One of Broadway’s hits in 1913 was Potash and Perlmutter, which ran for 441 performances at George M. Cohan’s Theatre. The title characters, Abe Potash and Morris Perlmutter, are partners in a wholesale women’s clothing business, mainly selling cloaks to department stores across the country from their headquarters on White Street in Tribeca. By the time of the play’s action, however, they have prospered and relocated their showroom to East Broadway.

The play was mainly the work of Montague Glass (1877–1934), who arrived in New York City at age fourteen from Manchester, England, and became a moderately successful attorney serving merchants in the garment industry. That world of petty tradesmen, comprising mainly Eastern European Jewish immigrants with a sprinkling of previously settled German Jews, was Glass’s Forest of Arden, or perhaps his Shropshire. Nothing happens outside it, and within it, there is enough space for the whole human comedy.

Glass introduced Abe and Morris (“Mawruss”) to the world in a series of short stories starting in 1908. By 1909, he had found a popular platform for them in The Saturday Evening Post, where over the course of five years he published sixty-nine episodes from the lives of the two cantankerous but scrupulously honest outfitters. By the time he brought them on stage at the Cohan Theatre, Potash and Perlmutter were cherished figures in New York’s Jewish community. The pair represented ethnic stereotypes done humorously but with footlights of affection. They rail at one