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Weimar_10mm:Weimar_10mm 12/03/2010 19:33 Page 1

KRUTIKOV
ESTRAIKH AND
Berlin emerged from the First World War as a multicultural LEGENDA is a joint imprint
European capital of immigration from the former Russian Em- of the Modern Humanities
pire, and while many Russian emigrés moved to France and Research Association and
other countries in the 1920s, a thriving east European Jewish Routledge. Titles range from
community remained. Yiddish-speaking intellectuals and ac- medieval texts to

YIDDISH
tivists participated vigorously in German cultural and political contemporary cinema and
debate. Multilingual Jewish journalists, writers, actors and form a widely comparative
artists, invigorated by the creative atmosphere of the city, view of the modern
formed an environment which facilitated exchange between humanities.
the main centres of Yiddish culture: eastern Europe, North

IN
America and Soviet Russia. All this came to an end with the

WEIMAR BERLIN
Nazi rise to power in 1933, but Berlin remained a vital pres- STUDIES IN YIDDISH 8
ence in Jewish cultural memory, as is testified by the works of
Sholem Asch, Israel Joshua Singer, Moyshe Kulbak, Uri Zvi
Grinberg and Meir Wiener.

This volume includes contributions by an international team of

Yiddish in
leading scholars dealing with various aspects of history, arts and
literature, which tell the dramatic story of Yiddish cultural life in
Weimar Berlin as a case study in modern European culture. Weimar Berlin
Gennady Estraikh is Associate Professor of Yiddish Studies,
New York University. Mikhail Krutikov is Assistant Professor At the Crossroads of Diaspora Politics
of Jewish-Slavic Relations at the University of Michigan.
and Culture
Edited by
Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov

cover illustration: Yiddish theatre in Berlin: A scene

from the Vilna Troupe’s performance. From the archive
of the Forward Association, New York. Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge
 Yiddish in Weimar Berlin
At the Crossroads of Diaspora Politics and Culture
 legenDA
leenda , founded in 1995 by the european Humanities Research Centre of
the University of Oxford, is now a joint imprint of the Modern Humanities
Research Association and Routledge. Titles range from medieval texts to
contemporary cinema and form a widely comparative view of the modern
humanities, including works on Arabic, Catalan, english, French, german, greek,
Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish literature. An editorial Board of
distinguished academic specialists works in collaboration with leading scholarly
bodies such as the Society for French Studies and the British Comparative literature
Association.

The Modern Humanities Research Association ( ) encourages and promotes

advanced study and research in the field of the modern humanities, especially
modern European languages and literature, including English, and also cinema.
It also aims to break down the barriers between scholars working in different
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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the
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Routledge is one of the world’s leading academic publishers in the Humanities
and Social Sciences. It publishes thousands of books and journals each year, serving
scholars, instructors, and professional communities worldwide.
www.routledge.com
 Editorial Board
Chairman
Professor Colin Davis, Royal Holloway, University of London

Professor Malcolm Cook, University of Exeter (French)

Professor Robin Fiddian, Wadham College, Oxford (Spanish)
Professor Paul Garner, University of Leeds (Spanish)
Professor Marian Hobson Jeanneret,
Queen Mary University of London (French)
Professor Catriona Kelly, New College, Oxford (Russian)
Professor Martin McLaughlin, Magdalen College, Oxford (Italian)
Professor Martin Maiden, Trinity College, Oxford (Linguistics)
Professor Peter Matthews, St John’s College, Cambridge (Linguistics)
Dr Stephen Parkinson, Linacre College, Oxford (Portuguese)
Professor Ritchie Robertson, St John’s College, Oxford (German)
Professor Lesley Sharpe, University of Exeter (German)
Professor David Shepherd, University of Sheffield (Russian)
Professor Michael Sheringham, All Soul’s College, Oxford (French)
Professor Alison Sinclair, Clare College, Cambridge (Spanish)
Professor David Treece, King’s College London (Portuguese)

Managing Editor
Dr Graham Nelson
41 Wellington Square, Oxford ox1 2jf, UK

[email protected]
www.legenda.mhra.org.uk
 Studies in Yiddish

Legenda Studies in Yiddish embrace all aspects of Yiddish culture

and literature. The series regularly publishes the proceedings of the
International Mendel Friedman Conferences on Yiddish Studies, which
are convened every two years by the European Humanities Research
Centre of the University of Oxford.

published in this series

1. Yiddish in the Contemporary World
2. The Shtetl: Image and Reality
3. Yiddish and the Left
ed. by Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov
4. The Jewish Pope: Myth, Diaspora and Yiddish Literature, by Joseph Sherman
5. The Yiddish Presence in European Literature: Inspiration and Interaction
ed. by Joseph Sherman and Ritchie Robertson
6. David Bergelson: From Modernism to Socialist Realism
ed. by Joseph Sherman and Gennady Estraikh
7. Yiddish in the Cold War, by Gennady Estraikh

[email protected]
www.legenda.mhra.org.uk
 Yiddish in Weimar Berlin
At the Crossroads of Diaspora Politics and Culture

edited by
Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov

Studies in Yiddish 8
Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge
2010
 First published 2010

Published by the
Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

LEGENDA is an imprint of the

Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© Modern Humanities Research Association and Taylor & Francis 2010

ISBN 978-1-906540-70-8 (hbk)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying,
recordings, fax or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the
publisher.

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
 Contents
❖

Acknowledgements ix
Preface x
List of Illustrations xiv
Note on Transliteration xvi
Introduction: Yiddish on the Spree 1
gennady estraikh
1 Deciphering the Hieroglyphics of the Metropolis: Literary Topographies of
Berlin in Hebrew and Yiddish Modernism 28
shachar pinsker
2 A Yiddish Poet Engages with German Society: A. N. Stencl’s Weimar Period 54
heather valencia
3 ‘Like fires in overgrown forests’: Moyshe Kulbak’s Contemporary Berlin Poetics 73
jordan finkin
4 Belarus in Berlin, Berlin in Belarus: Moyshe Kulbak’s Raysn and Meshiekh
ben-Efrayim between Nostalgia and Apocalypse 89
marc caplan
5 ‘The air outside is bloody’: Leyb Kvitko and his Pogrom Cycle 1919 105
sabine koller
6 A Warm Morning Gown and a Shawl from Berlin: Liebe Zaltsman’s
Yiddish Letters to Helene Koigen 123
verena dohrn
7 The Berlin Bureau of the New York Forverts 141
gennady estraikh
8 Max Weinreich in Weimar Germany 163
amy blau
9 Reports from the ‘Republic Lear’: David Eynhorn in Weimar Berlin 1920–24 179
anne-christin sass
10 Jewish Universalism, the Yiddish Encyclopedia, and the Nazi Rise to Power 195
barry trachtenberg
11 Yiddish, the Storyteller, and German-Jewish Modernism: A New Look
at Alfred Döblin in the 1920s 215
jonathan skolnik
12 Between Literature and History: Israel Joshua Singer’s Berlin Novel
The Family Carnovsky as a Cul-de-Sac of the German-Jewish ‘Symbiosis’ 224
elvira grözinger
13 Unkind Mirrors: Berlin in Three Yiddish Novels of the 1930s 239
mikhail krutikov
Index 263
 list of contributors
v

Amy Blau is Visiting Assistant Professor of German, Whitman College, Walla

Walla, Washington
Marc Caplan is the Zelda and Myer Tandetnik Assistant Professor of Yiddish Litera­
ture, Language, and Culture at the Johns Hopkins University
Verena Dohrn is a Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin and the Coordinator of the
Re­search Project ‘Charlottengrad und Scheunenviertel.Osteuropäisch-jüdische
Mi­g ranten im Berlin der 1920/30er Jahre’ at the Chair of Eastern and Central
European History, Osteuropa-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin
Gennady Estraikh is Associate Professor of Yiddish Studies, Skirball Department of
Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University
Jordan Finkin is the Cowley Lecturer in Post-Biblical Hebrew at the University of
Oxford
Elvira Grözinger is Lecturer in Yiddish at the Institut für Judaistik, Freie Universität
Berlin
Sabine Koller is a Dilthey-Fellow of the VolkswagenStiftung at the Institute of Slavic
Studies, University of Regensburg
Mikhail Krutikov is Assistant Professor of Slavic and Jewish Studies at the University
of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Shachar Pinsker is Assistant Professor of Hebrew Literature and Culture at the
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Anne-Christin Sass is a Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin at the Chair of Eastern and
Central European History, Osteuropa-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin
Jonathan Skolnik is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Massachusetts
Amherst
Barry Trachtenberg is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at the University at
Albany, State University of New York
Heather Valencia is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Languages,
Cultures and Religions, University of Stirling, Scotland
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
v

Warm thanks are due to Jack and Naomi Friedman for their generosity, and to
members of the Editorial Board of Legenda Press for their vision, in supporting
the series ‘Studies in Yiddish’, the only academic book series devoted to this field
of research.
Dr Verena Dohrn, who co-ordinates the Research Project ‘Charlottengrad und
Scheunenviertel. Osteuropäisch-jüdische Migranten im Berlin der 1920/30er Jahre’
at Freie Universität Berlin (Osteuropa-Institut, Chair Prof. Gertrud Pickhan),
helped form the team of this volume’s contributors. In fact, half of the authors also
parti­cipate in the aforementioned project.
In gathering illustrations for this volume, a number of people have been singularly
generous with assistance. Essential help in selecting photographs and obtaining per­
mission to use them came from Chana Pollack, Archivist at the Forward Assoc­iation
in New York, Boris Budiyanskiy, Art Director of Yiddish Forward Newspaper, and
Jesse Aaron Cohen, Photo and Film Archivist at the YIVO in New York. Henning
Dohrn (Hanover), Alexander Ivanov (St Petersburg), and Anne-Christin Sass
(Berlin) made photographs of memorable sites in Berlin.
Dr Graham Nelson, managing editor of Legenda Press, and Dr Alastair
Matthews, the copy editor, worked wonders, transforming the chapters written by
the international group of contributors into a uniform text.
 Preface
v

