ry and elemental strength and beauty.

Sholom Asch was born and brought up in a little town in Poland,
Kuttnow, near Lodz. His father was a merchant on a small scale. He
bought sheep and oxen from the peasants and shipped them to be
marketed in Lodz, in Germany, in France. He rode about the country and
sometimes took Sholom with him, whom he loved especially because he
studied so well. Sholom liked the sheep and the cattle, and he loved
the melancholy Polish landscape--mystic, fearful.

His father was a healthy, normal, honorable Jew; not fanatical but
deeply religious. He was philosophic toward life, he cared nothing for
money and was content without it. His mother, on the other hand, was
nervous and worldly. She was dependent on the externals of life and to
her no money was misery. There was a big house with much food, many
new clothes, much hospitality, and many big brothers and sisters;
something like eleven children. The ceremonies of the Jewish faith
were observed beautifully, the holidays kept happily. There was
substance and spirit.

* * * * *

AND Sholom absorbed this atmosphere of the old religious rites, and
the paganism of the cattle and nature, and spoke little. When he was
six he was sent to the Jewish school. This was in session from eight
in the morning until five in the evening. He and the other children
used to watch the sun shine on certain spots and know the time. How
they waited for the moment of freedom, little knowing how well one of
their number was to picture for the world each intimate emotion and
thought of their imprisoned souls.

One day a peasant came to his house and Sholom went with him on his
wagon. That was a wonderful day; he played hookey. The next day the
rabbi, who believed in corporal punishment, expressed his views on the
matter of absence.

Asch was extremely clever at learning the Talmud and the old history
and philosophy of the Jews. He learned to reason from the Talmud and
to-day he says, "Art is logic. There must be an 'Urkraft' (elemental
strength) behind a man's work." And if there is one outstanding
characteristic of Asch's work, it is this elemental, this passionately
strong and elemental vein.

Max Reinhardt, whom Asch calls "Ein Dichter im Theater," loves Asch
dearly. In his Deutsches Theater, the most artistic and best equipped
theatre in the world, he produced Asch's _God of Vengeance_. This was
a marked success and is still a m