Omaha Daily Bee Newspaper, September 14, 1902, Page 27

THE PEDDLERS ARE EW YORKERS have been amazed recently by figures that show, as the result of < 1l ealenlation, that on Manhattan island—the old city of New York—every fourth person is a Jew They find it hard to believe, because, in spite of all that they imagine they know about their metropolis, probably not 1 per cent knows anything about the great city of the Jew that has been builded within New York. They hear much talk of the *“Ghetto,’ but comparatively few outsiders ever it. If New Yorkers did visit it they would believe the figures. For in that wonderful section one may pass through forty miles of streets and see none but Jewish faces, with the exceptions of policemen, street sweepers and other city tmployes. The section could not have been located better geographically to insure scculsion. Of all New York territory it is the one that does not contain at least one great thoroughfare vital to the life of the city. The thoroughfares that traverse it—East Broadway, Grand street and Houston street serve only a relatively small proportion of outside workers and remain noticeably local in their nature. So, as the famous Ghetto of old Frank- furt once was walled in with structures of masonry, loop-holed and guarded with towers, the Ghetto of modern New York is walled in with natural conditions that make it a land so unknown to the mass of the rest of the population that it might as well be in Siberia Possibly more New Yorkers would know it if it were. Its limits are defined almost as sharply as if, indeed, they were marked by walls. The visitor steps out of the German quar- ter or the Hungarian quarter or the Ital- ian quarter at once into the City of the Jew. This is a city truly, and no ‘‘mere quarter.”’ The tall flats of the tenement houses, from end to end of vistas, are gaudy with pinks and blues and yellows from top to bottom, as if they were Oriental houses with gorgeous rugs flung from each open- ing. The spattering of hues is from the rugs of the East Side -the bedding that is hung out from every window to sun throughout the day The atavism of the population has over- whelmed the hideous tenement house de- signs. From the coloring of the fronts to the crowds on the streets, everywhere i3 ’;L‘ touch of the Orient In the ceasless flowing to and fro of a people there come and go true figures of the magical east Here, presiding over a stand with melons and pears, black bearded, hawknosed, hawkeyed, straight and lithe, surely is a son of Ishmael-—such a one as might be pictured in a flowing burnouse, riding a white racing camel and waving flashing weapons in a charge over Arabia's vellow sand By the side of him, chaffering with would-be buyers of the cheap cottons and mus ins on his handcart, stands a veritable Egyptian sculpture come to earth stalking out of twilight tombs on the Nile to stand on Essex streel and oparter stuffs made in Connecti cut. There are the wide (highs, the sinewy shoulders, with the muscles laid on them as they are laid on in those carved figures A Russian general could not look more nposing than es yonder Jew with his close trimmed beard and his keen, strong determined face. That he should be pushing a cart with suspenders and hose on it seems as ridiculous as the topsy-turvy things seen in dreams Bent old men with white ringlets and tic beard noble modelg pictures of Cadis and Talmudists, sit behind greasy show windows waiting for customers to buy ma their unleavened breads or groceries or ko- sher meats. Tall, thin German Jews, modern in every respect, with the deep, angry eyes of men ho talk o' nights of social tyran nies, press through the crowds, bearing unfin- shel trousers and vests to the sweatshoj Bihind a tumblid, junk-like mass of shoe gtrings, tin spoons at the price of two for STANDING. CONSTANT PASSING OF MILES AND MILES OF SHOPS AND STRE ETS PACKED WITH MERCHANTS 1 cent, and 2-cent whiskbrooms, there looks a single exception ther a man who bears on his brown neck a per- Nubfan head Swaying from the hips, a girl p.cture of a biblical is no house Ghetto and never see man or child take so much as an apple or a plum from the placed so temptingly within reach merchants are far removed from level of their colleagues of the outer city They have their regular trade tomers sit on boxes and baskets and shop at their stands and push carts as if they They have goods for ¢ measurement there are thirty- walking steadily of four miles an hour could than eight commercial continuous And on his other hand there will headdresses, coutinuous merchants. middle-age by them wherever they dare were under roof. But what the women lack, the for not one of them has his called that. Grand street and, looking north and south along any of the