Long before the unification of Germany under Bismarck and Wilhelm I, Jews
created their own imagined Germanic realm, or Ashkenaz — a reinterpretation
of the rather obscure biblical toponym. This German Ashkenaz originated in the
medie­val Rhineland or, perhaps, other German-speaking territories, and later spread
eastwards. The article on Ashkenaz in the Encyclopaedia Judaica describes it as a
cultural complex comprised of ideas, views, ways of life, folk mores, legal concepts,
and social institutions. Although one can debate the viability and the meaning of this
term, it has certainly played a significant role as an ideological construct, especially
among the European Jewish intelligentsia of the early twentieth century, which
was predominantly of Ashkenazi origin. For some of them, the imagined medieval
community of Ashkenaz became the historical foundation on which they developed
their concept of Yiddishland, or a modern extraterritorial Yiddish-speaking nation.
For a brief period in the 1920s, Berlin was the major European metropolis of that
imagined Yiddishland. Dominated by intellectuals and artists who grew up in the
Pale of Jewish Settlement of the Russian Empire or in the Austrian provinces of
Galicia and Bukovina, the capital of the Weimar Republic became a meeting ground
for champions of different ideologies, artistic styles, and literary movements. Despite
many disagreements, all of them shared — some more, others less consciously — the
sense of belonging to the Ashkenazic civilization which for them was synonymous
with Jewishness, or its eastern European variety, Yiddishkayt, in the broadest sense
of the word.
These doctors of philosophy and eternal students, many of whom were educated at
German-speaking universities, emerged as trendsetters in all major Jewish ideological
currents of post-World War I Europe. Some of these currents, such as autonomism,
Territorialism, or Yiddishism, are largely defunct today, whereas others, like Zionism,
remain part of today’s discourse. The Yiddishists envisioned the transformation of
eastern European Jewry into a modern Yiddish-speaking nation which would either
eventually find a territory for establishing its own statehood, or remain an ‘extra­
territorial’ (some people called it ‘spiritual’) nation in Diaspora. Yiddishland was a
fluid concept. Its initial contours emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century
in the environment of civic and cultural organizations that took shape outside the
framework of traditional religious communities as a by-product of modernization.The
economic and social changes in eastern and central Europe, such as industrialization,
the spread of general education, mass migrations, and political mobilization, turned
millions of shtetl-dwellers into political activists, trade unionists, educationists, and,
above all, avid consumers and producers of ideas and culture production.
After the end of World War I and the ensuing collapse of the imperial order in that
part of Europe, accompanied by an unprecedented eruption of violence, hundreds
 Preface xi

of thousands of Yiddish speakers streamed into the urban centres in and beyond the
borders of the former Russian Empire. By that time, smaller or larger immigrant
communities of Yiddish-speaking Jews already existed all over the world. In the
United States and Argentina, France and Canada, Great Britain and South Africa,
Lithuania and Palestine,Yiddish-speaking Jews became involved in various Jewish and
non-Jewish modern activities, from cabaret theatre to the anarchist underground. At
that fluid historical moment, a critical mass of European Jewish intellectuals found
refuge in Weimar Germany, as if symbolically reclaiming their Ashkenazi roots in
a country where, as some of them would argue, Yiddish had already been spoken
hundreds of years ago. Of course, there were other, weightier practical reasons to
choose Berlin, and Germany in general, as a place of residence. The authorities of the
newly established Weimar Republic were relatively tolerant to immigrants from the
east, while diplomatic and trade relations with Soviet Russia and the other countries
across the eastern border facilitated contact with the ‘old home’.
Thanks to its specific political and cultural location, Berlin can be described as
a ‘third space’ between west and east, where adherents of different ideological and
cultural views could communicate and interact. Atheists and Hasidim, communists
and liberals, champions of assimilation and Zionism, autonomists and Territorialists,
Yiddishists and Hebraists would meet informally in cafes or come to clubs for a
lecture, performance, or debate conducted in Yiddish, German, Hebrew, or Russian.
A cultural map of Jewish Berlin, similar to the one of Vienna provided by Edward
Timms in his biography of Karl Kraus,1 with cafes as reference points, would show
a network of personal and institutional connections linking, directly or indirectly,
people as different as Walter Benjamin and Leyb Kvitko (through Meir Wiener), Aron
Singalowsky and Alfred Döblin, David Bergelson and Albert Einstein, Else Lasker-
Schüler and A. N. Stencl, Raphael Abramovitch and Karl Kautsky.
Many Russian immigrants believed that one day, following the collapse or demo­
cratization of the Bolshevik regime, they would be able to return to Moscow, Kiev,
or Minsk, where they had earlier built Yiddish cultural institutions along the model
of the Kiev Yiddish Kultur-Lige (Culture League). In Berlin, however, the local
Kultur-Lige failed to develop any significant mass activities. In general, the Berlin-
based Yiddishist intelligentsia had little contact with the large section of the Yiddish-
speaking immigrant population which had little taste for ideological debate and ‘high’
Yiddish culture. The difference in class and culture was matched by a difference in
place of origin: whereas the middle-class intellectual arrivals came mostly from the
largely Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine and Lithuania, the poorer working class
and petit-bourgeois immigrants hailed from predominantly Polish-speaking Galicia
and Congress Poland. As a result, Yiddish cultural life flourished predominantly in
relatively secluded enclaves in the fashionable western parts of the city, such as the
Romanisches Café on the Kurfürstendamm and the Sholem Aleichem Club on
Kleiststraße, while the shtetl Jews lived in the Scheunenviertel, a poor district to the
east of the historical centre of the city. Yiddish literati felt more at home among
German Jewish intellectuals or among Russian émigrés than among the Yiddish-
speaking common folk. In fact, some of them were more comfortable speaking
German or Russian than Yiddish.
xii Preface

Many Yiddish-speaking intellectuals in Berlin, even those without a German-

language education, had contacts in German-speaking circles. Yiddish socialists had
close links with German Social Democrats; a pro-Soviet position united communist
sympathizers from eastern Europe with like-minded Germans and German Jews. The
ORT (originally the Society for Promoting Artisanal and Agricultural Work among
the Jews in Russia), which after the Revolution moved its headquarters to Berlin
but operated mostly in eastern Europe, had a German-Jewish branch, which was
very efficient in fundraising. The Yiddish poet A. N. Stencl and the novelist Samuel
Lewin were better known in German translation than in the original Yiddish. Mutual
cultural influences through the press, books, art, cinema, and theatre complemented
personal contacts. To all appearances, the intensity of cultural interaction between
Yiddish immigrant intellectuals and their local counterparts in Berlin was stronger
than in other centres of the eastern European Jewish Diaspora.
Berlin housed the European or central headquarters of several Jewish relief
organizations in which Yiddish played an important role. The ORT was dominated
by Yiddishists, who were also active in the Jewish Territorialist movement, such as its
director Aron Singalowsky and the editor of its magazine Virtshaft un lebn (Economy
and Life, 1928–31), Ben-Adir (Abraham Rosin). In 1925, a group of intellectuals met
in Berlin to establish the Yiddish Scientific Institute (later the Institute for Jewish
Research),YIVO, which was to become the central institution of Yiddish culture and
scholarship outside the Soviet Union. Until 1933, some of its scholars and fundraisers
lived in Berlin. Yiddish journalists wrote from Berlin for newspapers published in
various countries, most notably in the United States and Poland. From Berlin, Jewish
public intellectuals and political activists participated in all the important debates
on politics, ideology, and culture during the 1920s and early 1930s. With the gradual
decline of Jewish Berlin in the late 1920s, the Jewish intellectual and cultural world
became increasingly fragmented along ideological and linguistic lines. In the absence
of common ground many artists and thinkers were forced to make hard ideological
choices and ally themselves with political camps, which often had an adverse effect
on their creativity.
The combined efforts of multilingual Jewish journalists, writers, actors, and artists,
who were invigorated by the creative atmosphere of Weimar Berlin, left an indelible
imprint on modern Jewish culture. Most of the chapters in the present volume deal
with poetry and prose written by authors who spent some time in the ‘Yiddish
Berlin’ of the 1920s, and later moved to other countries: Moyshe Kulbak, Leyb Kvitko,
Avrom Nokhem Stencl, Israel Joshua Singer, Sholem Asch, Uri Zvi Greenberg, David
Eynhorn, and Meir Wiener (Chapters 2 to 7, 9, 13, and 14). One figure who is relatively
little considered is David Bergelson, perhaps the most significant Yiddish author of
Weimar Berlin, mainly because his Berlin period has already been discussed in one
of the previous publications in Legenda’s ‘Studies in Yiddish’ series, David Bergelson:
From Modernism to Socialist Realism (2007), edited by Joseph Sherman and Gennady
Estraikh. Various aspects of the influence of Yiddish and German literature on each
other have been discussed in a number of books, including the volume The Yiddish
Presence in European Literature: Inspiration and Interaction (2005), edited by Joseph Sherman
and Ritchie Robertson, in Legenda’s ‘Studies in Yiddish’ series. This theme continues
 Preface xiii

in Chapter 4 of the present volume, which offers a fresh view of Alfred Döblin’s
classic novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz. Hebrew-Yiddish literary interaction in the Berlin
context is discussed in Chapter 1. Chapters 9, 10, and 11 focus on the activity of the
Berlin-based journalists who wrote for the New York Yiddish daily Forverts (Forward).
Among them were such prominent figures as the demographer and economist Jacob
Lestschinsky, the socialist leader Raphael Abramovitch, the foremost Yiddish linguist
Max Weinreich, and the poet David Eynhorn. The last major intellectual project in
Yiddish that was initiated in Berlin was the comprehensive Algemeyne entsyklopedie
(General Encyclopedia), which remained unfinished and is discussed in Chapter 12.
Scores of highly talented, educated, and creative people contributed to the short
but intense period of flourishing Yiddish culture in Berlin. They left a large and
diverse legacy which has not yet been fully appreciated. It is our hope that Yiddish in
Weimar Berlin will arouse interest in that unique phenomenon and stimulate further
research on it.

Note to the Preface

1. Edward Timms, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 8.
 list of illustrations
v

Fig. 1. Kalman Zingman. By kind permission of K. Zingman’s granddaughter Amalia

Goldberg (Kfar Menachem, Israel)
Fig. 2. 8 Ruhlaer Straße, in Berlin-Schmargendorf, near Grunewald, where Simon Dub­
now lived in 1930–33. Photo by Henning Dohrn, 2009
Fig. 3. 34/35 Bleibtreustraße, Berlin, housed the ORT headquarters in 1921-26. Photo by
Alexander Ivanov, 2009
Fig. 4. At a Jewish art exhibition in the Sholem Aleichem Club (1928). From right to left:
(standing) Michael Wurmbrand (head of the Berlin office of the Jewish Telegraphic
Agency), Ben-Adir (Abraham Rosin), Nokhum Shtif, Jacob Lestschinsky, Gershon
(Herman) Swet, Zeev Wolf Latzki-Bertoldi, two unknown persons, Issachar Ber
Ryback, Nokhum Gergel, an unknown person, Meir Kreinin (a Jewish civil leader),
Mrs. Rebecca Tcherikower, Mrs. Deborah Shtrif, Elias Tcherikower; (sitting) Mrs. Leah
Swet, Mrs. Sonya Ryback, Mrs. Gergel. From the Archives of the YIVO, New York.
Fig. 5. Cover of the double issue of Albatros, edited and published in Berlin in 1923
Fig. 6. Avrom Nokhem Stencl. By kind permission of the Archiv Bibliographia Judaica,
Frankfurt am Main
Fig. 7. Cover of A. N. Stencl’s book Lider un gedikhtn (Songs and Poems), Leipzig, 1924
Fig. 8. Marc Chagall’s cover of David Hofstein’s Troyer. By kind permission of the Musée
d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme, Paris; © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2009
Fig. 9. Joseph Tchaikov’s cover of Peretz Markish’s Di kupe. By kind permission of the
Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme, Paris
Fig. 10. Joseph Tchaikov’s cover of Leyb Kvitko’s 1919. By kind permission of the Musée
d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme, Paris
Fig. 11. 3 Mommsenstrasse, Berlin-Charlottenburg, where Helene and David Koigen lived
in from 1928 to 1933. Photo by Henning Dohrn, 2009
Fig. 12. Abraham Cahan during one of his cross-Atlantic trips (undated). From the archive
of the Forward Association, New York
Fig. 13. Jacob Lestschinsky (undated). From the Archives of the YIVO, New York
Fig. 14. David Bergelson at home in Zehlendorf, Berlin, 1931. By kind permission of Lev
Bergelson
Fig. 15. Max Weinreich (undated), with newspaper designer’s marks. From the archive of
the Forward Association, New York
Fig. 16. 18 Oranienburger Straße, Berlin, whose Ressource-Saal was often used as a venue
for meetings of Jewish organizations, including the Berlin committee for the pro­mo­
tion of the Central Yiddish School Organization in Poland. Photo by Anne-Christin
Sass, 2009
Fig. 17. Cover of David Eynhorn’s Gezamlte lider 1904-1924 (Collected Poems 1904–1924),
published in 1924 in Berlin by the Jüdische Arbeiterbuchhandlung
 List of Illustrations xv

