n. This was a free republic; the author of 'Hamlet' was no
better than anybody else. Goldwater, on the stage, glared at the
little poet.

At last a compromise was found. A chair was placed at the back of a
packed box. American boxes are constructed for publicity, not privacy,
but the other dozen occupants bulked between him and the house. He
could see, but he could not be seen. Sullen and mortified he listened
contemptuously to the play.

It was, indeed, a strange farrago, this romantic drama with which the
vast audience had replaced the Sabbath pieties, the home-keeping
ritual of the Ghetto, in their swift transformation to American life.
Confined entirely to Jewish characters, it had borrowed much from the
heroes and heroines of the Western world, remaining psychologically
true only in its minor characters, which were conceived and rendered
with wonderful realism by the gifted actors. And this naturalism was
shot through with streaks of pure fantasy, so that kangaroos suddenly
bounded on in a masque for the edification of a Russian tyrant. But
comedy and fantasy alike were subordinated to horror and tragedy:
these refugees from the brutality of Russia and Rumania, these
inheritors of the wailing melodies of a persecuted synagogue, craved
morbidly for gruesomeness and gore. The 'happy endings' of Broadway
would have spelled bankruptcy here. Players and audience made a large
family party--the unfailing result of a stable stock company with the
parts always cast in the same mould. And it was almost an impromptu
performance. Pinchas, from his proximity to the stage, could hear
every word from the prompter's box, which rose in the centre of the
footlights. The Yiddish prompter did not wait till the players 'dried
up'; it was his role to read the whole play ahead of them. 'Then you
are the woman who murdered my mother,' he would gabble. And the actor,
hearing, invented immediately the fit attitude and emphasis, spinning
out with elocutionary slowness and passion the raw material supplied
to him. No mechanical crossing and recrossing the stage, no
punctilious tuition by your stage-manager--all was inspiration and
fire. But to Pinchas this hearing of the play twice over--once raw and
once cooked--was maddening.

'The lazy-bones!' he murmured. 'Not thus shall they treat my lines.
Every syllable must be engraved upon their hearts, or I forbid the
curtain to go up. Not that it matters with this fool-dramatist's
words; they a