to decide arbitrarily that it was rather an abstract problem.

In Buffalo, where he opened with his act, he began committing the unforgivable sin in the theatrical world—he began missing performances. He had lost all vital interest in his work.

By the time he was playing in Chicago, reports of his derelictions had reached David Lee, who, after long pondering, wrote a severe note.

"What Jack Robin needs," Lee said to Harry Anthony, his partner, "is a wife." In his note he said:

If I can't depend on a performer being steadily on the job, no matter if he has the genius of Booth and the popularity of George Cohan, I will not have him in my employ. I don't know what's ailing you, but whatever it is, you must steady down. There isn't a producer or booking-office in New York that will gamble on you if you're not completely dependable, and we're no exception.

Jack smiled crookedly when he read this. It came at a most unfortunate time, for having arrived in Chicago that morning, Jack had discovered that the sixth number on the bill with him at the Majestic was "The World-Famous Dancer of Joyous Dances."

And this discovery was sending him sauntering, blithely bitter, to Righeimer's bar.

IT WAS two in the afternoon. His act went on at three. The act of the girl whose unseen nearness possessed the power to slash him into bewilderment would begin at four. If he left the theatre promptly after his act, most likely he could avoid seeing her. And, with a comforting cargo of Righeimer's product on board, he felt he would be able to give an account of himself on the stage.

To make doubly sure that the sense of Amy's nearness would not cause his heart to sink before the footlights, he took three or four extra drinks. They more than achieved their purpose. The world became an insignificant turmoil underneath his feet, and he strolled, his smile growing steadily more crooked, down Clark Street toward Madison, where at the Morrison bar they could mix the finest Tom Collins in the world. The words of David Lee's letter came into his mind. "'Completely dependable'— that's me! I'll drink all the Tom Collinses Jerry can mix—to the great god Dependability."

He halted in the crush of traffic on the corner, and, not two feet away from him, jammed by a fat woman on one side and grabbed at on the other by two sticky children, he saw Amy Prentiss. As his eyes glimpsed her proud little head, brown-toqued, quaintly half veiled, his lips compressed into a straight line and he turned sharply away. But the crowd began to move; Amy had seen him, and she was already edging her way toward him. Her face smiled a friendly greeting, and in voluntarily Jack looked behind him to see if it were not some one else she was addressing.

"Why, Mr. Robin!" she was saying. "I was just going to the house early to see your turn."

Jack was dumb. They crossed Madison Street together in the surge of the released crowd.

"How did you happen to recognize me?" he blurted.

"You recognized me, didn't you?"

"Oh, I recognized you, all right." Jack paused. He longed for an hour in solitude, so that he could think. "This gets me," he confessed. "Your knowing me so quickly, and your actually going early to see my act."

"You're funny. Hasn't anybody let you in on the secret that you're one of the few real rag-singers in America? As for remembering you, how could I ever forget your genuine little compliment on my act out on the Coast?"

They had turned the corner at Monroe Street and were at the entrance to the Majestic. Jack looked hurriedly at his watch.

"Listen," he said; "I have to speed like the deuce to make it. I want to see you—talk to you some more. Meet me after your turn."

His mind raced in zigzags as he hastened to his dressing-room. He searched his memory for the exact wording of Amy's remark that Saturday in San Francisco, for her expression. He tried to see and hear again the outward things and to give a new, inner meaning to them. But all he could recall was the bitterness in him, the significant and fateful words of Henrietta, and Amy's vagueness, which turned the knife in his wounded vanity. And now she had voluntarily talked to him; she was deliberately coming to see him perform; she had been pleasant, approachable, inviting. His mind could find no place for such a manifestation from this girl.

His performance that matinée was discouragingly poor. Amy made no comment on it when they met.

"Let's have dinner somewhere," Jack suggested. "That is"—a flicker of his old wretchedness returning—"that is, if you haven't made any other arrangements, and—and if——"

“I should be glad to.”

They dined at the Cafe Lafayette, which has a sedate lower floor and an upper floor with an orchestra for dancing. It had been in Jack's mind to avoid the beat of syncopated music, but by the time they reached the restaurant, the sweet poise of the girl had filled him with unreasoning dismay at himself. The old familiar bewildered sinking of the heart followed. And so he led her up-stairs. A violin was weaving a slim pattern of simple melody, which was being tortured into savage bedlam by the bullet like spitting of the drum and by the saxophone's gusts of passionate whining.