Fig. 18. David Eynhorn (standing the seventh from left) with a group of Paris Bundists,
around 1930. From the Archives of the YIVO, New York
Fig. 19. Raphael Abramovitch (undated). By kind permission of the International Institute
of Social History, Amsterdam
Fig. 20. The first instalment of Sholem Asch’s novel Baym opgrunt (At the Abyss) in For­verts,
2 February 1935
Fig 21. Meir Wiener. By kind permission of Julia Wiener
 NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
v

Generally we have employed the Standard Yiddish Romanization system, also

known as the YIVO transcription system. Titles and quotes written according
to various orthographic codes have been respelled following the YIVO system.
Although Yiddish does not distinguish capitals from lower case, we have in trans­
literation capitalized the first letter in titles and personal names. Forms which are
common in English publications are retained for some personal names, such as
Sholem Asch and Jacob Lestschinsky.
We use in this volume ‘Vilna’ rather than ‘Vilnius’, because the volume does not
discuss the post-1939 period, when the city became the Lithuanian capital. For the
same reason, Kaunas (the then capital of Lithuania) rather than Kovno, and Lwów
(then a city in Poland) rather than Lvov or Lviv, appears in most chapters.
 Introduction
v
Yiddish on the Spree
Gennady Estraikh

1
Jacob Lestschinsky, the well-known Jewish demographer, economist, and journalist,
once observed that in urban terrain Jews often became conspicuous even in those
localities where their population was relatively small.1 Indeed, the few thousand
Yiddish-speaking eastern European Jews, or, in the somewhat contemptuous
German term, Ostjuden, formed a visible minority in Berlin at the turn of the
twentieth century: they looked different, often with dark curly hair and wearing
clothes that were unusual for a German city, they spoke a peculiar Germanic
vernacular, and they lived many to one house. These incomers usually migrated
to the city from the then-German territory of Posen (Poznań), as well as from
Russian and Austro-Hungarian Poland. They would converge on the proletarian
east of the city, above all the Scheunenviertel (Barn Quarter), sarcastically called
‘Jüdische Schweiz’ ( Jewish Switzerland), the slum quarter ‘a few blocks northeast
of Alexanderplatz, bounded by Linienstrasse to the north, Oranienburger Strasse
to the west and south and Landsberger Allee to the east’.2 The Scheunenviertel,
however, never functioned as a Jewish ghetto in the true sense of the word, because
Ostjuden lived there together with others who were outsiders twice over, being
both non-German and foreign-born. Thousands of full-bearded ‘caftan Jews’
and their families never acquired the assets for social mobility and stayed put in
the Alexanderplatz area, while many others would work their way up from the
lowest rung on the social ladder and move to more elegant districts, including
Charlottenburg, merging there with ‘real’ western Jews.3
Residents of other Berlin neighbourhoods experienced a culture shock walking
through the poverty-stricken Scheunenviertel streets with their military names:
Grenadier­straße, Dragonerstraße, and Artilleriestraße. On Dragonerstraße, the
Jewish People’s Home (Volksheim), founded by a group of German Jewish intel­
lectuals, attempted to help culturally and socially disadvantaged children acquire
skills they needed to begin their lives in Germany.4 The whole area had a bad
reputation because its deprived inhabitants were, according to Joseph Roth, often
forced to ‘become black marketers, smugglers, and even common criminals’.5
Solici­tation was legal in Germany, and Münzstraße, a street perpendicular to
Grenadier­straße, gained notoriety as a prostitutes’ hang-out.6 For all that, peddling,
petty trade, and buying up old clothing were among the most common sources
of income. Furthermore, migrants from Russia formed the majority of the city’s
cigarette rollers.7
2 Gennady Estraikh

Alexander Granach, who came to Berlin in 1906, where he gained his first
acting experience as a Yiddish actor and later established himself as a significant
German theatre and film actor, remembered, among other things, the community
life of the Alexanderplatz area: ‘The more pious had their synagogues. The
Zionists, Socialists, Social Revolutionaries, Bundists, and anarchists all had their
respective societies. [...] Posters with big letters and pictures advertised minor
actors and supernumeraries from the Yiddish theaters in Russia, Romania, and
Galicia as famous international stars.’8 As early as the late 1870s, local Yiddish
speakers could enjoy the antics of touring actors. From 1890, Yiddish cultural life
in Berlin was dominated by the brothers Anton and Donat (David) Herrnfeld,
whose theatre, where unsophisticated musicals by Abraham Goldfaden, Joseph
Latteiner, and other authors were performed, was popular among the inhabitants
of the Scheunenviertel.9 From time to time, some German Jewish intellectuals
would also visit Yiddish performances. Eastern European Jewishness attracted
them as the exotic, ‘genuine’ roots of their confused national identity and the
most reliable way of avoiding assimilation. The Berlin-based magazine Ost und
West (East and West, 1901–23), which at its height reached at least ten per cent of
the German Jewish population, published translations of Yiddish literary works
as part of its intention to construct a national ethnic identity that combined both
eastern European and western European forms of Jewishness. Romanticization of
the eastern European Jews had its roots also in the völkisch, neo-Romantic trend in
German and Austrian intellectual circles, which sought a return to ‘authentic’ ways
of life.10 Peretz Hirschbein, the rising Yiddish literary star who spent three months
in Berlin in 1907, came to the conclusion that ‘ethnography rather than real Jewish
life’ fascinated the German Jewish intellectuals.11
The 1908 Yiddish Language Conference, convened in Czernowitz, then part of
the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now Chernivtsi in Ukraine, became a mani­
festation of pan-Ashkenazic symbiosis, especially as its main organizer, Nathan
Birnbaum, was a speaker of German.12 Yiddishism, or Ashkenazic nationalism,
found an intense following in the late Russian Empire and, to a lesser degree, in
other countries to which Yiddish speakers had turned. Pondering the shape of the
future Jewish nation, Yiddishists of various hues usually believed that non-covenantal
highbrow culture based on the eastern European Jewish vernacular should replace
or supplement religion and thereby secure the endurance of Ashkenazic civilization.
Echoing the historian Simon Dubnow’s postulate that the Jewish people embodied
the highest form of a cultural-historic or spiritual nation, Nathan Birnbaum saw in
Yiddish culture the main source of national pride.13
The Czernowitz conference placed advocates of the Hebrew language on the
defensive. In December 1909, a conference of Hebraists was convened in Berlin.14
Zionists regarded Berlin as one of their nerve centres. Local activists and visitors
would assemble in the Café Monopol, built in a Mauritanian style and situated
‘right in the hell, in the middle of Friedrichstraße, with all the dirt and immorality
of the three-million city streaming to this terribly tumultuous street’. Yet inside,
behind the heavy curtains, Jewish intellectuals found a gut-bruder-ort, an amiable
place, where Russia’s Pale of Jewish Settlement lay at the centre of the interests of
 Introduction 3

the clientele, who discussed ad nauseam the future of Yiddishkayt, or the eastern
European model of Jewish life. Yiddish literary luminaries, such as Sholem Alei­
chem and Sholem Asch, were among the visitors. People would ‘speak Hebrew
as a matter of principle and speak Yiddish as a matter of principle’. In Yiddish
usage at the turn of the century, the German term Stammgast, ‘regular customer’,
was modelled as shtam-gast (plural shtam-gest).15 Before the war, the Yiddish writer
Hersh David Nomberg, known for his sociability, had established a Yiddish
literary kibetzarnye, ‘talking shop’, at the Café des Westens, then the bohemian hub
of the city.16
Apart from global plans for modernizing Jewish life, Berlin-based intellectuals
sometimes tried to realize local projects. At the end of 1911 and the beginning
of 1912, Abraham Wieviorka, a young Yiddish story-writer and journalist from
Poland, published in Berlin Dos bukh (Book), which was conceived as a ‘monatshrift
far kunst un kritik’ [monthly for art and criticism] but was discontinued after its
second issue. Although the journal was published in Cracow, the imprint of its
first issue displayed the address of a Berlin editorial office. It contained an essay by
the critic Shmaryahu Gorelik, who saw Yiddish literature at a crossroads: either
it would succeed in achieving a level appropriate to the Jewish intelligentsia, or
it would continue producing conventional writings for the masses, akin to the
sought-after rugs from the Turkish town of Smyrna.17 From September 1912 to
May 1913, Berlin housed the satirical journal Der Ashmeday (Ashmedai is the king
of demons), whose editors, Abraham Margolin and Meir Grossman, later played
prominent roles in Jewish journalism.18
Both Margolin and Grossman were educated in Germany and belonged to the
category of Jewish students who came from Russia after they had finished secondary
school but been unable to gain access to an institution of higher education in their
own country following the introduction of a percentage-based numerus clausus
in 1887. This category of students began to outnumber the yeshiva-trained young
men who could also gain admittance to the German universities (the enrolment
procedures did not include checking the candidate’s educational credentials),
though only a minority of these essentially undereducated people from the yeshivas
would ultimately gain a degree. Oranienburger Straße, the main artery of the
Scheunenviertel, was the ‘Latin Quarter’ of Berlin, as this was where poor students
often rented rooms. Among the 533 Russian students who studied in Berlin in the
winter semester of 1912 to 1913, ninety-seven per cent were Jewish.19 One of the
students recalled, looking back to around 1904: ‘Even the poorest among us could
get by in Germany, so cheap and commodious was it there at that time. We could
study and breathe freely, we felt good living among the Germans.’ 20

