A Century of Progress by John Drury (Chicago: Consolidated Book Publishers Inc 1933)

“TOWER TOWN,” over the river on the near north side. Chicago’s largest and most flourishing bohemian quarter, bounded roughly on the south by Grand Avenue, on the east by Michigan Avenue and Lake Shore Drive, on the north by Division Street and on the west by Clark Street. District centers about the historic old Chicago Avenue Water Tower, Chicago and Michigan Avenues. Studios, art galleries, tea rooms, bookshops, alley forums and Italian restaurants are on every hand. The famous Dill Pickle Club, conducted by Jack Jones, is “Tower Town’s” main rendezvous. On Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday evenings lectures, debates and dances are held here. The Dill Pickle occupies a chapter in Albert Parry’s “Garrets and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America.” It is located at 18 Tooker Place. Nearby is “Bughouse Square” (Washington Square, North Dearborn Street and Walton Place), haunt of soap-box orators.

Chicago’s Left Bank by Alson J. Smith (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company 1953)

In Towertown, one-eyed Jack Jones had started the Dill Pickle Club, and here, every Saturday night, a Chicago one act play, written by some unknown Chicago playwright, presented by unknown Chicago actors, took the boards. […] With the coming of Prohibition, Towertown became something of a haunt for the underworld, too. The Dill Pickle became a scarcely-disguised speakeasy, and even had itself raided a few times just for the publicity.

Hobohemia by Frank O. Beck (Rindge: Richard R. Smith Publisher Inc. 1956)

One evening in 1919 no less a luminary than Sherwood Anderson published in The Chicago Daily News the statement, “Jack Jones and the Dill Pickle Club are the bright spots in the rather somber aspects of our town.”

Jack was a man of stature and a visit to the Club was for many years a must in the itinerary of all pilgrims making a round of the night clubs of the Windy City. It was a focal point of the nightlife of Towertown, a region of the near north side where, when the shades of night arrived, foregathered the Bohemian, the artist, the near-artist and the strange conglomeration of city dwellers who follow in their train.

The Dill Pickle Club is surely an appropriate name for an eating spot. What epicure but does not relish the dill, the humble anise of the Scriptures? When the eating club was opened on Locust Street and patronized mainly by disputatious labor leaders, it had over its door the sign, “The Copper Kettle and the Dill Pickle. ” A few years later, Bohemia-in-Chicago was stirred by food poisoning caused (supposedly) by the use of the copper kettle and the Club dropped “The Copper Kettle” end of the name and the Dill Pickle went it alone. While the Irish were pleased, the Germans were not.

The same Jack Jones, who in 1917 opened the Dill Pickle Club, now incorporated the club, copyrighted the name and moved it to Tooker Alley, where he continued to serve “coffee and a few light foods that are tolerable” as John Drury writes in his Dining in Chicago. On Wednesdays, his mild-mannered sister prepared a goodly assortment of sandwiches for the literary group who took over that evening. It was on one of these special evenings that I, in search of a copywriter, bought “coffee and — ” for a young writer, Carl Sandburg. He ate it in a dimly lighted recess in the wall, as I tried to persuade him to come with me to do some special writing, as I was then making the Chicago Area Survey of the Inter-Church World Movement.

But for John Archibald (Jack) Jones, the Dill Pickle Club was to serve purposes other than gastronomy. This king of the Picklers came to Chicago about the year 1907 and, as a labor leader, he wished his Club to serve his ends, by enlisting the intelligentsia.

Where he came from and who he was was definitely secondary to the fact that he was a most intelligent and militant labor agitator, one of the founders of the Industrial Workers of the World. His Club was to be a public forum for the discussion of what, to Jones, was the most vital subject in our national life, the rights of manual laborers.

Of an earlier interesting place, a nursery rhyme said, “The way into my parlor is up a winding stair.” The way into the Dill Pickle Club was even more complicated. Off North State Street to the left you wedged yourself, if you were thin enough, through a hole in the wall, a narrow slit between the four-story buildings. Then, with ashcans and garbage cans making it wise to watch your step, you went over the cobblestones and bricks of Tooker Alley to No. 18, where you faced a bright green light over an orange door with three small stained glass apertures. Here you were admonished, if you aspired to enter, to “Step high, stoop low, and leave your dignity outside.” Crawling was really the best means of locomotion from there on in.

Blazed across the vestibule was the enigmatical line “This club is established to elevate the minds of people to a lower level.” There were several ways in which the Club made no more sense than that.