He felt instinctively that liquor was not on the cards. But he was tense, strung up, dreadfully nervous.

"Let's dance," he said.

The music was sending forth a one-step, and Jack gave himself to it hungrily. He seemed, somehow, to make of the simple steps a wild, heart-breaking aria, a mad pounding on the doors of heaven.

Back at the table they sat a while in silence. Amy studied his face. She said,

"You dance differently from any one I know."

Jack flushed.

"I don't suppose I dance very well. I—I wish I could dance standing straight and moving sort of—well, evenly and correctly, if you know what I mean. Like that fellow, for instance." He indicated a tall, stolid- looking youth who was soberly and skilfully maneuvering a sleek young creature about the polished floor.

"That's funny," Amy remarked. "I'm crazy about the way you dance. I never quite liked any one's dancing so well. You danced to-night the way you used to sing—the way you sang when I first heard you in New York."

"You like my dancing?" Jack leaned to her, unbelieving. His voice came huskily. "You don't dance that way—even on the stage. You dance more like that fellow. I don't mean stiff as him—not that. But you're his kind, if you know what I mean. I'm—I'm crazy about that quality in you. I'd give anything if I could have it—that careless, happy—Guess I'm talking like a fool," he ended lamely.

But Amy, her eyes aglow, was leaning to him.

"You're the funniest person! I've been crazy about the very thing in you that you're deprecating. I wish I had it". I'd give anything to have it. It—it hurt me a lot to find your performance, to-day lacking in it."

THEY dined and danced together every day that week. There was no making of appointments after that evening; tacitly they met after Amy's turn and went out together. Jack went about in an unreal world. He tried to think, but his mind persisted in substituting the turn of Amy's wrist, the curve of her cheek, the gay animation of her eyes, the little liquid turns in her voice.

Each day he grew more afraid of her while she was with him and more desolate while she was not. His only interludes were when they danced. The blare of the orchestra had somehow for him become Music—a glorious substitute for tears, a gleaming speedway for a breathless race hand in hand with grief. Sunday evening—the last of the week they would have together—he found himself holding Amy crushingly close, and he relaxed sharply, dancing badly after that.

Back at the table, sitting side by side on an upholstered bench against the wall, Amy chattered happily until she became aware that Jack was not listening. His food untouched, he was staring with undisguised misery before him. Amy placed her hand lightly over his on the seat.

"What is it?" she asked.

He withdrew his hand, afraid. For a moment he was silent, and Amy repeated her question.

"I—I suppose you think I'm out of my head, but—I—I'm crazy about you."

"I'm crazy about you, too," said Amy promptly.

Jack looked at her then, a puzzled, imploring look.

"You don't know what I mean."

"What do you mean?"—with a flicker of a smile.

He breathed deeply.

"I mean that I love you—that I want to marry you."

"That," said Amy, "is what I thought you meant."

LATE that night, in his room at the hotel, Jack scribbled a note to David Lee and one to his mother. To Lee he wrote:

You needn't worry any longer about my dependability. I'm engaged to be married. . . . She's the kind of a girl who could no more understand my not being on the job than she could understand quitting of any kind. I'm going to work my head off. If it's in me at all, I'll be on Broadway in a year.

To his mother he wrote briefly that he was to be married, mentioning the girl's name, Amy Prentiss.

His letters brought two prompt results. David Lee offered him a part in the coming "Frivolities" and instructed him to leave for New York at once for rehearsals. And old Cantor Rabinowitz, not so strong as he used to be, had a nervous collapse.

"A Shiksa!" he repeated over and over as he lay in his bed. "A Shiksa! Our Jakie should marry a Shiksa! God in heaven, why do you let me live to suffer like this?"

His white-haired wife, broken-hearted, tried to console him.

"What could you tell it from a name, Yosele? A name, it ain't nothing. Look—our Jakie he goes by the name Jack Robin. Amy Prentiss—it could be she's a Yiddishe girl. Look—Jenny Levy from Ludlow Street is her name on the stage Genevieve Leeds. Wait we should hear from Jakie some more."

"It's a Shiksa," her husband insisted. "If it was a Yiddishe girl, he would have written it in the letter. I feel it—I know it—it's a Shiksa. Gott im Himmel, help me to live out my last years!"

