The Jewish community on New York's Lower East Side is the subject of this book, which was first published in 1902. It describes streets teeming with pushcart peddlers and rag-pickers, sweatshop workers and Talmudic scholars, cafes bursting with intellectuals and unionists, socialists and garment workers – a community whose inhabitants defeated omnipresent poverty with a rich intellectual life, a love of the theater, and literature. Jacob Epstein's drawings reveal a rarely known facet of the great sculptor's art. It was Mr. Hapgood who first appreciated the work of this young artist of the ghetto – “He tells the truth about the ghetto as he sees it, but into the dark reality of the external life he puts frequently a melancholy beauty of spirit.” The proceeds from the sketches for The Spirit of the Ghetto enabled nineteen-year-old Jacob Epstein to sail for Europe, where he was to achieve international acclaim. Harry Golden, who wrote the notes for the new edition, was himself raised on the Lower East Side. His running commentary is quick, vivid, perspicacious, and – inevitably – highly amusing.