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Title: Children of loneliness
Author: Anzia Yezierska
Release date: August 7, 2023 [eBook #71361]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Cassell and Company, 1923
Credits: The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHILDREN OF LONELINESS ***
Children _of_ Loneliness
BY
ANZIA YEZIERSKA
Author of “Hungry Hearts,” “Salome of the Tenements,” etc.
[Illustration]
CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD
London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
First published 1923
Copyright, 1923, by
FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
_Printed in Great Britain_
To
Mrs. HENRY OLLESHEIMER
and
Mr. R. J. CUDDIHY
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
1. MOSTLY ABOUT MYSELF 1
2. CHILDREN OF LONELINESS 29
3. BROTHERS 57
4. TO THE STARS 98
5. AN IMMIGRANT AMONG THE EDITORS 134
6. AMERICA AND I 151
7. A BED FOR THE NIGHT 172
8. DREAMS AND DOLLARS 192
9. THE SONG TRIUMPHANT 222
10. THE LORD GIVETH 256
CHILDREN OF LONELINESS
MOSTLY ABOUT MYSELF
I feel like a starved man who is so bewildered by the first sight of
food that he wants to grab and devour the ice-cream, the roast and the
entrée all in one gulp. For ages and ages, my people in Russia had no
more voice than the broomstick in the corner. The poor had no more
chance to say what they thought or felt than the dirt under the feet.
And here, in America, a miracle has happened to me. I can lift up my
head like a person. After centuries of suppression I am allowed to
speak. Is it a wonder that I am too excited to know where to begin?
All the starved, unlived years crowd into my throat and choke me. I
don’t know whether it is joy or sorrow that hurts me so. I only feel my
release is wrung with the pain of all those back of me who lived and
died, their dumbness pressing down on them like stories on the heart.
My mother, who dried out her days fighting at the pushcarts for
another potato, another onion into the bag, wearing out her heart
and soul and brain with the one unceasing worry--how to get food for
the children a penny cheaper--and my father, a Hebrew scholar and
dreamer who was always too much up in the air to come down to such
sordid thoughts as bread and rent, and the lost and wasted lives of my
brothers and sisters and my grandfather and grandmother, and all those
dumb generations back of me, are crying in every breath of every word
that is struggling itself out of me.
I am the mad mob at a mass meeting, shouting, waving with their hands
and stamping with their feet, to their leader: “Speech! Speech!” And
I am also the bewildered leader struggling to say something and make
myself heard through the deafening noise of a thousand clamouring
voices.
I envy the writers who can sit down at their desks in the clear, calm
security of their vision and begin their story at the beginning and
work it up logically, step by step, till they get to the end.
With me, the end and the middle and the beginning of my story whirl
before me in a mad blur. And I cannot sit still inside myself till the
vision becomes clear and whole and sane in my brain. I’m too much on
fire to wait till I understand what I see and feel. My hands rush out
to seize a word from the end, a phrase from the middle, or a sentence
from the beginning. I jot down any fragment of a thought that I can get
hold of. And then I gather these fragments, words, phrases, sentences,
and I paste them together with my own blood.
Think of the toil it takes to wade through a dozen pages that you must
cut down into one paragraph. Sometimes the vivisection I must commit on
myself to create one little living sentence leaves me spent for days.
I thought when the editor asked me to write mostly about myself,
telling of my own life, it would be so simple the thing would write
itself. And just look at me at my desk! Before me are reams of jumbled
pages of madness and inspiration, and I am trying to make a little
sense of it all.
What shall I keep, and what shall I throw away? Which is madness, and
which is inspiration? I never know. I pick and choose things like a
person feeling his way in the dark. I never know whether the thoughts
I’ve discarded are not perhaps better than the thoughts I’ve kept.
With all the physical anguish I put into my work, I am never sure of
myself. But I am sure of this, that the utterance of the ignorant like
me is something like the utterance of the dying. It’s mixed up and
incoherent, but it has in it the last breath of life and death.
I am learning to accept the torture of chaos and confusion and doubt
through which my thoughts must pass, as a man learns to accept a hump
on his back, or the loss of an arm, or any affliction which the fates
thrust upon him.
I am learning, as I grow older, to be tolerant with my own inadequacy.
I am learning slowly to stop wasting myself trying to make myself over
on the pattern of some better organized, more educated person than I
am. I no longer waste precious time wishing for the brains of a George
Eliot, or the fluency of a George Sand, or the marvellous gift of words
of a May Sinclair. Here I am as I am, and life is short and work is
long. With this limited brain of my inadequate self I must get the most
work done. I can only do the best I can and leave the outcome in the
hands of the Higher Powers.
I am aware that there’s a little too much of I--I--I, too much of
self-analysis and introspection in my writing. But this is because I
was forced to live alone with myself so much. I spent most of my youth
at work I hated, work which called only for the use of the hands,
the strength of my body--not my heart, not my brain. So my thoughts,
instead of going out naturally to the world around me, were turned in
upon myself.
I look upon my self-analysis and introspection as so much dirt through
which I have to dig before I can come into the light of objectivity and
see the people of the worlds around me.
Writing is to me a confession--not a profession. I know a man, a
literary hack who calls himself a dealer in words. He can write to
order on any subject he is hired to write about. I often marvel at the
swift ease with which he can turn from literary criticism to politics,
or psycho-analysis. A fatal fluency enables him to turn out thousands
of words a day in the busy factory of his brain, without putting
anything of himself into it.
But I can never touch the surfaces of things. I can only write from the
depths. I feel myself always under the aching weight of my thoughts.
And words are luring lights that beckon to me through the thick mist of
vague, dumb thoughts that hang over me and press down on me.
I am so in love with the changing lights and shades of words that
I almost hate their power over me, as you hate the tyranny of the
people you love too much. I almost hate writing, because I love so
passionately to express the innermost and outermost of my thoughts
and feelings. And the words I write are never what I started out to
express, but what came out of my desire for expression.
Often I read my own writing as though it were somebody else’s. My own
words mock at me with their glaring unreality. Where is that burning
vividness of things that possessed me when I began? Why did I kill
myself so for nothing? Are these stiff, stilted words me?
I stare at the pages that represent so many days and nights of labour
more bitter, more violent, than childbirth. What has happened? Has my
terrific passion for giving out my experiences only built a barrier of
barren words against the experience that I held so close?
It’s as if every kiss, every embrace of the lover and the beloved
instead of fusing them into a closer oneness only drew them farther and
farther apart. Every written word instead of bringing the vision nearer
only pushed it farther and farther away.
But the sense of failure never stops me. It only spurs my sleeping
senses with ever new inexhaustible energy to do the one thing over
and over and over again till I touch nearer the edge of that flaming
reality just beyond reach.
Writing is ordinarily the least part of a man. It is all there is of
me. I want to write with every pulse of my blood and every breath of
my spirit. I want to write waking or dreaming, year in and year out. I
burn up in this all-consuming desire my family, my friends, my loves,
my clothes, my food, my very life.
And yet the minute my writing gets into print I hate the sight of it. I
have all the patience in the world to do over a page a thousand times.
But the moment it gets out of my hand I can’t bear to touch it with a
pitchfork. The minute a manuscript gets into print it’s all dead shells
of the past to me.
I know some people who hate the books I write, and because they hate
my books they hate me. I want to say to them now that I, too, hate the
stuff I write. Can’t we be friends and make the mutual hatred of my
books a bond instead of a barrier? My books are not me.
Is this a contradiction of anything I said in the page above? I do not
claim to be logical or consistent. I do not claim to think things out;
I only feel out my feelings, and the only thing true about feelings is
that they change and become different in the very process of utterance.
The minute I say a thing with the absolute sincerity of my being, up
rushes another thought that hits my most earnest sincerity in the face
and shows it up for a lie.
I am alive, and the only thing real in my aliveness is the vitality of
unceasing change. Sometimes I wake up in the morning with a fresh new
thought that sweeps out of the window all of the most precious thoughts
of the day before.
Perhaps by the time I shall have reached the end of this little sketch
I shall have refuted every statement I tried to make at the beginning.
I cannot help it. I am not attempting to write a story to fit into
the set mould of a magazine. I am trying to give you the changing,
baffling, contradictory substance of which my life is made.
* * * * *
I remember my mother’s ecstatic face when she burst into the house and
announced proudly that, though she never had had a chance to learn the
alphabet, she could read the names of the streets and she could find
her way to the free dispensary without having to be led by us.
“I’m no longer blind,” she cried, tossing up her market basket in a
gesture of triumph. “The signs of the streets are like pictures before
my eyes. Delancey Street has the black hooks one way, and Essex Street
has black hooks the other way.” She tore off her blue-checked apron. “I
can also be a lady and walk without having to beg people to show me the
way.”
Something of my mother’s wonder was mine when, without knowing the
first alphabet of literature, I had discovered that Beauty was anywhere
a person tries to think out his thoughts. Beauty was no less in the
dark basement of a sweat-shop than in the sunny, spacious halls of a
palace. So that I, buried alive in the killing blackness of poverty,
could wrest the beauty of reality out of my experiences no less than
the princess who had the chance to live and love and whose only worry
was which of her adorers should she choose for a husband.
I did not at first think it as clearly as I write it now. In fact, I
did not think then at all. I only felt. And it gave me a certain power
over the things that weighed over me, merely saying out on paper what I
felt about them.
My first alphabet of self-expression was hatred, wrath and rebellion.
Once during lunch-hour while the other girls in the shop were eating
and talking and laughing, I wrote out on my greasy lunch-bag the
thoughts that were boiling in me for a long, long time.
“I hate beautiful things,” I began. “All day long I handle beautiful
clothes, but not for me--only for others to wear. The bloated rich
with nothing but cold cash can buy the beautiful things made with the
sweat of my hands, while I choke in ugliness.” Merely writing out the
wildness running through my head enabled me to wear the rags I had to
wear with a certain bitter defiance.
But after a while, raving at things in the air ceased to bring me
relief. I felt a little like my mother yelling and cursing at the
children and the worries around her without knowing what or where.
I felt like a woman standing in the middle of her upset house in
the morning--beds not made, dishes not washed, dirty clothes and
rags hanging over the chairs, all the drawers pushed out in mixed-up
disorder, the broom with the dirt in the middle of the floor--and she
not knowing where to begin.
I wanted order, order in my head. But then I was too mixed up with too
many thoughts to put anything in its place. In a blind sort of way, in
groping for order I was groping for beauty. I felt no peace in what I
wrote unless I could make my words laugh and cry with the life of the
poor I was living. I was always digging, digging for the beauty that I
sensed back of the dirt and the disorder. Until I could find a way to
express the beauty of that reality there was no rest in me. Like the
woman who makes the beds or sweeps the house and lets the rest go, so I
took hold of one idea at a time and pushed all the other ideas out of
my head. And day and night I burned up my body and brain with that one
idea till it got light all around me--the light of an idea that shaped
itself in a living picture of living people.
When I saw my first story in print I felt bigger than Columbus who
discovered the New World. I felt bigger than the man who built Brooklyn
Bridge or the highest skyscraper in New York. I walked the streets,
holding the magazine tight in my hands, laughing and crying to myself:
“I had an idea and I thought it out. I did it, I did it! I’m not a
crazy fool, I’m not a crazy fool!”
But the next day all my fiery gladness turned cold. I saw how far from
the whole round circle of the idea was my printed story. And I was
burning to do the same thing over again from another side, to show it
up more.
Critics have said that I have but one story to tell, and that I tell
that one story in different ways each time I write. That is true. My
one story is hunger. Hunger driven by loneliness.
But is not all of human life but the story of our hunger, our
loneliness? What is at the root of economics, sociology, literature and
all art but man’s bread hunger and man’s love hunger?
When I first started to write I could only write one thing--different
phases of the one thing only--bread hunger. At last I’ve written out my
bread hunger. And now I can write only the different phases of the one
thing only--loneliness, love hunger, the hunger for people.
In the days of poverty I used to think there was no experience that
tears through the bottom of the earth like the hunger for bread. But
now I know, more terrible than the hunger for bread is the hunger for
people.
I used to be more hungry after a meal than before. Years ago, the food
I could afford to buy only whetted my appetite for more food. Sometimes
after I had paid down my last precious pennies for a meal in one of
those white-tiled restaurants, I’d get so mad with hunger I’d want to
dash the empty dishes at the heads of the waiters and cry out like a
lunatic: “Don’t feed me with plates and forks and tablecloths. I want
real food. I want to bite into huge chunks of meat. I want butter and
quarts of milk and eggs--dozens of eggs. I want to fill up for once in
my life.”
This unacted madness used to be always flying through my brain,
morning, noon and night. Whenever I wanted to think, my thoughts were
swept away by the sight of thick, juicy steaks and mounds of butter and
platters full of eggs.
Now I no longer live in a lonely hall-room in a tenement. I have won
many friends. I am invited out to teas and dinners and social affairs.
And I wonder, is my insatiable hunger for people so great because for
so many centuries my race has been isolated in Ghettos, shut out of
contact with others? Here in America for the first time races, classes
and creeds are free to meet and mingle on planes as high and wide
as all humanity and its problems. And I am aching to touch all the
different races, classes and creeds at all possible points of contact,
and I never seem to have enough of people.
When I first came to America the coldness of the Americans used to
rouse in me the fury of a savage. Their impersonal, non-committal air
was like a personal insult to me. I longed to shake them out of their
aloofness, their frozen stolidity. But now when I meet an Anglo-Saxon
I want to cry out to him: “We’re friends, we’re friends, I tell you! We
understand the same things, even though we seem to be so different on
the outside.”
Sometimes a man and a woman are so different that they hate each other
at first sight. Their intense difference stabs a sharp sword of fear
into each heart. But when this fear that froze each into his separate
oppositeness ever has a chance for a little sun of understanding, then
the very difference that drew them apart pulls them closer than those
born alike. Perhaps that accounts for the devouring affinity between my
race and the Anglo-Saxon race.
* * * * *
In my early childhood my people hammered into me defeat, defeat,
because that was the way they accepted the crushing weight of life.
Life had crushed my mother, so without knowing it she fed defeat with
the milk of her bosom into the blood and bone of her children. But this
thing that stunted the courage, the initiative, of the other children
roused the fighting devils in me.
When yet barely able to speak, I began to think and question the
justice of the world around me and to assert my rights.
“Mamma,” I asked out of a clear sky, “why does Masha Stein have butter
on her bread every morning, and why is our bread always hard and dry,
and nothing on it?”
“Butter wills itself in you!” shrieked my mother, as she thrust the
hash of potato peelings in front of me for my noonday meal. “Have you
got a father a business man, a butcher or a grocer, a breadgiver, like
Masha Stein’s father? You don’t own the dirt under Masha’s doorstep.
You got a father a scholar. He holds himself all day with God; he might
as well hang the beggar’s bag on his neck and be done with it.”
At the time I had no answer. I was too young to voice my revolt against
my mother’s dark reasoning. But the fact that I did not forget this
speech of so many years ago shows how her black pessimism cut against
my grain.
I have a much clearer memory of my next rebellion against the thick
gloom in which my young years were sunk.
“Mamma, what’s a birthday?” I cried, bursting into the house in a
whirl of excitement. “Becky, the pawnbroker’s girl on the block, will
have a birthday to-morrow. And she’ll get presents for nothing, a cake
with candles on it, and a whole lot of grand things from girls for
nothing--and she said I must come. Could I have a birthday, too, like
she?”
“Woe is to me!” cried my mother, glaring at me with wet, swollen eyes.
“A birthday lays in your head? Enjoyments lays in your head?” she
continued bitterly. “You want to be glad that you were born into the
world? A whole lot you got to be glad about. Wouldn’t it be better if
you was never born already?”
At the harsh sound of my mother’s voice all my dreams took wing. In
rebellion and disappointment I thrust out my lips with a trembling
between retort and tears. It was as if the devil himself urged my
mother thus to avenge herself upon her helpless children for the aches
and weariness of her own life. So she went on, like a horse bolting
downhill, feeling the pressure of the load behind him.
“What is with you the great joy? That you ain’t got a shirt on your
back? That you ain’t got no shoes on your feet? Why are you with
yourself so happy? Is it because the landlord sent the moving bill, and
you’ll be laying in the street to-morrow, already?”
I had forgotten that we had received a notice of eviction, for unpaid
rent, a few days before. A frenzy of fear had taken possession of my
mother as she anticipated the horror of being thrown into the street.
For hours at a time I would see her staring at the wall with the glassy
stare of a madwoman.
“With what have you to be happy, I ask only?” she went on. “Have you
got money laying in the bank? Let the rich people enjoy themselves.
For them is the world like made to order. For them the music plays.
They can have birthdays. But what’s the world to the poor man? Only one
terrible, never-stopping fight with the groceryman and the butcher and
the landlord.”
I gazed at my mother with old, solemn eyes, feeling helplessly sucked
into her bitterness and gloom.
“What’s a poor man but a living dead one?” she pursued, talking more
to herself than to me. “You ought to light a black candle on your
birthday. You ought to lie on your face and cry and curse the day you
was born!”
Crushed by her tirade, I went out silently. The fairy dream of the
approaching birthday had been rudely shattered. Blinded with tears, I
sat down on the edge of the gutter in front of our tenement.
“Look, these are the pink candles for the birthday cake!” A poke in the
back from Becky startled me. “Aren’t they grand? And mamma will buy me
a French doll, and papa said he’d give me a desk, and my aunt will give
me a painting set, and every girl that comes will bring me something
different.”
“But what’s the use?” I sobbed. “I ain’t got nothing for no present,
and I can’t come--and my mother is so mean she got mad and hollered
like hell because I only asked her about the birthday, and----”
A passionate fit of sobbing drowned my words.
In an instant Becky had her arms about me. “I want you to come without
a present,” she said. “I will have a lot of presents, anyhow.”
Assured of her welcome I went the next day. But as I opened the door
fear seized me. I paused trembling, holding the knob in my hand, too
dazed by the sight before me to make a step. More than the strangeness
of the faces awed me. Ordinary home comforts, cushioned chairs, green
ferns between white curtains, the bright rugs on the floor were new and
wonderful to me. Timorously I edged my way into the room, so blinded by
the shimmering colours of the cakes and fruits and candies that covered
the table that I did not see Becky approaching me with outstretched
arms.
“Mamma, this is that little immigrant girl who never had a birthday,”
she said, “so I wanted to show her mine.”
Becky’s father glanced at her all in white, with pink ribbons on her
curls, as she stood beside me in my torn rags reeking with the grime of
neglect. A shudder of revulsion went through him at the sight of me.
“See what Becky has to mix up with on the block,” he whispered to his
wife. “For God’s sake, give her a nickel, give her some candy, give her
anything, but let her run along.”
Street child that I was, my instinct sensed the cold wave of his
thought without hearing the exact words. Breaking away from Becky’s
detaining hand I made for the door.
“I want to go home! I want to go home!” I sobbed as I ran out of the
room.
Whitman has said, “It is as lucky to die as it is to be born.”
And I put his thought into my own words, “It is as lucky not
to have advantages as it is to have them.” I mean that facing
my disadvantages--the fears, the discouragements, the sense of
inferiority--drove me to fight every inch of the way for things I
demanded out of life. And, as a writer, the experience of forcing my
way from the bottomest bottom gave me the knowledge of the poor that
no well-born writer could possibly have.
I am thinking, for instance, of Victor Hugo and his immortal book,
“Les Misérables.” It’s great literature, but it isn’t the dirt and the
blood of the poor that I saw and that forced me to write. Or take the
American, Jack London: when he wrote about tramps he roused the sense
of reality in his readers, because he had been a tramp. But later, when
he tried to make stories of the great unwashed of the cities--again
this was only literature.
The clear realization that literature is beyond my reach, that I must
either be real or nothing, enables me to accept my place as the cobbler
who must stick to his last, and gives my work any merit it may have. I
stand on solid ground when I write of the poor, the homeless and the
hungry.
* * * * *
Like many immigrants who expected to find America a realized Utopian
dream, I had my disillusions. I quote here from an article which was
published in _Good Housekeeping_ in June, 1920.
* * * * *
When the editor told me that he would give me the chance to speak to
the Americans out of my heart and say freely, not what I ought to
feel--not what the Americans want me to feel--but what I actually
do feel--something broke loose in me--a tightness that had held me
strained like one whose fists are clenched--resisting--resisting----
Resisting what? Had I not come to America with open, outstretched arms,
all my earthly possessions tied up in a handkerchief and all the hopes
of humanity singing in my heart?
Had I not come to join hands with all those thousands of dreamers who
had gone before me in search of the Golden Land? As I rushed forward
with hungry eagerness to meet the expected welcoming, the very earth
danced under my feet. All that I was, all that I had, I held out in my
bare hands to America, the beloved, the prayed-for land.
But no hand was held out to meet mine. My eyes burned with
longing--seeking--seeking for a comprehending glance. Where are the
dreamers? cried my heart. My hands dropped down, my gifts unwanted.
I found no dreamers in America. I found rich men, poor men,
educated men, ignorant men--struggling--all struggling--for bread,
for rent, for banks, for mines. Rich and poor, educated and
ignorant--straining--straining--wearing out their bodies, their
brains, for the possession of things--money, power, position--their
dreams forgotten.
I found in this rich land man still fighting man, as in the poorest
part of the old country. Just as the starving Roumanian Jews, who
had nothing to eat in their homeland but herring, when they became
millionaires still ate herring from gold plates at banquets, so,
throughout America, the dollar fight that grew up like a plague in
times of poverty, killing the souls of men, still goes on in times of
plenty.
I had expected to work in America, but work at the thing I loved--work
with my mind, my heart, prepared for my work by education. I had
dreamed of free schools, free colleges, where I could learn to give
out my innermost thoughts and feelings to the world. But no sooner
did I come off the ship than hunger drove me to the sweatshop, to
become a “hand”--not a brain--not a soul--not a spirit--but just a
“hand”--cramped, deadened into a part of a machine--a hand fit only to
grasp, not to give.
Time came when I was able to earn my bread and rent. I earned what
would have been wealth to me in Poland. My knotted nerves relaxed.
I begun to breathe like a free human being. Ach! Maybe I could yet
be at home in America. Maybe I could yet make something of myself.
My choked-in spirit revived. There was a new light in my eyes, new
strength in my arms and fingers. New hopes, new dreams beckoned
to me. Should I take a night course in college, or buy myself the
much-longed-for books, or treat myself to a little vacation to have
time to think?
Then the landlady came with the raise in rent. The loaf of bread
that was five cents became ten. Milk that was eight cents a quart
became eighteen. Shoes, clothes, everything doubled and tripled in
price. I felt like one put on a rack--thumb-screws torturing my
flesh--pay--pay--pay!
What had been enough to give me comfort yesterday became starvation
to-day. Always the cost of living leaping over the rise in wages. Never
free from poverty--even in America.
And then I clenched my hands and swore that I would hold my dream of
America--and fight for it. I refuse to accept the America where men
make other men poor--create poverty where God has poured out wealth. I
refuse to accept the America that gives the landlord the right to keep
on raising my rent and to drive me to the streets when I do not earn
enough to meet his rapacious demands.
I cry out in this wilderness for America--my America--different from
all other countries. In this America promised to the oppressed of all
lands, there is enough so that man need not fight man for his bread,
but work with man, building the beauty that for hundreds of years,
in thousands of starved villages of Europe, men have dreamed was
America--beautiful homes--beautiful cities--beautiful lives reaching up
for higher, ever higher visions of beauty.
I know you will say what right have I to come here and make demands
upon America. But are not my demands the breath, the very life of
America? What, after all, is America, but the response to the demands
of immigrants like me, seeking new worlds in which their spirits may
be free to create beauty? Were not the Pilgrim Fathers immigrants
demanding a new world in which they could be free to live higher lives?
Yes, I make demands--not in arrogance, but in all humility. I
demand--driven by my desire to give. I want to give not only that which
I am, but that which I might be if I only had the chance. I want to
give to America not the immigrant you see before you--starved, stunted,
resentful, on the verge of hysteria from repression. I want to give a
new kind of immigrant, full grown in mind and body--loving, serving,
upholding America.