2
After the beginning of World War I, the German and Austro-Hungarian armies
strove to persuade the Jews of Poland to welcome the coalition soldiers as their
liberators from ‘the yoke of Moscow’.21 Indeed, whereas the Russian army showed
a hostile attitude to the Jewish population of Austro-Hungary and even of its own
4 Gennady Estraikh

country, the German army did not usually commit atrocities against the Jews. In
German propaganda literature of the time, ‘Yiddish suddenly became evidence
of Jewish loyalty to the German language and culture rather than an example
of linguistic “mongrelization” ’.22 Numerous guides to Yiddish began to appear,
including Solomon Birnbaum’s Praktische Grammatik der jiddischen Sprache für den
Selbstunterricht (Practical Grammar of Yiddish for Self-Tuition; the author was the eldest
son of Nathan Birnbaum).23 In a witness’s account we read that because the German
troops were able to communicate with Jews to some extent, they ‘were somewhat
more lenient towards them’. Moreover, ‘the Jews were of the utmost importance
to the foreign occupiers, who were unable to communicate with the majority of
the local population and therefore relied on Jews to be the interpreters’.24 German
officers, who could not attend Polish performances, went to Yiddish operettas,
which sometimes starred German actresses imported to entertain the uniformed
audience.25 Some occupiers found Yiddish quaint, especially as it was the vernacular
that helped them to communicate with local women. Vilna and Kovno had the
reputation of towns with very pretty women.26
The linguistically and culturally assimilated German Jewish soldiers, who pre­
viously had never heard Yiddish and knew (if at all) about shtetl-life from translations
of Yiddish writers published in Ost und West or Martin Buber’s German versions of
Hasidic stories, were often embarrassed when they saw the primitive conditions of
Jewish life in the occupied territories. Yet some of them admired eastern Europe
as the quintessentially Jewish habitat and discovered those living there ‘as a living
image of their lost cultural identity’.27 For German Jewish enthusiasts of Yiddish,
Vilna was particularly appealing, not least because it combined ‘shtetl authenticity’
with such urban conveniences as cafes and theatres and the presence of modern
educated people. Paradoxically, the occupation contributed to reinforcing the city’s
reputation as the ‘capital’ of Yiddish culture. The Germans’ suppression of Russian
education and culture diverted local activists’ energy into Yiddish-language organi­
zations, publications, and cultural events, especially as many Russian speakers,
non-Jewish and Jewish alike, chose to evacuate to the areas under Russian control.
The Yiddish linguist and journalist Zalman Reisen and the prominent community
leaders Dr Cemach Szabad and Dr Jacob Wigodski were among those intellectuals
who did not evacuate; they used the new environment to ‘Yiddishize’ the nationalist
sentiments in significant segments of the local Jewish population. The Vilna Letste
nayes (Latest News), edited by Dr Eliyahu Olsvanger (who had gained his medical
degree in Germany), was one of the Yiddish newspapers sponsored by the German
occupying authorities.28
Sammy Gronemann, a Zionist functionary in pre-war Germany, served in the
German Army’s Eastern Supreme Command during the war as an officer with the
role of keeping tabs on Jewish cultural activities. He was particularly impressed
by the local amateur Yiddish theatre, known as the Vilner Trupe (Vilna Troupe),
established in February 1916. After seeing their performance, he wrote in a letter: ‘I
am sure that in Berlin these people would have made noise and had a full house!’.29
Several other German Jewish intellectuals, including the artist Hermann Struck
and the playwright Herbert Eulenberg, also enthusiastically supported the Vilna
 Introduction 5

Troupe. Zalman Reisen explained that ‘for the western Jews, the troupe was a
kind of a spiritual revelation. In its performances they felt a representation of living
Jewish culture, which could appear only in such a nationally strong community
as the eastern European Jewry.’ The actors found in the moral support of the
German Jewish intelligentsia ‘a source of additional courage and hope. They could
no longer be satisfied with their success in provincial towns.’30 In 1921, Grone­
mann was instrumental in bringing the Vilna Troupe to Berlin. Following its first
performances at the B’nai B’rith Lodge and the German Writers’ Union (with
Bernhard Kellermann’s introductory talk on Yiddish theatre), two theatrical entre­
preneurs signed a contract with the Vilna Troupe. In September 1921 they opened
the season with Peretz Hirschbein’s play Di puste kretshme (The Haunted Inn).31
When Samuel Lewin, an aspiring Yiddish prose writer, came from Poland to
Berlin in 1920, he was supported by the German essayist and writer Fritz Mordecai
Kaufmann, who under the inf luence of Nathan Birnbaum became ‘passionately
interested in the life of the eastern European Jews and their language Yiddish’.
Lewin ‘found his [Kaufmann’s] Yiddish excellent. A little on the hard side, perhaps,
but nothing wrong with it.’ Kaufmann’s wife, a Russian Jewess, was a native
Yiddish speaker, and their daughter grew up with Yiddish as her first language.
Through Kaufmann, Lewin met Dr Fishl Schneersohn.32 A polymath, Schneersohn
pursued two careers: that of a distinguished psychologist and that of a Yiddish and
Hebrew man of letters.
More arrivals appeared in Berlin when Russia left the war after the signing
of the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty on 3 March 1918. On 9 November 1918, the
German Republic was proclaimed by the leader of the Social Democrats, Philipp
Scheidemann. In August 1919, the new constitution, drafted in the city of Weimar,
was adopted by the German National Assembly. Meanwhile, at the beginning of
1919, German troops abandoned Ukraine, and a small group of Jewish entrepreneurs
from Kiev followed them, relocating themselves and portions of their wealth to
Germany.33 Earlier, during the war, thousands of Jews had come, or been brought
to Germany by force, from the occupied territories, when the economy needed
additional manpower to replace the men drafted into the army. Many of the
migrants chose to stay in Germany rather than to return to their countries, which
were stricken by the war and revolution.34
About seven hundred Berlin residents of eastern European Jewish origin formed
the membership of the Perez-Verein, the workers’ association named after the
popu­lar Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz. This organization had a stronger Bundist
contingent and a weaker Labour-Zionist contingent. The majority of members
came from rela­t ively well-off families but had turned to proletarian occupations
during the war. Many of them were familiar with contemporary Yiddish literature
and subscribed to newspapers: the Warsaw-based Bundist Lebnsfragn (Problems of Life)
had four hun­dred subscribers, and the Cracow-based Labour-Zionist Der yidisher
arbeter ( Jewish Worker) three hundred. In 1920, the police closed the association, but
it later reappeared as the Kulturverein Progreß (Progress Culture Association).35
By the end of 1920, there were 13,000 Jews from the former Russian and Austro-
Hungarian empires, as well as from Romania, in Berlin’s population of four million,
6 Gennady Estraikh

which included 137,000 Jews. In 1925, a quarter of the more than 172,000 Jews in
Berlin were immigrants.36 The Yiddish poet and essayist David Eynhorn described
Berlin in 1921 as the transit centre for the whole ragged Jewish emigration from
Europe, the place of refuge for
those Jewish emigrants who due to certain unfortunate circumstances have
found themselves cut off from the great stream of emigration that is f lowing to
America. Berlin houses those who were not allowed to embark the ship, those
who were rejected by their families, or those whose papers were stolen. Berlin
lures Jewish deserters from Poland, expelled Jewish workers from France, and
the Jews pushed out from [Miklós] Horthy’s Hungary. It’s a station for halutzim
[Zionist pioneers] heading for Palestine and for Jewish workers who want to
reach Soviet Russia.37
Two years later, Eynhorn told the reader of the New York Yiddish daily Forverts
(Forward) that walking along Friedrichstraße felt like being in Berdichev, reputedly
the ‘Jewish capital’ of Ukraine. ‘Broken Russian was heard from all sides — with
[ Jewish] intonation and gesticulation. There was also a good deal of Yiddish,
predominantly Volhynian and Lithuanian Yiddish.’ 38 Sholem Asch, the best-selling
Yiddish novelist, found in Berlin ‘all of Jewish St Petersburg, Jewish Moscow,
Jewish Kiev, and Jewish Odessa’.39
The appearance, in June 1921, of the Vilna Troupe, which remained in Berlin
until March 1923, symbolized the arrival of highbrow Yiddish culture, especially
as the Vilna actors performed in the premises on Kommandantenstraße previously
occupied by the Herrnfeld Theatre, known for its light repertoire.40 Alfred Döblin,
then one of the most popular German writers, welcomed the troupe as ‘genuine
Jewish theatre’. He praised them, though it was hard for him to follow the actors’
language: ‘I could hardly understand more than in the Russian theatre. [...] The
theatre was very badly attended in any case. [...] People who can understand this
natural Esperanto, the linguistic mixture of Yiddish, live around the Alexanderplatz
and don’t have any money.’41
The Farlag Yidish was the pioneer Yiddish publishing house in Berlin. Its imprint
initially appeared in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, where it was established in 1917
by the novice Lithuanian-born writer Kalman Zingman (Singman). In addition to
his own and other authors’ literary works, he published two issues of the miscellany
Kunst-ring almanakh (Art Circle Journal), which he later reissued under the imprint of
the Kaunas-Berlin Farlag Yidish. At the end of 1920 Zingman moved to Kaunas,
now the capital of Lithuania, where he established himself as a publisher and a
man of letters. In 1921, his operation produced a dozen titles (including reprints
of Kharkiv editions), making Zingman the most prolific Yiddish publisher in pre-
1922 Berlin. However, this was the last year of his publishing activities in Berlin.
A possible explanation can be found in Zingman’s novel Oyfn shvindl-trep (On the
Winding Stairs), whose protagonist, a Kaunas publisher, fell deep into debt trying to
compete with private and state firms.42
At least two factors could inspire such people as Zingman to publish books in
Berlin. First, in the early 1920s Germany was a publisher’s paradise, guaranteeing an
ideal combination of low prices, high quality, and lax censorship. Dubnow punned
 Introduction 7

Fig. 1. Kalman Zingman

By kind permission of K. Zingman’s granddaughter Amalia Goldberg
(Kfar Menachem, Israel)
8 Gennady Estraikh

that the inf lation of the German mark triggered the inf lation of Berlin-based
publishing. Many publishers targeted (usually misguidedly) Russia as a marketplace
for their production.43 Jewish books and periodicals could be produced at well-
established printing shops such as H. Itzkowski and Son (founded in Berlin in
1874).44 Second, Berlin boasted a glut of intellectuals who had f led the chaos that
had consumed the former Russian Empire. In 1925, there were over two hundred
foreign Jewish writers, editors, and artists living in Prussia.45
For his projects, Zingman recruited the artist Eliezer Lissitzky (who designed the
publisher’s logo) and the man of letters Herman Frank. Lissitzky came to Berlin in
1921 with the aim of establishing contacts between Soviet and German artists. In
post-1917 Russia, he was a central figure in the Moscow Circle of Yiddish Writers
and Artists.46 A scholar who had gained his doctorate at the Friedrich Wilhelm
Uni­versity in Berlin with a thesis on the social and economic analysis of the Biały­
stok Jewish community, Frank owned the Berlin-based Russian publishing house
Argonavty (Argonauts). In 1921, the Farlag Yidish published his Yiddish translation
of Martin Buber’s three speeches on Judaism: Dray redn iber yidntum. In 1923 Frank
moved to the United States, where he became a leading Yiddish journalist and
editor.
A much more significant publishing outfit — the Yiddish-Hebrew publishing
house Klal-Farlag (General Publishing House) — was set up at 73 Markgrafenstraße
in May 1921. Shai (Saul Israel) Hurwitz, Simon Dubnow’s relative and the central
figure among Berlin Hebraists, laid the foundation for this Jewish offshoot of the
German publishing firm Ullstein. The Yiddish department of the Klal-Farlag was
headed by the master literary critic and journalist Bal-Makhshoves (Isidor Elyashev),
and the august Hebrew poet Khaim Nakhman Bialik succeeded Hurwitz, after his
death in August 1922, as the chief Hebrew editor. The Klal-Farlag announced a
programme of providing wide Jewish circles with affordable quality books in all
fields of classical and modern literature. Zeev Wolf Latzki-Bertoldi, another key
person in this publishing undertaking, played a prominent role in post-1917 political
and cultural life in Kiev. For a short time he even took on the portfolio of Minister
for Jewish Affairs during the heyday of Jewish autonomy in short-lived independent
Ukraine, but he decamped to Berlin after Kiev became Soviet in 1920.47
All in all, Yiddish book production in Berlin had reached a level second only to
Warsaw. In 1921 to 1923, German, predominantly Berlin-based, publishers released
one hundred and twenty-six Yiddish books, or fourteen per cent of all the Yiddish
book titles produced in the world. Moreover, in terms of printed sheets, Yiddish
book production in Germany made up about forty per cent of the worldwide total,
because publishers in other countries often produced booklets.48
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 CHAPTER VI.
THE RECONSTRUCTION.

