Montague Glass

Montague Marsden Glass (born July 23, 1877 – June 21, 1934) was a British-American Jewish lawyer and writer of short stories, plays and film scripts. His greatest success came with the creation of his fictional duo Abe Potash and Mawrus Perlmutter, who appeared in three books, a play, and several films.

Glass was born in Manchester, England, but spent his childhood in Baguley, in Cheshire. Glass' father worked in the linen and cotton trade. The Glass family moved to New York in 1890, in pursuit of Glass' father's business interests. Glass married Mary Caroline Patterson in 1908. He attended The College of the City of New York, and New York University Law School. After qualifying for the bar, Glass practiced law for several years while writing semi-professionally on the side. In 1909, Glass abandoned the practice of law to write full-time. Glass' transition from law to professional writing coincided with the emergence of the a pair of characters that would prove to be his most enduringly popular creations: Abe Potash and Mawrus Perlmutter.

Potash and Perlmutter made their debut in the short stories published serially in the New York Evening Post. These were then published in a collection "Potash and Perlmutter: Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures," in 1909. In the first story, Potash and Perlmutter meet and become partners in the "cloak and suit" business, subsequent stories seek humor in the pair's business dealings with buyers, suppliers and employees.

Glass, trained as a lawyer, derived the plots of many of the stories from his own experience of the legal problems typical of traders in goods: breached contracts, deliveries of non-conforming goods, problems with trade credit, etc. “For ten years Mr. Glass was present almost daily at bankruptcy meetings, closing of titles to real estate, and conferences with reference to the entrance into or dissolution of co-partnerships.” These experiences formed the basis of his stories.

The characters of Potash and Perlmutter were both Jewish, like Glass himself. The characters' Jewishness is highlighted by Glass' use of dialect in rendering their dialogue. One contemporary critic wrote: "His method is photographic and phonographic; that is, we get the life just as it stirs daily in the cloak and suit section of New York, and we get it through its own language." In rendering the characters' dialect in print, Glass primarily relied on word choice and word order, seldom misspelling words for effect. Thus, a critic in 1917 distinguished Glass' style from "dialect stories ... in which the "Hoot mon" and "Ah'. gwuine, Suh" are sprinkled as liberally as caraway seeds in rye bread."

The use of dialect was carried over into the stage adaptations. Willa Cather wrote of the play "Potash and Perlmutter": "[T]here is not an American in the piece and the only character who speaks conventional English is a Russian refugee." In a later essay, Cather remarked that the stage dialect was accurate enough to satisfy a heavily Jewish audience that was fully familiar with the types being portrayed.

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