The next Tuesday evening Jack came unexpectedly. As he stepped into the spotless little flat, his father, who was sitting before the kitchen table in his shirt-sleeves, a skull cap on his white head, reading loudly to himself from the Mishna, looked up mildly over his glasses and spoke the question he must have rehearsed scores of times to himself.

"To a Shiksa you're engaged, ain't it?"

Jack hesitated. The calmness of his father he sensed at once as being anything but indifference. He suddenly was swept with shame for not having thought more about what his engagement would mean to them.

The old man had turned back to the Mishna. Apparently, Jack's hesitation had replied adequately. And now his mother came into the kitchen from the narrow, dark corridor of the tenement. Jack kissed her wrinkled cheek. It was the first time in years that he had kissed her, and it thrilled the old woman. But in a moment she had observed the portentous absorption of her husband in his book of the Talmud.

"Yosele, don't you see our Jakie is here?"

The cantor continued with the low-murmured singsong as if he had not heard her. She turned to Jack, who gave her a queer smile and an almost imperceptible shrug of the shoulders.

"Then it's a Shiksa?" she whispered. Briskly she moved to the kitchen stove. "You'll stay for supper. Jakie?" she asked over her shoulder. "Sit down. I'll have it quick ready. The soup is already on the stove—Borsht, red-beets soup, Jakie—and tonight we got it cucumbers in sour cream, and cheese Blintzes, too."

The old cantor joined them at the table, but beyond the various ritual prayers he and Jack mumbled together, he did not utter a word. The old woman, pathetically striving to eke out some harmony from the situation, made not the slightest attempt to get Jack to talk of his fiancée.

"You are coming to the synagogue next Sabbath?"

"I'm sorry, ma. I'm going to be terribly busy. You see, this is my one big chance. Lee has been fine, and it's up to me to repay him. He's one of these men who doesn't do things half-way. Either he backs you to the limit or he drops you. He's watching me closely, and I have to prove I can be relied upon. He's not giving me a star part, but I'm a principal, and if I make a hit, I'll rise fast with David Lee. This is the first time, ma, that my future has meant anything to me, and I'm going to give all I have to rehearsals."

When the meal was cleared off the table, the old cantor moved with his tome to the smaller kitchen table, where he went on with his low-toned recitative of the Talmud. Jack and his mother sat in silence at the larger table. Then Jack placed his hand tenderly over hers.

"Ma. it's a funny thing, but I'm just beginning to appreciate what you and pa mean to me. I never realized it until suddenly last week. I——"

"Do you hear what our Jakie is saying, Yosele? He's saying that now he's grown up and he knows how good it is a papa and a mamma. He's saying——"

It was as if the old man had not heard.

They talked on softly, rapidly at first, exchanging ideas and comments, and then peaceful silences crept between them. After a rather long pause in the talk, his mother said, with a casual air:

"You know, Jakie, I was just thinking the other day—I was thinking that if a Yiddishe girl marries a Goyisher boy, then it's bad, because you know how it is in a house—everything is like the father wants. But if a Yiddisher boy marries a Goyishe girl, then it ain't so terrible. She could be learned to buy Kosher meat and to have two kinds of dishes, for Fleischige and for Milchige—and the children could be brought up like Yiddishe children; they could be sent to a Chaidar—I was just thinking like this only yesterday, Jakie. Ain't it funny I should think of it?"

Jack's hand tightened over hers.

"You're sweet, ma," he said slowly. "I'm afraid it can't be. I was brought up that way, ma, and I've been unhappy all my life. And Amy was brought up the other way, and she's been happy from the day she was a baby. I'll want my children to be happy like Amy is."

The sharp sound of a book snapping shut twisted their attention to the cantor. He had risen, and, eyes, blazing, was pointing a shaking finger at Jack.

"Go out!" he cried. "Go out from my house—bum! Go!" A fit of coughing seized him, and he sank to his chair. They hastened to his side. The old man was unable to speak, but his eyes glared so that Jack stepped back. His mother turned, tragic-eyed, to him and said,

"Maybe you better go, Jakie."

There are few tasks more absorbing and exacting than that of rehearsing for the "Frivolities," and the days which followed for Jack were so full that he found time only to telephone his mother. As there was no connection directly to the flat on Hester Street, Jack had to call the drug store on the corner. He succeeded in getting her but twice in the five times he called. His father was well, she told him cheerfully, but naturally getting old and feeble. She doubted whether he would be able to continue as cantor for very many more years, but thanked God that he would be able to lead in the services for the coming holy day, Yom Kippur—the Day of Atonement. "Maybe you will come to the synagogue then, and fast the whole day?" she asked wistfully.

