Yekl

CHAPTER I.
JAKE AND YEKL.

The operatives of the cloak-shop in which Jake was employed had been idle allthe morning. It was after twelve o’clock and the “boss” hadnot yet returned from Broadway, whither he had betaken himself two or threehours before in quest of work. The little sweltering assemblage—for itwas an oppressive day in midsummer—beguiled their suspense variously. Arabbinical-looking man of thirty, who sat with the back of his chair tiltedagainst his sewing machine, was intent upon an English newspaper. Every littlewhile he would remove it from his eyes—showing a dyspeptic face fringedwith a thin growth of dark beard—to consult the cumbrous dictionary onhis knees. Two young lads, one seated on the frame of the next machine and theother standing, were boasting to one another of their respective intimacieswith the leading actors of the Jewish stage. The board of a third machine, in acorner of the same wall, supported an open copy of a socialist magazine inYiddish, over which a cadaverous young man absorbedly swayed to and fro droningin the Talmudical intonation. A middle-aged operative, with huge red sidewhiskers, who was perched on the presser’s table in the corner opposite,was mending his own coat. While the thick-set presser and all the three womenof the shop, occupying the three machines ranged against an adjoining wall,formed an attentive audience to an impromptu lecture upon the comparativemerits of Boston and New York by Jake.

He had been speaking for some time. He stood in the middle of the overcrowdedstuffy room with his long but well-shaped legs wide apart, his bulky round headaslant, and one of his bared mighty arms akimbo. He spoke in Boston Yiddish,that is to say, in Yiddish more copiously spiced with mutilated English than isthe language of the metropolitan Ghetto in which our story lies. He had a deepand rather harsh voice, and his r’s could do credit to the thickest Irishbrogue.

“When I was in Boston,” he went on, with a contemptuous mienintended for the American metropolis, “I knew a feller,[1]<

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