When we were peddlers
together he had been considered a failure and a fool. He now
struck me as a clever fellow, full of dash.
Nor did Volodsky represent the only metamorphosis of this kind
that I came across. It was as though there were something in the
atmosphere which turned paupers into capitalists and inane
milksops into men of brains and pluck.
Volodsky succeeded in luring me into a network of speculations
Tevkin had an interest in some of these operations, and, as they
were mostly concerned with property in Harlem or in the Bronx,
his house became my real-estate headquarters. There were two
classes of callers at his home now: the socialists and the literary
men or artists who visited Tevkin's children and the "real-estate
crowd" who came to see Tevkin himself. It came to be tacitly
understood that the library was to be left to the former, while the
dining-room, in the basement, was used as Tevkin's office. Being
"a friend of the family," I had the freedom of both
"You're making a big mistake, Levinsky," Nodelman once said to
me, with a gesture of deep concern.
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