However, the founder, Jack Jones, an American pioneer in the field of labor education, was a powerful magnet and drew unusual personalities within his orbit. It was probably in the cards from the beginning that Jack, years later, should die alone in a third-class men’s lodging house, and his wasted and besotted body, not yet sixty-four years old, be buried in a casket, the gift of a thousand derelict men on the stem on West Madison Street.

What mattered was what Jack Jones, a flaming missionary of industrial justice, did with his opportunity in the Dill Pickle Club. At once it became the rendezvous of leading labor organizers and leaders, of radical artists too often coarse and ribald, of modern poets often equally unrefined and gross, of rising literary personages and revolutionists. It became more than a serious labor forum, it became an institution for all the arts. It opened its doors wide to everybody who had a message, a grievance, a hope, or a criticism, constructive or destructive; who wished to raise his voice against oppression, prejudice and injustice in all their multiforms. To every guest, at some time during his sojourn at the Club, Jack Jones, the ingenious, put the question, “Are you a nut about anything?”

One night in an unrestrained moment the group of the evening accepted the following credo: “We of the Dill Pickle believe in everything. We are radicals, pickpockets, second-story men and thinkers. Some of us practice free love, and some, medicine. Most of us have gone through religion and have tired of it. Some of us have tired of our wives.” This was the Dill Pickle Club in its most indulgent and unrestrained mood.

This creed did not express the main objectives of the Club. It was definitely not a place where men grow broad bellied and narrow minded, despite the fact that there were hedonists there and those allergic to purity. Through the years they did much creative work. Here experts taught dancing and other arts. Poets read their own verses. Artists, wood carvers, ornamental iron designers, sculptors and painters created and displayed their handicraft, always to an interested public. From the haymow on the second floor — the city used transportation that fed on hay — came the mingled odors of charcoal, turpentine, fixatives. Often a party of visitors stood by, waiting to be shocked at the nude subject.

In the birth and early development of the little theatre the Club must be given prominent mention. This, one of the earliest of the little theatres, presented some of the finest amateur talent. Jack, a man of varied talent, built with his own hands a splendid stage, invented and installed an unusual lighting system, wrote, directed and acted in the plays.

The open forum of the Club was stimulated by the idea that truth wholly controlled may become dangerous. Yet no matter how important the question brought before the Dill forum or how illustrious the speaker, he was thrown to the lions, as he expected to be. His message — important, crack-brained, serious or humorous — the omnipresent heckler treated the same as the last and the next. And what consummate hecklers were there! There was big John Laughman, whose biting Irish witticism, often almost sadistical, literally cowed the speaker and thrilled the audience; little Birdie Weber, hook-nosed and bespectacled, vulgar always and thunderous in his approach, confused and trapped the orator. The heckling was usually brilliant and constituted not an inconsiderable part of the entertainment.

The Dill Pickle Club drew to its platform a surprising “Who’s Who” of speakers. In my diary are listed speakers heard there, and many of them were monthly guests. There was Maxwell Bodenheim, author of Ninth Avenue; Carl Sandburg, the poet; Ben Reitman, King of the Hoboes; Ben Hecht, author of 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, editor of the Chicago Literary Times and a promising poet; Countess Luddie, who wore sandals and bobbed her hair; Paddy Carrol from Hell’s Half Acre; Aimee Semple McPherson, and a Spanish spiritualist who shaved her head and dyed it green; Morris Levine, blind, gray-haired orator; Van Cima, Dutch artist and piccolo player; Emma Goldman, the Anarchist, and Rube Menken, Russian art critic; Eugene Debs and William D. Haywood, tycoons of the labor movement; Sherwood Anderson, the playwright, and Jim Larkin, the famous Irish rebel; Harry Batters, selling socialism to the Democrats and democracy to the Socialists; Yellow Kid Weil, of high-finance fame; Clarence Darrow and scores of the more brilliant members of the faculties of Northwestern and Chicago universities. Sooner or later everybody had a chance to ex- press himself and the Club’s Sunday night doings often made Monday morning news.

One night one of the university speakers remarked seriously, “More famous people have passed through this Club than through any fifty universities in the world.” The statement was, to say the least, extravagant. It was statements like this that convinced me that I was using rather well the time I gave to them. Early in the Club’s history, Jack Jones invited me to join his staff and called me “Chaplain.” I have met few groups with such enormous responsiveness and so much in need of education of the spirit. I tried to understand when they needed praise and when they needed prayer. They always needed a friend. Jack Jones climaxed his study of labor’s problems by writing a treatise, “The Tech-Up,” a pronouncement on technocracy.