“Helen, I actually slept all night.”

“So did I. If any one had told me I could sleep a wink, I would have
been furious. I wish we could hear from Father. You saw Cousin
Lizzie felt just exactly as I did about that Dr. Wright. He may be all
right and he may be all wrong. If he is all wrong, couldn’t he make
us dance, though? He could sell us out, lock, stock and barrel,
pocket the proceeds and skidoo.”
“Oh, Helen, how can you even give such a horrid idea a moment’s
lodgement in your mind? Dr. Wright is as good as he looks, I am
sure. He certainly looks kind and honest.”
“Well, he ought to be honest he is so ugly.”
The girls were still in bed, which they had shared ever since they
had been promoted from cradles. It was Saturday morning and the
day before had been the one of trial.
“Father likes him a lot and trusts him.”
“Ye—s, I know—but then, you see——”
“Yes, I see he is a very fine young man who thought, and quite
rightly, that we had been blindly selfish and heartless to let Father
work so hard; and he let us know what he thought of us and it got
your goat.”
“Is that the way you are going to express yourself in your B. M.
exams? Because if it is, you will win a scholarship surely.”
“If I only could!... Come in!” in answer to a knock at the door.
“Telegraph fer you, Miss Douglas. I hope an’ trus’ ’tain’t no bad news
’bout yo’ maw and paw,” said the housemaid, bringing in a dreaded
yellow envelope. “Uncle Oscar, he dreamed ’bout aigs las’ night an’
they was whole an’ entire, an’ all de dream books say dat it is a sho’
sign an’ symbol er trouble. De trouble is in de shell an’ time alone
will hatch it out.”
“Well, this is good news, Susan,” laughed Douglas as she quickly
scanned the message: “‘Your father and mother slept well and are
now enjoying breakfast at Pennsylvania Station. Will see you this
evening. George Wright.’”
“Well, Glory be! It can’t be Mr. Carter what the bad luck is layin’ fer. I
’low it is dat lo’ down nigger Jim, Uncle Oscar’s sister’s step-son,
what got stuck in de lonesome ribs by a frien’ at meetin’ las’ Sunday
with one er these here unsafety razors,” and Susan took herself off
to give out in the kitchen that no doubt Jim was going to die, since
Mr. Carter was improving.
“Now, Helen, don’t you think Dr. Wright is very thoughtful? You just
said you wished we could hear from Father.”
“He does seem to think of lots of things. I couldn’t help admiring
him for the way he got the drawing room for them and put them on
the train at the downtown station to keep them from having to see
so many people. That night train is always full of people we know
and they all of them get on at Elba. I bet you he got his telegram in
ten words, though. I know he is economical and would die rather
than spill over. Let me see it. Humph! Nineteen words. I wonder he
didn’t send it collect.”
“Oh, Helen! How can you be so hard on the poor young man? I
believe you are just pretending to hate him so. I am glad it is
Saturday and no school. I think we had better go see real estate
agents the first thing this morning and try to rent our house
furnished for the summer. I am pretty sure Dr. Wright would approve
of that. And also see about selling the car.”
“Selling the car! Why, Douglas, how on earth will we do without it?”
“Of course we must sell it. Helen Carter, I actually believe you think
that if you give up wearing silk stockings for a year we can live on
your resolution. Do you realize that the cash we have in bank would
just about pay the chauffeur and keep us in gasoline for a month?”
“Oh, I am such a dunce! I am afraid my being poor has a kind of
musical comedy effect in my mind so far. What are you going to do
with me, Douglas?”
“Nothing, honey, but you must not get angry with me when I call
you down about money. I feel so responsible somehow.”
“Angry with you! Why, I think you are just splendid, and I am going
to be so careful I just know you will never have to call me down.”
Douglas smiled, knowing very well that Helen and economy were not
meant to dwell together.
“There is only one thing I am going to make all of you promise, that
is NOT TO CHARGE,” with great emphasis.
“Oh, of course not after we get started, but how are we to get our
outfits for the mountains? Our khaki skirts and leggins and things
that are appropriate? And then the cotton stockings that I have
sworn to wear until Father is well! I have to have a new set of them.
Ugh! how I hate ’em!”
“But, Helen, we have our Camp-Fire outfits that are thoroughly
suitable for what we are going to do. There are loads of middy
blouses in the house, so I am sure we need buy no more of them.
As for stockings—it seems to me you had better wear out what
stockings you have, even if they are silk, before you buy any more.”
“Never! You don’t seem to understand the significance of my oath.
When a pilgrim of old swore to put on sackcloth and travel to some
distant shrine, he didn’t say he would not go to the expense of
sackcloth since he had plenty of velvet suits on hand, did he now?
No! He went and bought some sackcloth if he didn’t happen to have
any in the house and gave his velvet suits to the poor or had his
hand-maidens pack them up in frankincense and myrrh or something
until he got back——”
“All right! All right! But please don’t give away anything to the poor.
If Cousin Lizzie should hear of your doing such a thing she would
certainly say: ‘Charity begins at home.’”
“I won’t give them away if you think I shouldn’t, but I’d like to put
temptation out of my reach. I hope we can get off to the mountains
real soon as I am sure I have no desire to flaunt my penance in the
face of the Richmond public. Don’t you think, Douglas, that I might
have the fifty-nine cents that is in the bank so things will balance
better, and with fifty-nine cents I can get three pair of sixteen-and-
two-third-cent stockings? I’ll bring back the nine cents change.”
Helen was quite solemn in her request, but Douglas was forced to
laugh at her lugubrious countenance.
“Yes, dear, if you really feel so strongly about the cotton stockings.
Haven’t you any money at all in your purse? I have a little, I
believe.”
“Well, I never thought of that! Sure I have!” and Helen sprang out of
bed, where they were still lolling while the above conversation was
going on, and hunted wildly in a very much mussed drawer for her
silver mesh bag. “Hurrah! Three paper dollars and a pile of chicken
feed silver! I can get cotton stockings for a centipede with that much
money.”
It was a very pretty room that Douglas and Helen Carter shared.
Robert Carter had brought to bear all the experience he had gained
in building other persons’ houses to make his own house perfect. It
was not a very large house but every detail had been thought out so
not one brick was amiss. Convenience and Beauty were not
sacrificed to one another but went hand in hand. The girls loved
their room with its dainty pink paper and egg-shell paint. They had
not been in the house long enough for the novelty to wear off, as it
was only about a year old. As Douglas lay in her luxurious bed while
Helen, being up in search of money, took first bath, she thought of
the bitterness of having strangers occupy their room. How often she
had lain in that soft, comfortable nest and fancied that it must be
like the heart of a pink rose. And the charming private bath-room
must be given up, too.
She could hear Helen splashing away, evidently enjoying her
morning shower as she was singing with many trills and folderols,
trying seemingly to hear herself above the noise of the running
water.
“Poor Helen!” thought Douglas. “It is harder, somehow, for her than
any of us. Lucy is young enough to learn the new trick of being poor
very easily, and Nan is such a philosopher; and dear little Bobby
won’t see the difference just so he can have plenty of mud to play
in; and I—oh, well—I have got so much to do I can’t think about
myself—I must get up and do it, too. Here I am selfishly lying in bed
when I know Nan and Lucy want to hear the news from Father just
as much as I did.” So, slipping on a kimono, she ran into the room
across the hall, shared by the two younger girls.
They were up and almost dressed. “Lucy and I thought maybe we
could help, so we hurried. I know you’ve lots to do,” said Nan.
“That was dear of you both. Of course we won’t have so much to do
right now, as we have to wait for Dr. Wright to come home; and
then if we can rent the house furnished, we must get everything in
order. But first listen to the good news!” and she read the telegram.
“Isn’t that splendid and wasn’t it kind of Dr. Wright to send it to
you?”
“I think so. If only Helen would not feel so unkindly to him! She
utterly refuses to like him,” and Douglas sighed.
“I don’t intend to like him either, then!” exclaimed Lucy. “He shan’t
boss me if he isn’t going to boss Helen.”
“How absurd you are,” laughed Nan. “You are so afraid that Helen
will get something you don’t have that you won’t even let her have a
private little dislike without wanting to have some, too. I bet if Helen
got the smallpox you would think yourself abused if you didn’t get it,
too.”
“And in your heart of hearts you know you do like him,” said Douglas
with a severity that she felt such silliness warranted.
“Well, if I do—and—and—maybe I do, I’m not going to take anything
off of him that Helen won’t.”
“Well, I reckon Dr. Wright will be glad to wash his hands of us,
anyhow,” said Nan. “I can’t see that it would be any sweet boon to
look after you and Helen or any of us, for that matter.”
“I should think not,” laughed Douglas; “but you see his having power
of attorney from Father makes it necessary for us to consult with
him about some things, selling the automobile, for instance, and
renting the house.”
“Selling the car!” wailed Lucy. “I think it is foolishness to do that. I’d
like to know how you are to occupy Dan, the chauffeur, if we haven’t
a car to keep him busy.”
“Oh, you incorrigible girls! Of course we will have to let the
chauffeur go immediately; and I’ve got to tell the servants to-day
that we can’t keep them. I’ll give them all a week’s warning, of
course.”
“I understand all that,” said Nan, “so please don’t bunch me in with
the incorrigibles.”
“But, Douglas, Oscar has been with us since long before we were
born. I don’t see how you can have the heart to dismiss him,” and
Lucy looked resentfully at her older sister.
“Heart! I haven’t the heart to let any of them go, but it would be a
great deal more heartless to have them work for us with no money
to pay them with.”
“Now, Lucy Carter, you’ve pretty near made Douglas cry. You sound
like a half-wit to me. Heartless, indeed! If you had half of Douglas’s
heart and one-fourth of her sense, you wouldn’t make such
remarks,” and Nan put her arms around Douglas.
“No, she didn’t make me cry, but what does make me feel bad is
that Lucy and Helen can’t even now realize the state of affairs. I
hated to have to tell Helen she mustn’t charge anything more, no
matter what it is she wants.”
“Charge! I should say not! I think I would walk on my uppers all the
rest of my life before I’d put any more burden like that on Father,”
declared Nan.
“But don’t people always charge when they haven’t got any money?
What will we do when we need things?” asked Lucy.
“Do without,” said Douglas wearily. She saw it was going to take
more than a few hours or a few days to make two of her sisters
realize the necessity for reconstruction of their lives. “Helen and I
are going right after breakfast to see real estate agents about
getting us a tenant, and Helen is going to purchase some cotton
stockings. She still persists in sticking to the letter of her oath not to
wear silk stockings until Daddy is home and well.”
“I’m going to wear cotton stockings, too, if Helen is.”
“So you are, so are all of us, but we are going to keep on with the
ones we have until we go to the country. Helen is spending her own
money, some she had, on these stockings and no one is buying
them for her,” and Douglas went back to her room to dress and take
up the burden of the day that was beginning to seem very heavy to
her young shoulders. “If only Helen and Lucy could see without
being knocked down and made to see,” she thought. “Poor Father, if
he had only not been so unselfish how much better it would have
been for all of us now that we have got to face life!”
True to their determination, Douglas and Helen went to several real
estate agents. None of them were very encouraging about renting
during the summer months to reliable tenants, but all of them
promised to keep an eye open for the young ladies.
“Your father gone off sick?” asked one fatherly old agent. “Well, I
saw him going to pieces. Why, Robert Carter did the work of three
men. Just look at the small office force he kept and the work he
turned out! That meant somebody did the drudgery, and that
somebody was the boss. What do the fellows in his office think of
this?”
“I—I—don’t know,” stammered Douglas. She couldn’t let the kind old
man know that she had not even thought of informing the office of
her father’s departure. How could she think of everything?
Before seeing any more agents, she and Helen betook themselves to
their father’s office, a breezy apartment at the top of a great bank
building. Two young men were busily engaged on some architectural
drawings. They stopped work and came eagerly forward to inquire
for Mr. Carter. Their consternation was great on hearing of his
sudden departure and their grief and concern very evident.
“We will do all we can to keep things going,” said the elder of the
two.
“You bet we will!” from the other, who had but recently been
advanced from office boy.
“There is a big thing Mr. Carter has been working on for some time,
a competitive design for a country club in North Carolina. It is about
done and I will do my best to finish it as I think he would want it,
and get it off. Did he leave power of attorney with any one? You see,
Mr. Carter has two accounts, in different banks, one, his personal
account, and one, his business one.”
“Yes, Dr. Wright, his physician, was given power of attorney. There
was no time to let any of you know as it was important to have
Father kept very quiet, with no excitement. Dr. Wright will come in to
see you on Monday, I feel sure. He does not get back from New York
until to-night.”
“More work and responsibility for the doctor,” thought Douglas.
“More power over us than we dreamed even,” was in Helen’s mind.
“We want to rent our house, furnished, for the summer, giving
possession immediately, or almost immediately,” continued Douglas;
“perhaps you may hear of some one who will be interested.”
“I know of some one right now,” eagerly put in Dick, the promoted
office boy. “It is a family who have been driven from Paris by the
war. They have been living there for years—got oodlums of money
and no place to spend it now, poor things! They want a furnished
house for six months with privilege of renewing the lease for a year.”
“Oh, please, could you send them to me or me to them right off?”
“Yes, Miss Carter, that’s easy! If you go home, I’ll have the folks up
there in an hour.”
“How kind you are!”
“Not a bit of it! I’m so glad I happened to know about them—and
now you will be saved an agent’s fee.”
“How much do you think we should ask for our house?” said
Douglas, appealing to both young men.
“Well, that house is as good a one as there is in Richmond for its
size,” said Mr. Lane, the elder. “I know, because I helped on it. There
is not one piece of defective material in the whole building. Even the
nails were inspected. If it had been on Franklin Street, I’d say one
hundred a month, unfurnished, with all the baths it has in it; but
since it is not on Franklin, I believe one hundred, furnished, would
be a fair price.”
“Oh, wouldn’t that be fine, Douglas?” spoke Helen for the first time.
She had been very quiet while these business conferences had been
going on. “That will be a whole lot of money. Now we need not feel
so poverty stricken.”
“Certainly families do live on less,” and the young man smiled. “I
think Mr. Carter usually takes out about six hundred a month for his
household expenses—of course, that’s not counting when he buys a
car. I know it is none of my business, but I am very much interested
to know what you young ladies are going to do with yourselves. If I
can be of any assistance, you must call on me.”
“Oh, we’ve got the grandest scheme! I thought of it myself, so I am
vastly proud of it. We are going up to Albemarle County, where
Father owns a tract of land right on the side of a mountain, and
there we are going to spend the summer and take boarders and
expect to make a whole lot of money.”
“Take boarders? Is there a house there? I understood from Mr.
Carter that it was unimproved property.”
“So it is. That is the beauty of it. We intend to camp and all the
boarders will camp, too.”
The young men could not contain themselves but burst out laughing.
They had not seen much of their employer’s family but they well
knew the luxurious lives they lived and their helplessness. It was
funny to hear this pretty butterfly of a girl talking about taking
boarders and making money at it.
“It does sound funny,” said Douglas when the laugh in which she
and Helen had joined subsided, “but we are really going to do it—
that is, I think we are,” remembering that the Power of Attorney had
not yet been consulted and nothing could really be determined on
until then. “I don’t know about our making lots of money, but we
can certainly live much more cheaply camping than any other way.”
“That’s so!” agreed Mr. Lane. “Now maybe this is where Dick and I
can help. Camps have to be built and we can get up some plans for
you. There is a book of them just issued and we can get a working
plan for you in short order.”
“That is splendid. We have a cousin, Lewis Somerville, who is home
now and has nothing to do, and he is going up to Albemarle ahead
of us and build the camp. I’ll tell him to come down and see you and
you can tell him all about it.”
Then the girls, with many expressions of gratitude, hastened home
to prepare for the poor rich people who had been driven from Paris
and now had no place to spend their money.
They stopped on Broad Street long enough for Helen to spend one
of her precious dollars for six sixteen-and-two-third-cent stockings.
“Do you think it would be very extravagant if I spent a dime in
market for flowers?” asked Helen. “It would make the house look
more cheerful and might make the poor rich people like it better.”
“Why, no, I don’t think that would be very extravagant,” laughed
Douglas.
So they went over to the Sixth Street market, where the old colored
women sit along the side-walk, and purchased a gay bunch of wild
phlox for a dime. And then Helen could not resist squandering
another nickel for a branch of dogwood. They jitneyed home,
another extravagance. There was no tangible reason why they
should not have ordered out their own car for this business trip they
had been forced to take, but it had seemed to both of them a little
incongruous to ride in a seven-seated touring car on the mission
they had undertaken.
“It doesn’t gee with cotton stockings, somehow,” declared Helen, “to
step out of a good car like ours. Jitneys are much more in keeping.”
The exiles from Paris came with the faithful Dick; liked the house;
did not mind the price, although furnished houses during the
summer months are somewhat a drug in the real estate market; and
were ready to close the bargain just as soon as Dr. Wright should
return.
The son, an æsthetic looking youth of seventeen, who was Dick’s
acquaintance, was carried away with the wild phlox and went into
ecstasies over the branch of dogwood which Helen had placed near
a Japanese print in the library.
“Let’s take it, Mamma! It is perfect!” he exclaimed as he stood
enraptured by the effect.
Helen always declared that the market flowers rented the house,
and so they may have.
 CHAPTER VII.
A COINCIDENCE.

