Below is the OCR text representation for this newspapers page.

Friday, S*pt. 8, INI THE 80VTUEIN ISRAELITE F*ge Nlatco NEW YEAR GREETINGS Pennington Bean Company 3 Produce Row, S.W. — Atlanta, Ga. JAckson 3-2444 New Year Greeting’s Rumbold & Co. Inc. Distributors JA. 4-3652 379 - 381 Nelson St. S. W. Atlanta, Ga. »•••« GREETINGS FOR THE HOLY DAYS Southern Door Closer Service 125 EAST STREET FOREST PARK, GEORGIA 366-4673 366 3721 ammmm New Year's Greetings from The Dettelbach Corporation ►************************************************; ★ * * ▲ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ New Year Greetings Luckie Hotel 180 LUCKIE ST., N. W. Atlanta. Ga. JA. 4-9879 COMPLIMENTS OF DRUG SHOP 46-5th Street, N. E. Atlanta, Ga. HAYWARD WOODWARD, Mgr. & Reg. Phar. Pick-up and deliver prescriptions anywhere in the city, FREE TR. 6-0367 TR. 6-3737 ^Jew 'Ijea r (greetings • • • WE ENJOY SERVING YOU Maytag Laundromat 1424 N. HIGHLAND AVE. next to Mg Apple ATLANTA, GA. Schmaryahu Levin A Centennial Portrait by D. BLACK This year marks the centen nial of the birth of Schmaryahu Levin, a great "traveling sales man for Zionism” as he was once described. I recall a story which gives a capsule description of the mag netism of his oratory. One time after speaking in Philadelphia, a Jew came up to him and told him how much he loved his speech. Schmaryahu Levin turned a wry face. "Listen, my friend, I saw you in Brooklyn and also at a New York meeting. Quit following me around from town to town. Because of you I have to change my speech in every place.” Not all were so magnetized by his oratory as to follow him around of course, but no one could be impassive listening to him. Levin did not indulge in ora torical platitudes. He was not theatrical. He would get up, look his audience over and, seemingly after a general survey, center his eyes on some one individual and carry on, as it were, a conversa tion with him. It was this prac tice which once had an amusing aftermath-in the early stages of his career. He centered his talk on a young woman—and a great romance ensued between them. He could be ruthlessly blunt. At the time he was traveling about the country and speaking for Zionism, one of the better known staff writers of the Jewish Daily Forward carried on a continuous tirade against the Zionist idea. One time, this anti-Zionist came up and said to Levin, “Schmaryahu, don’t you remem ber me, I am So and So from your home town, I changed my name in America. I write those articles against Zionism now.” Levin looked at him. So, he said, "abie ich hob gemeint es seinen zwei paskudnakes. Es is gor ein paskudnak.” On his mother’s side, Schmar yahu Levin came from Hassidim who had followed the Lubavit- cher, while his father was an ardent Misnagid. He had the usual Cheder train ing. He recalls in his autobio graphy the time when one of his fellow Cheder pupils was being whipped, word came that the wife of the boy being spanked had just given birth to a child Jews married early in those days. Levin's mother was mar ried at the age of fourteen. But if his early education was of the primitive sort, later at Berlin, he partook of the more sophisticated kind. It didn’t en tirely ring bells with Schmarya hu Levin. He found the German students gloating in the amount of beer one drank. Unless you could put down fifteen glasses of beer daily, even if you had a Ph D you weren’t regarded as amounting to anything. Goethe and Lessing and Kant were no longer German idols. Instead, they gloried in Von Moltke and Bismark. Power alone they re spected. Schmaryahu Levin as a young man had planned to settle in Eretz Israel, but most of the early Zionist leaders themselves in private were not very en couraging. Levin recalled the story of another young man who had read that shells were found in abundance on the beaches of Eretz Israel, so he conceived the idea of going there and opening a button factory. But one of the leading Zionist writers said to him. “Who will buy your but tons?” It was not an easy problem. Later, after Schmaryahu Levin had done his work winning American Jewry over, he settled in Jerusalem. For a lime, 1 be lieve, he took part in some agri cultural activities. Later, he help ed Bialik launch a publishing house. But the intense, dynamic Levin was restless. I used to see him come in to the Vienna Cafe in Jerusalem in his last yean early in the morning looking for some one to play chess with. His place was on the podium and the Jewish population there at the time was too small to re quire much oratory or statesmen as Levin might well have been. In the state of Israel today, he would have been much happier. T. Ralph Grimes Sheriff, Fulton County Extends Cordial Holiday Greetings * Extending Our Best Wishes For 5722 X- A 3k omaS d^radburi ¥ an d ^ddsociates