Mona now rose to draw closer. Mr. Elfenbein extended his hands, as if to a dancing partner. He sized her up from head to toe, like an auctioneer. Then he said: And what did you play in last, my rose of Sharon?
The Green Cockatoo, she replied (Tic-tac-toe.)
And before that?
The Goat Song, Liliom ... Saint Joan.
Stop! He put up his hand. The Dybbuk is better suited to your temperament. More gynecological. Now what was that play of Sudermann's? No matter. Ah yes ... Magda. You're a Magda, not a Monna Vanna. I ask you, how would I look in The God of Vengeance? Am I a Scbildkraut or a Ben Ami? Give me Siberia to play, not The servant in the House! He chucked her under the chin. You remind me a little of Elissa Landi. Yes, with a touch of Nazimova perhaps. If you had more weight, you could be another Modjeska. Hedda Gabler, that's for you. My favorite is The Wild Duck. After that The Playboy of the Western World. But not in Yiddish, God forbid!
The theatre was his pet subject evidently. He had been, an actor years ago, first in Rummeldumvitza or some hole like that, then at the Thalia on the Bowery. It was there he met Ben Ami. And somewhere else Blanche Yurka. He had also known Vesta Tilly, odd thing. And David Warfield. He thought Androcles and the Lion was a gem, but didn't care much for Shaw's other plays. He was very fond of Ben Jonson and Marlowe, and of Hasenclever and von Hoffmansthal.
Beautiful women rarely make good actresses, he was saying. There should always be a defect of some kind—a longish nose or the eyes a little mis-focused. The best is to have an unusual voice. People always remember the voice. Pauline Lord's, for example. He turned to Mona. You have a good voice too. It has brown sugar in it and cloves and nutmeg. The worst is the American voice—no soul in it. Jacob Ben Ami had a marvelous voice ... like good soup ... never turned rancid. But he dragged it around like a tortoise. A woman should cultivate the voice above everything. She should also think more, about what the play means ... not about her exquisite postillion ... I mean posterior. Jewish actresses have too much flesh usually; when they walk across the stage they shake like jelly. But they have sorrow in their voices.'.. Sorge. They don't have to imagine that a devil is pulling a breast off with hot pincers. Yes, sin and sorrow are the best ingredients. And a bit of phantasmus. Like in Webster or Marlowe. A shoemaker who talks to the Devil every time he goes to the water closet. Or falls in love with a beanstalk, as in Moldavia. The Irish plays are full of lunatics and drunkards, and the nonsense they talk is holy nonsense. The Irish are poets always, especially when they know nothing. They have been tortured too, maybe not as much as the Jews, but enough. No one likes to eat potatoes three times a day or use a pitchfork for a toothpick. Great actors, the Irish. Born chimpanzees. The British are too refined, too mentalized. A masculine race, but castrated...
A commotion was going on at the door. It was Sid Essen returning from his walk with a couple of mangy looking cats he had rescued. His wife was trying to shoo them out.
Elfenbein! he shouted, waving his cap. Greetings! How did you get here?
How should I get here? By my two feet, no? He took a step forward. Let me smell your breath! Go way, go way! When have you seen me drunk? When you are too happy—or not so happy. A great pal, Elfenbein, said Reb, slinging an arm around his shoulder affectionately. The Yiddish King Lear, that's what he is ... What's the matter, the glasses are empty.
Like your mind, said Elfenbein. Drink of the spirit. Like Moses. From the rock gushes water, from the bottle only foolishness. Shame on you, son of Zweifel, to be so thirsty.
The conversation became scattered. Mrs. Essen had got rid of the cats, cleaned up the mess they had made in the hallway, and was once again smoothing her hair back from her brow. A lady, every inch of her. No rancor, no recriminations. Gelid, in that super-refined, ethical-culturish way. She took a seat by the window, hoping no doubt that the conversation would take a more rational turn. She was fond of Mr. Elfenbein, but he distressed her with his Old World talk, his crazy grimaces, his stale jokes.
