Jacob Epstein, the name of the artist, has a melancholy wistful face. He was born in the Ghetto twenty years ago, of poor Jews, who were at first tailors and afterwards small tradespeople, and who had emigrated from Poland. He went to the public schools until he was thirteen years old. Since then he has worked at various jobs. Until recently he was an instructor in the boys' out-door gymnasium near the corner of Hester and Essex streets. For one summer, in order to get a vacation, he became a farm laborer. His art education as well as his education in general is slight, consisting of two terms at the Art Students' League. But for so young a man his intellectual, as well as his artistic activity has been considerable. He belongs to a number of debating societies, and is now hesitating in his mind whether to become a Socialist or an Anarchist, altho he is tending towards a humane socialism.
Two things, however, he seems definitely to have settled--that he will devote himself to his art, and that that art shall be the plastic picturing of the life of his people in the Ghetto. He seems to rejoice at having lost his various pot-boiling positions.
"I was not a gymnast," he said cheerfully, explaining why he left the last one, "and now they have a gymnast."
Now he lives alone on his beloved Hester Street and the studio, where he sleeps and eats. For that modest room he pays $4 a month, and as he cooks his own meals, $12 a month is quite sufficient to satisfy all his needs. This amount he can usually manage to make through the sale of his sketches; but when he does not he "goes to bed," as he puts it, and lies low until one of his various little art enterprises brings him in a small check. Withal, he is very happy, altho serious, like his race in general; and full of idealism and ambition. On one occasion the idea occurred to him and to his friend, Bernard Gussow, that men ought to live closer to nature than they can in the Ghetto. It was in the winter time that they were filled with this conviction, but they nevertheless packed off and hired a farmhouse at Greenwood Lake, and stayed there the whole winter. When their money gave out they cut ice in the river to pay the rent.