* * * * *
By writing out my protests and disillusions, I aired and clarified
them. Slowly, I began to understand my unreasoning demands upon America
and what America had to offer. I saw that America was a new world in
the making, that anyone who has something real in him can find a way
to contribute himself in this new world. But I saw I had to fight for
my chance to give what I had to give, with the same life-and-death
earnestness with which a man fights for his bread.
What had I with my empty hands and my hungry heart to give to America?
I had my hunger, my homelessness, my dumbness, my blind searchings
and gropings for what I knew not. I had to give to America my
aching ignorance, my burning desire for knowledge. I had to give to
America the dirt and the ugliness of my black life of poverty and my
all-consuming passion for beauty.
As long as I kept stretching out my hands begging, begging for others
to understand me, for friendship, for help--as long as I kept begging
them to give me something--so long I was shut out from America. But the
moment I understood America well enough to tell her about herself as
I saw her--the moment I began to express myself--America accepted my
self-expression as a gift from me, and from everywhere hands reached
out to help me.
With the money I earned writing out stories of myself and my people, I
was enabled to go abroad and to take another look around the Old World.
I travelled from city to city. My special purpose was to talk to the
poor people in the different countries and see how their chance to live
compared with the chances of those in America.
I find that in no other country has the new-comer such a _direct_
chance to come to the front and become a partner in the making of the
country. Not where you come from, but what is in you and what you are,
counts in America.
In no other country is there such healthy rebellion, such vital
discontent, as there is among the poor in America. And the rebellion
and discontent of the poor is in proportion to how well off they are.
The poor people demand more of America than they ever dared to demand
of their homeland, because America is brimming over with riches enough
for everybody.
Life in America is a swift, sharp adventure. In the old countries
things are more or less settled. In America the soil is young, and the
people are young blossoming shoots of a new-grown civilization.
The writers of Europe can only be stylists, because life and traditions
are fixed with them. In America life is yet unexplored, and lived new
by each new-comer. And that is why America is such virgin stuff for the
novelist.
Fiction is a mirror of life as it is being lived at the moment. And the
moments are more static in Europe than in America. I admit that art
is not so good in America as in Europe, because art is a decoration,
and America is a young country too turbulent with life to take time to
decorate itself.
I who used to be the most violent rebel of an immigrant, I now find
myself the most ardent defender of America. I see every flaw of
America perhaps more clearly than ever before. I know the ruthless
commercialism of our big cities, the grabbing greed of landlords since
the war making the thought of home almost impossible to the poor. I
know that the gospel of success which rules in America hurts itself,
because failure and defeat have revelations for humanity’s deeper
growth, to which success is deaf and dumb and blind.
I know how often the artists, the makers of beauty, in America are
driven to the wall by the merciless extortion of those who sell the
means of existence. But I know, too, that those of the artists who
survive are vitalized by the killing things which had failed to kill
them. America has no place for the dawdling, soft-spined, make-believe
artists that swarm in the Paris cafés.
In the sunshine of the opportunities that have come to me, I am
always aware of those around me and behind me who lacked the terrific
vitality, the brutal self-absorption with which I had to fight for my
chance or be blotted out. My eyes will always turn back with loneliness
and longing for the old faces and old scenes that I loved more than my
life. But though it tears my heart out of my body to go on, I must go
on.
There’s no going back to the Old World for anyone who has breathed
the invigorating air of America. I return to America with the new
realization that in no other country would a nobody from nowhere--one
of the millions of lonely immigrants that pour through Ellis Island--a
dumb thing with nothing but hunger and desire, get the chance to become
articulate that America has given me.
CHILDREN OF LONELINESS
§ 1
“Oh, mother, can’t you use a fork?” exclaimed Rachel as Mrs. Ravinsky
took the shell of the baked potato in her fingers and raised it to her
watering mouth.
“Here, _teacherin_ mine, you want to learn me in my old age how to put
the bite in my mouth?” The mother dropped the potato back into her
plate, too wounded to eat. Wiping her hands on her blue-checked apron,
she turned her glance to her husband, at the opposite side of the table.
“Yankev,” she said bitterly, “stick your bone on a fork. Our
_teacherin_ said you dassn’t touch no eatings with the hands.”
“All my teachers died already in the old country,” retorted the old
man. “I ain’t going to learn nothing new no more from my American
daughter.” He continued to suck the marrow out of the bone with that
noisy relish that was so exasperating to Rachel.
“It’s no use,” stormed the girl, jumping up from the table in disgust;
“I’ll never be able to stand it here with you people.”
“‘You people’? What do you mean by ‘you people’?” shouted the old
man, lashed into fury by his daughter’s words. “You think you got a
different skin from us because you went to college?”
“It drives me wild to hear you crunching bones like savages. If you
people won’t change, I shall have to move and live by myself.”
Yankev Ravinsky threw the half-gnawed bone upon the table with such
vehemence that a plate broke into fragments.
“You witch you!” he cried in a hoarse voice tense with rage. “Move by
yourself! We lived without you while you was away in college, and we
can get on without you further. God ain’t going to turn his nose on us
because we ain’t got table manners from America. A hell she made from
this house since she got home.”
“_Shah!_ Yankev _leben_,” pleaded the mother, “the neighbours are
opening the windows to listen to our hollering. Let us have a little
quiet for a while till the eating is over.”
But the accumulated hurts and insults that the old man had borne in
the one week since his daughter’s return from college had reached the
breaking-point. His face was convulsed, his eyes flashed, and his lips
were flecked with froth as he burst out in a volley of scorn:
“You think you can put our necks in a chain and learn us new tricks?
You think you can make us over for Americans? We got through till fifty
years of our lives eating in our own old way----”
“Woe is me, Yankev _leben_!” entreated his wife. “Why can’t we choke
ourselves with our troubles? Why must the whole world know how we are
tearing ourselves by the heads? In all Essex Street, in all New York,
there ain’t such fights like by us.”
Her pleadings were in vain. There was no stopping Yankev Ravinsky once
his wrath was roused. His daughter’s insistence upon the use of a knife
and fork spelled apostasy, anti-Semitism, and the aping of the gentiles.
Like a prophet of old condemning unrighteousness, he ran the gamut of
denunciation, rising to heights of fury that were sublime and godlike,
and sinking from sheer exhaustion to abusive bitterness.
“_Pfui_ on all your American colleges! _Pfui_ on the morals of America!
No respect for old age. No fear for God. Stepping with your feet on
all the laws of the holy Torah. A fire should burn out the whole new
generation. They should sink into the earth, like Korah.”
“Look at him cursing and burning! Just because I insist on their
changing their terrible table manners. One would think I was killing
them.”
“Do you got to use a gun to kill?” cried the old man, little red
threads darting out of the whites of his eyes.
“Who is doing the killing? Aren’t you choking the life out of me?
Aren’t you dragging me by the hair to the darkness of past ages every
minute of the day? I’d die of shame if one of my college friends should
open the door while you people are eating.”
“You--you----”
The old man was on the point of striking his daughter when his wife
seized the hand he raised.
“_Mincha!_ Yankev, you forgot _Mincha_!”
This reminder was a flash of inspiration on Mrs. Ravinsky’s part, the
only thing that could have ended the quarrelling instantly. _Mincha_
was the prayer just before sunset of the orthodox Jews. This religious
rite was so automatic with the old man that at his wife’s mention of
_Mincha_ everything was immediately shut out, and Yankev Ravinsky
rushed off to a corner of the room to pray.
“_Ashrai Yoishwai Waisahuh!_
“Happy are they who dwell in Thy house. Ever shall I praise Thee.
_Selah!_ Great is the Lord, and exceedingly to be praised; and His
greatness is unsearchable. On the majesty and glory of Thy splendour,
and on Thy marvellous deeds, will I meditate.”
The shelter from the storms of life that the artist finds in his
art, Yankev Ravinsky found in his prescribed communion with God.
All the despair caused by his daughter’s apostasy, the insults and
disappointments he suffered, were in his sobbing voice. But as he
entered into the spirit of his prayer, he felt the man of flesh
drop away in the outflow of God around him. His voice mellowed, the
rigid wrinkles of his face softened, the hard glitter of anger and
condemnation in his eyes was transmuted into the light of love as he
went on:
“The Lord is gracious and merciful; slow to anger and of great
loving-kindness. To all that call upon Him in truth He will hear their
cry and save them.”
Oblivious to the passing and repassing of his wife as she warmed anew
the unfinished dinner, he continued:
“Put not your trust in princes, in the son of man in whom there is no
help.” Here Reb Ravinsky paused long enough to make a silent confession
for the sin of having placed his hope on his daughter instead of on
God. His whole body bowed with the sense of guilt. Then in a moment his
humility was transfigured into exaltation. Sorrow for sin dissolved in
joy as he became more deeply aware of God’s unfailing protection.
“Happy is he who hath the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in
the Lord his God. He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their
wounds.”
A healing balm filled his soul as he returned to the table, where the
steaming hot food awaited him. Rachel sat near the window pretending
to read a book. Her mother did not urge her to join them at the table,
fearing another outbreak, and the meal continued in silence.
The girl’s thoughts surged hotly as she glanced from her father to her
mother. A chasm of four centuries could not have separated her more
completely from them than her four years at Cornell.
“To think that I was born of these creatures! It’s an insult to my
soul. What kinship have I with these two lumps of ignorance and
superstition? They’re ugly and gross and stupid. I’m all sensitive
nerves. They want to wallow in dirt.”
She closed her eyes to shut out the sight of her parents as they
silently ate together, unmindful of the dirt and confusion.
“How is it possible that I lived with them and like them only four
years ago? What is it in me that so quickly gets accustomed to the
best? Beauty and cleanliness are as natural to me as if I’d been born
on Fifth Avenue instead of in the dirt of Essex Street.”
A vision of Frank Baker passed before her. Her last long talk with him
out under the trees in college still lingered in her heart. She felt
that she had only to be with him again to carry forward the beautiful
friendship that had sprung up between them. He had promised to come
shortly to New York. How could she possibly introduce such a born and
bred American to her low, ignorant, dirty parents?
“I might as well tear the thought of Frank Baker out of my heart,” she
told herself. “If he just once sees the pigsty of a home I come from,
if he just sees the table manners of my father and mother, he’ll fly
through the ceiling.”
Timidly, Mrs. Ravinsky turned to her daughter.
“Ain’t you going to give a taste the eating?”
No answer.
“I fried the _lotkes_ special for you----”
“I can’t stand your fried, greasy stuff.”
“Ain’t even my cooking good no more neither?” Her gnarled, hard-worked
hands clutched at her breast. “God from the world, for what do I need
yet any more my life? Nothing I do for my child is no use no more.”
Her head sank; her whole body seemed to shrivel and grow old with the
sense of her own futility.
“How I was hurrying to run by the butcher before everybody else, so as
to pick out the grandest, fattest piece of _brust_!” she wailed, tears
streaming down her face. “And I put my hand away from my heart and put
a whole fresh egg into the _lotkes_, and I stuffed the stove full of
coal like a millionaire so as to get the _lotkes_ fried so nice and
brown; and now you give a kick on everything I done----”
“Fool woman,” shouted her husband, “stop laying yourself on the ground
for your daughter to step on you! What more can you expect from a
child raised up in America? What more can you expect but that she
should spit in your face and make dirt from you?” His eyes, hot and
dry under their lids, flashed from his wife to his daughter. “The old
Jewish eating is poison to her; she must have _treifah_ ham--only
forbidden food.”
Bitter laughter shook him.
“Woman, how you patted yourself with pride before all the neighbours,
boasting of our great American daughter coming home from college! This
is our daughter, our pride, our hope, our pillow for our old age that
we were dreaming about. This is our American _teacherin_! A Jew-hater,
an anti-Semite we brought into the world, a betrayer of our race who
hates her own father and mother like the Russian Tsar once hated a Jew.
She makes herself so refined, she can’t stand it when we use the knife
or fork the wrong way; but her heart is that of a brutal Cossack, and
she spills her own father’s and mother’s blood like water.”
Every word he uttered seared Rachel’s soul like burning acid. She
felt herself becoming a witch, a she-devil, under the spell of his
accusations.
“You want me to love you yet?” She turned upon her father like an
avenging fury. “If there’s any evil hatred in my soul, you have roused
it with your cursed preaching.”
“_Oi-i-i!_ Highest One! pity Yourself on us!” Mrs. Ravinsky wrung her
hands. “Rachel, Yankev, let there be an end to this knife-stabbing!
_Gottuniu!_ my flesh is torn to pieces!”
Unheeding her mother’s pleading, Rachel rushed to the closet where she
kept her things.
“I was a crazy idiot to think that I could live with you people under
one roof.” She flung on her hat and coat and bolted for the door.
Mrs. Ravinsky seized Rachel’s arm in passionate entreaty.
“My child, my heart, my life, what do you mean? Where are you going?”
“I mean to get out of this hell of a home this very minute,” she said,
tearing loose from her mother’s clutching hands.
“Woe is me! My child! We’ll be to shame and to laughter by the whole
world. What will people say?”
“Let them say! My life is my own; I’ll live as I please.” She slammed
the door in her mother’s face.
“They want me to love them yet,” ran the mad thoughts in Rachel’s brain
as she hurried through the streets, not knowing where she was going,
not caring. “Vampires, bloodsuckers fastened on my flesh! Black shadow
blighting every ray of light that ever came my way! Other parents
scheme and plan and wear themselves out to give their child a chance,
but they put dead stones in front of every chance I made for myself.”
With the cruelty of youth to everything not youth, Rachel reasoned:
“They have no rights, no claims over me, like other parents who do
things for their children. It was my own brains, my own courage, my
own iron will that forced my way out of the sweatshop to my present
position in the public schools. I owe them nothing, nothing, nothing.”
§ 2
Two weeks already away from home, Rachel looked about her room. It was
spotlessly clean. She had often said to herself while at home with her
parents: “All I want is an empty room, with a bed and table and chair.
As long as it is clean and away from them, I’ll be happy.”
But was she happy?
A distant door closed, followed by the retreating sound of descending
footsteps. Then all was still, the stifling stillness of a
lodging-house. The white, empty walls pressed in upon her, suffocated
her. She listened acutely for any stir of life, but the continued
silence was unbroken save for the insistent ticking of her watch.
“I ran away from home burning for life,” she mused, “and all I’ve
found is the loneliness that’s death.” A wave of self-pity weakened
her almost to the point of tears. “I’m alone! I’m alone!” she moaned,
crumpling into a heap.
“Must it always be with me like this,” her soul cried in terror,
“either to live among those who drag me down or in the awful isolation
of a hall bed-room? Oh, I’ll die of loneliness among these frozen,
each-shut-in-himself Americans! It’s one thing to break away, but, oh,
the strength to go on alone! How can I ever do it? The love instinct is
so strong in me; I cannot live without love, without people.”
The thought of a letter from Frank Baker suddenly lightened her
spirits. That very evening she was to meet him for dinner. Here was
hope, more than hope. Just seeing him again would surely bring the
certainty.
This new rush of light upon her dark horizon so softened her heart that
she could almost tolerate her superfluous parents.
“If I could only have love and my own life, I could almost forgive
them for bringing me into the world. I don’t really hate them; I only
hate them when they stand between me and the new America that I’m to
conquer.”
Answering her impulse, her feet led her to the familiar Ghetto streets.
On the corner of the block where her parents lived she paused, torn
between the desire to see her people and the fear of their nagging
reproaches. The old Jewish proverb came to her mind: “The wolf is not
afraid of the dog, but he hates his bark.” “I’m not afraid of their
black curses for sin. It’s nothing to me if they accuse me of being an
anti-Semite or a murderer, and yet why does it hurt me so?”
Rachel had prepared herself to face the usual hail-storm of reproaches
and accusations, but as she entered the dark hallway of the tenement,
she heard her father’s voice chanting the old familiar Hebrew psalm of
“The Race of Sorrows”:
“Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my cry come unto Thee.
“For my days are consumed like smoke, and my bones are burned as an
hearth.
“I am like a pelican of the wilderness.
“I am like an owl of the desert.
“I have eaten ashes like bread and mingled my drink with weeping.”
A faintness came over her. The sobbing strains of the lyric song melted
into her veins like a magic sap, making her warm and human again. All
her strength seethed to flow out of her in pity for her people. She
longed to throw herself on the dirty, ill-smelling tenement stairs and
weep: “Nothing is real but love--love. Nothing so false as ambition.”
Since her early childhood she remembered often waking up in the middle
of the night and hearing her father chant this age-old song of woe.
There flashed before her a vivid picture of him, huddled in the corner
beside the table piled high with Hebrew books, swaying to the rhythm
of his jeremiad, the sputtering light of the candle stuck in a bottle
throwing uncanny shadows over his gaunt face. The skull-cap, the
side-locks, and the long grey beard made him seem like some mystic
stranger from a far-off world and not a father. The father of the
daylight who ate with a knife, spat on the floor, and who was forever
denouncing America and Americans was different from this stranger of
the mystic spirit who could thrill with such impassioned rapture.
Thousands of years of exile, thousands of years of hunger, loneliness,
and want swept over her as she listened to her father’s voice.
Something seemed to be crying out to her to run in and seize her father
and mother in her arms and hold them close.
“Love, love--nothing is true between us but love,” she thought.
But why couldn’t she do what she longed to do? Why, with all her
passionate sympathy for them, should any actual contact with her people
seem so impossible? No, she couldn’t go in just yet. Instead, she ran
up on the roof, where she could be alone. She stationed herself at the
air-shaft opposite their kitchen window, where for the first time since
she had left in a rage she could see her old home.
_Ach!_ what sickening disorder! In the sink were the dirty dishes
stacked high, untouched, it looked, for days. The table still held
the remains of the last meal. Clothes were strewn about the chairs.
The bureau-drawers were open, and their contents brimmed over in mad
confusion.
“I couldn’t endure it, this terrible dirt!” Her nails dug into her
palms, shaking with the futility of her visit. “It would be worse than
death to go back to them. It would mean giving up order, cleanliness,
sanity, everything that I’ve striven all these years to attain. It
would mean giving up the hope of my new world--the hope of Frank Baker.”
The sound of the creaking door reached her where she crouched against
the air-shaft. She looked again into the murky depths of the room. Her
mother had entered. With arms full of paper bags of provisions, the
old woman paused on the threshold, her eyes dwelling on the dim figure
of her husband. A look of pathetic tenderness illumined her wrinkled
features.
“I’ll make something good to eat for you, yes?”
Reb Ravinsky only dropped his head on his breast. His eyes were red and
dry, sandy with sorrow that could find no release in tears. Good God!
never had Rachel seen such profound despair. For the first time she
noticed the grooved tracings of withering age knotted on his face and
the growing hump on her mother’s back.
“Already the shadow of death hangs over them,” she thought as she
watched them. “They’re already with one foot in the grave. Why can’t I
be human to them before they’re dead? Why can’t I?”
Rachel blotted away the picture of the sordid room with both hands over
her eyes.
“To death with my soul! I wish I were a plain human being with a heart
instead of a monster of selfishness with a soul.”
But the pity she felt for her parents began now to be swept away in a
wave of pity for herself.
“How every step in advance costs me my heart’s blood! My greatest
tragedy in life is that I always see the two opposite sides at the same
time. What seems to me right one day seems all wrong the next. Not only
that, but many things seem right and wrong at the same time. I feel I
have a right to my own life, and yet I feel just as strongly that I owe
my father and mother something. Even if I don’t love them, I have no
right to step over them. I’m drawn to them by something more compelling
than love. It is the cry of their dumb, wasted lives.”
Again Rachel looked into the dimly lighted room below. Her mother
placed food upon the table. With a self-effacing stoop of humility, she
entreated, “Eat only while it is hot yet.”
With his eyes fixed almost unknowingly, Reb Ravinsky sat down. Her
mother took the chair opposite him, but she only pretended to eat the
slender portion of the food she had given herself.
Rachel’s heart swelled. Yes, it had always been like that. Her mother
had taken the smallest portion of everything for herself. Complaints,
reproaches, upbraidings, abuse, yes, all these had been heaped by her
upon her mother; but always the juiciest piece of meat was placed on
her plate, the thickest slice of bread; the warmest covering was given
to her, while her mother shivered through the night.
“Ah, I don’t want to abandon them!” she thought; “I only want to get
to the place where I belong. I only want to get to the mountain-tops
and view the world from the heights, and then I’ll give them everything
I’ve achieved.”
Her thoughts were sharply broken in upon by the loud sound of her
father’s eating. Bent over the table, he chewed with noisy gulps a
piece of herring, his temples working to the motion of his jaws.
With each audible swallow and smacking of the lips, Rachel’s heart
tightened with loathing.
“Their dirty ways turn all my pity into hate.” She felt her toes and
her fingers curl inward with disgust. “I’ll never amount to anything
if I’m not strong enough to break away from them once and for all.”
Hypnotizing herself into her line of self-defence, her thoughts raced
on: “I’m only cruel to be kind. If I went back to them now, it would
not be out of love, but because of weakness--because of doubt and
unfaith in myself.”
Rachel bluntly turned her back. Her head lifted. There was iron will in
her jaws.
“If I haven’t the strength to tear free from the old, I can never
conquer the new. Every new step a man makes is a tearing away from
those clinging to him. I must get tight and hard as rock inside of me
if I’m ever to do the things I set out to do. I must learn to suffer
and suffer, walk through blood and fire, and not bend from my course.”
For the last time she looked at her parents. The terrible loneliness of
their abandoned old age, their sorrowful eyes, the wrung-dry weariness
on their faces, the whole black picture of her ruined, desolate
home, burned into her flesh. She knew all the pain of one unjustly
condemned, and the guilt of one with the spilt blood of helpless lives
upon his hands. Then came tears, blinding, wrenching tears that tore at
her heart until it seemed that they would rend her body into shreds.
“God! God!” she sobbed as she turned her head away from them, “if all
this suffering were at least for something worth while, for something
outside myself! But to have to break them and crush them merely because
I have a fastidious soul that can’t stomach their table manners, merely
because I can’t strangle my aching ambitions to rise in the world!”
She could no longer sustain the conflict which raged within her higher
and higher at every moment. With a sudden tension of all her nerves she
pulled herself together and stumbled blindly down the stairs and out
of the house. And she felt as if she had torn away from the flesh and
blood of her own body.
§ 3
Out in the street she struggled to get hold of herself again. Despite
the tumult and upheaval that racked her soul, an intoxicating lure
still held her up--the hope of seeing Frank Baker that evening. She
was indeed a storm-racked ship, but within sight of shore. She need
but throw out the signal, and help was nigh. She need but confide to
Frank Baker of her break with her people, and all the dormant sympathy
between them would surge up. His understanding would widen and deepen
because of her great need for his understanding. He would love her the
more because of her great need for his love.
Forcing back her tears, stepping over her heartbreak, she hurried to
the hotel where she was to meet him. Her father’s impassioned rapture
when he chanted the psalms of David lit up the visionary face of the
young Jewess.
“After all, love is the beginning of the real life,” she thought as
Frank Baker’s dark, handsome face flashed before her. “With him to hold
on to, I’ll begin my new world.”
Borne higher and higher by the intoxicating illusion of her great
destiny, she cried:
“A person all alone is but a futile cry in an unheeding wilderness. One
alone is but a shadow, an echo of reality. It takes two together to
create reality. Two together can pioneer a new world.”
With a vision of herself and Frank Baker marching side by side to the
conquest of her heart’s desire, she added:
“No wonder a man’s love means so little to the American woman. They
belong to the world in which they are born. They belong to their
fathers and mothers; they belong to their relatives and friends. They
are human even without a man’s love. I don’t belong; I’m not human.
Only a man’s love can save me and make me human again.”
It was the busy dinner-hour at the fashionable restaurant. Pausing at
the doorway with searching eyes and lips eagerly parted, Rachel’s swift
glance circled the lobby. Those seated in the dining-room beyond who
were not too absorbed in one another, noticed a slim, vivid figure of
ardent youth, but with dark, age-old eyes that told of the restless
seeking of her homeless race.
With nervous little movements of anxiety, Rachel sat down, got up, then
started across the lobby. Half-way, she stopped, and her breath caught.
“Mr. Baker,” she murmured, her hands fluttering toward him with
famished eagerness. His smooth, athletic figure had a cocksureness that
to the girl’s worshipping gaze seemed the perfection of male strength.
“You must be doing wonderful things,” came from her admiringly, “you
look so happy, so shining with life.”
