Marriage Guest*

Greta Zwenge, Karl Bleicher, George Gewurtz

The Story begins with the bold, brusque strokes of a poster: the German quarter of New York about 1890; Anton Zwenge, a violin-mender; his mercurial wife; his manual-laboring friends. Frau Zwenge sells sheet music against her husband's will. With the years this business prospers, dislodges him from his workbench, drives him into a corner of her store. It is the same with his old friends. The cigarmaker's sons, the baker's, install machinery. Mass production, money, is the pulse of the city. There are immigrants by the thousand to buy, to push the older immigrants up the social and economic scale.

Greta Zwenge grows up her father's child. For her, quality. She admires, loves, the dignified young composer, Karl Bleicher, who has brought here the Crucifixion theme of his forefathers, yet incomplete. He loves her, with the old reserve.

But up sweeps the speed of the growing city . . . George Gewurtz, a lusty young contractor. Frau Zwenge smells the soundness of his bricks and mortar--his automobile, real estate, immediacy. Karl Bleicher is behind the rushing times and Greta is pushed, swept off into George's arms.

In the first hours of their three-day honeymoon in Albany she learns her mistake. Brutality. Karl would have wept at her body. The thought fastens upon her until she is able to believe it is Karl with whom she lies, by whom she conceives. Meantime Karl thinks he has learned his mistake. Drinking heavily, he prostitutes his Crucifixion theme, twisting its sonorous measures into hip-hitching, gold-getting jazz tunes, publishes anonymously.

Some years are brushed in. George is a rich builder, with mistresses and a stolid sense of shame. Greta, apart, spiritualizes her grief the more deeply now that Karl is a ragtime king. But her daughter Karoline is Karl's spiritually, almost physically. He gives her music lessons.

The old baker dies, true to a fanaticism for cremation. His deathbed plea cleanses Karl and he pushes the Crucifixion to an immense conclusion, only to have it denounced as a plagiarism on the day's jazz. Then more irony, the War--and Karl home after it with the sorrows of Germany in his pale face, needing convalescence like the world.

Now the poster is shaded and filled, not teased, into a powerful fresco on the walls of Manhattan and of life. Karl sees Greta again in her daughter. The girl has found her lover, just such a penniless composer as Karl once was. But the older man is prestige, comfort, immediacy and she accepts him. Frau Zwenge applauds, on that practical side as before. The old grandfather is glad, having loved Karl. George Gewurtz is for it, seeking to force an issue he has long suspected: the truth about Karoline's paternity.

Greta, tortured, repeats, "It cannot be," until the shadows sharpen and the colors burn and they all come together about a table to hear the truth.

Significance. Here is art on a major scale. As characters, these Germans stand in their own right. As a human document, that is, emotionally, the book is unwaveringly valid. It is also a sound social contribution, bringing progress and tradition into violent conflict. Historically it is significant that Manhattan has been chronicled again by one of her stoutest-hearted inhabitants.

Author. Educated in his native Rumania, Konrad Bercovici entered the U. S. in 1916 with his Rumanian wife. Soon his stories of gypsy life were appearing in The Pictorial Review, the Century, Harper's and other magazines. His name became a familiar one in the columns of The Nation, The New Republic, The Masses, and The Liberator, where he wrote on sociological questions from the vantage of an educated man, an immigrant to one of the most complex and multicolored cities on earth--New York. The completeness with which he assimilated the flavors, forces and antecedents of his new surroundings testifies to his large capacity for social feeling. Besides The Marriage Guest, Author Bercovici has just published an autobiographical work, On New Shores.

-THE MARRIAGE GUEST--Konrad Bercovici --Boni & Liveright ($2.00).

God's Wisdom

PASSION AND GLORY -- William Cummings--Knopf ($2.50). Lens, a young Norwegian in a New England fishing town, is frustrate, since his dumb passion has been denied by the woman he loves and harlots do not satisfy him. So he turns with a mystical simplicity to God. God gives Lens passion to win the woman he loves. But there is no glory; their son dies at birth. The sins of the fathers. . . . After a few years she dies, too, and then there is neither passion nor glory for Lens. At last he stumbles upon glory, finding that he has a son of his own flesh. He who has gone dumbly feeling through life concludes: "God's wisdom is stronger than all the foolishness of the world."

Primitive Passions

RUN SHEEP RUN--Thames Wil- liamson--Small, Maynard ($2.50). "Ba-a-a-a-a" bleat 2,000 "woollies" as they start forward harried by the sheep-dog at their flanks. A sheepherder, strong in suffering hardship, powerful in emotion, childish in mind, is alone for a whole summer, far in the California mountains with his sheep. He grows wilderness-mad. His only civilized emotion is a strange attachment to his herd. All summer long he makes only three acquaintances--a cougar, a prospector and the prospector's daughter. Successively, in unreasoning passion, he kills the first two and takes the last for his mate. The power of the book, the excuse for it, is that the author, once a sheepherder, treats the protagonist as he treats the beasts in the story, as a dumb brute suffering without understanding. It is not a comedy, and unlike the Scandinavian treatment of such a theme it is not stark tragedy. It is simply a wild-animal tale, effectively told.

Best

THE BEST PLAYS OF 1924-1925-- Burns Mantle, Editor--Small, Maynard ($3.00). Of the 201 new plays which appeared on the Manhattan stage last season, Critic Mantle has selected ten for his Year Book, and he points with pride to the fact that his selection for the first time (although he has made a similar one for the past five years) is composed entirely of plays by American authors.

What Price Glory, They Knew What They Wanted, Desire Under the Elms, The Firebrand, Dancing Mothers, Mrs. Partridge Presents, The Fall Guy, The Youngest, Minick, Wild Birds--these ten plays in slightly condensed form make up the bulk of the volume.