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,Irepeated 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?