“Almost time for Dr. Wright!” exclaimed Douglas. “I believe I heard

the R. F. & P. stop at Elba. I do wonder what he is going to say.”
“He is going to say we are a set of fools and lunatics and refuse to
let us have any money to start the camp. Since we have been so
extravagant and selfish for all these years, he’ll think we ought to go
to the poor house, where we belong,” said Helen, frowning. “I can
see him now looking through his eyebrows at me with the
expression of a hairy wildman in a show.”
Dr. Wright came with good news of the travelers. He had not only
seen them safely on board but had sailed with them, coming back
with the pilot. He reported Mr. Carter as singularly calm and rested
already and Mrs. Carter as making an excellent nurse. Evidently he
was rather astonished that that poor lady could make herself useful,
and Helen, detecting his astonishment, was immediately on the
defensive; but as Dr. Wright was addressing his remarks principally
to Douglas, almost ignoring her, she had no chance to let him know
what she thought of his daring even to think slightingly of poor little
Mumsy.
“I have a scheme for you girls, too, if you won’t think I am
presumptuous to be making suggestions,” he said, now including all
four of the sisters.
Of course, Douglas and Nan assured him that they considered it very
kind of him to think of them at all, but Helen tossed her head and
said nothing. Lucy waited to see what Helen would do and did the
same thing, but she could not help smiling at the young doctor when
he laughed out-right at her ridiculous mimicry of Helen. He flushed,
however, showing he was not quite so callous to Helen’s scorn and
distrust as he would have liked to appear.
“I think the wisest thing for you to do would be to rent this house,
furnished, if you can find a tenant——”
“We’ve done it!” exclaimed Helen triumphantly.
“That is, we have got a tenant if you think it is best,” explained
Douglas. “We were going to do nothing without your approval.”
“Oh, come now! I have no jurisdiction over you,” laughed the young
man.
“Isn’t power of attorney jurisdiction?” asked Lucy. “Nan says I can’t
have any more stockings until you permit me.”
“Well, well! I must be a terrible bugaboo to you! I don’t feel at all
qualified to judge of your stockings, little girl, or anything else
pertaining to the female attire. It was the merest accident that I was
given power of attorney. I am not in the least an appropriate person
to be having it. I only consented to have it wished on me when I
saw your father was becoming excited and tired over the
unexpected hitch when the notary spoke of Miss Douglas’s not being
of age. I have transferred what cash your father has to your sister’s
account. I must find out from you whom you want to look after your
affairs and consult that person——”
“But, Dr. Wright, we would lots rather have you, if you don’t mind!”
exclaimed Douglas. “Any of our kinsmen that we might call on would
insist upon our coming to live with them or make us go to some
stuffy boarding house or something. They would not look at it as I
believe you would at all. We have a scheme, too, but we want to
hear yours first.”
“My scheme was, as I say, first to rent your house, furnished, and
then all of you, with some suitable older person and some man
whom you can trust, go and camp out on the side of the mountain
in Albemarle. What do you say to it?” The girls burst out laughing,
even Helen.
“Dr. Wright, this is absolutely uncanny!” exclaimed Douglas. “That is
exactly what we were planning!”
“Only we were going you some better and were to have boarders,”
drawled Nan.
“Boarders, eh, and what do you know about keeping boarders?”
laughed the doctor.
“We know enough not to do the way we have been done by at
summer boarding houses where we have been sometimes.”
“Well, all I can say is that I think you are a pretty spunky lot. Please
tell me which one of you thought up this plan. There must surely
have been a current of mental telepathy flowing from one of you
girls to me. It was you, I fancy, Miss Douglas.”
“No, I am never so quick to see a way out. It was Helen.”
“Yes, Helen thought of it, but I came mighty near doing it,” declared
Lucy. “I would have done it all the way but I went to sleep.”
Helen looked as though she did not at all relish having anything even
so intangible as a current of mental telepathy connecting her with
one whom she was still determined to look upon as an enemy. He
was gazing at her with anything but the eyes of an enemy, however,
and Nan’s remark about his eyes looking like blue flowers high up on
a cliff that you must climb to reach, came back to her. She felt that
those flowers were in easy reach for her now; that all she had to do
to make this rugged young man her friend was to be decently polite.
But her pride was still hurt from his former disapproval and while his
present attitude was much better, she still could not bring herself to
smile at him. She was very quiet while the other girls unfolded their
plans for the camp. She did not take so much pleasure in it now that
it was not altogether her scheme. To think that while she was
working it up this bumptious young doctor was doing the same
thing!
“The keeping boarders part of it was mine, though,” she comforted
herself by thinking.
Dr. Wright was really astonished by the quickness with which these
spoiled girls had acted and their eagerness to begin to be something
besides the butterflies they had seemed. Douglas told him of the
plans for the camp that the assistant in the office was to draw for
them, and then showed him some of the advertisements of their
boarding camp that Nan had been working on all day.
“This is sure to draw a crowd of eager week-enders,” he declared.
“In fact, I believe you will have more boarders than the mountain
will hold.”
“I thought it best to have kind of catchy ads that would make people
wonder what we were up to anyhow,” said Nan. “Now this one is
sure to draw a crowd: ‘A week-end boarding camp, where one can
have all of the discomforts of camping without the responsibility.’
Here is another: ‘Mountain air makes you hungry! Come to The
Week-End Camp and let us feed you.’”
“Fine!” laughed the young man. “But please tell me how you plan to
feed the hungry hordes that are sure to swarm to your camp. Do
you know how to cook?”
“Helen can make angel’s food and I know how to make mayonnaise,
but sometimes it goes back on me,” said Nan with the whimsical air
that always drew a smile from Dr. Wright.
“I can make angel’s food, too,” declared Lucy.
“Well, angel’s food and mayonnaise will be enough surely for hungry
hordes.”
“Of course, we are going to take some servants with us,” said Helen,
breaking the vow of silence that she was trying to keep in Dr.
Wright’s presence. “Old Oscar, our butler, and Susan, the housemaid,
have both volunteered to go. I can make more things than angel’s
food, and, besides, I am going to learn how to do all kinds of things
before we go.”
“That’s so, you can make devil’s food,” teased Nan. “Somehow I
didn’t like to mention it.”
“Cook is going to teach me to make all kinds of things. I am going to
get dinner to-morrow and have already made up bread for breakfast.
I am going to buy some of the cutest little bungalow aprons to cook
in, pink and blue. I saw them down town this morning. They are
what made me think of learning how to cook.”
“I’m going to learn how to cook, too, and I must have some aprons
just like Helen’s.”
“All of us are Camp Fire Girls,” said Douglas to the doctor, “and of
course we have learned some of the camping stunts, but we have
not been as faithful as we might have been.”
“I am an old camper and can put you on to many things if you will
let me.”
“We should be only too glad,” responded Douglas sincerely.
“One of the first things is canvas cots. Don’t try to sleep on all kinds
of contrived beds. Get folding cots and insure comfortable nights.
Another is, don’t depend altogether on camp fires for cooking.
Kerosene stoves and fireless cookers come in mighty handy for
steady meal getting. It will be another month at least before you go,
won’t it?”
“Just about, I think, if we can manage it. We have school to finish
and I have some college exams that I want to take, although I see
no prospect of college yet. Another thing I want to discuss with you,
Dr. Wright, is selling our car. I think that might bring in money
enough for us to pay for all the camp fixtures and run us for awhile.”
“Certainly; I’ll see about that for you immediately.”
The young man took his departure with a much higher opinion of
the Carter sisters than he had held twenty-four hours before. As for
the Carter sisters: they felt so grateful to him for his kindness to
their parents and to them that their opinion of him was perforce
good. Helen still sniffed disdainfully when his name was mentioned,
but she could not forget the expression of approval in his blue eyes
when he found that the camping scheme was hers.
 CHAPTER VIII.
GWEN.