“Yes”--he shook her hand vigorously--“I’ve been living for the first
time since I was a kid. I’m full of such interesting experiences. I’m
actually working in an East Side settlement.”
Dazed by his glamorous success, Rachel stammered soft phrases of
congratulation as he led her to a table. But seated opposite him, the
face of this untried youth, flushed with the health and happiness of
another world than that of the poverty-crushed Ghetto, struck her
almost as an insincerity.
“You in an East Side settlement?” she interrupted sharply. “What
reality can there be in that work for you?”
“Oh,” he cried, his shoulders squaring with the assurance of his
master’s degree in sociology, “it’s great to get under the surface
and see how the other half live. It’s so picturesque! My conception
of these people has greatly changed since I’ve been visiting their
homes.” He launched into a glowing account of the East Side as seen by
a twenty-five-year-old college graduate.
“I thought them mostly immersed in hard labour, digging subways or
slaving in sweatshops,” he went on. “But think of the poetry which the
immigrant is daily living!”
“But they’re so sunk in the dirt of poverty, what poetry do you see
there?”
“It’s their beautiful home life, the poetic devotion between parents
and children, the sacrifices they make for one another----”
“Beautiful home life? Sacrifices? Why, all I know of is the battle to
the knife between parents and children. It’s black tragedy that boils
there, not the pretty sentiments that you imagine.”
“My dear child”--he waved aside her objection--“you’re too close to
judge dispassionately. This very afternoon, on one of my friendly
visits, I came upon a dear old man who peered up at me through
horn-rimmed glasses behind his pile of Hebrew books. He was hardly able
to speak English, but I found him a great scholar.”
“Yes, a lazy old do-nothing, a bloodsucker on his wife and children.”
Too shocked for remonstrance, Frank Baker stared at her.
“How else could he have time in the middle of the afternoon to pore
over his books?” Rachel’s voice was hard with bitterness. “Did you
see his wife? I’ll bet she was slaving for him in the kitchen. And his
children slaving for him in the sweatshop.”
“Even so, think of the fine devotion that the women and children show
in making the lives of your Hebrew scholars possible. It’s a fine
contribution to America, where our tendency is to forget idealism.”
“Give me better a plain American man who supports his wife and
children, and I’ll give you all those dreamers of the Talmud.”
He smiled tolerantly at her vehemence.
“Nevertheless,” he insisted, “I’ve found wonderful material for my new
book in all this. I think I’ve got a new angle on the social types of
your East Side.”
An icy band tightened about her heart. “Social types,” her lips formed.
How could she possibly confide to this man of the terrible tragedy that
she had been through that very day? Instead of the understanding and
sympathy that she had hoped to find, there were only smooth platitudes,
the sight-seer’s surface interest in curious “social types.”
Frank Baker talked on. Rachel seemed to be listening, but her eyes had
a far-off, abstracted look. She was quiet as a spinning-top is quiet,
her thoughts and emotions revolving within her at high speed.
“That man in love with me? Why, he doesn’t see me or feel me. I don’t
exist to him. He’s only stuck on himself, blowing his own horn. Will
he never stop with his ‘I,’ ‘I,’ ‘I’? Why, I was a crazy lunatic to
think that just because we took the same courses in college he would
understand me out in the real world.”
All the fire suddenly went out of her eyes. She looked a thousand years
old as she sank back wearily in her chair.
“Oh, but I’m boring you with all my heavy talk on sociology.” Frank
Baker’s words seemed to come to her from afar. “I have tickets for a
fine musical comedy that will cheer you up, Miss Ravinsky----”
“Thanks, thanks,” she cut in hurriedly. Spend a whole evening sitting
beside him in a theatre when her heart was breaking? No. All she wanted
was to get away--away where she could be alone. “I have work to do,”
she heard herself say. “I’ve got to get home.”
Frank Baker murmured words of polite disappointment and escorted her
back to her door. She watched the sure swing of his athletic figure as
he strode away down the street, then she rushed upstairs.
Back in her little room, stunned, bewildered, blinded with her
disillusion, she sat staring at her four empty walls.
Hours passed, but she made no move, she uttered no sound. Doubled fists
thrust between her knees, she sat there, staring blindly at her empty
walls.
“I can’t live with the old world, and I’m yet too green for the new.
I don’t belong to those who gave me birth or to those with whom I was
educated.”
Was this to be the end of all her struggles to rise in America, she
asked herself, this crushing daze of loneliness? Her driving thirst
for an education, her desperate battle for a little cleanliness, for a
breath of beauty, the tearing away from her own flesh and blood to free
herself from the yoke of her parents--what was it all worth now? Where
did it lead to? Was loneliness to be the fruit of it all?
Night was melting away like a fog; through the open window the first
lights of dawn were appearing. Rachel felt the sudden touch of the sun
upon her face, which was bathed in tears. Overcome by her sorrow, she
shuddered and put her hand over her eyes as though to shut out the
unwelcome contact. But the light shone through her fingers.
Despite her weariness, the renewing breath of the fresh morning entered
her heart like a sunbeam. A mad longing for life filled her veins.
“I want to live,” her youth cried. “I want to live, even at the worst.”
Live how? Live for what? She did not know. She only felt she must
struggle against her loneliness and weariness as she had once struggled
against dirt, against the squalor and ugliness of her Ghetto home.
Turning from the window, she concentrated her mind, her poor tired
mind, on one idea.
“I have broken away from the old world; I’m through with it. It’s
already behind me. I must face this loneliness till I get to the new
world. Frank Baker can’t help me; I must hope for no help from the
outside. I’m alone; I’m alone till I get there.
“But am I really alone in my seeking? I’m one of the millions of
immigrant children, children of loneliness, wandering between worlds
that are at once too old and too new to live in.”
BROTHERS
I had just begun to unpack and arrange my things in my new quarters
when Hanneh Breineh edged herself confidingly into my room and started
to tell me the next chapter in the history of all her lodgers.
“And this last one what sleeps in the kitchen,” she finished, “he’s
such a stingy--Moisheh the Schnorrer they call him. He washes himself
his own shirts and sews together the holes from his socks to save a
penny. Think only! He cooks himself his own meat once a week for the
Sabbath and the rest of the time it’s cabbage and potatoes or bread and
herring. And the herring what he buys are the squashed and smashed ones
from the bottom of the barrel. And the bread he gets is so old and hard
he’s got to break it with a hammer. For why should such a stingy grouch
live in this world if he don’t allow himself the bite in the mouth?”
It was no surprise to me that Hanneh Breineh knew all this, for
everybody in her household cooked and washed in the same kitchen, and
everybody knew what everybody else ate and what everybody else wore
down to the number of patches on their underwear.
“And by what do you work for a living?” she asked, as she settled
herself on my cot.
“I study at college by day and I give English lessons and write letters
for the people in the evening.”
“Ach! So you are learning for a _teacherin_?” She rose, and looked
at me up and down and down and up, her red-lidded eyes big with awe.
“So that’s why you wanted so particular a room to yourself? Nobody in
my house has a room by herself alone just like you. They all got to
squeeze themselves together to make it come out cheaper.”
By the evening everybody in that house knew I was a _teacherin_, and
Moisheh the Schnorrer was among my first applicants for instruction.
“How much will you charge me for learning me English, a lesson?” he
blurted, abrupt because of his painful bashfulness.
I looked up at the tall, ungainly creature with round, stooping
shoulders, and massive, shaggy head--physically a veritable giant, yet
so timid, so diffident, afraid almost of his own shadow.
“I wanna learn how to sign myself my name,” he went on. “Only--you’ll
make it for me a little cheaper--yes?”
“Fifty cents an hour,” I answered, drawn by the dumb, hunted look that
cried to me out of his eyes.
Moisheh scratched his shaggy head and bit the nails of his huge,
toil-worn hand. “Maybe--could you yet--perhaps--make it a little
cheaper?” he fumbled.
“Aren’t you working?”
His furrowed face coloured with confusion. “Yes--but--but my family. I
got to save myself together a penny to a penny for them.”
“Oh! So you’re already married?”
“No--not married. My family in Russia--_mein_ old mother and Feivel,
_mein_ doctor brother, and Berel the baby, he was already learning for
a book-keeper before the war.”
The coarse peasant features were transformed with tenderness as he
started to tell me the story of his loved ones in Russia.
“Seven years ago I came to America. I thought only to make quick money
to send the ship tickets for them all, but I fell into the hands of a
cockroach boss.
“You know a cockroach boss is a _landsman_ that comes to meet the
greenhorns by the ship. He made out he wanted to help me, but he only
wanted to sweat me into my grave. Then came the war and I began to earn
big wages; but they were driven away from their village and my money
didn’t get to them at all. And for more than a year I didn’t know if my
people were yet alive in the world.”
He took a much-fingered, greasy envelope from his pocket. “That’s the
first letter I got from them in months. The book-keeper boarder read it
for me already till he’s sick from it. Only read it for me over again,”
he begged as he handed it to me upside down.
The letter was from Smirsk, Poland, where the two brothers
and their old mother had fled for refuge. It was the cry of
despair--food--clothes--shoes--the cry of hunger and nakedness. His
eyes filled and unheeding tears fell on his rough, trembling hands as I
read.
“That I should have bread three times a day and them starving!” he
gulped. “By each bite it chokes me. And when I put myself on my warm
coat, it shivers in me when I think how they’re without a shirt on
their backs. I already sent them a big package of things, but until I
hear from them I’m like without air in my lungs.”
I wondered how, in their great need and in his great anxiety to supply
it, he could think of English lessons or spare the little money to pay
for his tuition.
He divined my thoughts. “Already seven years I’m here and I didn’t
take for myself the time to go night school,” he explained. “Now
they’ll come soon and I don’t want them to shame themselves from their
_Amerikaner_ brother what can’t sign his own name, and they in Russia
write me such smart letters in English.”
“Didn’t you go to school like your brothers?”
“Me--school?” He shrugged his toil-stooped shoulders. “I was the only
breadgiver after my father he died. And with my nose in the earth on a
farm how could I take myself the time to learn?”
His queer, bulging eyes with their yearning, passionate look seemed
to cling to something beyond--out of reach. “But my brothers--_ach_!
my brothers! They’re so high-educated! I worked the nails from off my
fingers, but only they should learn--they should become people in the
world.”
And he deluged me with questions as to the rules of immigrant admission
and how long it would take for him to learn to sign his name so that
he would be a competent leader when his family would arrive.
“I ain’t so dumb like I look on my face.” He nudged me confidentially.
“I already found out from myself which picture means where the train
goes. If it’s for Brooklyn Bridge, then the hooks go this way”--he
clumsily drew in the air with his thick fingers--“and if it’s for the
South Ferry, then the words twist the other way around.”
I marvelled at his frank revelation of himself.
“What is your work?” I asked, more and more drawn by some hidden power
of this simple peasant.
“I’m a presser by pants.”
Now I understood the cause of the stooped, rounded shoulders. It must
have come from pounding away with a heavy iron at an ironing board,
day after day, year after year. But for all the ravages of poverty,
of mean, soul-crushing drudgery that marked this man, something big
and indomitable in him fascinated me. His was the strength knitted and
knotted from the hardiest roots of the earth. Filled with awe, I looked
up at him. Here was a man submerged in the darkness of illiteracy--of
pinch and scraping and want--yet untouched--unspoiled, with the same
simplicity of spirit that was his as a wide-eyed, dreamy youth in the
green fields of Russia.
We had our first lesson, and, though I needed every cent I could earn,
I felt like a thief taking his precious pennies. But he would pay.
“It’s worth to me more than a quarter only to learn how to hold up the
pencil,” he exulted as he gripped the pencil upright in his thick fist.
All the yearning, the intense desire for education were in the big,
bulging eyes that he raised towards me. “No wonder I could never make
those little black hooks for words; I was always grabbing my pencil
like a fork for sticking up meat.”
With what sublime absorption he studied me as I showed him how to
shape the letters for his name! Eyes wide--mouth open--his huge,
stoop-shouldered body leaning forward--quivering with hunger to grasp
the secret turnings of “the little black hooks” that signified his name.
“M-o-i-s-h-e-h,” he repeated after me as I guided his pencil.
“Now do it alone,” I urged.
Moisheh rolled up his sleeve like one ready for a fray. The sweat
dripped from his face as he struggled for the muscular control of his
clumsy fingers.
Night after night he wrestled heroically with the “little black hooks.”
At last his efforts were rewarded. He learned how to shape the letters
without any help.
“God from the world!” he cried with childishly pathetic joy as he wrote
his name for the first time. “This is me--Moisheh!” He lifted the paper
and held it off and then held it close, drunk with the wonder of the
“little black hooks.” They seemed so mysterious to him, and his eyes
loomed large--transfigured with the miracle of seeing himself for the
first time in script.
It was the week after that he asked me to write his letter, and this
time it was from my eyes that the unheeding tears dropped as I wrote
the words he dictated.
“To my dear Loving Mother, and to my worthy Honourable Brother Feivel,
the Doctor, and to my youngest brother, the joy from my life, the
light from mine eyes, Berel the Book-keeper!
“Long years and good luck to you all. Thanks the highest One in Heaven
that you are alive. Don’t worry for nothing. So long I have yet my
two strong hands to work you will yet live to have from everything
plenty. For all those starving days in Russia, you will live to have
joy in America.
“You, Feivel, will yet have a grand doctor’s office, with an electric
dentist sign over your door, and a gold tooth to pull in the richest
customers. And you, Berel, my honourable book-keeper, will yet live to
wear a white starched collar like all the higher-ups in America. And
you, my loving mother, will yet shine up the block with the joy from
your children.
“I am sending you another box of things, and so soon as I get from you
the word, I’ll send for you the ship tickets, even if it costs the
money from all the banks in America.
“Luck and blessings on your dear heads. I am going around praying and
counting the minutes till you are all with me together in America.”
Our lessons had gone on steadily for some months and already he was
able to write the letters of the alphabet. One morning before I was out
of bed he knocked at my door.
“Quick only! A blue letter printed from Russia!” he shouted in an
excited voice.
Through the crack of the door he shoved in the cablegram. “Send ship
tickets or we die--pogrom,” I read aloud.
“_Weh--weh!_” A cry of a dumb, wounded animal broke from the
panic-stricken Moisheh.
The cup of coffee that Hanneh Breineh lifted to her lips dropped with a
crash to the floor. “Where pogrom?” she demanded, rushing in.
I re-read the cablegram.
“Money for ship tickets!” stammered Moisheh. He drew forth a sweaty
moneybag that lay hid beneath his torn grey shirt and with trembling
hands began counting the greasy bills. “Only four hundred and
thirty-three dollars! Woe is me!” He cracked the knuckles of his
fingers in a paroxysm of grief. “It’s six hundred I got to have!”
“_Gottuniu!_ Listen to him only!” Hanneh Breineh shook Moisheh roughly.
“You’d think he was living by wild Indians--not by people with
hearts....”
“Boarders!” she called. “Moisheh’s old mother and his two brothers are
in Smirsk where there’s a pogrom.”
The word “pogrom” struck like a bombshell. From the sink, the
stove, they gathered, in various stages of undress, around Moisheh,
electrified into one bond of suffering brotherhood.
Hanneh Breineh, hand convulsively clutching her breast, began an
impassioned appeal. “Which from us here needs me to tell what’s a
pogrom? It drips yet the blood from my heart when I only begin to
remember. Only nine years old I was--the _pogromschiks_ fell on our
village.... Frightened!... You all know what’s to be frightened from
death--frightened from being burned alive or torn to pieces by wild
wolves--but what’s that compared to the cold shiverings that shook us
by the hands and feet when we heard the drunken Cossacks coming nearer
and nearer our hut. The last second my mother, like a crazy, pushed
me and my little sister into the chimney. We heard the house tremble
with shots--cries from my mother--father--then stillness. In the middle
of the black night my little sister and I crawled ourselves out to
see----” Hanneh Breineh covered her eyes as though to shut out the
hideous vision.
Again Hanneh Breineh’s voice arose. “I got no more breath for
words--only this--the last bite from our mouths, the last shirt from
our backs we got to take away to help out Moisheh. It’s not only
Moisheh’s old mother that’s out there--it’s our own old mother--our own
flesh-and-blood brothers.... Even I--beggar that I am--even I will give
my only feather bed to the pawn.”
A hush, and then a tumult of suppressed emotion. The room seethed with
wild longings of the people to give--to help--to ease their aching
hearts sharing Moisheh’s sorrow.
Shoolem, a grey, tottering ragpicker, brought forth a grimy cigar-box
full of change. “Here is all the pennies and nickels and dimes I was
saving and saving myself for fifteen years. I was holding by life on
one hope--the hope that some day I would yet die before the holy walls
from Jerusalem.” With the gesture of a Rothschild he waved it in the
air as he handed it over. “But here you got it, Moisheh. May it help to
bring your brothers in good luck to America!”
Sosheh, the finisher, turned aside as she dug into her stocking and
drew forth a crisp five-dollar bill. “That all I got till my next pay.
Only it should help them,” she gulped. “I wish I had somebody left
alive that I could send a ship ticket to.”
Zaretsky, the matchmaker, snuffed noisily a pinch of tobacco and pulled
from his overcoat pocket a book of War Savings stamps. “I got fourteen
dollars of American Liberty. Only let them come in good luck and I’ll
fix them out yet with the two grandest girls in New York.”
* * * * *
The ship bearing Moisheh’s family was to dock the next morning at
eleven o’clock. The night before Hanneh Breineh and all of us were busy
decorating the house in honour of the arrivals. The sound of hammering
and sweeping and raised, excited voices filled the air.
Sosheh, the finisher, standing on top of a soap box, was garnishing the
chandelier with red-paper flowers.
Hanneh Breineh tacked bright, checked oilcloth on top of the washtubs.
Zaretsky was nailing together the broken leg of the table.
“I should live so,” laughed Sosheh, her sallow face flushed with
holiday joy. “This kitchen almost shines like a parlour, but for only
this----” pointing to the sagging lounge where the stained mattress
protruded.
“_Shah!_ I’ll fix this up in a minute so it’ll look like new from
the store.” And Hanneh Breineh took out the red-flowered, Sabbath
tablecloth from the bureau and tucked it around the lounge.
Meantime Moisheh, his eyes popping with excitement, raised clouds of
dust as he swept dirt that had been gathering since Passover from the
corners of the room.
Unable to wait any longer for the big moment, he had been secretly
planning for weeks, zip! under the bed went the mountain of dirt, to be
followed by the broom, which he kicked out of sight.
“Enough with the cleaning!” he commanded. “Come only around,” and he
pulled out from the corner his Russian steamer basket.
“Oi--oi--oi--oi, and ai--ai!” the boarders shouted, hilariously. “Will
you treat us to a holiday cake maybe?”
“Wait only!” He gesticulated grandly as he loosened the lock.
One by one he held up and displayed the treasured trousseau which
little by little he had gathered together for his loved ones.
A set of red-woollen underwear for each of the brothers, and for his
mother a thick, grey shirt. Heavy cotton socks, a blue-checked apron,
and a red-velvet waist appeared next. And then--Moisheh was reduced
to guttural grunts of primitive joy as he unfolded a rainbow tie for
Feivel, the doctor, and pink suspenders for his “baby” brother.
Moisheh did not remove his clothes--no sleep for him that night. It
was still dark when the sound of his heavy shoes, clumping around the
kitchen as he cooked his breakfast, woke the rest of us.
“You got to come with me--I can’t hold myself together with so much
joy,” he implored. There was no evading his entreaties, so I promised
to get away as soon as I could and meet him at the dock.
I arrived at Ellis Island to find Moisheh stamping up and down like a
wild horse. “What are they holding them so long?” he cried, mad with
anxiety to reach those for whom he had so long waited and hungered.
I had to shake him roughly before I could make him aware of my
presence, and immediately he was again lost in his eager search of the
mob that crowded the gates.
The faces of the immigrants, from the tiniest babe at its mother’s
breast to the most decrepit old grey-haired man, were all stamped with
the same transfigured look--a look of those who gazed for the first
time upon the radiance of the dawn. The bosoms of the women heaved
with excitement. The men seemed to be expanding, growing with the surge
of realized hopes, of dreams come true. They inhaled deeply, eager to
fill their stifled bodies and souls with the first life-giving breath
of free air. Their eyes were luminous with hope, bewildered joy and
vague forebodings. A voice was heard above the shouted orders and
shuffling feet--above the clamour of the pressing crowds--“_Gott sei
dank!_” The pæan of thanksgiving was echoed and re-echoed--a pæan of
nations released--America.
I had to hold tight to the bars not to be trampled underfoot by the
crowd that surged through the gates. Suddenly a wild animal cry
tore from Moisheh’s throat. “_Mammeniu! Mammeniu!_” And a pair of
gorilla-like arms infolded a gaunt, wasted little figure wrapped in a
shawl.
“Moisheh! my heart!” she sobbed, devouring him with hunger-ravaged eyes.
“_Ach!_” She trembled--drawing back to survey her first-born. “From
the bare feet and rags of Smirsk to leather shoes and a suit like a
Rothschild!” she cried in Yiddish. “_Ach!_--I lived to see America!”
A dumb thing laughing and crying he stood there, a primitive figure,
pathetic, yet sublime in the purity of his passionate love, his first
love--his love for his mother.
The toil-worn little hand pulled at his neck as she whispered in
Moisheh’s ear, and as in a dream he turned with outstretched arms to
greet his brothers.
“Feivel--_mein_ doctor!” he cried.
“Yes, yes, we’re here,” said the high-browed young doctor in a tone
that I thought was a little impatient. “Now let’s divide up these
bundles and get started.” Moisheh’s willing arms reached out for the
heaviest sack.
“And here is my _teacherin_!” Moisheh’s grin was that of a small boy
displaying his most prized possession.
Berel, the baby, with the first down of young manhood still soft on his
cheeks, shyly enveloped my hand in his long, sensitive fingers. “How
nice for you to come--a _teacherin_--an _Amerikanerin_!”
“Well--are we going?” came imperiously from the doctor.
“Yeh--yeh!” answered Moisheh. “I’m so out of my head from joy, my
feet don’t work.” And, gathering the few remaining lighter packages
together, we threaded our way through the crowded streets--the two
newly arrived brothers walking silently together.
“Has Moisheh changed much?” I asked the doctor as I watched the big man
help his mother tenderly across the car tracks.
“The same Moisheh,” he said, with an amused, slightly superior air.
I looked at Berel to see if he was of the same cloth as the doctor, but
he was lost in dreamy contemplation of the towering sky-scrapers.
“Like granite mountains--the tower of Babel,” Berel mused aloud.
“How do they ever walk up to the top?” asked the bewildered old mother.
“Walk!” cried Moisheh, overjoyed at the chance to hand out information.
“There are elevators in America. You push a button and up you fly like
on wings.”
Elated with this opportunity to show off his superior knowledge, he
went on: “I learned myself to sign my name in America. Stop only and
I’ll read for you the sign from the lamp-post,” and he spelled aloud,
“W-a-l-l--Wall.”
“And what street is this?” asked the doctor, as we came to another
corner.
Moisheh coloured with confusion, and the eyes he raised to his brother
were like the eyes of a trapped deer pleading to be spared. “L-i-b----”
He stopped. “Oh, _weh_!” he groaned, “the word is too long for me.”
“Liberty,” scorned the doctor. “You are an _Amerikaner_ already and you
don’t know Liberty?”
His own humiliation forgot in pride of his brother’s knowledge, Moisheh
nodded his head humbly.
“Yeh--yeh! You a _greener_ and yet you know Liberty. And I, an
_Amerikaner_, is stuck by the word.” He turned to me with a pride that
brought tears to his eyes. “Didn’t I tell you my brothers were high
educated? Never mind--they won’t shame me in America.”
A look of adoration drank in the wonder of his beloved family. Overcome
with a sense of his own unworthiness, he exclaimed, “Look only on me--a
nothing and a nobody.” He breathed in my ear, “And such brothers!” With
a new, deeper tenderness, he pressed his mother’s slight form more
closely to him.
“More Bolsheviki!” scoffed a passer-by.
“Trotzky’s ambassadors,” sneered another.
And the ridicule was taken up by a number of jeering voices.
