Evening star., 1923-04-28
The Library Table
BY THE BOOKLOVER.

village, where poverty and drudgery
form his only existence in the present
and his only hope for the future, and
comes to the new world, which he
pictures as a land flowing with milk
and honey, have been treated by Mary
Antin in 1.-THE Promised Land" and
! They Who Knock at Our Gates"
| Mary Antin's books are stories of
fact, colored by a rich Imagination.
Another writer, more recent and not
yet as well known, is using the same
! material as fction--but fiction which
| rings as true and seems as personal
as Mary Antin's confeSscdly auto
! biographical books.
| Anzia Yezierska has been poor and
sick and knows what she writes
about, but she has lived through to
| success Her first volume of short
| stories, Hungry Hearts," won her
recognition. and Edward ]. O'Brief
dedicated to her his BEST Short
Stories of 1920" Now she has just
| Tenements." the story Of Sonya
/ Vrunsky. an east side tenement girl
| who marries John Manning, a mill
! lionaire philanthropist and settle
ment worker. Miss Yezierska says:
| Sonya: my heroine, and Manning.
| trlcked into matrimony. were the
| oriental and the Anglo-Saxon trying
to find common language. An
| East Side savage forced suddenly in
to the straight jacket of American
| civilization"
Some of the constantly recurring
themes in Miss Yezierska's stories
are the disappointment Of the Rus
sian and Polish Jews when they reach
New York and find that the bright
! land of their hopes offers them only
| airless, sunless tenement homes and
long hours of work in a sweat shop;
| the universal Jewish aspiration "to
make from myself a person"-to be
somebody, the thirst for learning; the
longing for ideal love and happiness
ana the abhorrence of charity, which
even the daily bitter struggle for ex-
| istence cannot make acceptable. One
| of the most striking stories in Hun
cry Hearts" tells of the misery of an
cast eide mother who is sent with her
| children to a charity vacation farm,
where she was thinking for why
with SO many rules, didn't they also
have already another rule, about how
much air in our lungs to breathe"
Another is the tragedy Of an old Jew
grow rich and through them has been
| brought to live on the fat of the
! land" that is in fashionable apart
ment on Riverside Drive but cannot
| fit into the new life. When the emp
| tincss Of her days becomes unendura-
| BILE. she slips down to Delaney street
and hunts for bargains of fish and
| onions from the puShcarts. bargains
| "hich the uniformed hall man will
not permit her to bring into the
marble sepulcher" of the Riverside
apartment.
! A real love of reading is in evil
dence on every page of The Place
| Of Books in the Life We Live" by
! William L. Stidger. I have been espe-
cially interested in the two chapters
on the place Of books in the lives of
Abra ham Lincoln and of Theodore
Roosevelt-a meager list of thorough
| " mastered books in the case of Lin
coin and a prodigious number of well
assimilated books in the case of
Roosevelt.
Many people engaged in educational
work have been pretty restive over the
extreme conclusions that certain scien-
| fists have been drawing from the men
tai tests of the young drafted men in
| the Army camps. Some of these psy-
biologists have even gone so far as to
announce that these tests indicate that
1000 900 Americans have little or no
bra ms" and that "education can add
nothing to their intelligence" Such
| conclusions are stoutly contested in an
article in the May Century entitled "A
Defence of Education" by Walter Lipp-
| mann, who says that ''if 70,0o0.ooO are
predeStined and irretrievabie fools, this
democracy is probably predestined
and irretrievable failure" Mr.. Lipp-
! mann states that the mental testers
seem to assume that the men tested
/ had already learned all they We're ca
| pable of learning and that additional
| education would have made no appre-
| ciable difference in the results. But Mr..
Lippmann, by some very telling COM
parisons among sections of the country
| having poor and fine educational facili-
/ ties. points out that high average in
, teiigence scores are shown by the men
! from the states having the best schools
| and the lowest average intelligence
scores by the men from the states hav-
| ing the poorest schools. l am glad that
Mr.. Lippmann has reopened the matter,
| and l shall watch with interest for the
! answer of the psychologists to his criti-
| cism. so destructive to the case built
up by them. but so constructive from
! the point of view of those who still be-
| lieve in education.
I X
! We have been accustomed to think
! Of Jane Austen as a novelist of the
past whose work was overland pub
] lished in complete edition; but re-
| Gently we are being presented with ad-
ditional Jane Austen stories. unearthed
in fragments from her dusty manu-
scripts and furnished up by careful
! h sEant ton fln
| latest of these stories is novel, THE
Watsons,' worked up from nameless
fragment by Miss Oultorr The frag-
ment was probably written about 1904
and was published in Miss Austen's
| memoirs in 1871, but has long been un-
available to the public.
! X x
| Americans who delude themselves
with the thought that in our foreign
affairs the United States has always
! followed a policy of complete recti-
/ tude will receive rude shock if they
! read Americans in Eastern Asia" by
Tyler bennett of the State Depart
ment In this book. whose subtitle is
| "A critical study of the policy of the
United States with reference to China.
/ Japan and Korea in the nineteenth
century" the author says: mo ma
| ton, either of the east or of the west.
| has escaped the valid charge of bad
| faith. - Each nation, the United
States not excepted. has made its con-
| tribution to the welter of evil which
now comprises the far eastern ques-
| ton. We shall do we'll to drop for all
! time the pose of self-righeousness and
| injured innocence and penitently face
| the facts" Among the high points
of this interesting survey are: Half
! a century of an open-door policy be-
! fore John Hay. missionaries and i'm
1 perialism; how the Americans tried
| to take Formosa: the American share