The Yiddish King Lear was now beyond all bridling. He had launched into a lengthy monologue on the Zend Avestas, with occasional sideswipes at the Book of Etiquette, Jewish presumably, though from the references he made to it it might as well have been Chinese. He had just finished saying that, according to Zoroaster, man had been chosen to continue the work of creation. Then he added: Man is nothing unless he is a collaborator.
God is not kept alive by prayers and injections. The Jew has forgotten all this—and the Gentile is a spiritual cripple.
A confused discussion followed these statements, much to Elfenbein's amusement. In the midst of it he began singing at the top of his lungs—Rumeinie, Rumeinie, Rumeinie ... a mameligele ... a pastramele ... a karnatsele ... un a gleizele wine, Aha!
You see, he said, when the hubbub had subsided, even in a liberal household it's dangerous to introduce ideas. Time was when such talk was music to one's ears. The Rabbi would take a hair and with a knife like a razor he would split it into a thousand hairs. Nobody had to agree with him; it was an exercise. It sharpened the mind and made us forget the terror. If the music played you needed no partner; you danced with Zov, Toft, Giml. Now when we argue we put bandages over our eyes. We go to see Tomashevsky and we weep like pigs. We don't know any more who is Pechorin or Aksakov. If on the stage a Jew visits a bordel—perhaps he lost his way!—every one blushes for the author. But a good Jew can sit in the slaughter-house and think only of Jehovah. Once in Bucuresti I saw a holy man finish a bottle of vodka all by himself, and then he talked for three hours without stopping. He talked of Satan. He made him so repulsive that I could smell him. When I left the cafe everything looked Satanic to me. I had to go to a public house, excuse me, to get rid of the sulphur. It glowed like a furnace in there; the women looked like pink angels. Even the Madame, who was really a vulture. Such a time I had that night! All because the Tzaddik had taken too much vodka.
Yes, it's good to sin once in a while, but not to make a pig of yourself. Sin with eyes open. Drown yourself in the pleasures of the flesh, but hang on by a hair. The Bible is full of patriarchs who indulged the flesh but never lost sight of the one God. Our forefathers were men of spirit, but they had meat on their bones. One could take a concubine and still have respect for one's wife. After all, it was at the door of the temple that the harlot learned her trade. Yes, sin was real then, and Satan too. Now we have ethics, and our children become garment manufacturers, gangsters, concert performers. Soon they will be making trapeze artists of them and hockey players...
Yes, said Reb from the depths of his arm-chair, now we are less than nothing. Once we had pride...
Elfenbein cut in. Now we have the Jew who talks like the Gentile, who says nothing matters but success. The Jew who sends his boy to a military academy so that he can learn how to kill his fellow Jew. The daughter he sends to Hollywood, to make a name for herself, as a Hungarian or Roumanian by showing her nakedness. Instead of great rabbis we have heavy-weight prize-fighters. We even have homosexuals now, weh is mir. Soon we will have Jewish Cossacks.
Like a refrain, Reb sighed: The God of Abraham is no more.
Let them show their nakedness, said Elfenbein, but not pretend that they are heathen. Let them remember their fathers who were peddlers and scholars and who fell like chaff under the heels of the hooligans.
On and on he went, leaping from subject to subject like a chamois in thin air. Names like Mordecai and Ahasuerus dropped from his lips, together with Lady Windermere's Fan and Sodom and Gomorrah. In one breath he expatiated on The Shoemaker's Holiday and the lost tribes of Israel. And always, like a summer complaint, he came back to the sickness of the Gentiles, which he likened unto eine Arschkrankheit. Egypt all over again, but without grandeur, without miracles. And this sickness was now in the brain. Maggots and poppy seed. Even the Jews were looking forward to the day of resurrection. For them, he said, it would be like war without dum dum bullets.