Harper Leech, co-originator of the War Insurance plan, wrote of Jack’s “The Tech-Up”: “A masterpiece of explanation of the industrial form of unionism.” It brought Jack a trip to Washington, D. C., during World War I at Uncle Sam’s expense, for conference with the Department of Labor. Labor sympathizers of the Dill Pickle type later followed the worker’s movement through syndicalism and the Worker’s Party into the Communist Party.

When the crest of bootlegging came, the Club’s cultural flame flickered low. The lawless horned in on the management of the Club and chiseling gangsters followed. Man shall not live by free love, companionate marriage, unrestrained Bohemianism, rackets, “red” Russia, alone — vital subjects though they were to the adherents of the Club. However, sincere voices raised against suppression, prejudice and injustice bring their own reward. Dill Pickle’s popular forum, little theatre, art school, social center, all often on the five-yard line in their way and day, served the cause of adult education and democracy.

And possibly society has a greater ability to reform itself than many of us thought that day.

By the time Abba (sometimes spelled Aba) Gordin (1887-1964), publisher of The Clarion (1932), arrived in New York, Jacob Maryson had long been publishing his own translation work.

Y. A. Merison (aka Jacob Abraham Maryson) (1866-1941) was a Jewish translator/publisher in New York. I discovered him because of his “Der Eyntsiger un Zayn Eygentum”, which you can probably guess is St. Max’s book in Yiddish.  It was published by Kropotkin Literatur Gezelshaft (Kropotkin Literary Society), New York (aka Nyu York) in 1916.

The Kropotkin Literary Society, was founded on the Prince Kropotkin’s 70th birthday (1913?). It was the intent of the society to publish Anarchist and Socialist literature in Yiddish.

According to Immigrants against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America by Kenyon Zimmer, Maryson was appointed editor of “was the longest-running anarchist periodical in the Yiddish language”  Fraye Arbeter Shtime, aka פֿרייע אַרבעטער שטימע‎ (Yiddish); The Free Voice of Labor (English), but only lasted a few months because he refused to publish a pro-Russian Communist Party article. Abba Gordin, was a contributor to the journal. Michael E. Coughlin’s journal The Dandelion (1977) Vol. 1, No. 4 was a memorial issue when the Freie Arbeiter Stimme folded.

Paul Avrich notes in his Anarchist Voices that Hilel Solotaroff (1865-1921 was a jewish physician and anarchist on the East Side who both contributed to Fraye Arbeter Shtime and was an executive member of Kropotkin Literary Society.

In the same book Averich mentions bookstore owner/bibliophile Max N. Maisel as being a charter member of the Kropotkin Literary Society, and his distribution of Kropotkin, Thoreau, Wilde that “he published himself.” Maisel sold tickets to Emma Goldman lectures and distributed anarchist periodicals such as Free Society and Mother Earth. The Margaret Sanger Papers has a biographical sketch of Maisel that says “He published a compilation of Margaret Sanger’s New York Call series, What Every Girl Should Know (1916), and also published What Every Mother Should Know (1916). Maisel was also the publisher of the New York Tageblat, a Jewish daily, and translations of many Yiddish-language books.” Archive.org has a few scans of books he published in both English and Yiddish: https://archive.org/search.php?query=publisher%3A%22Max+N.+Maisel%22 There seems to be a scholarly biography in Hebrew here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23568453?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

One website had a list of other titles Maryson has translated, including links to digital versions:

•  Di ersṭe printsipen fun a sisṭem fun sinṭeṭisher filozofye / (Nyu Yorḳ : Liṭerarisher Ferlag, c1910), by Herbert Spencer
•  Di Ertsihung : gayst ig, moralish un fizish / (Nyu York : Mayzel, c1910), by Herbert Spencer
•  Di flikhṭ fun ungehorkhzamḳayṭ tsum shṭaat / (Nyu Yorḳ : M. Mayzl, 1907), by Henry David Thoreau
•  Fiziologie. Ershter teil. Der menschlicher kerper, geveben, beiner, un muskulen, fun Dr. J. A. Maryson. A kurs lektzies gegeben in der Yiddisher folks-universitet durch korrespondentz. (New York : Literarisher ferlag, [c1914])
•  Fizyologye / ([New York] : Aroysgegeben fun der Edyuḳeyshonal ḳomiṭe fun Arb. Ring, 1918-1920)
•  Fizyologye / (New York : Literarisher Ferlag, 1914-1920)
•  Frayheyṭ / (Nyu Yorḳ : A. M. Yeṿalenḳa, c1909), also by John Stuart Mill and Chaim Zhitlowsky
•  Muṭer un ḳind : a lehrbukh far der muṭer : ṿi zikh tsu fihren beys̀ʾn shṿangeren : un ṿi tsu hodeṿen dos ḳind … (Nyu Yorḳ : Mayzel eṭ komp., [c1912])
•  Opshṭamung fun menshen : un, Der opḳlayb beshaykhes̀ tsu geshlekhṭ … / (Nyu Yorḳ : M.N. Mayzel, 1921), by Charles Darwin and J. Arthur Thomson

