A CHAPTER IN CHILDREN'S LIBRARIES (continued 8)

It cannot be far amiss to put into this paper a picturesque Sicilian woman who has grown old in years but is still a child in spirit. She loves a fairy story as much as she did sixty years ago, and listens with the same breathless credulity. One night about twilight as I sat on the front steps with her and several little Italian children, listening to her tales of the old home country, there came a silence in our little group. Suddenly Angel Licavoli asked, "Teacher, what is God like?" With a feeling that our friend of riper experience could give us more satisfaction, I repeated the question to her. Her sweet old face surrounded by the white curls was a study in simple faith as she assured us, "Maybe She is like the holy pictures."

When I approach the subject of the Russian Jew, I do it with a great humbleness and fear lest I do not do it justice. So much have they had to overcome, and such tenacity and perseverance have they shown in overcoming it! Straight from the Pales of Kief, Ketchinoff, and Odessa they come to settle in the nearest to a pale we have to offer. Great has been their poverty; a long-standing terror with them, and along with it in many cases, persecution, starvation, and social ostracism. Poverty in all but spirit and mind. The great leveler to them is education, and it is no uncommon thing for the Jewish father to sacrifice himself in order to better his son, to take upon himself that greatest of sacrifices, daily grind and deprivation. Not only this generation, but the one before and the one before that. They cannot keep up such a white-hot search for learning without sooner or later finding out what is wisdom—real wisdom. Stripped of all but bare necessities, they come to possess a sense of value that is remarkably true. We come into contact then with the offspring of such conditions, simple and direct in manner and having a passionate impersonal curiosity. Always asking, searching for the real things, eager for that which will render them impervious to their sordid surroundings, they have thrown aside all superfluous mannerisms and get easily to the heart of things. Accustomed to the greatest repression, and exclusion from all schools and institutions of the sort, the free access to so many books is an endless joy to them. They browse among the shelves lovingly, and instinctively read the best we have to offer. Tales from the ancient Hebrews, history, travel —these are the books they take. But what they read most gladly is biography. It is just as difficult to find a life of Lincoln on the shelves as it is to find an Altsheler—and of comparisons is that not the strongest? Heroes of all sorts attract the Jewish child, heroes in battles, statesmen and leaders in adventure, conquest, business. If a hero is also a martyr, their delight knows no bounds.

We know now that we need be surprised at nothing; extreme cases have come at Crunden to be the average, if I may be permitted to be paradoxical. We were interested but not surprised when Sophie Polopinsk, a little girl but a short time from Russia, wheeled up the truck, climbed with great difficulty upon it and promptly lost herself in a volume of Tolstoi's "Resurrection," a volume almost as large as the small person herself, and formidable with its Russian characters. In telling you of Sol Flotkin I may be giving you the history of a dozen or so small Russian Jews who have come to Crunden. At the age of ten, Sol had read all of Gorki, Tolstoi, Turgenev and Dostoievski in the original and then devoured Hugo and Dumas in the language of his adoption. The library with Sol became an obsession. He was there waiting for the doors to open in the morning, and at nine o'clock at night we would find him on the adult side, probably behind the radiator, lost to us, but almost feverishly alive in his world of imagination that some great man had made so real for him. It was to Crunden branch that the truant officer came when the school authorities reported him absent from his place. It was there, too, his father came, imploring, "Could we not refuse Sol entrance?" The Door man demanded, did we know that at twelve and one o'clock at night he was often compelled to go out and find the boy, only to discover him crouched under the street light with a copy of "War and peace" lovingly upon his young knees? And there are many others like Sol. Is it not inspiring to the librarian to work with children who must be coaxed, not to read good books, but to desist from reading them?

Among the Jewish people the word "radical" is in high favor —it is the open sesame to their sympathy. For the ordinary layman, radicalism, for some unexplained reason, is associated with the words Socialism, Anarchism, etc. The deep dyed conservative, to whom comes the picture of flaunting red at the mention of the word, would be surprised to learn in what simple cases it is often used. We have, for instance, an organization meeting once a week under the head of the "Radical Jewish School." When the secretary came to us for the first time we asked him what new theory they intended to work out. Their radical departure from custom consisted only in teaching to the children a working Yiddish in order that the Jewish mother might understand her amazingly American child, in order to lessen the tragedy of misunderstanding which looms large in a family of this sort. They are setting at defiance the old Jewish School which taught its children only a Hebrew taken from the Talmud, a more perfect but seldom used language. Not so terrifying that.

Children who are forced to forage for themselves from a very early age, as most of our youngsters are, develop while yet very young a sense of responsibility and a certain initiative seldom found in more tenderly nurtured children. It is the normal thing in the life of a girl in our neighborhood when she reaches the age of eight or nine years to have solely in her charge a younger brother or sister. When she jumps rope or plays jacks or tag she does it with as much joy as her sister of happier circumstances—but with a deftness foreign to the sheltered child she tucks away under her arm the baby, which after six weeks becomes almost a part of herself. Often we will fearfully exhort her to hold the baby's back, etc. Invariably the child will smile indulgently at us, as at a likeable but irresponsible person, and change the position of the infant not one whit. She is really the mother, she feels, with a mother's knowledge of what the baby needs; we are only nice library teachers. Their pride in the baby and their love for it sometimes even exceeds that of the mother who is forced to be so much away from the little ones. From five years of age the boys are expected to manage for themselves—to fight their own battles, literally—and to look out for themselves in general. Naturally they possess a self-reliance greater than other children of their age. We come into contact with this in the library in the child's more or less independent choice of books and his free criticism—often remarkably keen— of the contents. Another place where the children show initiative is in the formation of clubs, which is a great diversion of theirs. Seldom does a week pass without a crowd of children coming to us petitioning for the use of one of the club rooms. Often these clubs are of short duration, but some of them have been in existence for years. Sometimes they are literary, sometimes purely social—but more often dramatic. In the dramatic club the children, starved for the brighter things of life—can pretend to their hearts' content, and their keen imagination can make it all vividly realistic for them. They choose their own plays, draw the parts, make their costumes and carry out their own conception of the different roles. Astonishingly well they do it too. Is it any wonder that with their drab unhappy lives in mind, fairies and beautiful princesses figure largely? It seems to me that a singularly pathetic touch is the fact that yearly the "Merry Making Girls Club" spends weeks and weeks of preparation for an entertainment given for the benefit of the Pure Milk and Ice Fund for the poor babies of St. Louis, they themselves being the most liable to become beneficiaries of the fund.

A very small thing is sufficient to fire their imagination. The most trivial incident will suggest to them the formation of a club —a gilt crown, an attractive name, etc. An amusing instance has lately come up in this connection. Several boys of about thirteen or fourteen asked the use of one of the club rooms for the "Three C's." Very reticent they were about the nature of this organization. Finally amid rather embarrassed giggles the truth came out—a picture show in the neighborhood had distributed buttons bearing the picture and name of the popular favorite, which buttons were sufficient reason to form the "Charlie Chaplin Club."

When we think of many foreigners of different nationality together, there comes to most of us from habit the idea first suggested by Mr. Zangwill of amalgamation. I think most of us at Crunden do not like to feel that our branch and others like it are melting pots; at any rate of a heat so fierce that it will melt away the national characteristics of each little stranger—so fierce that it will level all picturesqueness into deadly sameness. Rather, just of a glow so warm that it melts almost imperceptibly the racial hate and antagonism.