The Strand Magazine, Vol. 27, Issue 160, April, 1904Various
General
The Strand Magazine, Vol. 27, Issue 160, April, 1904
Various
English literature -- Periodicals; Short stories, English -- Periodicals
Of some of the things that I have seen I have written from time to time,
but I have always longed for the pencil of the artist to enable the reader
to realize what some of the scenes actually mean. And now my wish has been
gratified. I have been able to wander off the track in London accompanied
by an artist _confrère_, and to provide him with opportunities for making
sketches on the spot.
* * * * *
It is four o'clock on Sunday afternoon as we come out of Aldgate Station
and in a few minutes turn into Middlesex Street, littered with paper and
straw and rubbish, the remains of the great Sunday morning market, which is
at its highest at noon and gradually disappears as the afternoon wears on.
The scene is known to most Londoners, for the fame of Petticoat Lane, as
the street was formerly called, has spread through the length and breadth
of the land.
But we must pass through it to get off the track in the Ghetto, which has
burst its old boundaries and now extends over a large area which until
lately was a Christian quarter.
It is not till we come to Wentworth Street that the strangeness of the
Sunday scene reveals itself. Here all the shops are open and the narrow
thoroughfare is packed with the stalls of Jewish hawkers. We hear a little
English at the top of Wentworth Street, but as we push our way through the
seething crowd and get nearer to Brick Lane the English words become rarer
and rarer, and presently only the German Hebrew jargon known as "Yiddish"
reaches our ears.
We are in the heart of the old Ghetto. The alien immigrants, many of them
fresh from the Pale of Settlement in Russia and the persecutions of
Roumania, are chaffering and bargaining with their co-religionists who have
been in London long enough to stock a barrow or a stall and start on the
path of financial progress, which may lead their sons, if not themselves,
_viâ_ Dalston, Canonbury, Maida Vale, and Bayswater, to Kensington, and
perhaps Park Lane.
Stop for a moment and gaze at the crowd. A London child seeing it for the
first time would look at the faces and recall the Bible pictures.
Everywhere the Oriental type predominates. The old, solemn-looking men--the
poorest of the hawkers, for they have come to the Land of Promise too late
to struggle out of the ruck--have the beards and features of the
Patriarchs. They are calling aloud the price of their poor goods in the
lachrymose sing-song of the Eastern pedlar. Pious Jews are these aged
immigrants, and if you were to follow them to their synagogue you would see
them swaying to and fro as they repeat their prayers in the same mournful,
wailing voice with which they cry their wares.
[Illustration: "IN WENTWORTH STREET."]
The women are as Eastern as the men. The girls are handsome, dark-haired,
dark-eyed daughters of Israel, whose type of beauty has not changed in all
the thousand years of persecution and exile.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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