by sheer famine" (91).
There was also a definite consensus that this small area of the world .
was grossly overpopulated. Although Cahan and James agree that there .
is a certain sense of suffocation, they differ on the general feeling of the environment. Cahan describes the activities on Grand Street as a " surging crowd" and as " deafening chaos" that " had many a tale of woe to tell" .
(91). A strong sense of hopelessness is evident when he states "Many of .
the peddlers, too, bore piteous testimony to the calamity which was then.
preying on the quarter" (91). He writes using such descriptive negative connotations such as: self-torture, "abject effect of begging alms" (91) and .
he leads us to envision a sad, desperate, chaotic group that have been disillusioned. He describes the peddlers as "gesticulating with the desperation of imminent ruin." and "disguised with an air of martyrdom or of shamefaced unwontedness" (91). With all of this, Cahan evokes a picture of a people sentenced to a life of doom and despair. .
James, however, is seemingly uncomfortable with the living conditions .
in his old neighborhood, and he doesn't condone what he sees. He does in .
fact observe the same congested streets as Cahan, and also notices the .
poverty and crowdedness, yet envisions things a little differently. What he describes is " a swarming, a swarming that had begun to thicken, infinitely" (107), a scene that " bristled, at every step, with signs and sounds, immitigable, unmistakable, of a Jewry that had burst all bounds" (107). He also states "I was to learn later on that, with the exception of some shy corner of Asia, no district in the world known to the statistician has so many inhabitants to the yard" (107). Although he was confused and displeased with the seemingly deteriorating state of the quarter, he is somehow impressed by the perseverance of the immigrants. .
This becomes apparent in his statement "This, I think, makes the Jew more .