“Poor devils!” came from a richly dressed Hebrew, resplendent in
his fur collar and a diamond stud. There was in his eyes a wistful,
reminiscent look. Perhaps the sight of these immigrants brought back to
him the day he himself had landed, barefoot and in rags, with nothing
but his dreams of America.
The street was thronged with hurrying lunch seekers as we reached
lower Broadway. I glanced at Moisheh’s brothers, and I could not help
noticing how different was the calm and carefree expression of their
faces from the furtive, frantic acquisitive look of the men in the
financial district.
But the moment we reached our block the people from the stoops and
windows waved their welcome. Hanneh Breineh and all the boarders,
dressed up in their best, ran to meet us.
“Home!” cried the glowing Moisheh. “_Mazel-tuff!_ Good luck!” answered
Hanneh Breineh.
Instantly we were surrounded by the excited neighbours whose voices of
welcome rose above the familiar cries of the hucksters and pedlars that
lined the street.
“Give a help!” commanded Hanneh Breineh as she seized the bundles from
Moisheh’s numbed arms and divided them among the boarders. Then she led
the procession triumphantly into her kitchen.
The table, with a profusion of festive dishes, sang aloud its welcome.
“Rockefeller’s only daughter couldn’t wish herself grander eatings
by her own wedding,” bragged the hostess as she waved the travellers
to the feast. A brass pot filled with _gefulte_ fish was under the
festooned chandelier. A tin platter heaped high with chopped liver
and onions sent forth its inviting aroma. _Tzimmes_--_blintzes_--a
golden-roasted goose swimming in its own fat ravished the senses. Eyes
and mouths watered at sight of such luscious plenty.
“White bread!--_Ach!_--white bread!” gasped the hunger-ravaged old
mother. Reaching across the table, she seized the loaf in her trembling
hands. “All those starving years--all those years!” she moaned, kissing
its flaky whiteness as though it were a living thing.
“Sit yourself down--_mutterel_!” Hanneh Breineh soothed the old woman
and helped her into the chair of honour. “White bread--even white bread
is nothing in America. Even the charities--a black year on them!--even
the charities give white bread to the beggars.”
Moisheh, beaming with joy of his loved ones’ nearness, was so busy
passing and repassing the various dishes to his folks that he forgot
his own meal.
“_Nu_--ain’t it time for you also to sit yourself down like a person?”
urged Hanneh Breineh.
“_Tekeh--tekeh!_” added his mother. “Take something to your mouth.”
Thereupon Moisheh rolled up his sleeves and with the zest of a hungry
caveman attacked the leg of a goose. He no sooner finished than he bent
ravenously over the meat platter, his forehead working in rhythm to his
jaws.
“Excuse me,” stammered Moisheh, wiping his lips with the end of his
shirt-sleeve and sticking the meat on a fork.
“What’s the difference how you eat so long you got what to eat?” broke
in Zaretsky, grabbing the breast of the goose and holding it to his
thick lips.
His sensibilities recoiling at this cannibalistic devouring of food,
Berel rose and walked to the air-shaft window. His arms shot out as
though to break down the darkening wall which blotted out the daylight
from the little room. “Plenty of food for the body, but no light for
the soul,” he murmured, not intending to be heard.
Feivel, the doctor, lit a cigarette and walked up and down the room
restlessly. He stopped and faced his younger brother with a cynical
smile. “I guess America is like the rest of the world--you get what you
take--sunlight as well as other things----”
“How take sunlight? What do you mean?”
“I mean America is like a dish of cheese _blintzes_ at a poor house.
The beggars who are the head of the table and get their hands in first,
they live and laugh----”
Hanneh Breineh wiped her lips with the corner of her apron and faced
him indignantly. “You ain’t yet finished with your first meal in
America and already you’re blowing from yourself like it’s coming to
you yet better.”
“But why come to America?” defended Berel, the poet, “unless it gives
you what’s lacking in other lands? Even in the darkest days in Russia
the peasants had light and air.”
“Hey, Mr. Greenhorn Doctor--and you, young feller,” broke in Zaretsky,
the block politician, “if you don’t like it here, then the President
from America will give you a free ride back on the same ship on which
you came from.”
Silenced by Zaretsky’s biting retort, the doctor lit a cigarette and
sent leisurely clouds of smoke ceilingward.
Moisheh, who had been too absorbed in his food to follow the talk,
suddenly looked up from his plate. Though unable to grasp the trend of
the conversation, he intuitively sensed the hostile feeling in the room.
“Why so much high language,” he asked, “when there’s yet the nuts and
raisins and the almonds to eat?”
* * * * *
A few months later Hanneh Breineh came into my room while peeling
potatoes in her apron. “Greenhorns ain’t what greenhorns used to be,”
she said, as she sat down on the edge of my cot. “Once when greenhorns
came, a bone from a herring, a slice from an onion, was to them milk
and honey; and now pour golden chicken fat into their necks, and they
turn up their nose like it’s coming to them yet better.”
“What is it now?” I laughed.
Hanneh Breineh rose. “Listen only to what is going on,” she whispered,
as she noiselessly pushed open the door and winked to me to come over
and hear.
“I’m yet in debt over my neck. In God’s name, how could you spend out
so much money for only a little pleasure,” remonstrated Moisheh.
“Do you think I’m a _schnorrer_ like you? I’m a man, and I have to
live,” retorted the doctor.
“But two dollars for one evening in the opera only, when for ten cents
you could have seen the grandest show in the movies!”
The doctor’s contemptuous glance softened into a look of condescending
pity. “After all, my presser of pants, what a waste the opera would be
on you. Your America is the movies.”
“Two dollars!” cried the little old mother, wringing her hands
despairingly. “Moisheh didn’t yet pay out for the ship tickets.”
“Ship tickets--bah!--I wish he had never brought us to this golden
country--dirt, darkness, houses like stalls for cattle!” And in a
fury of disgust, not unmitigated with shame at his loss of temper, he
slammed the door behind him.
“_Oi weh!_” wailed the careworn old mother. “Two dollars for an opera,
and in such bad times!”
“_Ach! Mammeniu_,” Moisheh defended, “maybe Feivel ain’t like us.
Remember he’s high-educated. He needs the opera like I need the bite of
bread. Maybe even more yet. I can live through without even the bite of
bread, but Feivel must have what wills itself in him.”
Hanneh Breineh closed the door and turned to me accusingly. “What’s the
use from all your education, if that’s what kind of people it makes?”
“Yes,” I agreed with Hanneh Breineh. “Education without heart is a
curse.”
Hanneh Breineh bristled. “I wish I should only be cursed with an
education. It’s only by the Americans education is nothing. It used to
be an honour in Russia to shine a doctor’s shoes for him.”
“So you’re for education, after all?” I ventured, trying the
impossible--to pin Hanneh Breineh down.
“Bloodsuckers!” Hanneh Breineh hissed. “Moisheh dries out the marrow
from his head worrying for the dollar, and these high-educated brothers
sit themselves on top of his neck like leeches. Greenhorns--opera--the
world is coming to an end!”
Work with the Immigration Department took me to Washington for almost
a year. As soon as I returned to New York I went to the only home I
knew--Hanneh Breineh’s lodging-house.
My old friend, Moisheh, greeted me at the door. “_Teacherin!_” he
cried, with a shout of welcome, and then called to his mother. “Come
quick. See only who is here!”
Sleeves rolled up and hands full of dough, the little soul hurried in.
“The sky is falling to the earth!” she cried. “You here? And are you
going to stay?”
“Sure will she stay,” said Moisheh, helping me remove my things.
“And where are Hanneh Breineh and the boarders?” I questioned.
“Out on a picnic by Coney Island.”
“And why didn’t you and your mother go?”
“I got to cook Feivel’s dinner,” she gesticulated with doughy palms.
“And I got my Coney Island here,” said Moisheh.
To my great delight I saw he had been reading the life of Lincoln--the
book I had left him the day I went away.
“My head is on fire thinking and dreaming from Lincoln. It shines
before my face so real, I feel myself almost talking to him.”
Moisheh’s eyes were alive with light, and as I looked at him I felt
for the first time a strange psychic resemblance between Moisheh and
Lincoln. Could it be that the love for his hero had so transformed him
as to make him almost resemble him?
“Lincoln started life as a nothing and a nobody,” Moisheh went on,
dreamily, “and he made himself for the President from America--maybe
there’s yet a chance for me to make something from myself?”
“Sure there is. Show only what’s in you and all America reaches out to
help you.”
“I used to think that I’d die a presser by pants. But since I read
from Lincoln, something happened in me. I feel I got something for
America--only I don’t know how to give it out. I’m yet too much of a
dummox----”
“What’s in us must come out. I feel America needs you and me as much as
she needs her Rockefellers and Morgans. Rockefellers and Morgans only
pile up mountains of money; we bring to America the dreams and desires
of ages--the youth that never had a chance to be young--the choked
lives that never had a chance to live.”
A shadow filmed Moisheh’s brooding eyes. “I can’t begin yet to think
from myself for a few years. First comes my brothers. If only Feivel
would work for himself up for a big doctor and Berel for a big writer
then I’ll feel myself free to do something....
“Shah! I got great news for you,” Moisheh announced. “Feivel has
already his doctor’s office.”
“Where did he get all the money?”
“On the instalment plan I got him the chair and the office things. Now
he’s beginning to earn already enough to pay almost half his rent.”
“Soon he’ll be for dinner.” The old lady jumped up. “I got to get his
eating ready before he comes.” And she hastened back to the kitchen
stove.
“And Berel--what does he do?” I inquired.
“Berel ain’t working yet. He’s still writing from his head,” explained
Moisheh. “Wait only and I’ll call him. He’s locked himself up in his
bedroom; nobody should bother him.”
“Berel!” he called, tapping respectfully at the door.
“_Yuk!_” came in a voice of nervous irritation. “What is it?”
“The _teacherin_ is here,” replied Moisheh.
“Only a minute.”
“It’s me,” I added. “I’d like to see you.”
Berel came out, hair dishevelled, with dreamy, absent look, holding
pencil and paper in his hand. “I was just finishing a poem,” he said in
greeting to me.
“I have been looking for your name in the magazines. Have you published
anything yet?”
“I--publish in the American magazines?” he flung, hurt beyond words. “I
wouldn’t mix my art with their empty drivel.”
“But, surely, there are some better magazines,” I protested.
“Pshah! Their best magazines--the pink-and-white jingles that they call
poetry are not worth the paper they’re printed on. America don’t want
poets. She wants plumbers.”
“But what will you do with the poetry you write?”
“I’ll publish it myself. Art should be free, like sunlight and beauty.
The only compensation for the artist is the chance to feed hungry
hearts. If only Moisheh could give me the hundred dollars I’d have my
volume printed at once.”
“But how can I raise all that money when I’m not yet paid out with
Feivel’s doctor’s office?” remonstrated Moisheh. “Don’t you think
if--maybe you’d get a little job?”
An expression of abstraction came over Betel’s face, and he snapped,
impatiently: “Yes--yes--I told you that I would look for a job. But I
must write this while I have the inspiration.”
“Can’t you write your inspiration out in the evening?” faltered
Moisheh. “If you could only bring in a few dollars a week to help pay
ourselves out to the instalment man.”
Berel looked at his brother with compassionate tolerance. “What are to
you the things of the soul? All you care for is money--money--money!
You’d want me to sell my soul, my poetry, my creative fire--to hand you
a few dirty dollars.”
The postman’s whistle and the cry, “Berel Cinski!”
Moisheh hurried downstairs and brought back a large return envelope.
“Another one of those letters back,” deplored the mother, untactfully.
“You’re only for making the post office rich with the stamps from
Moisheh’s blood money.”
“Dammit!” Defeat enraged the young poet to the point of brutality.
“Stop nagging me and mixing in with things you don’t understand!” He
struck the rude table with his clenched fist. “It’s impossible to live
with you thickheads--numskulls--money-grubbing worms.”
He threw on his hat and coat and paused for a moment glowering in the
doorway. “Moisheh,” he demanded, “give me a quarter for car fare. I
have to go uptown to the library.” Silently the big brother handed him
the money, and Berel flung himself out of the room.
The door had no sooner closed on the poet than the doctor sauntered
into the room. After a hasty “Hallo!” he turned to Moisheh. “I’ve had a
wonderful opportunity offered me--but I can’t take advantage of it.”
“What!” cried Moisheh, his face brightening.
“My landlord invited me to his house to-night, to meet his only
daughter.”
“Why not go?” demanded Moisheh.
“Sure you got to go,” urged the mother, as she placed the food before
him. “The landlord only got to see how smart you are and he’ll pull
you in the richest customers from uptown.”
Feivel looked at his clothes with resigned contempt. “H--m,” he smiled
bitterly. “Go in this shabby suit? I have too much respect for myself.”
There was troubled silence. Both brother and mother were miserable that
their dear one should be so deprived.
Moisheh moved over to the window, a worried look on his face. Presently
he turned to his brother. “I’d give you the blood from under my nails
for you but I’m yet so behind with the instalment man.”
The doctor stamped his foot impatiently. “I simply have to have a suit!
It’s a question of life and death.... Think of the chance! The landlord
took a liking to me--rich as Rockefeller--and an only daughter. If he
gives me a start in an uptown office I could _coin_ money. All I need
is a chance--the right location. Ten--twenty--fifty dollars an hour.
There’s no limit to a dentist’s fee. If he sets me up on Riverside
Drive I could charge a hundred dollars for work I get five for in
Rutgers Street!”
“Can I tear myself in pieces? Squeeze the money from my flesh?”
“But do you realize that, once I get uptown, I could earn more in an
hour than you could in a month? I’ll pay you back every penny a hundred
times over.”
“_Nu_--tell me only--what can I do? Anything you’ll say----”
“Why--you have your gold watch.”
Moisheh’s hand leaped to the watch in his vest pocket. “My gold
watch! My prize from the night school?” he pleaded. “It ain’t just a
watch--it’s given me by the principal for never being absent for a
whole year.”
“Oh, rot!--you, with your sentimentality! Try to understand something
once.” The doctor waved his objections aside. “Once I get my start in
an uptown office I can buy you a dozen watches. I’m telling you my
whole future depends on the front I put up at the landlord’s house, and
still you hesitate!”
Moisheh looked at his watch, fingering it. His eyes filled with tears.
“_Oi weh!_” he groaned. “It’s like a piece from my heart. My prize from
the night school,” he mumbled, brokenly; “but take it if you got to
have it.”
“You’ll get it back,” confidently promised the doctor, “get it back
a hundred times over.” And as he slipped the watch into his pocket,
Moisheh’s eyes followed it doggedly. “So long, _mammeniu_; no dinner
for me to-day.” Feivel bestowed a hasty good-bye caress upon his old
mother.
* * * * *
The doctor was now living in an uptown boarding-house, having moved
some weeks before, giving the excuse that for his business it was
necessary to cultivate an uptown acquaintance. But he still kept up his
office in Rutgers Street.
One morning after he had finished treating my teeth, he took up a
cigarette, nervously lit it, attempted to smoke, and then threw
it away. I had never seen the suave, complacent man so unnerved
and fidgety. Abruptly he stopped in front of me and smiled almost
affectionately.
“You are the very person I want to speak to this morning--you are the
only person I want to speak to,” he repeated.
I was a little startled, for his manner was most unlike him. Seldom did
he even notice me, just as he did not notice most of Moisheh’s friends.
But his exuberant joyousness called out my instinctive response, and
before I knew it I was saying, “If there’s anything I can do for you
I’ll be only too happy.”
He took a bill from his pocket, placed it in my hand, and said, with
repressed excitement: “I want you to take my mother and Moisheh to see
‘Welcome Stranger.’ It’s a great show. It’s going to be a big night
with me, and I want them to be happy, too.”
I must have looked puzzled, for he narrowed his eyes and studied me,
twice starting to speak, and both times stopping himself.
“You must have thought me a selfish brute all this time,” he began.
“But I’ve only been biding my time. I must make the most of myself, and
now is my only chance--to rise in the world.”
He stopped again, paced the floor several times, placed a chair before
me, and said: “Please sit down. I want to talk to you.”
There was a wistful pleading in his voice that none could resist, and
for the first time I was aware of the compelling humanness of this
arrogant intellectual.
“I’ll tell you everything just as it is,” he started. And then he
stopped again. “_Ach!_” he groaned. “There’s something I would like
to talk over with you--but I just can’t. You wouldn’t understand....
A great thing is happening in my life to-night--but I can’t confide
it to anyone--none can understand. But--I ask of you just this: will
you give Moisheh and my mother a good time? Let the poor devils enjoy
themselves for once?”
As I walked out of the office, the bill still crumpled in my hand,
I reproached myself for my former harsh condemnation of the doctor.
Perhaps all those months, when I had thought him so brutally selfish,
he had been building for the future.
But what was this mysterious good fortune that he could not confide to
anyone--and that none could understand?
“Doctor Feivel gave me money to take you to the theatre,” I announced
as I entered the house.
“Theatre!” chorused Moisheh and his mother, excitedly.
“Yes,” I said. “Feivel seemed so happy to-day, and he wanted you to
share his happiness.”
“Feivel, the golden heart!” The old mother’s eyes were misty with
emotion.
“_Ach!_ Didn’t I tell you even if my brother is high-educated, he
won’t shame himself from us?” Moisheh faced me triumphantly. “I was so
afraid since he moved himself into an uptown boarding-house that maybe
we are losing him, even though he still kept up his office on Rutgers
Street.” Moisheh’s eyes shone with delight.
“I’ll tell you a little secret,” said he, leaning forward
confidentially. “I’m planning to give a surprise to Feivel. In another
month I’ll pay myself out for the last of Feivel’s office things. And
for days and nights I’m going around thinking and dreaming about buying
him an electric sign. Already I made the price with the instalment man
for it.” By this time his recital was ecstatic. “And think only--what
_mein_ doctor will say, when he’ll come one morning from his uptown
boarding-house and find my grand surprise waiting for him over his
office door!”
All the way to the theatre Moisheh and his mother drank in the glamour
and the glitter of the electric signs of Broadway.
“_Gottuniu!_ If I only had the money for such a sign for Feivel,”
Moisheh sighed, pointing to the chewing-gum advertisement on the roof
of a building near the Astor. “If I only had Rockefeller’s money, I’d
light up America with Feivel’s doctor sign!”
When we reached the theatre, we found we had come almost an hour too
early.
“Never mind--_mammeniu_!” Moisheh took his mother’s arm tenderly.
“We’ll have time now to walk ourselves along and see the riches and
lights from America.”
“I should live so,” he said, surveying his mother affectionately. “That
red velvet waist and this new shawl over your head makes your face so
shine, everybody stops to give a look on you.”
“Yeh--yeh! You’re always saying love words to every woman you see.”
“But this time it’s my mother, so I mean it from my heart.”
Moisheh nudged me confidentially. “_Teacherin!_ See only how a little
holiday lifts up my _mammeniu_! Don’t it dance from her eyes the joy
like from a young girl?”
“Stop already making fun from your old mother.”
“You old?” Moisheh put his strong arm around his mother’s waist. “Why,
people think we’re a young couple on our honeymoon.”
“Honeymoon--_ach_!” The faded face shone with inward visioning. “My
only wish is to see for my eyes my sons marry themselves in good luck.
What’s my life--but only the little hope from my children? To dance
with the bride on my son’s wedding will make me the happiest mother
from America.”
“Feivel will soon give you that happiness,” responded Moisheh. “You
know how the richest American-born girls are trying to catch on to him.
And no matter how grand the girl he’ll marry himself to, you’ll have
the first place of honour by the wedding.”
As we turned in at Forty-fifth Street a curious crowd blocked our path.
A row of sleek limousines stood before the arched entrance of the Van
Suydden Hotel.
“Look only--a wedding! Let’s give a look on the bride!” exclaimed
Moisheh’s mother, eagerly. A wedding was, in her religion, the most
significant ceremony in life. And for her sake we elbowed our way
towards the front.
A procession of bridesmaids in shimmering chiffons, bedecked with
flowers, were the first to tread the carpeted steps.
Then we saw the bride.... And then----Good God!--was it possible?
Moisheh clutched his mother’s hand convulsively. Could it really be
their Feivel?
The two stood gaping blindly, paralysed by the scene before them.
Suddenly--roused by the terrible betrayal--the mother uttered a
distorted sob of grief. “Feivel--son _mein_! What have you done to me?”
Moisheh grasped the old woman more firmly as the bride tossed her head
coquettishly and turned possessive eyes on her husband--their son and
brother.
The onlookers murmured appreciatively, thrilled by the pretty romance.
Enraged by the stupid joy of the crowd which mocked her misery, the old
mother broke from Moisheh’s hold with wiry strength and clawed wildly
at the people around her.
“Feivel--black curses----!” she hissed--and then she crumpled,
fainting, into Moisheh’s arms.
Unaware of the disturbance outside, the happy couple passed into the
festive reception hall.
With quick self-control, Moisheh motioned to a taxicab out of which had
just emerged another wedding guest. Then he gently lifted the fainting
form of the little mother in beside him.
And all through the night the bitter tears of betrayed motherhood
poured over the shrunken bosom where Feivel, as a suckling infant, had
once helped himself to life.
TO THE STARS
§ 1
“There are too many writers and too few cooks.” The dean laughed at her
outright. His superior glance placed her. “The trouble with you is that
you are a Russian Jewess. You want the impossible.”
Sophie Sapinsky’s mouth quivered at the corners, and her teeth bit into
the lower lip to still its trembling.
“How can you tell what’s possible in me before I had a chance?” she
said.
“My dear child”--Dean Lawrence tried to be kind--“the magazine world is
overcrowded with native-born writers who do not earn their salt. What
chance is there for you, with your immigrant English? You could never
get rid of your foreign idiom. Quite frankly, I think you are too old
to begin.”
“I’m not so old like I look.” Sophie heard a voice that seemed to
come from somewhere within her speak for her. “I’m only old from the
crushed-in things that burn me up. It dies in me, my heart, if I don’t
give out what’s in me.”
“My dear young woman”--the dean’s broad tolerance broke forth into
another laugh--“you are only one of the many who think that they have
something to say that the world is languishing to hear.” His easy
facetiousness stung her into further vehemence.
“But I’m telling you I ain’t everybody.” With her fist she struck his
desk, oblivious of what she was doing. “I’m smart from myself, not from
books. I never had a chance when I was young, so I got to _make my
chance_ when I’m ‘too old.’ I feel I could yet be younger than youth if
I could only catch on to the work I love.”
“Take my advice. Retain the position that assures you a living.
Apply yourself earnestly to it, and you will secure a measure of
satisfaction.”
The dean turned to the mahogany clock on his desk. Sophie Sapinsky was
quick to take the hint. She had taken up too much of his time, but she
could not give up without another effort.
“I can’t make good at work that chokes me.”
“Well, then see the head of the English department,” he said, with a
gesture of dismissal.
The professor of English greeted Sophie with a tired, lifeless smile
that fell like ashes on her heart. A chill went through her as she
looked at his bloodless face. But the courage of despair drove her to
speak.
“I wasted all my youth slaving for bread, but now I got to do what I
want to do. For me--oh, you can’t understand--but for me, it’s a case
of life or death. I got to be a writer, and I want to take every course
in English and literature from the beginning to the end.”
The professor did not laugh at Sophie Sapinsky as the dean had done. He
had no life left for laughter. But his cold scrutiny condemned her.
“I know,” she pleaded, “I ain’t up to those who had a chance to learn
from school, but inside me I’m always thinking from life, just like
Emerson. I understand Emerson like he was my own brother. And he says:
‘Trust yourself. Hold on to the thoughts that fly through your head,
and the world has got to listen to you even if you’re a nobody.’ Ideas
I got plenty. What I want to learn from the college is only the words,
the quick language to give out what thinks itself in me--just like
Emerson.”
The preposterous assumption of this ignorant immigrant girl in
likening herself to the revered sage of Concord staggered the
professor. He coughed.
“Well--er”--he paused to get the exact phrase to set her
right--“Emerson, in his philosophy, assumed a tolerant attitude that,
unfortunately, the world does not emulate. Perhaps you remember the
unhappy outcome of your English entrance examination.”
Sophie Sapinsky reddened painfully. The wound of her failure was still
fresh.
“In order to be eligible for our regular college courses, you would
have to spend two or three years in preparation.”
Blindly, Sophie turned to go. She reached for the door. The professor’s
perfunctory good-bye fell on deaf ears.