"Ma, I don't see how I can possibly come. It's the fifteenth, and our show opens on Broadway the same evening. I—I'd give anything, ma, to be able to come. I'd do it for my own sake as well as for papa's and yours. It's beginning to mean something to me—Yom Kippur. You see how it is, don't you, ma?"

"Yes," his mother sighed; "I see."

The second time, she brought up the subject again.

"Your papa he's ain't feeling so good, Jakie. Maybe this will be his last Yom Kippur. He talks about you. He is all the time talking about you. He says God has punished him enough for his sins that he should be the last Rabinowitz in ten generations to sing Chazonoth in a Shool. He don't say you should come on Yom Kippur—he didn't talk about that. But I think in his heart he means it, Jakie."

"I'll tell you what I'll do, ma," he replied, after some thought. "We open Monday night, and there probably will be a lot of changes made in the special rehearsal on Tuesday. But I'll try to dodge that Tuesday rehearsal and come to the synagogue for the morning and most of the afternoon."

"You're a good boy, Jakie."

AMY, who had swung West on the vaudeville circuit, was in Denver at this time. Jack wrote her every day—love-letters, almost childish in their outpouring of longing, full of high resolve, glowing with the miracle of the new insight he felt he was getting into life.

I realize that with me it isn't a question of ability, but of character. I've seen enough of this show to believe that I can put my songs over so big that Lee will have to star me. But I must be unswervingly steady. I have to be as good at the end of the season as on the opening night. I have to be on hand all of the time. My health must be guarded as well as my impulses. I don't even want to miss a performance with illness as an excuse. I can see that some of them are a bit leery of me—they're not dead-sure they can depend on me. Lee is the only one who's different. He's like a rock. I'd rather break a leg than fail him. But your wonderful confidence and my own resolution make me smile at them. I know I'll come through.

Swiftly the last month of rehearsal went by, and then the great day came. At two Monday afternoon, David Lee, who had attended the dress-rehearsal, called a halt.

"That's all," he said. "Take it easy until to-night. Robin, I want to see you."

He took Jack aside in a corner of the shadowy theatre.

"You're a winner if you can come through. Not exactly a world-beater—Frank Binney and Hal Bolton and Eddie Loren and Helen Kennedy still have something you haven't got. I don't know what it is, but you have the capacity to get it. I've seen it show suddenly in talented performers, sometimes overnight. But you'll make the electric lights, and I'm behind you. Now beat it, and be sure to take it easy."

AT THREE in the afternoon, Jack, in his suite at the family hotel on Seventy-ninth Street, was busily writing a letter to Amy, who was in Salt Lake City. He had taken a hot bath, intending to sleep off some of his nervousness after this note to his sweet heart. He finished the letter and had just sunk beneath the covers of his bed when the telephone-bell rang. It was old Chiam Yudelson, friend and neighbor of his parents, to tell him that his father had just died.

When Jack's taxi-cab drew up before his home in Hester Street, a harassed police man was swinging his club in the effort to disperse the crowd in front of the tenement where the beloved cantor lay dead. Jack elbowed his way through. He was recognized, and a pathway was instantly made for him.

In the tiny flat were his mother, the Shamas of the synagogue, old Chiam Yudelson and his wife, and Lawyer Feldman, the friend of all Hester Street. Greater perhaps than her grief at the loss of the man who had loved her and his God with equal fervor for sixty years was Mrs. Rabinowitz's panic at the thought that it was Yom Kippur eve and that the lyric voice of a Rabinowitz would not be raised in supplication to wipe out the sins of the Chosen People before their Creator. When Jack crowded his way through the friends and neighbors who packed the dark, narrow corridor, she was clinging to the hand of Lawyer Feldman.

"Look, Mr. Feldman," she was saying; "it's only two hours to Yom Kippur. It's got to be a good Chaaon to sing. The last words my Yosele he said to me, he said, 'Rivka, get our Jakie.' So low he says it, Mr. Feldman, I couldn't hardly hear him. His face was white like a Yahrzeit candle, and he says to me: 'Rivka, God will forgive our Jakie if he will sing "Kol Nidre" for me to-night. Maybe my dying,' he says, 'will make a Chazon from our Jakie. Tell him, Rivka,' he says. Look, Mr. Feldman; Jakie is maybe coming here. Maybe you could talk to him. In his heart he's a good boy. Tell him—tell him—his father is dead—tell him—oh, Mr. Feldman, my heart is breaking in pieces—I—I can't talk no more——"

"Here's Jakie!" Chiam Yudelson broke in.