Bill Tinsley was as keen on the camp building plan as Lewis

Somerville had said he would be.
“Sleeping on my arms,” was his telegram in answer to the letter he
got from Lewis, a letter with R. S. V. P. P. D. Q. plainly marked on the
envelope.
“Good old Bill! I almost knew he would tumble at the chance. All of
you will like Bill, I know.”
“What does he mean by sleeping on his arms?” asked Lucy. “I
should think it would make him awfully stiff.”
“Oh, that means ready to go at a moment’s notice. I bet his kit is
packed now.”
Mr. Lane and Dick had worked hard on the plans for the camp and
had them ready when the would-be builder called for them. Then Mr.
Lane and Lewis made a flying trip to Greendale to look into the lay
of the land and to decide on a site for the dining pavilion. It was a
spot about one hundred yards from the log cabin, built by the
aforesaid sick Englishman, that seemed to them to be intended for
just their purpose. It was a hollowed out place in the mountain side,
not far from the summit, and four great pine trees formed an almost
perfect rectangle of forty by twenty-five feet. In the centre stood a
noble tulip poplar.
“Pity to sacrifice him,” said Bill Tinsley, whom they had picked up at
Charlottesville on their way to Greendale. Bill was a youth of few
words but of frequent mirth expressed in uncontrollable fits of
laughter that nothing could stop, not even being shipped from West
Point. It was this very laugh that had betrayed the hazers. If Bill had
only been able to hold in that guffaw of his they would never have
been caught. His laugh was unmistakable and through it the whole
crowd of wrongdoers was nabbed, poor Lewis along with them
although he was innocent.
“No more to blame for laughing than a lightning bug for shining,” he
had declared to Lewis; “but I wish I had died before I got you into
this, old fellow.”
“Well, it can’t be helped, but I bet you will be laughing on the other
side of your face before you know it.”
The youths had remained fast friends and now that this chance had
come for them to be of service and to use the surplus energy that
was stored up in their splendidly developed muscles, they were
happy at the prospect of being together again.
Mr. Lane took careful measurements and adapted his plans so as to
utilize the four trees as natural posts and the great tulip poplar as a
support for the roof. Under the pavilion the space was to be made
into kitchen and store room. Some little excavating would be
necessary for this as measurements showed that one edge of the
pavilion would rest almost on the mountain side while the other
stood ten feet from the ground.
“I am trying to spare you fellows all the excavating possible, as that
is the tedious and uninteresting part of building,” explained Mr. Lane.
“Oh, we can shovel that little pile of dirt away in no time,” declared
Lewis, feeling his muscles twitch with joy at the prospect of
removing mountains. Mr. Lane smiled, knowing full well that it was
at least no mole hill they were to tackle.
Within a week after Mr. and Mrs. Carter had sailed on their health-
seeking voyage, Lewis and his chum were en route for Greendale, all
of the lumber for their undertaking ordered and their tools sent on
ahead by freight. Bill had gone to Richmond, ostensibly to consult a
dentist, but in reality to see the Carter girls, who had aroused in him
a great curiosity.
“They must be some girls,” had been his laconic remark.
“So they are, the very best fun you ever saw,” Lewis had assured
him. “They took this thing of waking up and finding themselves poor
a great deal better than you and I did waking up and finding
ourselves nothing but civilians when we had expected to be major
generals, at least.”
The Carter girls had one and all liked Bill, when Lewis took him to
call on them the evening of his arrival in Richmond.
“There is something so frank and open in his countenance,” said
Helen.
“His mouth!” drawled Nan. “Did you ever see or hear such a laugh?”
“He is a great deal nicer than your old Dr. Wright, who looks as
though it would take an operation on his risibles to get a laugh out
of him.”
Bill had offered the services of a battered Ford car he had in
Charlottesville as pack mule for the camp and it was joyfully
accepted. He and Lewis stopped in Charlottesville on their way to
Greendale and got the tried old car, making the last leg of their trip
in it.
They had decided to sleep in the Englishman’s cabin, as the little log
house that went with the property was always called, but Miss
Somerville had made them promise to burn sulphur candles before
they went in and was deeply grieved because her beloved nephew
refused to carry with him a quart bottle of crude carbolic acid that
she felt was necessary to ward off germs.
It was late in the afternoon as the faithful Ford chugged its way up
the mountain road to the site of the proposed camp. The boys had
stopped at the station at Greendale and taken in all the tools they
could stow away, determined to begin work at excavating the first
thing in the morning.
“Let’s lay out the ground this afternoon,” proposed Lewis.
“There’s nothing to lay out since the four pine trees mark the
corners. I, for one, am going to lay out myself and rest and try to
decide which one of your cousins is the most beautiful.”
“Douglas, of course! The others can’t hold a candle to her, although
Helen is some looker and Nan has certainly got something about her
that makes a fellow kind of blink. And that Lucy is going to grow up
to her long legs some day and maybe step ahead of all of them.”
“Well, I’m mighty glad you thought about giving me this job of
working for such nice gals.” These young men always spoke of
themselves as being in the employ of the Carter girls, and all the
time they were building the camp they religiously kept themselves to
certain hours as though any laxity would be cheating their bosses.
Besides, the regular habits that two years at West Point had drilled
into them would have been difficult to break.
“I don’t know how to loaf,” complained Lewis. “That’s the dickens of
it.”
“Me, neither!”
“They say the Government makes machines of its men.”
“True! I am a perpetual motion machine.”
They were busily engaged on their first morning in the mountains,
plying pick and shovel. They bent their brave young shoulders to the
task with evident enjoyment in the work. When they did straighten
up to get the kinks out of their backs, they looked out across a
wonderful country which they fully appreciated as being wonderful,
but raving about landscapes and Nature was not in their line and
they would quickly bend again to the task in a somewhat
shamefaced way.
The orchards of Albemarle County in Virginia are noted and the
green of an apple tree in May is something no one need be ashamed
to admire openly, but all these boys would say on the subject was:
“Good apple year, I hope.”
“Yep! Albemarle pippins are sho’ good eats.”
Moving mountains was not quite so easy as they had expected it to
be. They remembered what Mr. Lane had said about excavating
when the sun showed it to be high noon and after five hours’ steady
work they had made but little impression on the pile they were to
dig away.
“Gee, we make no impression at all!” said Lewis. “I verily believe
little Bobby Carter could have done as much as we have if he had
been turned loose to play mud pies here.”
“Well, let’s stop and eat. I haven’t laughed for an hour,” and Bill gave
out one of his guffaws that echoed from peak to peak and started
two rabbits out of the bushes and actually dislodged a great stone
that went rolling down the side of the mountain into an abyss below.
At least, his laugh seemed to be the cause but Bill declared it was
somebody or something, and to be sure a little mountain boy came
from behind a boulder, grinning from ear to ear.
“What be you uns a-doin’?”
“Crocheting a shawl for Aunty,” said Lewis solemnly.
“Well, we uns is got a mule an’ a scoop that could make a shawl fer
Aunty quicker’n you uns.” This brought forth another mighty peal
from Bill and another stone rolled down the mountain side.
“Good for you, son!” exclaimed Lewis. “Suppose you fetch the mule
here this afternoon and we’ll have a sewing bee. What do you say,
Bill? Do you believe we would ever in the world get this dirt moved?”
“Doubt it.”
“Do you uns want we uns to drive the critter? We uns mostly goes
along ’thout no axtra chawge.”
“Sure we want you. What do you charge for the mule and driver?”
“Wal, time was when Josephus brought as much as fifty cents a day,
but he ain’t to say so spry as onct, an’ now we uns will be satisfied
to git thirty cents, with a feedin’ of oats.”
“Oats! Who has oats? Not I. The only critter we have eats gasoline. I
tell you, son, you feed Josephus yourself and we will feed you and
pay you fifty cents a day for your animal. I don’t believe a mule
could work for thirty cents and keep his self-respect.”
“Wal, Josephus an’ we uns don’t want no money what we uns don’
arn,” and the little mountain boy flushed a dark red under his
sunburned, freckled face.
He was a very ragged youngster of about twelve. His clothes
smacked of the soil to such an extent that you could never have told
what was their original color. What sleeves there were left in his shirt
certainly must once have been blue, but the body of that garment
showed spots of candy pink calico, the kind you are sure to find on
the shelves of any country store. His trousers, held up by twine,
crossed over his wiry shoulders, were corduroy. They had originally
been the color of the earth and time and weather had but deepened
their tone. His eyes shone out very clear and blue in contrast to the
general dinginess of his attire. His was certainly a very likable face
and the young men were very much attracted to the boy, first
because of his ready wit, shown from his first words, and then
because of his quick resentment at the possibility of any one’s giving
him or his mule money they had not earned.
“Of course, you are going to earn it,” reassured Lewis. “Now you go
home and get your mule and as soon as we can cook some dinner
for ourselves and satisfy our inner cravings, we will all get to work.
You and Josephus can dig and Bill and I will begin to build.”
“Please, sir, wouldn’t you uns like Gwen to cook for you uns and
wash the platters an’ sich? She is a great han’ at fixin’s.”
“Gwen! Who is Gwen?”
Another stone slipped from behind the boulder from which the boy
had emerged and then a young girl came timidly forth.
“I am Gwen,” she said simply.
She was a girl of about fourteen, very slim and straight, with wide
grey eyes that looked very frankly into those of the young men,
although you felt a timidity in spite of her directness. Her scant blue
dress was clean and whole and her brown hair was parted and
braided in two long plaits, showing much care and brushing.
“Oh, how do you do, Miss Gwen? I am Lewis Somerville and this is
