Levering, born Lipwitz, had been driven to this place by a dim dream. There was struggle behind him, years of the unbelievable struggle of the poor man, of the immigrant Jew, against a relentless city. He could remember dimly a night in southern Russia, the pogrom, flames and the sounds of shots in the dark, driving out the Jew. He had been held up by his mother, crying, on the deck of an immigrant ship to see the Promised City blazing tall and splendid in the sunlight. They had all been held up to see it, he and Lena and Roziska and Leo and little Moses, even though Moses was too young to know what it was all about--and the Promised Land, as it materialized, a tenement in the crowded ghetto, too hard on the little Moses, who died in a few months. Behind Hal were the years as a singing waiter in cheap cabarets, as a “song plugger,” small-time vaudeville, and then a revue; and now marvellously he was Hal Levering, star and part owner of the Club Levering, and packing them in at higher prices than any other night club dared charge. He had done that single-handed. And he had carried the Lipwitz family with him. Lena was now a dancer, a good one; Isaac, a partner in a clothing store. Rosie had married a doctor. Mama kept house for Lena, and if Papa had been alive, Hal would undoubtedly have found something lucrative for him. Always his dream had driven him. The dream of the artist, inarticulate, clumsy, hunting for the ultimate beauty. He sang jazz now and he wore fine clothes, while around him were the flash of jewels and the white faces of gaudy women and the throb of Bennie Bernstein’s music. Everybody paid him homage, bowing, pounding on the table for Hal Levering, the artist, singing “Abie’s an Irisher Now,” a song whose words were a cry of pain, written by a Jew in contempt of his race. He sang it gorgeously, with exaggerated gestures, flexible hands, and when he did the part where Abie pretends to be the Irish plug-ugly, one saw the cringe of the homeless race that was ingrained in Abie in spite of the defiant throw of an Irish jaw. It was a beautiful bit of mimicking, and even though he was a Jew he did not mind the ugly words at all. He had one song, “When My Little Baby Boy Says His Prayers to Me,” that never failed to make his hearers cry. And there were tears in his own eyes, when he came off, not because of the song--he knew hokum even when he sang it himself--but because he could “get them” with it. Hal Levering, the artist, his triumph ringing in his ears clapped out by enthusiastic hands. The grinding afternoon before his new summer show went on; he was in his element. About him were excited waiters arranging their tables, decorators at work on the flowers, Bennie Bernstein in his shirt sleeves, sweating over the new songs, Lilian Laine begging help with the duet they were to sing. And then, as Hal went over his new numbers alone, the waiters and the decorators, Lilian and song-wise Bennie himself, stopped to listen to him.