The next moment his mother was in his arms. Lawyer Feldman drew her gently away, and she turned into the other room—the bedroom where her dead husband lay. Silence followed. Nervously Jack went after her, fearing that silence.

It was an immaculately clean room—so clean that every rip in the wall-paper, every stain on the plastered ceiling stared at them, hollow-eyed, terrible in nakedness. The bed, a thing of iron tubing, whose green paint had long since scaled off, stood head against an ancient oak bookcase, crammed with old-fashioned mahogany-colored books of the Talmud, the Chumesh, the various prayer-books, and a mass of huge music portfolios filled with note-scribbled sheets. On the bed lay his father's body. It had been covered completely with a white sheet, but his mother, flung across it, had drawn the sheet off so that the waxlike face and one thin old shoulder were revealed. Jack looked long at his father's face. It was beautiful in death. Every line in it spoke of a brave, poetic fight, of deep, fierce religious faith. His mother's body shuddered, and Jack reached over to take her hand.

She rose from the bed then, and son and mother stood alone.

"I—I came as soon as I—heard," Jack said.

His mother's hand rested lightly against his coat.

"He—he died this morning. It was a quarter to twelve. Yesterday he got sick. He talked about you—all the time about you, Jakie. At a quarter to twelve he died—a quarter to twelve. He just closed his eyes—like a baby, Jakie—and he said—he said: 'Rivka,' he said, 'God will forgive our Jakie if he will sing "Kol Nidre" for me to-night. Maybe,' he said, 'maybe—maybe—' Oh, Jakie, I—Jakie, mein Kind, your father is dead—I can't stand it——"

She was again in his arms. Lawyer Feldman appeared in the doorway.

"Better take her out of that room," he suggested. "It isn't doing her any good. Has she spoken to you about——"

Jack nodded. He gently led his mother toward the kitchen. As they passed him, the lawyer asked in a low tone,

"Are you going to do it?"

Jack placed his mother in a chair, where she sat blankly, looking first at the friends gathered in the kitchen, then out of the window where the crowds were still pushing and surging noisily, and then, in a most pathetic and forlorn way, down at her hands folded so helplessly in her lap.

The Shamas, who was there, mainly for the purpose of finding out whether Jack would serve as cantor that evening and the next day or whether he would have to step into the breach himself, was becoming nervous and impatient. He approached Jack, who looked unseeingly at him.

It was four-thirty. If he appeared in the show that evening, singing ragtime songs while his father lay dead—while the Hester Street Synagogue went cantorless for the first Day of Atonement in forty years—while his mother struggled under an unbearable double grief——

He turned to the Shamas.

"My father's Talis, it is at the synagogue?"

"Yes; everything is in the Shool, Mr. Rabinowitz," the Shamas replied eagerly.

"The tunes—the Genigen—of the choir—are they the same my father used ten, fifteen years ago?"

"The same Genigen, exactly."

"All right. I'll be there at six o'clock."

As Jack took his mother in his arms to sit out the next hour with her and to comfort her, the tears for the first time since her husband died flowed from her eyes, and she said over and over to him:

"In your heart you're a good boy. I always told him that in your heart you're a good boy."

NEWS travels like lightning in the East Side. "Jack Robin—the vaudeville headliner—is singing as cantor at the Hester Street Synagogue this Yom Kippur!" It might have been a newspaper scare headline, for by six-thirty that evening the slowly arriving members of the Hester Street Synagogue congregation had almost to fight their way through the mob that packed the street up to the corners of both Norfolk and Essex Streets. Wealthy East Siders, who had paid their ten and twelve dollars for pews in the much larger Beth Medresh Hagadol, neglected that comparatively splendid house of prayer to stand in the crammed lobby of the Hester Street synagogue and listen to the golden notes of this young singer of ragtime as he rendered "Kol Nidre" with a high, broken sobbing which, they insisted critically, surpassed his father's in his best days.

Every twist and turn of his father's had been branded unforgetably in Jack's memory from childhood days, but he sang the grief-laden notes with a lyric passion that was distinctly his own. The low-hanging rafters of the old synagogue, the cheap, shiny chandeliers of painted gold, the faded velvet hangings on the holy vault where the parchments of the Old Testament stood, the gold-fringed, worn white-silk cloth that covered the stand in the pulpit where he prayed—these called to something surging and powerful in him, something which made his whole life since his boyhood seem blurred and unreal.