There is a documentary from 1980 called “The Free Voice of Labor: The Jewish Anarchists” by Steve Fischler and Joel Sucher that touches on some of this time period and milieu.

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The following article touches upon the Kropotkin Literary Society, and the larger Jewish literary culture it existed in.

Yiddish Books and Their Readers

By A. A. ROBACK

(as published in The Nation, Vol. 107 No. 2780, October 12, 1918)

UNTIL recently the literary achievements of the Jewish people were the productions of their geniuses. The activity of the masses, or rather their appreciation and interest, were unconsidered. With the development of a Yiddish literature came the education of the lower classes; and it is their reaction to literature with which we are at present concerned. The genius of a nation manifests itself in the works actually produced by that nation; its taste, however, is discernible in the translations from foreign authors. There are comparatively few translations in Yiddish, and as late as 1890 Jules Verne was the only foreign author whose stories were given a Yiddish version, in the form of abridged adaptations. At one time, the Yiddish book market was flooded with such books of adventure. Zola and Tolstoy also enjoyed great popularity among the Jewish working classes, but the translations that were turned out could scarcely be regarded as anything more than abstracts. Even now only three or four of the latter’s novels have appeared unabridged in Yiddish, while Zola has not fared so well. Stories like his were those that all shopgirls and workingmen with any sort of intellectual pretchsions were expected to read; and in order to give them their fill of realism a portion of Boccaccio’s Decameron was Yiddished by the same “translator” and published by the same firm, whose main business consists in providing the older Jews with prayer books and other religious supplies.

It is characteristic of an abnormal literature like Yiddish that the great masters of all times have been totally neglected. Cervantes’s great work constitutes the sole exception. It is only within the last three years that small fragments of Homer have been translated—to appear only in the scarcely read anthologies of the “young” group of Yidlish poets. The literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans is an unknown quantity to the Yiddish-speaking public. A translation of Molière’s “Précieuses Ridicules” printed privately in England is all that the classical French period has contributed to modern Jewish literature.

The Golden Age of German literature is not much better off in the ghetto. It required the strenuous efforts of a typesetter not only to set but to translate and publish at his own risk “Werther’s Leiden.” When this book ran into the second edition, he was encouraged to translate Lessing’s “Emilia Galotti,” but this venture did not turn out successfully. The four volumes of Goethe that were published afterwards by the concern above referred to contain nothing but adaptations. The view of this publishing house seems to be that it is in many ways more economical for the Jewish reader to get the substance of a great book out of an abridgment or abstract.

Schiller, not to mention the lesser poets of his day, had until lately been ignored by Yiddish literature as if he had never existed. Recently, however, “Die Räuber” has been translated into Yiddish prose. Heine has been saved from total oblivion in the ghetto because of his Jewish racial affiliations and the scintillating brilliancy that runs throughout his works, both poetry and prose. Yet even Heine has received little recognition from his ghetto brethren. Many, no doubt, will be astonished to learn that, apart from a volume of abstracts, Shakespeare has been represented in Yiddish by a single work—an admirable translation of “The Merchant of Venice” by the young anarchist poet Bovshover, who died about three years ago in a hospital for the insane. Into Hebrew several of Shakespeare’s plays had been translated by a Jewish convert to Christianity whose initials appear on the title page of the books. The same author has also to his credit a Hebrew rendering of Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” In Yiddish . only the first few stanzas of this work are to be found in an old periodical. It is most important to note that the Hebrew reader and the Yiddish reader represent two totally different strata of Jewish society. One may safely venture to say that the “Vicar of Wakefield” will never be translated into Yiddish unless through some very peculiar circumstance; yet