She swung the door open. The president of the college stood before her.
She remembered it was he who had welcomed the extension students on the
evening of her first attendance. He moved deferentially aside for her
to pass. For one swift instant Sophie looked into kindly eyes. “Could
he understand? Should I cry out to him to help me?” flashed through
her mind. But before she could say a word he passed and the door had
closed.
Sophie stopped in the hall. Had she the courage to wait until he
came out? “He’s got feelings,” her instincts urged her. “He’s not an
_all-rightnik_, a stone heart like the rest of them.”
“_Ach!_” cried her shattered spirit, “what would he, the head of them
all, have to do with me? He wouldn’t even want to stop to listen.”
Too crushed to endure another rebuff, she dragged her leaden feet down
the stairs and out into the street. All the light went out of her eyes,
the strength out of her arms and fingers. She could think or feel
nothing but the choked sense of her defeat.
That night she lay awake staring into the darkness. Every nerve within
her cried aloud with the gnawing ache of her unlived life. Out of the
dim corners the spectre of her stunted girlhood rose to mock her--the
wasted, poverty-stricken years smothered in the steaming pots of other
people’s kitchens. “Must I always remain buried alive in the black
prison of my dumbness? Can’t I never learn to give out what’s in me?
Must I choke myself in the smoke of my own fire?”
Centuries of suppression, generations of illiterates, clamoured in her:
“Show them what’s in you! If you can’t write in college English, write
in ‘immigrant English.’”
She flung from her the college catalogue. About to trample on it,
she stopped. The catalogue had fallen open at the photograph of the
president. There looked up at her the one kind face in that heartless
college world. The president’s eyes gazed once more steadily into hers.
Sophie hesitated; but not to be thwarted of her vengeance, she tore out
his picture and laid it on the table, then she ripped the catalogue,
and stuffed the crumpled pages into the stove. It roared up the chimney
like the song of the Valkyrie. She threw back her head with triumph,
and once more her eyes met the president’s.
“Let them burn, these dead-heads. Who are they, the bosses of
education? What are they that got the say over me if I’m fit to learn
or not fit to learn? Dust and ashes, ashes and dust. But you,” she
picked up the picture, “you still got some life. But if you got life,
don’t their dry dust choke you?”
The wrestlings of her sleepless night only strengthened her resolve to
do the impossible, just because it seemed impossible. “I can’t tear
the stars out of heaven if it wills itself in me,” her youth cried in
her. “Whether I know how to write or don’t know how to write, I’ll be a
writer.”
§ 2
She was at the steaming stove of the restaurant at the usual hour the
next morning. She stewed the same _tzimmas_, fried the same _blintzee_,
stuffed the same _miltz_. But she was no longer the same. Her head was
in a whirl with golden dreams of her visionary future.
All at once a scream rent the air.
“_Koosh!_ where in goodness’ name is your head?” thundered her
employer. “The _blintzee_ burning in front of her nose, and she stands
there like a _yok_ with her eyes in the air!”
“Excuse me,” she mumbled in confusion, setting down the pan. “I was
only thinking for a minute.”
“Thinking!” His greasy face purpled with rage. “Do I pay you to think
or to cook? For what do I give you such wages? What’s the world coming
to? _Pfui!_ A cook, a greenhorn, a nothing--also me a thinker!”
Sophie’s eyes flamed.
“Maybe in Smyrna, from where you come, a cook is a nothing. In America
everybody is a person.”
“Bolshevik!” he yelled. “Look only what fresh mouths the unions make
from them! Y’understand me, in my restaurant one thing on a time: you
cook or you think. If you wan’ to think, you’ll think outside.”
“All right, then; give me my wages!” she retorted, flaring up. “The
Tsar is dead. In America cooks are also people.”
Sophie tore off her apron, and thrust it at the man.
To the cheapest part of the East Side she went in her search for a
room. Through the back alleys and yards she sought for a place that
promised to be within her means. And then a smeared square of cardboard
held between the iron grating of a basement window caught her eye.
“Room to let--a bargain--cheap!”
“Only three dollars a month,” said the woman in answer to Sophie’s
inquiry.
The girl opened a grimy window that faced a blank wall.
“_Oi, weh!_ not a bit of air!”
“What do you need yet air for the winter?” cried Hanneh Breineh. “When
the cold comes, the less air that blows into your room, the warmer you
can keep yourself. And when it gets hot in summer you can take your
mattress up on the roof. Everybody sleeps on the roof in summer.”
“But there’s so little light,” said Sophie.
“What more light do you yet need? A room is only for to sleep by night.
When you come home from work, it’s dark, anyway. _Gottuniu!_ it’s so
dark on my heart with trouble, what difference does it make a little
darkness in the room?”
“But I have to work in my room all day. I must have it light.”
“_Nu_, I’ll let you keep the gas lighted all day long,” Hanneh Breineh
promised.
“Three dollars a month,” deliberated Sophie. The cheapness would give
her a sense of freedom that would make up for the lack of light and
air. She paid down her first month’s rent.
_Her_ house, securely hers. Yet with the flash of triumph came a stab
of bitterness. All that was hers was so wretched and so ugly! Had her
eager spirit, eager to give, no claim to a bit of beauty, a shred of
comfort?
Over the potato-barrel she flung a red shawl, once her mother’s, and
looked through her bag for something to cover an ugly break in the
plaster. She could find nothing but the page torn from the college
catalogue.
“It’s not so sunny and airy here as in your college office,” she said,
tacking the photograph on the wall; “but maybe you’d be a realer man if
once in your life you had to put up with a hole like this for a room.”
Sophie spread her papers on the cot beside her. With tense fingers she
wrote down the title of her story, then stopped, and stared wildly at
the ceiling.
Where was the vision that had haunted her all these days? Where were
the thoughts and feelings that surged like torrents through her soul?
Merely the act of putting her pencil to paper, her thoughts became a
blur, her feelings a dumb ache in her heart.
_Ach_, why must she kill herself to say what can never be said in
words? But how did Emerson and Shakespeare seize hold of their vision?
What was the source of their deathless power?
The rusty clock struck six.
“I ought to run out now for the stale bread, or it will be all sold
out, and I will have to pay twice as much for the fresh,” flashed
through her mind.
“_Oi weh!_” she wailed, covering her eyes, “it’s a stomach slave I am,
not a writer. I forget my story, I forget everything, thinking only of
saving a few pennies.”
She dragged herself back to the page in front of her and resumed her
task with renewed vigour.
“Sarah Lubin was sixteen years old when she came to America. She came
to get an education, but she had to go to a factory for bread,” she
wrote laboriously, and then drew back to study her work. The sentences
were wooden, dead, inanimate things. The words laughed up at her,
mockingly.
Perhaps she was not a writer, after all. Writers never started stories
in this way. Her eyes wandered over to the bed, a hard, meagre cot. “I
must remember to fix the leg, or it will tip to-night,” she mused.
“Here I am,” she cried despairingly, “thinking of my comforts again!
And I thought I’d want nothing; I’d live only to write.” Her head sank
to the rough edge of the potato-barrel. “Perhaps I was a fool to give
up all for this writing.”
“Too many writers and too few cooks”: the dean’s words closed like a
noose around her anguished soul.
When she looked up, the kind face of the college president smiled down
at her.
“Then what is it in me that’s tearing and gnawing and won’t let me
rest?” she pleaded. The calm faith of the eyes levelled steadily at
her seemed to rebuke her despair. The sure faith of that lofty face
lifted her out of herself. She was humble before such unwavering power.
“_Ach!_” she prayed, “how can I be so sure like you? Help me!”
Sophie became a creature possessed. She lived for one idea, was driven
by one resistless passion, to write. As the weeks and months passed and
her savings began to dwindle, her cheeks grew paler and thinner, the
shadows under her restless eyes were black hollows of fear.
There came a day more deadly than death, when she had to face failure.
She took out the thinning wad from her stocking and counted out her
remaining cash: one, two, three dollars, and some nickels and dimes.
How long before the final surrender? If she kept up her rigorous ration
of dry bread and oatmeal, two or three weeks more at most. And then?
An end to dreams. An end to ambition. Back to the cook-stove, back to
the stifling smells of _tzimmas_, hash, and _miltz_.
No, she would never let herself sink back to the kitchen. But where
could she run from the terror of starvation?
The bitterest barb of her agony was her inability to surrender. She was
crushed, beaten, but she could not give up the battle. The unvoiced
dream in her still clamoured and ached and strained to find voice. A
resistless something in her that transcended reason rose up in defiance
of defeat.
§ 3
“A black year on the landlord!” screamed Hanneh Breineh through the
partition. “The rent he raised, so what does he need to worry yet if
the gas freezes? _Gottuniu!_ freeze should only the marrow from his
bones!”
Sophie turned back to the little stove in an attempt to light the gas
under the pan of oatmeal. The feeble flame flickered and with a faint
protest went out. Hanneh Breineh poked in her tousled head for sympathy.
“Woe is me! Woe on the poor what ain’t yet sick enough for the
hospital!”
As the chill of the gathering dusk intensified, Sophie seemed to see
herself carried out on a stretcher to the hospital, numb, frozen.
“God from the world! better a quick death than this slow freezing!”
With the perpetual gnawing of hunger sapping her strength, Sophie had
not the courage to face another night of torment. Drawing her shabby
shawl more tightly around her, she hurried out. “Where now?” she asked
as a wave of stinging snow blinded her. Hanneh Breineh’s words came
back to her: “the hospital!” Why not? Surely they couldn’t refuse to
shelter her just overnight in a storm like this.
But when she reached the Beth Israel her heart sank. She looked in
timidly at the warm, beckoning lights.
“_Ach!_ how can I have the gall to ask them to take me in? They’ll
think I’m only a beggar from the street.”
She paced the driveway of the building, back and forth and up and down,
in envy of the sick who enjoyed the luxury of warmth.
“To the earth with my healthy body!” she cursed. “Why can’t I only
break a bone or something?”
With a sudden courage of despair she mounted the steps to the
superintendent’s office; but one glance of the man’s well-fed face
robbed her of her nerve.
She sank down on the bench of the waiting applicants, glancing
stealthily at the others, feeling all the guilt of a condemned criminal.
When her turn came, the blood in her ears pounded from terror and
humiliation. She could not lift her eyes from the floor to face this
feelingless judge of the sick and the suffering.
“I’m so killed with the cold,” she stammered, twisting the fringes of
her shawl. “If I could only warm myself up in a bed for the night----”
The man looked at her suspiciously.
“If we fill up our place with people like you, we’ll have no room left
for the sick. We have a ’flu epidemic.”
“So much you’re doing for the ’flu people, why can’t you help me before
I get it?” She spoke with that suppressed energy which was the keynote
of her whole personality.
“Have you a fever?” he asked, his professional eye arrested by the
unnatural flush on her face.
“Fever?” she mumbled. “A person has got to be already dead in his
coffin before you’d lift a finger to help.” She sped from the office
into the dreary reception-hall.
On her way out her eye was caught by the black-faced type on the cover
of a magazine that lay on the centre-table.
SHORT-STORY COMPETITION
_A Five-Hundred-Dollar Prize for the Best Love-Story of a Working-Girl_
As she read the magical words, the colour rushed to her cheeks.
Forgotten was the humiliation of the superintendent’s refusal to take
her in, forgotten were the cold, the hunger. Her whole being leaped at
the words:
“Write your own love-story, but if you have never lived love, let it
be your dream of love.”
“Your dream of love.” The words were as wine in her blood. Was there
ever a girl who hungered and dreamed of love as she? It was as though
in the depths of her poverty and want the fates had challenged her to
give substance to her dreams. She stumbled out of the huge building,
her feet in the snow, her mind in the clouds.
“God from the world! the gas is burning again!” cried Hanneh Breineh as
she groped her way back into her cellar-room. “The children are dancing
over the fire like for a holiday. All day they had nothing to warm in
their bellies, and the coffee tastes like wine from heaven.”
“Wine from heaven!” repeated the girl. “What wine but love from
heaven?” and she clutched the magazine more tightly to her shrunken
chest.
In the flicker of the gas-jet the photograph on the wall greeted her
like a living thing. With the feel of the steady gaze upon her, she
re-read the message that was to her an invitation and a challenge;
and as she read, the dingy little room became alive with light. The
understanding eyes seemed to pour vision into her soul. What was the
purpose of all the harsh experiences that had been hers till now but
to make her see just this, that love, and love only, was the one vital
force of life? What was the purpose of all the privation and want she
had endured but to make her see more poignantly this ethereal essence
of love? The walls of her little room dissolved. The longing for love
that lay dumb within her all her years took shape in human form.
More real than life, closer than the beat within her heart, was this
radiant, all-consuming vision that possessed her.
She groped for pencil and paper and wrote, unaware that she was
writing. It was as though a hand stronger than her own was laid upon
hers. Her power seemed to come from some vast, fathomless source.
The starved passions of all the starved ages poured through her in
rhythmic torrent of words--words that flashed and leaped with the
resistless fire of youth burning through generations of suppression.
Not until daylight filtered through the grating of her window did the
writing cease, nor was she aware of any fatigue. An ethereal lightness,
a sense of having escaped from the trammels of her body, lifted her as
on wings. Her radiant face met the responsive glow of understanding
that shone down on her from the wall. “It’s your light shining through
me,” she exulted. “It’s your kind eyes looking into mine that made my
dumbness speak.”
For the moment the contest was forgotten. She was seized by an
irresistible impulse to take her outpourings to the man who had
inspired her. “Let him only see what music he made of me.” Gathering
tightly to her heart the scribbled sheets of paper, she hurried to the
university.
A whole hour she waited at his office door. As she saw him coming, she
could wait no longer, but ran towards him.
“Read it only,” she said, thrusting the manuscript at the bewildered
man. “I’ll be back in an hour.”
“What exotic creature was this, with her scattered pages of scrawling
script and eager eyes?” President Irvine wondered. He concluded she was
one of the immigrant group before which he had lectured.
§ 4
She returned, to find the manuscript still in his hand.
“Tell me,” he asked with an enthusiasm new to him, “where did you get
all this?”
“From the hunger in me. I was born to beat out the meaning of things
out of my own heart.”
Puzzled, he studied her. She was thin, gaunt, with a wasting power of
frustrated passion in young flesh. There was the shadow of blank nights
staring out of her eyes. Here was a personality, he thought, who might
reveal to him those intangible qualities of the immigrant--qualities he
could not grasp, which baffled, fascinated him.
He questioned her, and she poured out her story to him with eager
abandon.
“I couldn’t be an actress or a singer, because you got to be young and
pretty for that; but for a writer nobody cares who or what you are so
long as the thoughts you give out are beautiful.”
He laughed, and it was an appreciative, genial laugh.
“You ain’t at all like a professor, cold and hard like ice. You are a
person so real,” she naïvely said, interrupting the tale of her early
struggles, her ambitions, and the repulse that had been hers in this
very university of his. And then in sudden apprehension she cried out:
“Maybe the dean and the English professor were right. Maybe only those
with a long education get a hearing in America. If you would only fix
this up for me--change the immigrant English.”
“Fix it up?” he protested. “There are things in life bigger than rules
of grammar. The thing that makes art live and stand out throughout the
ages is sincerity. Unfortunately, education robs many of us of the
power to give spontaneously, as mother earth gives, as the child gives.
“You have poured out not a part, but the whole of yourself. That’s why
it can’t be measured by any of the prescribed standards. It’s uniquely
you.”
Her face lighted with joy at his understanding.
“I never knew why I hated to be Americanized. I was always burning to
dig out the thoughts from my own mind.”
“Yes, your power lies in that you are yourself. Your message is that of
your people, and it is all the stronger because you are not a so-called
assimilated immigrant.”
_Ach!_ just to hear him talk! It was like the realization of a power in
life itself to hold her up and carry her to the heights.
“Will you leave this manuscript here, so I can have my secretary type
it for you?” he asked as he took her to the door. “I can have it done
easily. And I shall write you when I’ll have time for another long talk
about your work.”
Only after she had left did she fully realize the wonder of this man’s
kindness.
“That’s America,” she whispered. “Where but in America could something
so beautiful happen? A crazy, choked-in thing like me and him such
a gentleman talking together about art and life like born equals. I
poverty, and he plenty; I ignorance, and he knowledge; I from the
bottom, and he from the top, and yet he making me feel like we were
from always friends.”
A few days later the promised note came. How quick he was with his
help, as if she were his only concern! Bare-headed, uncoated, she ran
to him, this prince of kindness, repeating over and over again the
words of the letter.
Her spirit crashed to the ground when she learned that he had been
suddenly called to a conference at Washington. “He would return in a
fortnight,” said the model-mannered secretary who answered her feverish
questions.
Wait a fortnight? She couldn’t. Why, the contest would be over by
that time. Then it struck her, the next best thing--the professor of
English. With a typewritten manuscript in her hand, he must listen to
her. And just to be admitted to his short-story class for one criticism
was all she would ask.
But small a favour as it seemed to her, it was greater than the
professor was in a position to grant.
“To concede to your request would establish a precedent that would be
at variance with the university regulations,” he vouchsafed.
“University regulations, precedents? What are you talking?” And
clutching at his sleeve, hysterically, she pleaded: “Just this once,
my life hangs on getting this story perfect, and you can save me by
this one criticism.”
Her burning desire knew no barrier, recognized no higher authority.
And the professor, contrary to his reason, contrary to his experienced
judgment, yielded without knowing why to the preposterous demands of
this immigrant girl.
In the end of the last row of the lecture-hall Sophie waited
breathlessly for the professor to get to her story. After a lifetime of
waiting it came. As from a great distance she heard him announce the
title.
“This was not written by a member of the class,” he went on, “but
is the attempt of a very ambitious young person. Its lack of form
demonstrates the importance of the fundamentals of technique in which
we have drilled.”
His reading aloud of the manuscript was followed by a chorus of
criticism--criticism that echoed the professor’s own sentiments:
“It’s not a story; it has no plot”; “feeling without form”; “erotic,
over-emotional.”
She could hardly wait for the hour to be over to get back this living
thing of hers that they were killing. When she left the class all the
air seemed to have gone out of her lungs. She dragged her leaden feet
back to her room and sank on her cot a heap of despair.
All at once she jumped up.
“What do they know, they, with only their book-learning?” If the
president had understood her story, there might be others who would
understand. She must have faith enough in herself to send it forth for
a judgment of a world free from rules of grammar. In a fury of defiance
she mailed the story.
§ 5
Weeks of tortuous waiting for news of the contest followed--weeks when
she dogged the postman’s footsteps and paced the lonely streets in
restless suspense. How could she ever have hoped to win the prize? Why
was she so starving for the golden hills on the sky? If only for one
day she could stop wasting her heart for the impossible!
Exhausted, spent, she lay on her cot when Hanneh Breineh, more than
usually disturbed by the girl’s driven look, opened the door softly.
“Here you got it, a letter. I hope it’s such good luck in it as the
paper is fine.”
“What’s the matter?” cried Hanneh Breineh in alarm at the girl’s
sudden pallor as the empty envelope fluttered from limp fingers.
For answer Sophie held up the cheque.
“Five hundred dollars,” she cried, “and the winner of the first prize!”
Hanneh Breineh felt the cheque. She read it. It was actually true. Five
hundred dollars! In a flurry of excitement she called the neighbours
in the hall-ways, and then hurried to the butcher, pushing through the
babbling women who crowded around the counter. “People listen only! My
_roomerkeh_ got a five-hundred-dollar prize!”
“Five hundred dollars?” The words leaped from lips to lips like fire
in the air. “_Ach!_ only the little bit of luck! Did she win it on the
lotteree?”
“Not from the lottery. Just wrote something from her head. And you
ought to see her, only a dried-up bone of a girl, and yet so smart.”
In a few moments Sophie was mobbed in her cellar by the gesticulating
crowd of women who hurried in to gaze upon the miracle of good luck.
With breathless awe hands felt her, and, reverently, the cheque. Yes,
even mouths watered with an envy that was almost worship. They fell on
her neck and kissed her.
“May we all live to have such luck to get rich quick!” they chorused.
The following day Sophie’s picture was in the Jewish evening paper. The
Ghetto was drunk with pride because one of their number, and “only a
dried-up bone of a girl,” had written a story good enough to be printed
in a magazine of America. Their dreams of romance had found expression
in the overwhelming success of this greenhorn cook.
In one day Sophie was elevated to a position of social importance by
her achievement. When she walked in the street, people pointed at her
with their fingers. She was deluged with requests “to give a taste” of
the neighbours’ cooking.
When she went to the baker for her usual stale bread, the man picked
out the finest loaf.
“Fresh bread for you in honour of your good luck. And here’s yet an
apple _strudel_ for good measure.” Nor would he take the money she
offered. “Only eat it with good health. I’m paid enough with the honour
that somebody with such luck steps into my store.”
“Of course,” explained Hanneh Breineh. “People will give you the last
bite from their mouth when you’re lucky, because you don’t need their
favours. But if you’re poor, they’re afraid to be good to you, so you
should not hang on their necks for help.”
But the greatest surprise that awaited Sophie was the letter from the
professor congratulating her upon her success.
“The students have unanimously voted you to be their guest of honour
at luncheon on Saturday,” it read. “May we hope for the honour of your
company on that occasion?”
The sky is falling to the earth--she a guest of honour of a well-fed,
well-dressed world! She to break bread with those high up in rules of
grammar! Sophie laughed aloud for the first time in months. Lunch at
the hotel! A vision of snowy tablecloths, silver forks, delicate china,
and sparkling glasses dazzled her. Yes, she would go, and go as she
was. The clothes that had been good enough to starve and struggle in
must be good enough to be feasted and congratulated in.
She was surprised at the sense of cold detachment with which she
entered the hotel lobby.
“Maybe it’s my excuse to myself for going that makes me feel that I’m
so above it,” she told herself. The grandeur, the lights, the lustre,
and glamour of the magnificent hotel--she took it all in, her nose in
the air.
At the entrance of the banquet-hall stood the professor, smiling,
smiling. And all these people in silks and furs and broadcloth wanted
to shake hands with her. Again, without knowing why, she longed to
laugh aloud.
Not until Professor ----, smiling more graciously than ever, reached
the close of his speech, not until he referred to her for the third
time as having reached “the stars through difficulties,” did she
realize that she who had looked on, she who had listened, she who had
wanted so to laugh, was a person quite different from the uncouth girl
with the shabby sweater and broken shoes whom the higher-ups were
toasting and flattering.
“I’ve never made a talk yet in my life,” she said in answer to the
calls for “Speech! speech!” “But these are grand words from the
professor, ‘to the stars through difficulties.’” She looked around on
these stars of the college world whom, after all her struggles, she had
reached. “Yes, ‘to the stars through difficulties.’” She nodded with a
queer little smile, and sat down amidst a shower of applause.
§ 6
In a daze Sophie left the heated banquet-hall. She walked blindly,
struggling to get hold of herself, struggling in vain. Every reality,
every human stay, seemed to slip from her. A stifled sense of emptiness
weighed her down like a dead weight.
“What’s the matter with me?” she cried. “Why do the higher-ups crush me
so with nothing? Why is their smiling politeness only a hidden hurt in
my heart?”
The flattering voices, the puppet-like smiles, the congratulations that
sounded like mockery, were now so distant, so unreal as was the girl
with her nose in the air. What cared these people wrapped in furs that
the winter wind pierced through her shabby sweater? What cared they if
her heart died in her from loneliness?
An aching need for human fellowship pressed upon her, a need for
someone who cared for her regardless of failure or success. In a sudden
dimming of vision she saw the only real look of sympathy that had ever
warmed her soul. Of them all, this man with the understanding eyes had
known that what she wanted to say was worth saying before it got into
print. If she could only see him--him himself!
If she could only pass the building where he was she would feel calm
and serene again! All her bitterness and resentment would dissolve, all
her doubts turn to faith. Who knows? Perhaps he had come back already.
Her feet seemed winged as they flew without her will, almost without
her consciousness, towards the place where she thought he might be.
As she ran up the steps she knew he was there without being told. Even
as she sent her name in, the door opened, and he stood there, the
living light of the late afternoon glow.
He wasn’t a bit startled by her sudden appearance. He merely greeted
her, and led her in silence to his inner study. But there was a quality
about the silence that made her feel at ease, as though he had been
expecting her.