When, with the congregation standing and swaying in humility before their Creator, he uttered that refrain which asks forgiveness for every sin of mankind from evil thoughts to murder, rising from a low sing song into a quivering, majestic wail and then breaking into incoherent plaintiveness, the sobs choked his throat.

His mother sat in the small gallery at the back reserved for women, and he saw her when, after marching slowly forward with the choir, he had flung open the hangings before the holy vault and turned to face the congregation as he led in the appeal that the "prayers of this evening shall come before the Divine Presence in the morning and by nightfall bring redemption for all sins."

When he finished the high melodious strains of this triumphant yet humble and supplicating piece, there was a low murmur of approbation throughout the synagogue.

The rabbi, a rotund little man in the front pews, turned to his neighbor and remarked:

"Even Rosenblatt, when I heard him in Moscow, didn't give a 'Yaaleh' like this. Aza Singen nehmt by die Harz!”

When the time came for Kadish, the prayer uttered only by those in mourning their dead, the whole congregation rose in silence in honor of the cantor who was dead and his son and wife. The other mourners subdued their customary loud recital, and the voices of Jack and his mother, the one flowing and resonant, the other high and broken with sobs, were heard clearly.

Crowds followed the couple as they slowly walked the half-block to the tenement-house that evening. As they paused on the stoop, Jack turned to the gathering people and in a low voice asked them to be good enough to leave his mother and himself alone with their grief. Instantly a cry was raised:

"Beat it!"

"Go home, bums, loafers! Ain't you got no respect for the Chazon?"

"G'wan! Can't you leave some peace be even on Yom Kippur—Paskudniks!"

The crowd dispersed.

Jack sat up until midnight that night with his mother, and then, completely weary, he fell asleep, to dream fitfully of Amy and of David Lee, of David Lee and of Amy, until morning.

DAVID LEE slept fitfully also that night. Jack's failure at the last moment to appear on the opening night had ruined three numbers and had made two others awkward, and Lee had a difficult job ahead of him in the next twenty-four hours. He wasted no time thinking about the delinquent. "He's going to do the worrying, not me," he said grimly to Harry Anthony. He stayed up until four in the morning, telephoning and telegraphing in the effort to get a substitute so much better than Jack that the reviews of Tuesday, probably derogatory, would be reversed on Wednesday morning.

His efforts did not meet with success, and he left word with his man to wake him early Tuesday. When his man called him, he asked for the morning papers.

He was about to turn to the theatrical page, when his eye was caught by a headline on the front sheet. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he read, and, as he read, a low whistle escaped him. He dropped the first paper and took another. He swore softly.

"That damn kid!" he murmured gleefully. "That damn kid! Stevens, tell Herman to have the car out in a half-hour."

He had to slip a crisp green bank-note into the hand of the policeman before room was made for him to stand in the crush in the narrow lobby of the Hester Street synagogue. Jack Robin, swathed in the folds of a great black-striped linen Talis, an elaborate and stiff black-plush skull-cap on his head, his thin, handsome face deadly white, his dark eyes afire, was singing that splendid aria of his father's—"Hamelech," "The King"—and as the majesty of it rolled forth, broke, and narrowed into rivulets of humility, David Lee pinched himself to see if he were asleep.

Then, after a few moments of quick rattling recitative, Jack went on into a clear, low-toned series of sound which had the effect of musical talking, of superbly self-contained remonstrance. This speech gradually rose to a fluttering uncertainty, a bewildered pleading, and then the climax came—a flood of confession.

Excitedly Lee elbowed his way out of the crowd.

"Where's the nearest telephone?'' he asked the policeman.

"Right on the corner—the drug store, sir."

In five minutes Harry Anthony was on the wire.

"Harry," said Lee, "do you want to hear the greatest ragtime singer in America in the making? A wonder, Harry, a wonder! Got Hal Bolton mopped off the boards. Come down right away. It's a dirty little hole down on the East Side called the Hester Street Synagogue. I'll meet you on the corner of Hester and Norfolk."

Copyrighted in 1921 by Samson Raphaelson. First published in Everybody’s Magazine, January 1922. Transcribed from Everybody’s Magazine on May 16th, 2017, by Tom Samuels.