The playwright David Pinski‘s first novel, Arnold Levenberg, was composed in Yiddish in 1919-1920, published by Simon and Schuster in Isaac Goldberg’s English translation in 1928, and in the original Yiddish only a decade later in Warsaw by the David Pinski Book Committee, Inc. The excerpt that follows takes place at a dinner party where the eponymous protagonist — an effete pacifist handkerchief manufacturer of German-Jewish descent — opines that the high ideals of the downtown Yiddish leftists, whom he meets at a celebration of the 1917 Russian Revolution, are doomed to failure. “Your Socialism will accomplish nothing,” he tells them. He’s answered by Olga Mankoff — a charismatic Socialist leader.

”… When I look into the future, I feel as the old Chinese felt when at sunrise they gazed from their seashore into the distance, where lay Japan. They beheld a fiery sun arise from the ocean — the waves undulating like molten gold, the heavens a burning expanse of every hue. So the distant land that they could not descry became for them the Land of the Rising Sun, mysterious and holy — the land of heroes and gods…”

Her cheeks burned, her eyes glowed with the rays of the rising sun, and her listeners enjoyed a double measure of beauty. Arnold, too, rejoiced in her beauty, but he could not restrain himself from chilling her ardor:

“Well, is Japan a holy land, a land of heroes and gods? How do those Chinese feel who have seen Japan?”

Olga felt truly as if she had been showered with a douche of icy water. The rising sun in her eyes was clouded over, and sorrow overcast her countenance. She made a hopeless, almost imperceptible gesture.

“I’m sorry if I’ve hurt you,” apologized Arnold, noticing the alteration of her features. “But your comparison inevitably provoked my question.”

“I said,” began Olga, as if in pity for this unfortunate pessimist, “that I felt as the old Chinese felt. But the old Chinese were simply indulging in fantasies when they pictured that distant land as the abode of gods and heroes. We are not satisfied with mere figments of the imagination. We want to make our Land of the Rising Sun the abode of gods and heroes. … Why do you wish to persuade us that deep in our hearts we feel the truth of your doubts as to humanity? Mankind is still very young. It has set itself ambitious goals. It would rise to a higher ethic, a higher spirituality. It would climb to sunnier beauties, to a pinnacle of happiness; Isaiah’s visions, the teachings of Christ, Socialism. Do your share, lend a hand, don’t predict at the outset that the effort is useless. That’s just the way man’s flight in the air was ridiculed. But today we fly.”

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