“I have things to say to you,” she faltered. “Do you have time?”
For answer he pushed closer to the blazing logs an easy chair, and
motioned her into it.
There no longer seemed any need to say what she had planned. His mere
presence filled her with a healing peace.
“And it was so black for my eyes only a while before!” She spoke aloud
her thought and paused, embarrassed.
“Black for your eyes?” he repeated, leaning towards her with an
inviting interest.
“You know I was first on the table by the hotel?”
His eyebrows lifted whimsically.
“Tell me about it,” he urged.
“All those higher-ups what didn’t care a pinch of salt for me myself
making such a fuss over a little accident of good luck!”
“Accident! You have won your way inch by inch grappling with life.”
His calm, compelling look seemed to flood her with strength. “You have
what our colleges cannot give, the courage to face yourself, the power
to think. And now all your past experiences are so much capital to be
utilized. Do you see the turning-point I mean?”
“The turning-point in my life is to know I got a friend. I owe it
to the world to do something, to be something, after this miracle
of your kindness.” And at his deepening smile, “But you are not
kind in a leaning-down sort of kindness. You got none of that
what-can-I-do-for-you-my-poor-child-look in you.”
Her effusiveness embarrassed him.
“You make too much out of nothing.”
“Nothing?” Her eyes were misty with emotion. “I was something wild up
in the air, and I couldn’t get hold of myself all alone, and you--you
made me for a person.”
“I cannot tell you how it affects me that in some way I do not
understand I have been the means of bringing release to you. Of
course,” he added quickly, “I was only an instrument, not a cause. Just
as a spade which digs the ground is not a cause of the fertility of the
soil or of the lovely flowers which spring forth. I cannot get away
from the poetic, the religious experience which has so unexpectedly
overtaken me.”
She listened to him in silent wonder. How different he was from the
college people she had met at luncheon that day!
“I can’t put it in words,” she fumbled, “but I owe it to you, this
confession. I can’t help it. I used to hate so the educated! ‘Why
should they know everything, and me nothing?’ it cried in me. ‘Here
I’m dying to learn, to be something, and they holding tight all the
learning like misers hiding gold.’”
§ 7
President Irvine did not answer. After a while he began talking in his
calm voice of his dream of democracy in education, of the plans under
way for the founding of the new school.
“I see it all!” She leaped to her feet under the inspiration of his
words. “This new school is not to be only for the higher-ups by the
higher-ups. It’s to be for everybody--the tailor and the fish-pedlar
and the butcher. And the teachers are not to be professors, talking
to us down from their heads, but living people, talking out of their
hearts. It’s to be what there never yet was in this country--a school
for the people.”
President Irvine had the sensation of being swept out of himself
upon strange, sunlit shores. The bleak land of merely intellectual
perception lay behind him. Her ardour, her earnestness broke through
the habitual restraint of the Anglo-Saxon.
“Let me read you part of my lecture on the new school,” he said, the
contagion of her enthusiasm vibrant in his low voice. “Teachers, above
all others, have occasion to be distressed when the earlier idealism
of welcome to the oppressed is treated as a weak sentimentalism,
when sympathy for the unfortunate and those who have not had a fair
chance is regarded as a weak indulgence fatal to efficiency. The new
school must aim to make up to the disinherited masses by conscious
instruction, by the development of personal power for the loss of
external opportunities consequent upon the passing of our pioneer days.
Otherwise, power is likely to pass more and more into the hands of the
wealthy, and we shall end with the same alliance between intellectual
and artistic culture and economic power due to riches which has been
the curse of every civilization in the past, and which our fathers in
their democratic idealism thought this nation was to put an end to.”
“Grand!” she cried, clapping her hands ecstatically. “Your language is
a little too high over my head for me to understand what you’re talking
about, but I feel I know what you mean to say. You mean, in the new
school, America is to be America, after all.” Eyes tense, brilliant,
held his. “I’ll give you an advice,” she went on. “Translate your
lecture in plain words like they translate things from Russian into
English, or English into Russian. If you want your new school to be for
the people, so you got to begin by talking in the plain words of the
people. You got to feel out your thoughts from the heart and not from
the head.”
Her words were like bullets that shot through the static security of
his traditional past.
“Perhaps I can learn from you how to be simple.”
“Sure! I feel I can learn you how to put flesh and blood into your
words so that everybody can feel your thoughts close to the heart.”
The gesticulating hands swam before him like waves of living flame.
“Stand before your eyes the people, the dumb, hungry people--hungry
for knowledge. You got that knowledge. And when you talk in that
high-headed lecture language, it’s like you threw stones to those who
are hungry for bread.”
Then they were both silent, lost in their thoughts. There was a new
light in her eyes, new strength in her arms and fingers, when she rose
to go.
“I shall never see the America which is to be,” he said as he took her
hand in parting; “it will not come in my day. But I have seen its soul
like a free wild bird, beating its wings not against bars, but against
the skies that the light might come through and reveal the earth to be.”
She walked down the corridor and out of the building still under the
spell of his presence. “Like a free wild bird! like a free wild bird!”
sang in her heart.
She had nearly reached home when she became aware that tears were
running down her cheeks, but they were tears of a soul filled to the
brim--tears of vision and revelation. The glow of the setting sun
illuminated the whole earth. She saw the soul beneath the starved,
penny-pinched faces of the Ghetto. The raucous voices of the hucksters,
the haggling women, the shrill cries of the children--all seemed to
blend and fuse into one song of new dawn, of hope, of faith fulfilled.
“After all,” she breathed in prayerful gratitude, “it is ‘to the stars
through difficulties.’ A _meshugeneh_ like me, a cook from Rosinsky’s
Restaurant burning her way up to the president for a friend!”
AN IMMIGRANT AMONG THE EDITORS
Ever since I began to read the American magazines one burning question
has consumed me: why is it that only the thoughts of educated people
are written up? Why shouldn’t sometimes a servant girl or a janitress
or a coal-heaver give his thoughts to the world? We who are forced to
do the drudgery of the world, and who are considered ignorant because
we have no time for school, could say a lot of new and different
things, if only we had a chance to get a hearing.
Very rarely I’d come across a story about a shop-girl or a washerwoman.
But they weren’t real stories. They were twisted pictures of the way
the higher-ups see us people. They weren’t as we are. They were as
unreal as the knowledge of the rich about the poor. Often I’d read
those smooth-flowing stories about nothing at all, and I’d ask myself:
why is it that so many of the educated, with nothing to say, know how
to say that nothing with such an easy flow of words, while I, with
something so aching to be said, can say nothing?
I was like a prison world full of choked-in voices, all beating in my
brain to be heard. The minute I’d listen to one voice a million other
voices would rush in crying for a hearing, till I’d get too excited and
mixed up to know what or where.
Sometimes I’d see my brain as a sort of Hester Street junk-shop, where
a million different things--rich up-town silks and velvets and the
cheapest kind of rags--were thrown around in bunches. It seemed to me
if I struggled from morning till night all my years I could never put
order in my junk-shop brain.
Ach! If I only had an education, I used to think. It seemed to me
that educated people were those who had their hearts and their heads
so settled down in order that they could go on with quiet stillness
to do anything they set out to do. They could take up one thought,
one feeling at a time without getting the rest of themselves mixed up
and excited over it. They had each thought, each feeling, laid out in
separate shelves in their heads. So they could draw out one shelf of
ideas while the rest of their ideas remained quiet and still in the
orderly place inside of them.
With me my thoughts were not up in my head. They were in my hands and
feet, in the thinnest nerves of my hair, in the flesh and blood of my
whole body. Everything hurt in me when I tried to think; it was like
struggling up towards something over me that I could never reach--like
tearing myself out inch by inch from the roots of the earth--like
suffering all pain of dying and being born.
And when I’d really work out a thought in words, I’d want to say it
over and over a million times, for fear maybe I wasn’t saying it
strong enough. And I’d clutch at my few little words as a starving man
clutches at crumbs. I could never sit back with the feeling that I had
said what I wanted to say, like the educated people, who are sure of
themselves when they say something. The real thing I meant remained
inside of me for want of deeper, more burning words than I had yet
found in the cold English language.
With all the confused unsureness of myself, I was absolutely sure I had
great things in me. I felt that all I needed was the chance to reach
the educated higher-ups, and all the big things in me would leap out
quicker than lightning. But how was I to reach these American-born
higher-ups when they were so much above me? I could never get into
their colleges because I could never take the time to learn all the
beginnings from school to pass their entrance examinations. And even if
I had the time to study, I wasn’t interested in grammar and arithmetic
and dry history and still drier and deader literature about Chaucer and
Marlowe. I was too much on fire trying to think out my own thoughts to
get interested in the dust and ashes of dead and gone ones. And yet I
was so crazy to reach those who had all that book-learning from school
in their heads that I was always dreaming of the wonderful educated
world that was over me.
Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night and stare through
the darkness at an imaginary world of educated people that would
invite me in to share with them their feast of learning. I saw them
sitting around a table talking high thoughts, all the wisdom of the
ages flowing from lip to lip like living light. I saw just how they
talked and how they looked, because once I had worked as a waitress in
a professor’s house. Their words were over my head, but the sound of
their low voices went through me like music of all that I longed and
dreamed and desired to be.
I used to hold myself tight-in, like a wooden dummy, when I passed them
the food. My lips were tight together, my eyes half-closed, like a
Chinaman’s, as though I didn’t see or hear anything but my one business
of waiting on them. But all the time something in the choked stillness
of me was crying out to them: “I’m no dummy of a servant. I want to be
like you. I could be like all of you if I only had a chance.”
“If I only had a chance” kept going round and round in my head.
“Make your chance,” a still voice goaded me.
“If I could only write out my wonderful thoughts that fly away in the
air I’d get myself a first place in America.”
“No, go ahead. Think connectedly for one minute. Catch your crazy wild
birds and bring them down to earth.”
And so I pushed myself on to begin the adventure of writing out my
thoughts.
But who’ll print what I write? was my next bother.
In my evenings off I used to go to the library and kept looking and
looking through all the magazines to see where I could get a start.
At last I picked out three magazines that stood out plainly for their
special interest in working people. I will call them _The Reformer_,
_The People_ and _Free Mankind_.
_Free Mankind_ was a thin, white, educated-looking magazine, without
covers, without pictures, without any advertising. It gave me the
feeling when I looked through the pages that it was a head without a
body. Most of the articles were high words in the air. I couldn’t make
out what they were talking about, but some of the editorials talked
against paying rent. This at once got me on fire with interest, because
all my life the people I knew were wearing out their years worrying
for the rent. If this magazine was trying to put the landlords out of
business, I was with it. So, fired by the inspiration of the moment, I
rushed to see the editor of _Free Mankind_.
I don’t remember how I ever pushed myself past the telephone girl and
secretary, but I found myself talking face to face with a clean, cold,
high-thinking head, Mr. Alfred Nott, editor-boss of _Free Mankind_. My
burning enthusiasm turned into ice through all my bones as I looked
into the terrible, clean face and cold eyes of this clean cold
higher-up. But I heard my words rushing right to him like the words of
a soap-box speaker who is so on fire with his thoughts that even the
cold ones from up-town are forced to listen to him.
“I can put a lot of new life into your magazine,” I said. “I have in me
great new ideas about life, and I’m crazy to give them out to you. Your
magazine is too much up in the head and not enough down on earth. It’s
all words, words, long-winded empty words in emptiness. Your articles
are something like those long sermons about nothing, that put people
to sleep. I can wake up your readers like lightning. I can make your
magazine mean living things to living people.”
The man fell back in his chair as if frightened. His mouth opened to
speak, but no words came from his lips.
“What you tell us about not paying rent is good enough,” I went on.
“But you should tell us how to put an end to all that. I know enough
about not having a place to sleep in to write you something that will
wake up the dead. You’re not excited enough with feelings when you
write, because you live in a soft steam-heated place with plenty of
money to pay for it. But the poor like me, with little rent, and
drying out their heads worrying for that little, they feel what it is
to be under the foot of those Cossacks, the landlords. In my stories
I’d write for you, I’d get the readers so mad, they’d rush out and do
something.”
Even while I was yet talking, Mr. Nott slipped out of the chair and
disappeared like a frightened rabbit. I could see him vanishing through
the door before I could stop my flow of words. I looked about me in the
empty room. I felt as if I’d been slapped in the face.
I ran out of the office with tears in my eyes. And I couldn’t stop my
crying in the street. So this is his Free Mankind! When a person comes
to him with something real he runs away as from a madman. Here was a
paper that would reform the world, and its boss wouldn’t even listen to
one of the people he was setting out to save.
But there were other magazines in America, I told myself. _The
Reformer_ flashed before my eyes, because I remember it said on the
back page, “It speaks for the average man.”
I found myself again face to face with an editor--John Blair, the great
liberal, the friend of an American President, the starter of a new
school that was to gather all the minds of the new world. With this
man I thought I’d begin by asking him a question instead of rushing
myself out to him in all my hungry eagerness.
“Mr. Blair,” I demanded in a voice of choked-in quietness, “do you
think that the educated people know it all?”
He looked at me for a long minute. His lips closed together, his eyes
cool like a judge. I felt he looked me over to decide in what shelf I
belonged in the filing bureau of his college head.
“No, my dear young woman. I don’t say that educated people have a
monopoly of knowledge, but they are the only ones that know how to use
it.”
“Then it’s only the thoughts of educated people for your magazine,” I
cried disappointedly. “How about people like me with a lot to say but
can’t put it in fancy language? Isn’t your new school to be different
from the old colleges in that you want to bring out the new thoughts of
new people like me? Wouldn’t you want to give a person like me a chance
in your magazine?”
“But can you express yourself logically, reasonably?”
“Logic--reason! Reason--logic!” I jumped from the chair with
excitement. “That’s why your magazine is so dull, so dead, because all
your living thoughts die down in the ashes of dead logic. Reason and
logic aren’t life. Hunger and desire are life. I know, because I’m
burning up with it. With this hunger they paint pictures and write
books and sing songs----”
“You Russians are full of interesting stuff. But you’re so incoherent.
You’d be no use to us unless you could learn to think clearly.”
“I know my thoughts are all mixed up,” I pleaded with educated
quietness, “but it’s only because I have so much to give and nobody
wants it. Wouldn’t it be better for your magazine to have my mixed-up
aliveness instead of the cold logic from your college writers?”
He smiled down pityingly on me.
“I’m afraid that such a chaotic mind as yours would be useless to an
intellectual journal. Good day.”
Not crushed, but bitter and hard and with head high, I walked out of
_The Reformer_ office. Were all the magazines that set themselves up to
save the world headed by such narrow-thinking tsars? Only to prove that
all of them were run by some clique of college professors, I went to
the office of _The People_.
Here the editor didn’t run from me like a frightened rabbit or sting me
with logic like John Blair. He cut short the interview by going over
to the shelf and taking down a book which he handed to me with pitying
kindness. “This will help you to think and maybe to write.”
Out in the street, I gave a look at the book. It was Genung’s
“Psychology of Madness.” It grew black and red before my eyes. So it’s
madness to want to give out my thoughts to the world? They turn me down
like a crazy beggar only because I come to give them new ideas.
I threw the book away in the nearest ash can. But that word “madness”
was to me like a red rag to a bull. I had to write now or go crazy with
the wrath these reformers roused in me.
“What’s my place in America?” I asked myself. “Must I remain a
choked-in servant in somebody’s kitchen or somebody’s factory, or will
I find a way to give out my thoughts to America?”
So what I wrote was the story of myself--myself lost in America.
It was like new air in my lungs to let myself loose on paper. But how
could I get it to the American people? One thing I was sure of. I
wasn’t going to subject myself to another insult from those reform
magazines. I don’t know how it happened, but I picked out _Wharton’s
Magazine_, the most literary magazine of all those I looked over,
simply because it looked so solidly high above the rest. My desperate
need for a hearing made me bold. In my ragged coat and torn shoes I
walked into that breath-taking rich office like a millionaire landlord
with pockets full of rent money.
“Do you want something new and different for your magazine?” I asked
with the low voice and the high head of an American-born.
Friendly eyes turned on me. “We’re always seeking something new and
different. Have you got it?”
I looked right into the friendly eyes. This was Mr. Robert Reeves, the
editor. He had the clean, well-dressed look of the born higher-up. But
how different from those others! His face was human. And there was a
shine in the eyes that warmed me.
“I’m an immigrant,” I said. “I have worked in kitchens, factories and
sweatshops. I’m dying away with the loneliness of my thoughts, so I
wrote myself out in a story.”
He snatched up the papers and began to read. A quick light flashed into
his eyes. Then he turned to me.
“I can see you have something original. But I can’t decide just now.
You’ll hear from me as soon as I have read it through.”
I could hardly walk the street for excitement. My life hung on this
man’s answer. And it came two days later in a small envelope. He
offered me two hundred dollars for my story.
I couldn’t believe it wasn’t a dream. And I rushed with the letter
to his office. “You could have given me a hundred dollars, fifty,
twenty-five, and it would have been to me a fortune. But two
hundred--do you mean really to give that much to me?”
He chuckled to himself, and I rushed right on. “I thought New York
was a den of thieves. The landlord robbing you with the rent, and
the restaurants cheating the strength out of every bite of food you
buy. And I thought the college higher-ups were only educated cowards
with dish-water in their veins, scared to death of hungry people like
me, scared to look at the face of suffering. Their logic and their
reason--only how to use their book-learning brains to shut out their
hearts--to make themselves deaf, dumb and blind to the cry of hunger
and want knocking at their doors.”
“Just because you felt all that so deeply you were able to put fire in
your words.”
A thousand windows of light burst open in me as I listened to him. I
was like something choked for ages in the tight chains of ignorance and
fear, breathing the first breath of free air. For the first time my
eyes began to see, my ears began to hear, my heart began to understand
the world’s wonder and the beauty.
A great pity welled up in my heart for the Alfred Notts and the John
Blairs whom I had so mercilessly condemned. Poor little-educated
ones! Why did I fear them and envy them and hate them so for nothing?
They were only little children putting on a long wooden face, playing
teacher to the world. And I was a little scared child afraid of
teacher--afraid they were grown-ups with the power to hurt me and shut
me out from the fun of life.
Why wasn’t I scared of Robert Reeves from the first minute? It was
because he didn’t frighten people with his highness. He didn’t wear a
wooden face of dignity. He was no reformer, no holy social worker--only
a human being who loved people.
That one flash of understanding from Robert Reeves filled me with such
enthusiasm for work that I shut myself off from the rest of the world
and began turning out story after story.
Years passed. The only sign of success I became aware of was the
increasing flood of mail that poured in on me. People who wanted to be
writers asked me for literary help. People who imagined I was rolling
in money sent me begging letters for aid. At the beginning I wanted
to help them all. But I soon saw that I’d have to spend all my time
answering the demands of foolish self-seekers who had nothing in common
with me. And so I had to harden my heart against these time-wasting
intruders.
One day, as I walked out of my house absorbed in one of the characters
that I was writing about, someone stopped me. I looked up. A pale,
thin, hungry-eyed young man asked timidly: “May I speak to you for
a minute?” Then he told me that he had written a book, and that the
publishers had turned it down, so he had printed it himself. “And I
want your opinion,” he pleaded, “because none of the critics would
listen to me.”
“I’m too busy,” I said irritably. “If you had to print the book
yourself it means it’s no good.”
“I thought you, who once had such a hard struggle, would
remember--would understand.”
“There’s nothing to understand except that you killed yourself with the
public.” And I walked off.
I tried to resume the trend of my thoughts, but I could not think. The
pale face, the hungry eyes, followed me accusingly in the street. “You
who once struggled would understand” rang in my ears. And suddenly I
realized how brutal I had been.
“But it’s the merciless truth,” I defended. Nobody could help him till
he finds himself. Nobody helped me till I had found myself.
“No, I’m all wrong,” another voice cried. “Robert Reeves helped me. I
could never have helped myself all alone. You can only help yourself
half the way. The other half is some Hand of God in the shape of a
human contact.”
Something hurt so deep in me I couldn’t work that day. I couldn’t
sleep that night. The pale face and the hungry eyes kept staring at
me through the darkness. I, who judged the Alfred Notts and the John
Blairs--I saw myself condemned as one of them. I had let myself get so
absorbed with the thoughts in my head that I ceased to have a heart for
the people about me.
What would I not have given to see that young man and tell him how I
suffered for my inhuman busy-business, which had shut my eyes to the
hungry hands reaching up to me. But I never saw him again. And yet that
man whom I had turned away like a beggar had brought me the life of a
new awakening. He had made me aware that I could never contribute my
deepest to America if I lost the friendly understanding of humanity
that Robert Reeves had given me, if I lost the one precious thing that
makes life real--the love for people, even if they are lost, wandering,
crazy people.
AMERICA AND I
As one of the dumb, voiceless ones I speak. One of the millions of
immigrants beating, beating out their hearts at your gates for a breath
of understanding.
Ach! America! From the other end of the earth from where I came,
America was a land of living hope, woven of dreams, aflame with longing
and desire.
Choked for ages in the airless oppression of Russia, the Promised Land
rose up--wings for my stifled spirit--sunlight burning through my
darkness--freedom singing to me in my prison--deathless songs tuning
prison bars into strings of a beautiful violin.
I arrived in America. My young, strong body, my heart and soul pregnant
with the unlived lives of generations clamouring for expression.
What my mother and father and their mother and father never had
a chance to give out in Russia, I would give out in America. The
hidden sap of centuries would find release; colours that never saw
light--songs that died unvoiced--romance that never had a chance to
blossom in the black life of the Old World.
In the golden land of flowing opportunity I was to find my work that
was denied me in the sterile village of my forefathers. Here I was to
be free from the dead drudgery for bread that held me down in Russia.
For the first time in America I’d cease to be a slave of the belly. I’d
be a creator, a giver, a human being! My work would be the living joy
of fullest self-expression.
But from my high visions, my golden hopes, I had to put my feet down on
earth. I had to have food and shelter. I had to have the money to pay
for it.
I was in America, among the Americans, but not of them. No speech, no
common language, no way to win a smile of understanding from them, only
my young, strong body and my untried faith. Only my eager, empty hands,
and my full heart shining from my eyes!
God from the world! Here I was with so much richness in me, but my mind
was not wanted without the language. And my body, unskilled, untrained,
was not even wanted in the factory. Only one of two chances was left
open to me: the kitchen, or minding babies.
My first job was as a servant in an Americanized family. Once, long
ago, they came from the same village from where I came. But they were
so well dressed, so well fed, so successful in America, that they were
ashamed to remember their mother tongue.
“What were to be my wages?” I ventured timidly, as I looked up to the
well-fed, well-dressed “American” man and woman.
They looked at me with a sudden coldness. What have I said to draw away
from me their warmth? Was it so low from me to talk of wages? I shrank
back into myself like a low-down bargainer. Maybe they’re so high up in
well-being they can’t any more understand my low thoughts for money.
From his rich height the man preached down to me that I must not be so
grabbing for wages. Only just landed from the ship and already thinking
about money when I should be thankful to associate with “Americans.”
The woman, out of her smooth, smiling fatness, assured me that this
was my chance for a summer vacation in the country with her two lovely
children. My great chance to learn to be a civilized being, to become
an American by living with them.
So, made to feel that I was in the hands of American friends, invited
to share with them their home, their plenty, their happiness, I pushed
out from my head the worry for wages. Here was my first chance to begin
my life in the sunshine after my long darkness. My laugh was all over
my face as I said to them: “I’ll trust myself to you. What I’m worth
you’ll give me.” And I entered their house like a child by the hand.
The best of me I gave them. Their house cares were my house cares. I
got up early. I worked till late. All that my soul hungered to give I
put into the passion with which I scrubbed floors, scoured pots, and
washed clothes. I was so grateful to mingle with the American people,
to hear the music of the American language, that I never knew tiredness.
There was such a freshness in my brains and such a willingness in my
heart that I could go on and on--not only with the work of the house,
but work with my head--learning new words from the children, the
grocer, the butcher, the iceman. I was not even afraid to ask for words
from the policeman on the street. And every new word made me see new
American things with American eyes. I felt like a Columbus, finding new
worlds through every new word.
But words alone were only for the inside of me. The outside of me
still branded me for a steerage immigrant. I had to have clothes to
forget myself that I’m a stranger yet. And so I had to have money to
buy these clothes.
