In his political feuilletons, Political Letters (“Politishe brif”), Yustman mediated global news from a traditionalist perspective in a highly idiomatic Yiddish, drawing on religious sources to convey his message. Another series of feuilletons, to which “They Let Me in the Saxon Garden” belongs, addressed the daily concerns of Warsaw Jewry.

The Saxon Garden (Ogród Saski), the coveted place the author wishes to enter, is a lavish public park which exists to this day in Warsaw. The garden was historically situated next to the so-called Jewish streets, Krochmalna and Grzybowska. This vast, open, green space, graced by an artificial lake and a fountain, was a welcomed respite from the crowded urban setting in its immediate vicinity. Yustman’s complaint is driven by the municipal authorities’ prohibition on Jews in traditional dress to enter the garden. The discrimination against the Jewish population in a park abutting the Jewish neighborhood was a painful reminder of the authorities’ blatant anti-Semitism. As Yustman wryly commented in the feuilleton, this ban discriminated not only against Jews in traditional dress, but also against dogs.

In 1911, the year Yustman published this feuilleton, the Jewish population in Warsaw amounted to roughly 40% of the entire residents of the capital city. In the wake of the 1905 revolution, this sizable minority was growing more confident of its prospects to translate its size into political power. 1911, however, was a harbinger of bad news. In July, Menahem Mendel Beilis was arrested on false accusation of commiting a ritual murder, in what came to be known as the Beilis affair. The same year saw an ongoing campaign in the Duma which called to restrict the Jewish rights to vote. “They Let Me in the Saxon Garden” thus reflects both an expectation for an increasingly inclusive political climate, as well as a sense of disillusionment. During the same year, Jews in traditional dress were invited to join the park, however, only during the chill of winter.

Yustman’s somewhat misdirected rage, undoubtedly a result of the constraints of the czarist censorship, was central to the Jewish feuilleton project in Eastern Europe, which often translated a protest against the regime into a critique of an internal Jewish matter. Rather than addressing the structural cause for this ban, the feuilleton centers primarily on how it corrupts the Jewish community, allowing Jewish debtors to get away from their creditors, and driving young couples apart. Discriminatory practices against traditional Jews, “They Let Me in the Saxon Garden” argues, erode Jewish solidarity. At the same time, this feuilleton makes a strong political statement, as it compares the Saxon garden ban with the restriction of Jewish residency outside of the Pale of Settlement. In this respect, the ban represents both a local Warsaw concern, as well as a significantly larger case of discrimination against the Jews in the Russian Empire. The feuilleton concludes with the figure of the author, in his traditional Jewish dress, freezing on a bench in the Saxon Garden in the dead of winter, enjoying his new freedom. What, the reader is left to wonder, does it mean in terms of the prospect of Jewish emancipation?