Shulamith Z. Berger

The author: The novel is by Joseph Opatoshu, who was born in 1886 in the Stupsker Vald, near Mlave (Mława), Poland.  In 1907 he immigrated to the United States and settled in New York.  He worked in a factory, delivered English newspapers, and later became a teacher in a Jewish elementary school, while he studied at Cooper Union in the evenings. He graduated in 1914 with a degree in civil engineering.  That same year the Yiddish daily, Der Tog, was founded. Opatoshu joined the staff in 1914 and wrote a short story a week for the newspaper until his death in New York in 1954. 

An excerpt: The scene in the "Green Paw" was rollicking.  From a distance, the narrow two-story building resembled a peasant's hut.  The small low-ceilinged rooms were jam-packed with people. An unpainted wooden ladder-like stairway with a handrail led to the restaurant. It swayed and groaned under the slightest weight as though it was about to snap in two. Kerosene and candle lanterns dimly lit the corridor. The doors in the hallway were painted with green animal paws and bird claws. They looked like works of magic. The small rooms were crowded with people seldom seen on the streets of New York. The men were dressed carelessly  with faces which betrayed worry even when they laughed. The women wore mannish clothing; with their bobbed hair and cigarettes in their mouths, at first glance they appeared to be boys dressed up. They gave the impression of beings who sleep by day, and at night, when the rule of law and its obedient children slumber, they creep out of their tiny bedrooms, slink unnoticed along the tenement walls and scurry to the Village.

A synopsis: The title of You Have to Yell in the Yiddish original was Hibru, a reference to the Hebrew teachers and the afternoon Hebrew schools which flourished on the Lower East Side. Students attended these schools after the end of the public school day in order to receive a Jewish education and prepare for becoming bar mitzvah.

The novel vividly depicts the professional and personal lives of the teachers, young immigrants, many with literary aspirations, who wander like lost souls in the land of opportunity seeking livelihood and love. Unlike many characterizations of the Lower East Side, which stress the travails of the sweatshops, Opatoshu's novel focuses on educated, intellectually oriented recent immigrants and their new lives in America. The city itself: the streets, schools, trolleys and tenements of the Lower East Side, the cafes of Greenwich Village, function as characters in the novel and the setting for the romances, camaraderie, and rivalries of the teachers and their circle of friends.

It highlights many historical issues of the time in a lively, realistic, entertaining manner: the lives of boarders in family settings, the future of Judaism and Jewish education in America, different paths pursued by immigrant intellectuals in order to make a living, labor strife in Hebrew schools, and the social life of young people on the Lower East Side, among others.  These topics distinguish You Have to Yell from other works, both Yiddish and English, which portray the Eastern European Jewish immigrant era in New York.

You Have to Yell reads as though it was written as a cinematic account of life on the Lower East Side a century ago.

The reader with an interest in New York history, the urban immigrant experience, and life on the Lower East Side, and a juicy story, will be rewarded.

Excerpts from You Have to Yell are available on the Yiddish Book Center website under the titles "Erev Shabes on a New York Trolley" and "Mr. Friedkin and Shoshana: Wandering Souls on the Lower East Side"