The month was up. I was so happy! Now I’d have money. _My own, earned_
money. Money to buy a new shirt on my back, shoes on my feet. Maybe yet
an American dress and hat!
Ach! How high rose my dreams! How plainly I saw all that I would do
with my visionary wages shining like a light over my head!
In my imagination I already walked in my new American clothes. How
beautiful I looked as I saw myself like a picture before my eyes! I saw
how I would throw away my immigrant rags tied up in my immigrant shawl.
With money to buy--free money in my hands--I’d show them that I could
look like an American in a day.
Like a prisoner in his last night in prison, counting the seconds that
will free him from his chains, I trembled breathlessly for the minute
I’d get the wages in my hand.
Before dawn I rose.
I shined up the house like a jewel-box.
I prepared breakfast and waited with my heart in my mouth for my lady
and gentleman to rise. At last I heard them stirring. My eyes were
jumping out of my head to them when I saw them coming in and seating
themselves by the table.
Like a hungry cat rubbing up to its boss for meat, so I edged and
simpered around them as I passed them the food. Without my will, like a
beggar, my hand reached out to them.
The breakfast was over. And no word yet from my wages.
“Gottuniu!” I thought to myself. “Maybe they’re so busy with their
own things they forgot it’s the day for my wages. Could they who have
everything know what I was to do with my first American dollars? How
could they, soaking in plenty, how could they feel the longing and the
fierce hunger in me, pressing up through each visionary dollar? How
could they know the gnawing ache of my avid fingers for the feel of
my own, earned dollars? _My_ dollars that I could spend like a free
person. _My_ dollars that would make me feel with everybody alike!”
Breakfast was long past.
Lunch came. Lunch past.
Oi-i weh! Not a word yet about my money.
It was near dinner. And not a word yet about my wages.
I began to set the table. But my head--it swam away from me. I broke
a glass. The silver dropped from my nervous fingers. I couldn’t stand
it any longer. I dropped everything and rushed over to my American lady
and gentleman.
“Oi weh! The money--my money--my wages!” I cried breathlessly.
Four cold eyes turned on me.
“Wages? Money?” The four eyes turned into hard stone as they looked me
up and down. “Haven’t you a comfortable bed to sleep, and three good
meals a day? You’re only a month here. Just came to America. And you
already think about money. Wait till you’re worth any money. What use
are you without knowing English? You should be glad we keep you here.
It’s like a vacation for you. Other girls pay money yet to be in the
country.”
It went black for my eyes. I was so choked no words came to my lips.
Even the tears went dry in my throat.
I left. Not a dollar for all my work!
For a long, long time my heart ached and ached like a sore wound. If
murderers would have robbed me and killed me it wouldn’t have hurt me
so much. I couldn’t think through my pain. The minute I’d see before
me how they looked at me, the words they said to me--then everything
began to bleed in me. And I was helpless.
For a long, long time the thought of ever working in an “American”
family made me tremble with fear, like the fear of wild wolves.
No--never again would I trust myself to an “American” family, no matter
how fine their language and how sweet their smile.
It was blotted out in me, all trust in friendship from “Americans.” But
the life in me still burned to live. The hope in me still craved to
hope. In darkness, in dirt, in hunger and want, but only to live on!
There had been no end to my day--working for the “American” family.
Now rejecting false friendships from higher-ups in America, I turned
back to the ghetto. I worked on a hard bench with my own kind on either
side of me. I knew before I began what my wages were to be. I knew what
my hours were to be. And I knew the feeling of the end of the day.
From the outside my second job seemed worse than the first. It was in a
sweat-shop of a Delancey Street basement, kept up by an old, wrinkled
woman that looked like a black witch of greed. My work was sewing
on buttons. While the morning was still dark I walked into a dark
basement. And darkness met me when I turned out of the basement.
Day after day, week after week, all the contact I got with America
was handling dead buttons. The money I earned was hardly enough to
pay for bread and rent. I didn’t have a room to myself. I didn’t even
have a bed. I slept on a mattress on the floor in a rat-hole of a room
occupied by a dozen other immigrants. I was always hungry--oh, so
hungry! The scant meals I could afford only sharpened my appetite for
real food. But I felt myself better off than working in the “American”
family, where I had three good meals a day and a bed to myself. With
all the hunger and darkness of the sweat-shop, I had at least the
evening to myself. And all night was mine. When all were asleep, I
used to creep up on the roof of the tenement and talk out my heart in
silence to the stars in the sky.
“Who am I? What am I? What do I want with my life? Where is America? Is
there an America? What is this wilderness in which I’m lost?”
I’d hurl my questions and then think and think. And I could not tear it
out of me, the feeling that America must be somewhere, somehow--only I
couldn’t find it--_my America_, where I would work for love and not for
a living. I was like a thing following blindly after something far off
in the dark!
“Oi weh!” I’d stretch out my hand up in the air. “My head is so lost
in America! What’s the use of all my working if I’m not in it? Dead
buttons is not me.”
Then the busy season started in the shop. The mounds of buttons grew
and grew. The long day stretched out longer. I had to begin with the
buttons earlier and stay with them till later in the night. The old
witch turned into a huge greedy maw for wanting more and more buttons.
For a glass of tea, for a slice of herring over black bread, she would
buy us up to stay another and another hour, till there seemed no end to
her demands.
One day, the light of self-assertion broke into my cellar darkness.
“I don’t want the tea. I don’t want your herring,” I said with terrible
boldness. “I only want to go home. I only want the evening to myself!”
“You fresh mouth, you!” cried the old witch. “You learned already too
much in America. I want no clock-watchers in my shop. Out you go!”
I was driven out to cold and hunger. I could no longer pay for my
mattress on the floor. I no longer could buy the bite in the mouth. I
walked the streets. I knew what it is to be alone in a strange city
among strangers.
But I laughed through my tears. So I learned too much already in
America because I wanted the whole evening to myself? Well, America has
yet to teach me still more: how to get not only the whole evening to
myself, but a whole day a week like the American workers.
That sweat-shop was a bitter memory but a good school. It fitted me
for a regular factory. I could walk in boldly and say I could work at
something, even if it was only sewing on buttons.
Gradually, I became a trained worker. I worked in a light, airy
factory, only eight hours a day. My boss was no longer a sweater and a
blood-squeezer. The first freshness of the morning was mine. And the
whole evening was mine. All day Sunday was mine.
Now I had better food to eat. I slept on a better bed. Now, I even
looked dressed up like the American-born. But inside of me I knew
that I was not yet an American. I choked with longing when I met an
American-born, and I couldn’t say nothing.
Something cried dumb in me. I couldn’t help it. I didn’t know what it
was I wanted. I only knew I wanted. I wanted. Like the hunger in the
heart that never gets food.
An English class for foreigners started in our factory. The teacher had
such a good, friendly face, her eyes looked so understanding, as though
she could see right into my heart. So I went to her one day for an
advice:
“I don’t know what is with me the matter,” I began. “I have no rest in
me. I never yet done what I want.”
“What is it you want to do, child?” she asked me.
“I want to do something with my head, my feelings. All day long, only
with my hands I work.”
“First you must learn English.” She patted me as though I was not yet
grown up. “Put your mind on that, and then we’ll see.”
So for a time I learned the language. I could almost begin to think
with English words in my head. But in my heart still hurt the
emptiness. I burned to give, to give something, to do something, to
be something. The dead work with my hands was killing me. My work left
only hard stones on my heart.
Again I went to our factory teacher and cried out to her: “I know
already to read and write the English language, but I can’t put it into
words what I want. What is it in me so different that can’t come out?”
She smiled at me down from her calmness as if I were a little bit out
of my head. “What _do you want_ to do?”
“I feel. I see. I hear. And I want to think it out. But I’m like dumb
in me. I only feel I’m different--different from everybody.”
She looked at me close and said nothing for a minute. “You ought to
join one of the social clubs of the Women’s Association,” she advised.
“What’s the Women’s Association?” I implored greedily.
“A group of American women who are trying to help the working-girl find
herself. They have a special department for immigrant girls like you.”
I joined the Women’s Association. On my first evening there they
announced a lecture: “The Happy Worker and His Work,” by the Welfare
director of the United Mills Corporation.
“Is there such a thing as a happy worker at his work?” I wondered.
“Happiness is only by working at what you love. And what poor girl can
ever find it to work at what she loves?” My old dreams about my America
rushed through my mind. Once I thought that in America everybody works
for love. Nobody has to worry for a living. Maybe this welfare man came
to show me the _real_ America that till now I sought in vain.
With a lot of polite words the head lady of the Women’s Association
introduced a higher-up that looked like the king of kings of business.
Never before in my life did I ever see a man with such a sureness in
his step, such power in his face, such friendly positiveness in his eye
as when he smiled upon us.
“Efficiency is the new religion of business,” he began. “In big
business houses, even in up-to-date factories, they no longer take
the first comer and give him any job that happens to stand empty.
Efficiency begins at the employment office. Experts are hired for the
one purpose, to find out how best to fit the worker to his work. It’s
economy for the boss to make the worker happy.” And then he talked a
lot more on efficiency in educated language that was over my head.
I didn’t know exactly what it meant--efficiency--but if it was to make
the worker happy at his work, then that’s what I had been looking
for since I came to America. I only felt from watching him that he
was happy by his job. And as I looked on this clean, well-dressed,
successful one, who wasn’t ashamed to say he rose from an office-boy,
it made me feel that I, too, could lift myself up for a person.
He finished his lecture, telling us about the Vocational Guidance
Centre that the Women’s Association started.
The very next evening I was at the Vocational Guidance Centre. There I
found a young, college-looking woman. Smartness and health shining from
her eyes! She, too, looked as if she knew her way in America. I could
tell at the first glance: here is a person that is happy by what she
does.
“I feel you’ll understand me,” I said right away.
She leaned over with pleasure in her face: “I hope I can.”
“I want to work by what’s in me. Only, I don’t know what’s in me. I
only feel I’m different.”
She gave me a quick, puzzled look from the corner of her eyes. “What
are you doing now?”
“I’m the quickest shirtwaist hand on the floor. But my heart wastes
away by such work. I think and think, and my thoughts can’t come out.”
“Why don’t you think out your thoughts in shirtwaists? You could learn
to be a designer. Earn more money.”
“I don’t want to look on waists. If my hands are sick from waists, how
could my head learn to put beauty into them?”
“But you must earn your living at what you know, and rise slowly from
job to job.”
I looked at her office sign: “Vocational Guidance.” “What’s your
vocational guidance?” I asked. “How to rise from job to job--how to
earn more money?”
The smile went out from her eyes. But she tried to be kind yet. “What
_do_ you want?” she asked, with a sigh of lost patience.
“I want America to want me.”
She fell back in her chair, thunderstruck with my boldness. But yet, in
a low voice of educated self-control, she tried to reason with me:
“You have to _show_ that you have something special for America before
America has need of you.”
“But I never had a chance to find out what’s in me, because I always
had to work for a living. Only, I feel it’s efficiency for America to
find out what’s in me so different, so I could give it out by my work.”
Her eyes half closed as they bored through me. Her mouth opened to
speak, but no words came from her lips. So I flamed up with all that
was choking in me like a house on fire:
“America gives free bread and rent to criminals in prison. They got
grand houses, with sunshine, fresh air, doctors and teachers, even
for the crazy ones. Why don’t they have free boarding-schools for
immigrants--strong people--willing people? Here you see us burning up
with something different, and America turns its head away from us.”
Her brows lifted and dropped down. She shrugged her shoulders away from
me with the look of pity we give to cripples and hopeless lunatics.
“America is no Utopia. First you must become efficient in earning a
living before you can indulge in your poetic dreams.”
I went away from the vocational guidance office with all the air out of
my lungs. All the light out of my eyes. My feet dragged after me like
dead wood.
Till now there had always lingered a rosy veil of hope over my
emptiness, a hope that a miracle would happen. I would open up my eyes
some day and suddenly find the America of my dreams. As a young girl
hungry for love sees always before her eyes the picture of lover’s arms
around her, so I saw always in my heart the vision of Utopian America.
But now I felt that the America of my dreams never was and never could
be. Reality had hit me on the head as with a club. I felt that the
America that I sought was nothing but a shadow--an echo--a chimera of
lunatics and crazy immigrants.
Stripped of all illusion, I looked about me. The long desert of wasting
days of drudgery stared me in the face. The drudgery that I had lived
through, and the endless drudgery still ahead of me rose over me like
a withering wilderness of sand. In vain were all my cryings, in vain
were all frantic efforts of my spirit to find the living waters of
understanding for my perishing lips. Sand, sand was everywhere. With
every seeking, every reaching out I only lost myself deeper and deeper
in a vast sea of sand.
I knew now the American language. And I knew now, if I talked to the
Americans from morning till night, they could not understand what the
Russian soul of me wanted. They could not understand _me_ any more than
if I talked to them in Chinese. Between my soul and the American soul
were worlds of difference that no words could bridge over. What was
that difference? What made the Americans so far apart from me?
I began to read the American history. I found from the first pages that
America started with a band of courageous Pilgrims. They had left their
native country as I had left mine. They had crossed an unknown ocean
and landed in an unknown country, as I.
But the great difference between the first Pilgrims and me was that
they expected to make America, build America, create their own world of
liberty. I wanted to find it ready-made.
I read on. I delved deeper down into the American history. I saw how
the Pilgrim Fathers came to a rocky desert country, surrounded by
Indian savages on all sides. But undaunted, they pressed on--through
danger--through famine, pestilence, and want--they pressed on. They
did not ask the Indians for sympathy, for understanding. They made no
demands on anybody, but on their own indomitable spirit of persistence.
And I--I was for ever begging a crumb of sympathy, a gleam of
understanding from strangers who could not sympathize, who could not
understand.
I, when I encountered a few savage Indian scalpers, like the old witch
of the sweat-shop, like my “Americanized” countryman, who cheated me of
my wages--I, when I found myself on the lonely, untrodden path through
which all seekers of the new world must pass, I lost heart and said:
“There is no America!”
Then came a light--a great revelation! I saw America--a big idea--a
deathless hope--a world still in the making. I saw that it was the
glory of America that it was not yet finished. And I, the last comer,
had her share to give, small or great, to the making of America, like
those Pilgrims who came in the _Mayflower_.
Fired up by this revealing light, I began to build a bridge of
understanding between the American-born and myself. Since their life
was shut out from such as me, I began to open up my life and the lives
of my people to them. And life draws life. In only writing about the
Ghetto I found America.
Great chances have come to me. But in my heart is always a deep
sadness. I feel like a man who is sitting down to a secret table
of plenty, while his near ones and dear ones are perishing before
his eyes. My very joy in doing the work I love hurts me like secret
guilt, because all about me I see so many with my longings, my burning
eagerness, to do and to be, wasting their days in drudgery they hate,
merely to buy bread and pay rent. And America is losing all that
richness of the soul.
The Americans of to-morrow, the America that is every day nearer coming
to be, will be too wise, too open-hearted, too friendly-handed, to
let the least last-comer at their gates knock in vain with his gifts
unwanted.
A BED FOR THE NIGHT
A drizzling rain had begun to fall. I was wet and chilled to the bone.
I had just left the free ward of a hospital, where I had been taken
when ill with the flu. It was good to be home again! Even though what I
called home were but the dim, narrow halls of a lodging-house. With a
sigh of relief, I dropped my suitcase in the vestibule.
As the door swung open, the landlady met me with: “Your room is taken.
Your things are in the cellar.”
“My room?” I stammered, white with fear.
“Oh no--please, Mrs. Pelz!”
“I got a chance to rent your room at such a good price, I couldn’t
afford to hold it.”
“But you promised to keep it for me while I was away. And I paid you
for it----”
“The landlord raised me my rent and I got to get it out from the
roomers,” she defended. “I got four hungry mouths to feed----”
“But maybe I would have paid you a little more,” I pleaded. “If you had
only told me. I have to go back to work to-day. How can I get another
room at a moment’s notice?”
“We all got to look out for ourselves. I am getting more than twice as
much as you paid me from this new lodger,” she finished triumphantly.
“And no housekeeping privileges.”
“You must give me time!” My voice rose into a shriek. “You can’t put
a girl out into the street at a moment’s notice. There are laws in
America----”
“There are no laws for roomers.”
“No law for roomers?” All my weakness and helplessness rushed out of me
in a fury of rebellion. “No law for roomers?”
“I could have put your things out in the street when your week was up.
But being you were sick, I was kind enough to keep them in the cellar.
But your room is taken,” she said with finality. “I got to let my rooms
to them as pay the most. I got to feed my own children first. I can’t
carry the whole world on my back.”
I tried to speak. But no voice came to my lips. I felt struck with
a club on the head. I could only stare at her. And I must have been
staring for some time without seeing her, for I had not noticed she had
gone till I heard a voice from the upper stairs, “Are you still here?”
“Oh--yes--yes--I--I--am--going--go-ing.” I tried to rouse my stunned
senses, which seemed struck to the earth.
“There’s no money in letting rooms to girls,” my landlady continued,
as she came down to open the door for me. “They’re always cooking, or
washing, or ironing and using out my gas. This new roomer I never hear
nor see except in the morning when he goes to work and at night when he
comes to sleep.”
I staggered out in a bewildered daze. I leaned against the cold iron
lamp-post. It seemed so kind, so warm. Even the chill, drizzling rain
beating on my face was almost human. Slowly, my numbed brain began to
recollect where I was. Where should I turn? To whom? I faced an endless
maze of endless streets. All about me strangers--seas of jostling
strangers. I was alone--shelterless!
All that I had suffered in lodging-houses rushed over me. I had never
really lived or breathed like a free, human being. My closed door
assured me no privacy. I lived in constant dread of any moment being
pounced upon by my landlady for daring to be alive. I dared not hang
out my clothes on a line in the fresh air. I was forced to wash and dry
them stealthily, at night, over chairs and on my trunk. I was under
the same restraint when I did my simple cooking although I paid dearly
for the gas I used.
This ceaseless strain of don’t move here and don’t step there was far
from my idea of home. But still it was shelter from the streets. I had
almost become used to it. I had almost learned not to be crushed by it.
Now, I was shut out--kicked out like a homeless dog.
All thought of reporting at my office left my mind. I walked and
walked, driven by despair. Tears pressed in my throat, but my eyes were
dry as sand.
I tried to struggle out of my depression. I looked through the
furnished room sections of the city. There were no cheap rooms to be
had. The prices asked for the few left were ten, twelve and fifteen
dollars a week.
I earn twenty-five dollars a week as a stenographer. I am compelled to
dress neatly to hold down my job. And with clothes and food so high,
how could I possibly pay more than one-third of my salary for rent?
In my darkness I saw a light--a vision of the settlement. As an
immigrant I had joined one of the social clubs there, and I remembered
there was a residence somewhere in that building for the workers.
Surely they would take me in till I had found a place to live.
“I’m in such trouble!” I stammered, as I entered the office of the head
resident. “My landlady put me out because I couldn’t pay the raise in
rent.”
“The housing problem is appalling,” Miss Ward agreed with her usual
professional friendliness. “I wish I could let you stay with us, my
child, but our place is only for social workers.”
“Where should I go?” I struggled to keep back my tears. “I’m so
terribly alone.”
“Now--now, dear child,” Miss Ward patted my shoulder encouragingly.
“You mustn’t give way like that. Of course, I’ll give you the addresses
of mothers of our neighbourhood.”
One swift glance at the calm, well-fed face and I felt instantly that
Miss Ward had never known the terror of homelessness.
“You know, dear, I want to help you all I can,” smiled Miss Ward,
trying to be kind, “and I’m always glad when my girls come to me.”
“What was the use of my coming to you?” I was in no mood for her
make-believe settlement smile. “If you don’t take me in, aren’t you
pushing me in the street--joining hands with my landlady?”
“Why--my dear!” The mask of smiling kindness dropped from Miss Ward’s
face. Her voice cooled. “Surely you will find a room in this long list
of addresses I am giving you.”
I went to a dozen places. It was the same everywhere. No rooms were to
be had at the price I could afford.
Crushed again and again, the habit of hope still asserted itself. I
suddenly remembered there was one person from whom I was almost sure
of getting help--an American woman who had befriended me while still
an immigrant in the factory. Her money had made it possible for me to
take up the stenographic course. Full of renewed hope, I sped along the
streets. My buoyant faith ever expectant could think of one outcome
only.
Mrs. Olney had just finished dictating to her secretary, when the maid
ushered me into the luxurious library.
“How good it is to see you! What can I do for you?” The touch of Mrs.
Olney’s fine hand, the sound of her lovely voice was like the warming
breath of sunshine to a frozen thing. A choking came in my throat.
Tears blinded me.
“If it wasn’t a case of life and death, I wouldn’t have bothered you so
early in the morning.”
“What’s the trouble, my child?” Mrs. Olney was all concern.
“I can’t stand it any longer! Get me a place to live!” And I told her
of my experiences with my landlady and my hopeless room-hunting.
“I have many young friends who are in just your plight,” Mrs. Olney
consoled. “And I’m sending them all to the Better Housing Bureau.”
I felt as though a powerful lamp went out suddenly within my soul. A
sharp chill seized me. The chasm that divides those who have and those
who have not yawned between us. The face I had loved and worshipped
receded and grew dim under my searching gaze.
Here was a childless woman with a houseful of rooms to herself.
Here was a philanthropist who gave thousands of dollars to help the
poor. And here I tried to tell her that I was driven out into the
street--shelterless. And her answer to my aching need was, “The Better
Housing Bureau.”
Again I turned to the unfeeling glare of the streets. A terrible
loneliness bled in my heart. Such tearing, grinding pain was dragging
me to the earth! I could barely hold myself up on my feet. “Ach! Only
for a room to rest!” And I staggered like a dizzy drunkard to the
Better Housing Bureau.
At the waiting-room I paused in breathless admiration. The soft greys
and blues of the walls and hangings, the deep-seated divans, the
flowers scattered in effective profusion, soothed and rested me like
silent music. Even the smoothly fitting gown of the housing specialist
seemed almost part of the colour scheme.
As I approached the mahogany desk I felt shabby--uncomfortable in
this flawless atmosphere, but I managed somehow to tell of my need. I
had no sooner explained the kind of room I could afford than the lady
requested the twenty-five cents registration fee.
“I want to see the room first,” I demanded.
“All our applicants pay in advance.”
“I have only a two-dollar bill, and I don’t get my pay till Monday.”
“Oh, that’s all right. I’ll change it,” she offered obligingly. And she
took my one remaining bill.
“Where were you born? What is your religion?”
“I came for a room and not to be inquisitioned,” I retorted.
“We are compelled to keep statistics of all our applicants.”
Resentfully, I gave her the desired information, and with the addresses
she had given me I recommenced my search. At the end of another
futile hour of room-hunting there was added to the twenty-five cents
registration fee an expense of fifteen cents for car fare. And I was
still homeless.
I had been expecting to hear from my sister who had married a
prosperous merchant and whom I hadn’t seen for years. In my agitation
I had forgotten to ask for my mail, and I went back to see about it. A
telegram had come, stating my sister was staying at the Astor and I was
to meet her there for lunch.
I hastened to her. For although she was now rich and comfortable, I
felt that after all she was my sister and she would help me out.
“How shabby you look!” She cast a disapproving glance at me from head
to foot. “Couldn’t you dress decently to meet me, when you knew I was
staying at this fashionable hotel?”
I told her of my plight.
“Why not go to a hotel till you find a suitable room?” she blandly
advised.
My laughter sounded unreal so loud it was, as I reminded her, “Before
the French Revolution, when the starving people came to the queen’s
palace clamouring for bread, the queen innocently exclaimed, ‘Why don’t
they eat cake?’”
“How disagreeable you are! You think of no one but yourself. I’ve come
here for a little change, to get away from my own troubles, and here
you come with your hatefulness.”
I hadn’t known the relief of laughter, but now that I was started I
couldn’t stop, no more than I could stop staring at her. I tried to
associate this new being of silks and jewels with her who had worked
side by side with me in the factory.
“How you act! I think you’re crazy,” she admonished, and glanced at her
wrist-watch. “I’m late for my appointment with the manicurist. I have
to have my nails done after this dusty railway trip.”