my friend and fellow laborer, Mr. William Tinsley.”
The girl made a little old-fashioned courtesy with a quaint grace that
charmed the laborers.
“Do you want me to cook and clean for you?”
“Of course we do! What can you cook?”
“I have learned to cook some very good dishes at the Mountain
Mission School. Maybe you would not like them, though.”
“Of course we would like them! When can you start?”
“When you wish!”
“Well, I wish now,” put in Bill. “I never tasted meaner coffee than
you made last night except what I made myself this morning, and as
for your method of broiling bacon—rotten—rotten!”
The girl followed Lewis to the Englishman’s cabin and after being
shown the provisions, she said she thought she could manage to get
dinner without his assistance. He showed her how to light the hard
alcohol stove which was part of their outfit and then gave her carte
blanche with the canned goods and groceries.
Gwen shook her head in disapproval at sight of the pile of dirty
dishes left from breakfast. It would take more than West Point
training to make men wash dishes as soon as a meal is over. Lewis
and Bill had a method of their own and never washed a plate until
both sides had been eaten from, and not then until they were
needed immediately. Supper had been eaten from the top side;
breakfast, from the bottom. There were still some clean plates in the
hamper, so why wash those yet?
In an incredibly short time Gwen called the young men to dinner.
They lay stretched at their ease on a grassy slope near the cabin,
quite pleased with themselves and their luck in having found a mule
to move the dirt and a girl to cook their food all in one morning.
“What do you make of her?” asked Lewis. “She doesn’t talk or walk
like a mountain girl.”
“Mission School!” commented Bill, looking at the slim, erect back of
the girl as she went up the hill to the spring. She had refused their
offer of help and said she wanted to get the water herself.
“I don’t believe Mission School would have her walking that way.
Don’t you fancy the boy goes to school, too? Look how he slouches.”
Just then the boy, whose name was Josh, appeared, leading
Josephus. Surely there never was such a specimen of horse flesh as
that mule. Maud in the comic supplement was beautiful compared to
him. His legs had great lumps on them and he was forced to walk
with his feet quite far apart to keep from interfering. He was sway
backed and spavined and blind in one eye, but there was a kindly
expression in his remaining eye that reassured one. One fore leg
was shorter than the other, which gave him a leaning, tumbling look
that seemed to threaten to upset his equilibrium at every step.
“Well, God bless my soul!” exclaimed Lewis. “Is that Josephus?”
“Yes, sir! He ain’t so measly as he looks. He kin do a sight of scrapin’
an’ dumpin’,” and the boy reached an affectionate arm up around the
old animal’s neck. Josephus responded by snorting in his master’s
ear. “We uns done brought the implee-ment to make Aunty’s shawl,”
pointing to a rusty old road shovel that Josephus had hitched to him.
“Good! as soon as Miss Gwen feeds us, we will see what he can do
in the way of fancy work.”
Gwen was a born cook and the domestic science that had been so
ably taught in the Mission School had developed her talent
wonderfully. She had turned up two empty boxes and smoothed
some wrapping paper over them. A bunch of mountain laurel
glorified an old soup can and made a beautiful centre piece. The
coffee was hot and clear and strong; the hoecake brown and crisp
on the outside and soft and creamy within, just as a hoecake should
be; the bacon vied with the hoecake in crispness, with no pieces
limp and none burned. She had opened a can of baked beans and
another of spaghetti, carefully following the directions on the cans as
how to serve the contents.
“Well, don’t this beat all?” said Bill as he sank down by the
improvised table.
“But you must come and eat with us, you and Josh,” insisted Lewis.
“Oh, no, the table isn’t big enough, and, besides, I must go on
baking hoecakes.”
“Well, Josh, you come, anyhow.”
“No, sir, thanky! We uns will wait for Gwen. We uns ain’t fitten to sit
down with the likes of you uns, all dirty with we uns’ meat a-stickin’
through the rags.”
“Nonsense!” exclaimed Lewis, “if you are fit to sit with Miss Gwen,
you are fit to sit with us. We don’t mind your meat sticking through,
and as for being dirty—why don’t you wash?”
Gwen gave a laugh of delight. “There now, Josh, what do I tell you
all the time? Rags don’t make a bit of difference if you are just
clean.”
“Wal, we uns’ll eat with Josephus if we uns has to wash. This ain’t
no time of the week for washin’.” But while the young men were
enjoying the very appetizing food, Josh did sneak off to the stream
and came back with his face and hands several shades fairer.
That afternoon was a busy one for all on that mountain side. Gwen
gave the cabin a thorough cleaning, washed all the dishes and put
papers on the shelves that were already in the cabin, unpacked the
provisions and placed them with the dishes neatly on the shelves
and in the old cupboard that still stood in the corner, left there by
the Englishman. She went back to her home for yeast and made up
a sponge, planning to have hot rolls for breakfast.
Josephus showed the mettle of his pasture by scraping and dumping
about three times as much dirt in an hour as the two West Pointers
had been able to move in a whole morning’s work. Josh did very
spirited driving, pretending all the time that his steed had to be
handled very carefully or he would run away, road-shovel and all.
“How did your mule happen to have one leg shorter than the other?”
teased Lewis.
“Wal, that’s a mounting leg. He got that walkin’ round the mounting.
All critters in the mountings is built that a way. Ain’t you an’ Mr. Bill
there a-planning that there buildin’ after we unses’ mule, with short
legs up the hill an’ long legs down?”
Bill almost fell out of the poplar tree where he had climbed to saw
off limbs for twenty feet or more. He laughed so loud and long at
the way Josh had gotten ahead of his friend in repartee that Gwen
came out of the cabin to see what was the matter. Bill’s laugh was a
very disconcerting thing until you got used to him.
That first day showed much accomplished. The excavating was half
done; the post holes were dug and logs cut and trimmed and
planted ready for the beams. A load of lumber arrived before
sundown and that meant no delay in the to-morrow’s work.
Six o’clock found them very tired and hungry but Gwen had supper
all ready for them, a great dish of scrambled eggs and flannel cakes.
She had brought from home a pitcher of milk that stayed delightfully
cool in the mountain spring.
“There’ll be buttermilk to-morrow,” she said, blushing with pleasure
at the praise the young men bestowed on her culinary efforts.
“Splendid and more splendid!” exclaimed Lewis. “And will you and
your brother just come every day and take care of us?”
“You mean Josh? He is not my brother.”
“Oh, cousin, then?”
“No, he is no relation to me. I live with his mother, though, Aunt
Mandy. I have lived with her for five years. I am very fond of Josh,
but if he were my brother, I’d simply make him take baths.”
“Can’t you anyhow as it is?”
“No,” sadly. “He thinks it is foolishness. Teacher has told him time
and time again and even sent him home, five miles across the
mountains, but he won’t wash for her or for me. Aunt Mandy thinks
it is foolishness, too, but she makes him bathe oftener than he used
to in summer.”
“Boys will be boys and it is hard to make them anything else. I
remember the time well when bathing was something that I thought
grown-ups wished on me just for spite, and now a cold shower every
morning is as necessary to my happiness as dirt used to be when I
was a kid. Bill and I are going to pipe from the spring up there and
concoct a shower somehow under the pavilion.”
“That will be glorious. Father always meant to use that spring and
get a shower at the cabin.”
“Your father!”
“Yes, my father was the man who built the Englishman’s cabin. He
died five years ago.”
“Gee whilikins! Now I understand!”
 CHAPTER IX.
SOME LETTERS.

From Lewis Somerville to Douglas Carter.

 Greendale, Va., May —, 19—.
Dear Douglas:
Bill and I are coming on finely. Already the noble palace is rearing its head. We’ve
got the posts planted and the uprights and rafters in place and will begin on the
roof to-morrow. Bill is a perfect glutton for work. Speaking of gluttons—we’ve got
a cook. A perfect gem of a cook who has been born and bred at Lonesomehurst
and doesn’t mind the country. We are going to hang on to her like grim Death to a
dead nigger.
The funny thing about her is she is a real lady. I spotted it from the beginning
from a certain way she had with her. She is only fourteen and her father, who, by
the way, was the Englishman who built this cabin and used to own the side of the
mountain, has been dead five years; but before he died this child evidently learned
to eat with a fork and to take a daily bath and to keep her hair smooth. She
handles the King’s English with the same respect and grace she does a fork, and
her speech is very marked because of the contrast between it and the we uns and
you uns and you allses of the ordinary mountaineer. She has lived ever since her
father’s death with Aunt Mandy, a regular old mountain character who looks as
though she might have stepped out of one of John Fox’s books. She is the same
back and front, concave both ways—slightly more convex in the back than the
front. She stands a good six feet in her stocking feet (although I doubt her ever
having on a pair). I have never seen her without a snuff stick in her mouth except
once and then she had a corn-cob pipe. She is as sharp as a tack and woe be to
the one who engages her in a contest of wit.
Josh is her son and Josephus her mule. Mr. Mandy is dead, and Aunt Mandy and
Josh, who is twelve, I think, have scratched a living out of their “clarin’” with the
help of Josephus, who is as much of a character as Aunt Mandy and Josh.
When the Englishman died, Aunt Mandy took the little orphan Gwendolin to her
house, never dreaming that there was anything for her to do but take her. She has
been as good as gold to the girl and shared her corn pone and drippings with a
heart of charity. Gwen is surely making up to her now for all her kindness as she
does all the housework for her foster mother and all kinds of sewing and knitting,
which she sells to the summer boarders down at the hotel at Greendale. I am
crazy to engage Gwen and Josh for you girls but am afraid of butting in on your
arrangements.
Josh is delicious. He did not learn to wash from an English father nor to handle a
fork, nor yet to speak the King’s English—but good old Aunt Mandy has endowed
him plentifully with a keen wit and as good and kind a heart as she herself has.
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