FICTION.
POTASH AND PERLMUTTER.*
Ma. MoNTAcruet GLASS had already made his mark as a writer of novels and short stories in the leading American magazines before he achieved resounding success with the delightful play which has recently been transplanted to the London boards. Indeed, Potash and Perlmutter and the com- panion volume, Abe and Motorises, antedated the comedy which bears the name of the former by two or three years. But it is as well to let readers know that the book is quite distinct from the play. Abe and Mawruss are, of course, the principal characters, and the redoubtable attorney with a partiality for Latin tags also appears ; but Mawruss is not a bachelor, the love interest is eliminated, there are no domestic scenes, and the romance of the Russian clerk is absent. So those who have seen the play will discover fresh entertain- ment in the book, while those who have not yet enjoyed that good fortune will find in the printed page an excellent prepara- tion for, and incentive to, a visit to the Queen's Theatre. But in whatever order they are taken, book and play alike have the great merit of novelty. Nothing quite like them has been seen or read in England before. Playwrights and novelists have given us endless portraits and caricatures of Jews, mostly unpleasing, sometimes tragic. It is only of recent years that any attempt has been made to bring home to the public at large the possibilities for comedy, conscious or unconscious, which are to be found in the life of the modern Jew. One does not think of the Jew as a humorist, in spite of Saphir and Heine; but at the present day some of the cleverest comedians on the variety stage are Jews who appear in Jewish character sketches. On the stage proper, however, we have had no genuine modern Jewish comedy before Potash and Perlmutter. We are not speaking of Yiddish plays, but plays written fora general audience, and it has been reserved for Mr. Montague Glass to achieve complete success with the least possible concession to sentiment or ignorance. We use the word "ignorance " advisedly, for an English audience is ez hypothesi unfamiliar with the minute details of a highly specialized trade carried on in New York by Jews who talk a curious lingo of American coloured by Yiddish idiom, and find relaxation in playing " auction pinochle." But Mr. Montague Glass triumphs over all these obstacles. Mr. Zangwill has given us mordant, ironic, and tragic sketches of the Jew in transition : Mr. Glass is concerned with the humorous aspects of that type as conditioned by the commercial system of a great American city. He shows us the Jew as "bustler,v yet at every turn governed or affected by the abiding characteristics of the race. The chief interest of the play is in the conflict between the acquisitive instinct and generous domestic impulses. In the book this motive is relegated to the background. We are introduced, in a series of episodes rich in ludicrous surprises, to the, romance of the "cloak-and-suit " trade as illustrated by the kaleidoscopic career of Potash and Perlmutter, whole- sale manufacturers of fashionable garments. From the financial and commercial point of view, the story is a wonder- ful commentary on the credit system, the elasticity of contracts • Potash and Perlmutter. By Montagne Oleo. Undo', 'Hodder and 5toughtoa. [ea] as drawn up by such legal virtuosi as Mr. Heldman, and the devices by which customers are secured or lured from other firms. But it is equally interesting as a psychological study of the mingled enterprise and caution, astuteness and rashness, of the Semitic temperament. The Jew is a great.,money- getter, but as portrayed in these pages he is also a gambler and an artist. Mr. Glass spares his race no more than Mr. Zangwill. He mentions, for example, of one of his characters, Mr. Philip Noblestone, formerly Pesach Edelstein, that in his scheme of ethics " to multiply a fact by two was to speak the truth unadorned." The "low lives "—i.e., low-down fellows—in these pages are all Jews. But with all his candour and detachment, Mr. Glass is eminently a genial satirist, and the moral of the story is, after all, indistinguishable from that contained in the old maxim about the cobbler sticking to his last. So long as Abe and Mawruss confined their activities to the " cloak-and-suit " trade they were on comparatively safe ground. The competition was of a cut-throat kind, it is true, but they knew the business from A to Z. It was another matter altogether when they took to dabbling in real estate, or investing in Interstate Copper, or buying " oitermobiles." Here their credulity was infra-infantile, and led invariably to fiascos. In these excursions there was nothing to choose between them on the score of folly, but it is most amusing to note how their mutual relations altered as the scheme developed. If Abe yielded reluctantly to the importunity of Mawruss, be was sure in the long ran to become the keener of the two, and vice-versd.
The book lends itself to endless quotation, but we must content ourselves with two or three typical extracts.
On the wearing of diamonds by business men :—
" 'Oh, Hymie ain't no crook, Abe,' Morris admitted, 'but I ain't got no use for a feller wearing diamonds. Diamonds looks good on women, Abe, and maybe also on a hotel-clerk or a feller what runs a restaurant, Abe, but a business man ain't got no right wearing diamonds.'—' Of course, Mawruss, people's got their likes and dislikes,' Abe said ; • but all the same I seen it many a decent, respectable feller with a good business, what wants a little accommodation at his bank. But he gets turned down just because he goes around looking like a slob ; while a feller what can't pay his own laundry bill, Mawruss, has no trouble getting a thousand dollars because the second vice-president is buffaloed already by a stovepipe bat, a Prince Albert coat and a four-carat stone with a flaw in it.'"
On wives' revelations
.‘" Wives' relations is nix, Mawruss,' Abs replied. got enough with wives' relations. When me and my Rosie gets married her mother was old man Smolinski's a widow. He made an honest failure of it in the customer peddler business in eighteen eighty- live, and the lodge money was pretty near gone when I got into' the family. Then my wife's mother gives my wife's brother, &holier Smolinski, ten dollars to go out and buy some schnapps for the wedding, and that's the last we see of him, Mawruss. But Rosie and me gets married, anyhow, and takes the old lady to live with us, and the first thing you know, Mawruss, she gets sick on us and died, with a professor and two trained nurses at my. expense, and that's the way it goes, Mawruss.'He roes to his feet and helped himself to a cigar from the L to N first and second credit customers' box. 'No, Mawruss; he concluded, if you can't sell a man goods on their merits, Mawruss, you'll never get him to take them because your wife is related by marriage to his wife. Ain't it ? We got a good line, Mawruss, and we stand a show to. sell our goods without no theayters nor dinners nor nothing."
On dealing with importunate intruders :—
"" Mr. Potash,' Jake said, ' them two ladies in the show-room wants to know if you would maybe give that party they was talking about a recommendation to the President of the Kosciusko Bank ? '—' Tell 'em,' Abe said, give 'em a recommendation to a policeman if they don't get right out of here. The only way what a feller should deal with a nervy proposition like that, Mawruss, is to squash it in the bud.' " In Morris Rosenfeld's Yiddish Songs from the Ghetto there is a touching poem headed " Sephirah," which begins :— "Meseems I should like to ask my Muse to laugh a little, but it is all in vain, for, to begin with, we now have Sephirah, and, besides, tell me how can a Jew laugh at all ? Oh, God, you laugh? What a pitiful laughter l Is there anything real in the pleasures of a Jew P Is the laughter of a Jew at all real ? No, it is but a mixture of sighing and groaning l" Mr. Montague Glass has shown that in the New World, et any rate, the ex-Ghetto Jew can not merely latigh, but make others laugh with as well as at him.
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