will promise anything to aid their business. The cult of incompetence, bluff, trickery, cheapness, shoddiness, and satisfaction with substitutes is penetrating all spheres of the material and spiritual culture of everyday life. And it is sad that even academia and education—the spheres for which Jews had always had particular esteem and respect—are an object of trade, trickery, and bluff.
***
[21] [A physician] is not a physician. A teacher is not a teacher. An artist is not an artist. A theatre is not a theatre. Most theatre establishments—theatres, restaurants, and cafés—hire Polish-speaking performers. There is a demand for Polish artistic forces in the two Polish-Yiddish theatres (Femina and Kameralny), as well as in the Sztuka, Splendid, Fontanna, Negresco, and Pałacyk59 cafés, and in many other places, too. The thing is that there are just a few, or in the best-case scenario, about a dozen professional Jewish actors who performed before the war. Consequently, the owners of the establishments hire amateurs and pay them low wages befitting their low-quality performances. [. . .] Such poor acting is still a popular profession among the young quasi-intelligentsia, and [. . .], as we know, any merchandise will find its consumer here. Consequently, even the worst actors easily get onto the stage. They act in dramas, comedies, operas, operettas, revues, and satirical performances. They write texts, translate from foreign languages, rewrite literary masterpieces, direct, dance, sing, and clown about. They are ignoramuses with poor articulation and unattractive looks, [. . .] substitutes [for actors], forgers of art.
To sum up, all spheres—with the exception of music—have been taken over by unprepared, unqualified, and incompetent elements.
We are an enterprising and clever nation, yet not an overly conscientious one.