Hebrew literature had a version of this quaint novel over twenty years ago. Of the other British authors, Defoe, Swift, with “Gulliver’s Travels,” George Eliot, with “Daniel Deronda,” Dickens, with “David Copperfield,” Scott, with “Ivanhoe,” and Kipling, with the “Jungle Book,” are the fortunate ones to be introduced to Yiddish readers. With the exception of the adaptations from Swift, these translations have been published in Russia, where a greater idealism is manifested in literary circles than is the case in this country. If we add to the previous list a sprinkling of Byron, scattered here and there throughout defunct periodicals, one of Conan Doyle’s detective stories, Olive Schreiner’s “Dreams,” and Oscar Wilde’s “De Profundis” and “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” the list of British authors patronized by the Yiddish reader, or, perhaps better, by the translator, is exhausted. It is the modernistic trend that seems to have impressed the Yiddish-speaking intelligentsia—not the dreamy, highly symbolistic modernism of Hofmannsthal and Bahr, or even of Verlaine and Baudelaire, if the period of the latter is not too remote to be considered modernistic. Social problems of a psychological nature are what the Jewish intellectuel is seeking, and generally these problems nowadays are bound up with an erotic element. The intelligent ghetto Jew will not appreciate the fiction that commonly appears in our American magazines. His aesthetic sense differs widely from that of the average American reader, who is interested in thrilling plot, snappy dialogue, and cleverly turned

phrases, rather than in clear-cut pictures of the various characters, their psychology, and also the problems thrown into relief by the story. The more or less intelligent Jewish workingman will sacrifice the elaborateness of the plot for the psychological situation, and will, on the whole, react more critically to the details that go to establish its vraisemblance. That is why Russian realism makes such a strong appeal to the Jew. There are other reasons for the close affinity between the two literatures. The sojourn of six million Jews in Russia is no slight factor in the result, but this circumstance by no means tells the whole story. It does not explain, for instance, why Pushkin, Lermontov, Lomonossov, Gogol, and other first-rate Russian writers of the old school do not exist for the Yiddish-speaking reader, while Artzibashev’s “Sanyin” appears in two different Yiddish translations and is followed by a series of like “gems” by the same author. It may be said that Russian literature has exercised a tremendous influence upon the Jewish mind by dint of its realism. Most of the modern Russian writers are represented in Yiddish literature. Here we find Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Tchernishevsky, Yushkevitz, Korolenko, Andreyev, Tchirikov, Gorky, Kuprin, Veressayev, and Artzibashev. Linked with these is the Pole Przybyszewsky, four of whose works have been published in Yiddish, including an unexpurgated edition of his “Homo Sapiens.” Of the whole modernistic group of Slavic writers, Przybyszewsky is probably the most uncanny and the greatest sex-monger. Przybyszewsky’s plays are frequently staged by Jewish amateurs. Of the other Polish writers, Sienkiewicz and Elize Orzeszkowa have received some attention in Jewish literary circles, the latter because of her philosemitic sentiments. Ibsen’s hold on the ghetto élite is to be accounted for only by the social problems in which the Jew is so engrossed. Most of Ibsen’s problems fit in with the various “isms” rampant in the ghetto. Strindberg’s name, though not so widely known as that of Ibsen, is likely to become even more popular among the Jewish working people. Björnson, though universally more famous, is much less of a favorite than Strindberg, and is known to the Jewish reader only through two or three plays. Of contemporary Teutonic authors, Hauptmann, Sudermann, and Schnitzler appeal very much to the ghetto taste; but it must be emphasized that only certain phases of these writers have made their way into Yiddish literature. The symbolistic phase of Schnitzler or the picturesque side of Sudermann’s talent will scarcely ever be disclosed to the Yiddish reader. If a close search is made for the bond that unites the various foreign authors who have received prominence in Yiddish literature, it will be discovered that the links constituting the chain are criticism of society,discussion of social problems, psychological analysis, and lastly, the erotic note dominant in these works. The Yiddish newspapers in this country have not been slow to detect the general tendency of their readers; and for years they have traded on the undeveloped and one-sided intelligence of the ghetto intellectuels. The keen competition evinced by the largest radical Yiddish newspapers, some time ago, furnishes us with interesting psychological material in this regard. No sooner did one newspaper announce as a forthcoming serial one of the more voluptuous novels of Catulle Mendès, in its Yiddish title “Beautiful Arabella,” than its contemporary and close competitor made it known that an unexpurgated translation of Maupassant’s “Une Vie,” expanded as “The Life of a Woman,” would shortly appear in its columns. Again, when one of the newspapers, turning to Teutonic \