peddler of stands they have not only fruits and vege but hardware, shoes, boits “‘delicatessen” even tailor made gowns head undecked. wear something tables and fish, as builders could pack flanked and surrounded surprising crowds vibrate I no indiffer nings provol immigrants ¢ gs provoke Lithuania and Tartar Russia a4 woman's garment Little and great & stretehing communal And that, again, is manifestation throughout the territory individual interest from the Bowery D L curb lines are tenements, Sidewalks exist only as places of fashionable merchandise ate r yuse line to house criminately from house 1 ) ho conceivably Side to have their dresses fitted by an un- of housekeeping desire ever to barter on frankly of clothes is done in some of the as the Ghetto Here and there someone is « 3 But for such a siege the new Ghetto is pro wondering with their friends on the stree it were shut in suddenly from all the world Everything from a string Children in hordes death every shouting festoons across a thoroughfare ju Ghetto this year long thundering along hetto this year | jedestrian nences and cackle and delivery g oy blacksmithing the bar rooms and insignificant and see al around him, and yet no remarkable decapitated heads of fowls grotesquely with the feath miles of them vendors dis play such utter confider Prominent Nask-shaped unleavened shop windows 2 o'clock every afternoon comes is the amazing The goods TRIBES out their news In the harsh jangle of uglish, Hebrew, German and a dozen othier dialcets that is known as Yiddish the papers that they carry all have fat in Hebraic characters, us 8 rees of the patrlarchs T'hey tell each day of the thousand loves and griefs and intrigues and joys of the great City of the Jew that the Jew has won. Passively, peacefully, never assuming the ottensive, he has filled it to its furthest confines as the waters from a mountain fill a valley and turn it into a lake. Swolling slowly, irresisiably, ever quietly, castward, his tribes nave Iinun- lated and obliterated the famous river colonies of the sturdy Irish, who held to those fastpesses aloug the river froots from Catherine street to Houston street until ten ycars ago, with all the grim fervor with which they love to confront the Saxon across the sea. Those brave, ever belilgerent, desperately hostile borderers maintained themselves for a long while, always ready to railse the standard of war on sign of intrusion. The Jew camped around that plucky last stand in his armies. His multitudes lay front to front with that border ground. But within the Irish fastness none of him ven- tured save on cowpulsion. What Hebrews were scen there rarely were seen moving 1t a lesser pace than a run. Thelr ex- perience in the Irish quarters was a mod- eru repetition of the Frankturt days, when the Jew who ventured out of his Ghetto vas marked for baiting and hunting. loday the river fronts belong to him. ‘Ihe Irish have vanished before him and from river o Bowery, from river o Chatham square, the land belongs to the tribes. They have made anoither conquest like those of the days of the old testa- ment, but without torce of arms. By overwhelming numbers, by patience, by humble tenacity, they have acquired the land and it is theirs, So surely s It theirs that the nomad aliens of New York no longer veniure on forays within it, as unce was their delight when the Ghetto Wuas in being. It would be a daring band that ventured now. Before it had pene- trated many blocks into the City of the Jew it would be swallowed in the sea of life that roars and swells forever in those sirange sireets—swallowed and lost as were certain Egyptiaus once in another sta that could not ewgull a wmultitude any more surely. bLlack headlines iothey Pointed Paragraphs Chicago News: The ancient classics never get oo old o learn The charity that begins at howme covers the most sins A husband iu hand is worth two that are Leyond coutrol IU's the coastwise steamer that manages to avoid the rocks It's easier to be a hero worshiper than it is to be a hero Some men are born with black eyes and sole acquire them. Nearly every family has the skeleton of an old clock in its closet. The wise weather prophet lays up an ex planation for a rainy day. Love may be blind, but it never fails to hear papa's footstep on the stair. Adam had his troubles, but he never had & spasm at the sight of a dressmaker's bill. Marriage isu't a lottery; when a man draws a blank in a lottery that's the end of it Golfin Rome New York Times: Aurelian bhad just de- tailed a slave to uphold the golden fetters of the beautiful Zenobla, when the menial rebelled. But," they expostuated with him, “you should be glad to have the opportunity of following the links." And thus, indeed, was golf first intro duced into ancient Rome