And I had been surprised at the insensate settlement worker, at my
uncomprehending American friend who knew not the meaning of want. Yet
here was my own sister, my own flesh and blood, reared in the same
ghetto, nurtured in the same poverty, ground in the same sweat-shop
treadmill, and because she had a few years of prosperity, because she
ate well and dressed well and was secure, she was deaf to my cry.
Where I could hope for understanding, where I could turn for shelter,
where I was to lay my head that very night, I knew not. But this much
suddenly came to me, I was due to report for work that day. I was shut
out on every side, but there in my office at least awaited me the
warmth and sunshine of an assured welcome. My employer would understand
and let me take off the remainder of the day to continue my search.
I found him out, and instead awaiting me was a pile of mail which he
had left word I should attend to. The next hour was torture. My power
of concentration had deserted me. I tapped the keys of my typewriter
with my fingers, but my brain was torn with worry, my nerves ready to
snap. The day was nearly spent. Night was coming on and I had no place
to lay my head.
I was finishing the last of the letters when he came. After a friendly
greeting he turned to the letters. I dared not interrupt until the
mail was signed.
“Girl! What’s wrong? That’s not like you!” He stared at me. “There are
a dozen mistakes in each letter.”
A blur. Everything seemed to twist and turn around me. Red and black
spots blinded me. A clenched hand pounded his desk, and I heard a voice
that seemed to come from me--scream like a lunatic. “I have no home--no
home--not even a bed for the night!”
Then all I remember is the man’s kindly tone as he handed me a glass of
water. “Are you feeling better?” he asked.
“My landlady put me out,” I said between laboured breaths. “Oh-h, I’m
so lonely! Not a place to lay my head!”
I saw him fumble for his pocket-book and look at me strangely. His
burning gaze seemed to strip me naked--pierce me through and through
from head to foot. Something hurt so deep I choked with shame. I seized
my hat and coat and ran out.
It was getting dark when I reached the entrance of Central Park.
Exhausted, I dropped to the nearest bench. I didn’t even know I was
crying.
“Are you lonely, little one?” A hand slipped around my waist and a
dapper young chap moved closer. “Are you lonely?” he repeated.
I let him talk. I knew he had nothing real to offer, but I was so
tired, so ready to drop the burden of my weary body that I had no
resistance in me. “There’s no place for me,” I thought to myself.
“Everyone shuts me out. What difference what becomes of me? Who cares?”
My head dropped to his shoulder. And the cry broke from me, “I have no
place to sleep to-night.”
“Sleep?” I could feel him draw in his breath and a blood-shot gleam
leaped into his eyes. “You should worry. I’ll take care of that.”
He flashed a roll of bills tauntingly. “How about it, kiddo? Can you
change me a twenty-dollar bill?”
As his other hand reached for me, I wrenched loose from him as from the
cloying touch of pitch. “I wish I were that kind! I wish I were your
kind! But I’m not!”
His hands dropped from the touch of me as though his flesh was
scorched, and I found I was alone.
I walked again. At the nearest public telephone office I called up the
women’s hotels. None had a room left for less than two dollars. My
remaining cash was forty cents short. The Better Housing Bureau had
robbed me of my last hope of shelter.
I passed Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue mansions. Many were closed,
standing empty. I began counting the windows, the rooms. Hundreds and
hundreds of empty rooms, hundreds and hundreds of luxuriously furnished
homes, and I homeless--shut out. I felt I was abandoned by God and man
and no one cared if I perished or went mad. I had a fresh sense why the
spirit of revolution was abroad in the land.
Blindly I retraced my steps to the park bench. I saw and felt nothing
but a devouring sense of fear. It suddenly came over me that I was
not living in a world of human beings, but in a jungle of savages who
gorged themselves with food, gorged themselves with rooms, while I
implored only a bed for the night. And I implored in vain.
I felt the chaos and destruction of the good and the beautiful within
me and around me. The sight of people who lived in homes and ate three
meals a day filled me with the fury of hate. The wrongs and injustices
of the hungry and the homeless of all past ages burst from my soul like
the smouldering lava of a blazing volcano. Earth-quakes of rebellion
raced through my body and brain. I fell prone against the bench and
wept, not tears, but blood.
“Move along! No loitering here!” The policeman’s club tapped me on the
shoulder. Then a woman stopped and bent over me.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t lift my head.
“Tell your friend to cut out the sob-stuff,” the officer continued,
flourishing his club authoritatively. “On your way, both of youse.
Y’know better than to loaf around here, Mag.”
The woman put her hand on mine in a friendly little gesture of
protection. “Leave her alone! Can’t you see she’s all in? I’ll take
care of her.”
Her touch filled me with the warmth of shelter. I didn’t know who or
what she was, but I trusted her.
“Poor kid! What ails her? It’s a rough world all alone.”
There was no pity in her tone, but comprehension, fellowship. From
childhood I’d had my friendships and many were dear to me. But this
woman, without a word, without a greeting, had sounded the depths of
understanding that I never knew existed. Even as I looked up at her
she lifted me from the bench and almost carried me through the arbour
of trees to the park entrance. My own mother couldn’t have been more
gentle. For a moment it seemed to me as though the spirit of my dead
mother had risen from her grave in the guise of this unknown friend.
Only once the silence between us was broken. “Down in your luck, kid?”
Her grip tightened on my arm. “I’ve been there myself. I know all about
it.”
She knew so well, what need had she of answer. The refrain came back to
me: “Only themselves understand themselves and the likes of themselves,
as souls only understand souls.”
In a darkened side street we paused in front of a brown stone house
with shutters drawn.
“Here we are! Now for some grub! I’ll bet a nickel you ain’t ate all
day.” She vaulted the rickety stairs two at a time and led the way into
her little room. With a gay assertiveness she planted me into her one
comfortable chair, attempting no apology for her poverty--a poverty
that winked from every corner and could not be concealed. Flinging off
her street clothes, she donned a crimson kimono, and rummaged through
her soap-box in which her cooking things were kept. She wrung her hands
with despair as though she suffered because she couldn’t change herself
into food.
Ah! the magic of love! It was only tea and toast and an outer crust of
cheese she offered--but she offered it with the bounty of a princess.
Only the kind look in her face and the smell of the steaming tray as
she handed it to me--and I was filled before I touched the food to my
lips. Somehow this woman who had so little had fed me as people with
stuffed larders never could.
Under the spell of a hospitality so real that it hurt like divine,
beautiful things hurt, I felt ashamed of my hysterical worries. I
looked up at her and marvelled. She was so full of God-like grace--and
so unconscious of it!
Not until she had tucked the covers warmly around me did I realize that
I was occupying the only couch she had.
“But where will you sleep?” I questioned.
A funny little laugh broke from her. “I should worry where I sleep.”
“It’s so snug and comfy,” I yawned, my eyes heavy with fatigue. “It’s
good to take from you----”
“Take? Aw, dry up, kid! You ain’t taking nothing,” she protested,
embarrassed. “Tear off some sleep and forget it.”
“I’ll get close to the wall and make room for you,” I murmured as I
dropped off to sleep.
When I woke up I found, to my surprise, the woman was sleeping in a
chair with a shawl wrapped around her like a huge statue. The half of
the bed which she had left for me had remained untouched.
“You were sleeping so sound I didn’t want to wake you,” she said as she
hurried to prepare the breakfast.
I rose, refreshed, restored--sane. It was more than gratitude that
rushed out of my heart to her. I felt I belonged to someone, I had
found home at last.
As I was ready to leave for work I turned to her. “I am coming back
to-night,” I said.
She fell back of a sudden as though I had struck her. From the quick
pain that shone in her face I knew I had hurt something deep within
her. Her eyes met mine in a fixed gaze but she did not see me, but
stared through me into the vacancy of space. She seemed to have
forgotten my presence, and when she spoke her voice was like that of
one in a trance. “You don’t know what you’re asking. I--ain’t--no good.”
“You no good? God from the world! Where would I have been without you?
Even my own sister shut me out. Of them all, you alone opened the door
and spread for me all you had.”
“I ain’t so stuck on myself as the _good_ people, although I was
as good as any of them at the start. But the first time I got into
trouble, instead of helping me, they gave me the marble stare and the
frozen heart and drove me to the bad.”
I looked closely at her, at the dyed hair, the rouged lips, the
defiant look of the woman driven by the Pharisees from the steps of
the temple. Then I saw beneath. It was as though her body dropped away
from her and there stood revealed her soul--the sorrows that gave her
understanding--the shame and the heartbreak that she turned into love.
“What is good or bad?” I challenged. “All I know is that I was hungry
and you fed me. Shelterless and you sheltered me. Broken in spirit and
you made me whole----”
“That stuff’s all right, but you’re better off out of here.”
I started towards her in mute protest.
“Don’t touch me,” she cried. “Can’t you see--the smut all over me?
Ain’t it in my face?”
Her voice broke. And like one possessed of sudden fury, she seized me
by the shoulder and shoved me out.
As the door slammed I heard sobbing--loosened torrents of woe. I sank
to my knees. A light not of this earth poured through the door that had
shut on me. A holiness enveloped me.
This woman had changed the world for me. I could love the people I
had hated yesterday. There was that something new in me, a light that
the dingiest rooming house could not dim nor all the tyranny of the
landlady shut out.
Vague, half remembered words flashed before me in letters of fire.
“Despised and rejected of men: a woman of sorrows acquainted with
grief.”
DREAMS AND DOLLARS
Spring was in the air. But such radiant, joyous spring as one coming
out of the dark shadows of the ghetto never could dream. Earth and sky
seemed to sing with the joy of an unceasing holiday. Rebecca Yudelson
felt as though she had suddenly stepped into fairyland, where the
shadow of sorrow or sickness, where the black blight of poverty had
never been.
An ecstasy of wonder and longing shone from her hungry, young eyes as
she gazed at the luxurious dwellings. Such radiance of colour! Fruits,
flowers and real orange-trees! Beauty and plenty! Each house outshone
the other in beauty and plenty.
Fresh from the East Side tenements, worn from the nerve-racking grind
of selling ribbons at the Five and Ten Cent Store, the residential
section of Los Angeles was like a magic world of romance too perfect to
be real. She had often seen the Fifth Avenue palaces of the New York
millionaires when she had treated herself to a bus ride on a holiday.
But nothing she had ever seen before compared with this glowing
splendour.
“And in one of these mansions of sunshine and roses my own sister
lives!” she breathed. “How could Minnie get used to so much free space
and sunshine for every day?”
Ten years since Minnie had left Delancey Street. Ten years’ freedom
from the black worry for bread. There must have come a new sureness in
her step, a new joy of life in her every movement. And to think that
Abe Shmukler from cloaks and suits had bought her and brought her to
this new world!
Rebecca wondered if her sister ever thought back to Felix Weinberg, the
poet who had loved her and whom she had given up to marry this bank
account man.
With the passionate ardour of adolescence Rebecca had woven an idyll
for herself out of her sister’s love affair. Felix Weinberg had become
for her the symbol of beauty and romance. His voice, his face, the
lines he had written to Minnie, coloured Rebecca’s longings and dreams.
With the love cadence of the poet’s voice still stirring in her heart,
she put her finger on the door bell.
The door was opened by a trim maid in black, whose superior scrutiny
left Rebecca speechless.
Her own sister Minnie with a stiff lady for a servant!
“My sister, is she in? I just came from New York.”
“Rebecca!” cried a familiar voice, as she was smothered in hungry arms.
“_Oi weh!_ How many years! You were yet so little then. Now you’re a
grown-up person.” And overcome by the memories of their ghetto days
together, they sobbed in one another’s arms.
Rebecca had been prepared for a change in Minnie. Ten years of plenty.
But to think that Abe Shmukler with his cloaks and suits could have
blotted out the fine sensitiveness of the sister she had loved and left
in its place his own gross imprint! Minnie’s thin long fingers were now
heavy and weighted with diamonds. The slender lines of her figure had
grown bulky with fat.
“And to think that you who used to shine up the street like a princess
in your home-mades are such a fashion-plate now?” Rebecca laughed
reproachfully.
They drew apart and gazed achingly at one another. Rebecca’s soul grew
faint within her as though her own flesh and blood had grown alien to
her. Why couldn’t Minnie have lifted Abe to her high thoughts? Why did
she let him drag her down to his cloaks and suits--make her a thing of
store-bought style?
“Minnie--Minnie!” the younger sister wept, bewildered. “Where have you
gone? What have you done with yourself?”
Minnie brushed away her tears and laughed away her sister’s reproach.
“Did you want me to remain always an East Side _venteh_?”
Then she hugged the young sister with a fresh burst of affection.
“Rebecca, you little witch! All you need is a little style. I’ll take
you to the best stores, and when I get through with you no one will
guess that you came from Delancey Street.”
“You have the same old heart, Minnie, although you shine like a born
Mrs. Vanderbilt.”
“No wonder you have no luck for a man with these clothes,” Minnie
harped back to the thing uppermost in her mind.
“But you weren’t fixed up in style when Felix Weinberg was so crazy
about you.”
“Do you ever see him?” came eagerly.
“Yes, I meet him every once in a while, but his thoughts are far away
when he talks to me.” She paused, overcome by a rush of feeling.
“Sometimes, in my dreams, I feel myself crying out to him, ‘Look at
me! Can’t you see I’m here?’”
“Don’t be a little fool and let yourself fall in love with a poet. He’s
all right for poetry, but to get married you need a man who can make a
living. I sent for you not only because I was lonesome and wanted you
near, but because I have a man who’ll be a great catch for you. He’s
full of money and crazy to marry himself.”
“Aren’t there plenty of girls in California for him?”
“But he’s like Abe. He wants the plain, settled down kind.”
“Am I the plain, settled-down kind like my sister?” thought Rebecca.
And so the whole afternoon sped by in reminiscence of the past and
golden plans for the future. Minnie told with pride that her children
were sent to a swell camp, where they rubbed sleeves with the
millionaires’ children of California. Abe had sold out the greater
share of his cloaks and suits business to Moe Mirsky--this very man
whom Minnie had picked out for Rebecca.
“And if we have the luck to land him, I’ll charge you nothing for the
matchmaking. My commission will be to have you live near me.”
Before Rebecca could answer there was a footstep in the outer hall and
a hearty voice called: “So your sister has come! No wonder you’re not
standing by the door waiting to kiss your husband.”
Abe Shmukler, fatter and more prosperous than ten years ago, filled
the doorway with his bulk. “Now there’ll be peace in the house,” he
exploded genially. “I’ve had nothing from my wife but cryings from
lonesomeness since I brought her here. You’ll have to keep my wife
company till we get you a man.”
Instinctively Rebecca responded to the fulsomeness of Abe’s greeting.
His sincerity, his simple joy in welcoming her, touched her. She
wondered if her sister had been quite fair to this big, happy-hearted
man.
And even as she wondered the vision of Felix Weinberg stood before her.
This man of fire and romance and dreams, against Abe Shmukler, was like
sunrise and moonrise and song against cloaks and suits. How could any
woman who had known the fiery wonder of the poet be content with this
tame, ox-like husband?
“I’ve already picked out a man for you, so you can settle near us for
good,” said Abe, giving Rebecca another affectionate hug.
Again her heart warmed to him. He was so well intentioned, so
lovable. The world needed these plain, bread-and-butter men. Their
affection-craving natures, their generous instincts, kept the home
fires burning.
Abe fulfilled the great essentials of life. He was a good provider, a
good husband, a good father and a genial host. But though he could feed
her sister with the fat of the land, what nourishment could this stolid
bread-giver provide for the heart, the soul, the mind?
Rebecca’s reverie was interrupted by the jangle of the telephone.
“I’ll bet it’s already that man asking if you arrived.” Abe winked at
his wife and twitted his sister-in-law under the chin as he picked up
the receiver.
“Yes, she’s here,” Rebecca heard Abe say. And turning to his wife:
“Minnie, our friend Moe is coming for dinner.”
“Coming right for dinner,” cried Minnie. “Quickly we must fix you up. I
can’t have that man see you looking like a greenhorn just off the ship.”
Rebecca surveyed herself critically in the gilt mirror. The excitement
of the arrival had brought a faint flush to her cheeks. Her hair had
become softer, wavier in the moist California air.
“Why can’t I see your Rockefeller prince as I am?” Rebecca was not
aware that her charm was enhanced by the very simplicity of her attire.
“Is he so high tone that plain me is not good enough for him?”
Her sister cut short her objections and hurried her upstairs, where she
tried on one gown after another. But they were all too big.
Then on a sudden thought she snatched a long, fillet scarf, which she
draped loosely around Rebecca’s neck.
“Why, you look like a picture for a painter.” Even Minnie, accustomed
now to the last word in style, recognized that the little sister had a
charm of personality that needed no store-bought clothes to set it off.
Awaiting them at the foot of the stairs was the smiling Abe. Behind him
with one hand grasping the banisters stood a short stocky young man.
Under his arm he held tightly to his side a heart-shaped box of candy
tied with a flowing red ribbon.
“My, look him over, kid! Ain’t he the swellest feller you ever set
your eyes on? Ain’t you glad you left your ribbon counter for your
California prince?”
Moe’s colour outshone the red ribbon which tied his box of candy. With
a clumsy flourish, he bowed and offered it to the girl. In a panic of
confusion, Rebecca let the box slip from her nervous fingers. And Moe
stooped jerkily to recover it.
And Abe burst into loud laughter.
“On! Solemiel!” Minnie cried, shaking him by the arm. “You’re a grand
brother-in-law.” And led the way to the dining-room.
Never had Rebecca seen such a rich spread of luxuries. Roast squabs,
a silver platter of _gerfulta_ fish, shimmering cut glass containing
chopped chicken livers and spiced jellies. The under-nourished girl saw
for the first time a feast of plenty fit for millionaires.
“What’s this--a holiday?” she asked, recovering her voice.
“Don’t think you’re yet in Delancey Street,” admonished the host. “In
California the fat of the land is for every day.”
As they fell to the food Rebecca understood the over-fed look of those
about her. She wondered if she would have sufficient self-control not
to make a pig of herself with such delicious plenty, making the eyes
glisten, the mouth water, and the heart glad as with song.
Rebecca, watching Moe as he smacked his lips in enjoyment of every
mouthful, understood why he wanted the plain, settled-down kind of
girl. A home, a wife, and fat dimpling babies belonged to him as
flowers and all green-growing things belong to the earth.
“Nu, could you tell on my sister-in-law that she never had meat
except on a holiday the way she eats like a bird?” Abe began anew his
raillery. And it was not until after dinner, when Minnie dragged her
Abe away to a neighbour, that Moe and Rebecca had a chance to talk
together.
“I got something grand to show you,” Moe burst out once the road was
clear. Why waste time and words in the slow love-making of cheap skates
who haven’t the shekels to show? His money could talk. And he led her
out proudly to see his red-lacquered limousine. “Swellest car in the
market, and I got it the minute your sister said you were coming.”
Rebecca was thrilled with this obvious flattery. It was the first time
she had had a man so on his knees to her.
“To-morrow I take you for a ride,” he said with the sure tone that
came into his voice when he concluded a good sale of cloaks and suits.
She nodded happily as they walked back to the parlour. Moe continued
his eager questions. Was she crazy for the movies? Did they have good
vaudeville out there on the East Side? Why did she not come sooner to
California? His eyes travelled over the girl with thick satisfaction.
“How becoming it would be to your diamonds on your neck!” And he rubbed
his palms ecstatically.
It was good to be made love to even though the man was not a poet.
Till now she had only eaten out her heart for a look, a word, from
Felix Weinberg. What a fool she was not to have come to California a
year ago as Minnie had begged her.
“I was so scared I’d be lonesome here, so far away from what I’m used
to,” she said, with a look that told him that a woman’s home is where
love is. “Now I wonder how I’ll ever be able to go back,” she finished
softly.
“Go back! You got to stay!” he commanded masterfully. “And I’ll see
that you shouldn’t be so skinny. You got to eat more.” And suiting his
action to his word, he forced more candy upon the already over-filled
girl.
Then he offered to teach her how to play cards. “Minnie and Abe are
such grand poker players,” he explained.
“My sister Minnie playing cards?”
“Shah! Little queen, you’ll have to learn cards, too. There ain’t
no other pleasure for women here, except cards or the movies or
vaudeville, and the bills don’t change more than once a week.” And he
told her that it was the custom in their group to play every night in a
different house.
A sudden pity gripped him. He longed to brighten the lonely look of
this little greenhorn, put roses into her pale thin cheeks.
“Tell me what is your best pleasure,” he asked with the sweeping manner
of a Rothschild.
“Ach! How I love music!” The glow of an inner sun lit up her face.
“I can’t afford a seat in the opera, but even if I have to stand all
evening and save the pennies from my mouth, music I’ve got to have.”
“Hah--ha!” He laughed in advance of his own humour. “My sweetest music
is the click of the cash register. The ring of the dollars I make is
grander to me than the best songs on the phonograph.”
His face became suddenly alive. For the first time she saw Moe
galvanized into a man of action, a man of power. The light that burned
throughout the ages in the eyes of poets and prophets burned also in
the eyes of the traders of her race.
“When I was a little hungry boy in the gutters of the ghetto, the
only songs I heard were the bargaining cries over pennies. Even when
I worked myself up to a clothing store in Division Street they were
still tearing my flesh in pieces, squeezing out cheaper, another dime,
another nickel from a suit.” But the eloquent story of his rise in the
world till now--here he was king of clothing--fell upon deaf ears.
Rebecca had ceased to listen.
She saw again their kitchen on Sunday night. Felix Weinberg’s pale
face under the sputtering gas jet, her sister leaning eagerly forward,
her hand instinctively reaching towards him across the table, her face
alight with the inner radiance that glowed from him like a burning
sun. She, Rebecca, close to him, at his feet, all a-tremble with the
nearness of him. The children on his knees, clutching at his neck,
peering from behind his shoulder. The eternal cadences of Keats and
Shelley, the surging rhythm of their song playing upon their hearts,
holding them enthralled with a music that they felt all the more deeply
because they did not understand.
Even mother, clattering busily with the pots at the stove, would pause
in her work, drawn by the magic of the enraptured group.
“_Nu_, with a clean apron I’m also a person to listen,” she said as
she tore from her the soiled rag which she wore around the stove and
reached for a clean blue-checked apron that she wore only for holidays.
“Ah, _Mammeniu_!” Felix would respond. “In honour of this shining
beautifulness, I’ll read something special for you,” and he would,
opening his Browning. At the words Rabbi Ben Ezra, _Mammeniu’s_ sigh
was the joy of a child in fairyland.
“Grow old along with me. The best is yet to be,
The last of life for which the first was made.”
Then like a child repeating its well-loved lesson for the hundredth
time, “_Nu_, I didn’t yet live out my years,” she would breathe
happily. “It will only begin my real life when my children work
themselves up in America.”
What matter if they had only potato-soup for supper--only the flavour
of fried onions in a little suet to take the place of meat? What
matter if the only two chairs were patched with boards and the rickety
table had for its support a potato barrel? Wonder and beauty filled the
room. Voices of poets and prophets of all time were singing in their
hearts.
And all that Minnie had given up. For what? For silver platters with
_gefulta_ fish. For roast squabs. For spiced jellies. And the dollar
music from cash registers.
Yes, Minnie, like this blustering Moe, had worked herself up in
America. She had a rich house, a Rolls-Royce car, a lady servant to
wait on her body. But what had happened to her spirit, her soul--the
soul that had once been watered and flowered with the love songs of a
poet?
“You see, in California nobody worries for bread,” broke in the heavy
guttural voice of Moe Mirsky. “People’s only trouble is how to enjoy
themselves.”
Excited, high-pitched voices from the hallway, and Minnie and Abe
entered. “So much your sister is crazy for you that she tore herself
away from the cards to be with you the first night,” said Abe with an
inquisitive, quizzical look at the young couple.
“And I was winning at the first shot, too,” Minnie added.
“My wife is the best poker player in the bunch,” Abe asserted. “Wait,
you’ll see Friday night when they come around.” And turning back to
Moe: “You’ve got to teach her quick the cards so she can join the
company.”
“Cards don’t go in her head at all.” Moe looked with unconcealed
proprietorship at his future wife. “I guess she ain’t yet used to a
little pleasure. Let’s only introduce her to our society, and she’ll
soon learn what it is in good time.”
The next few days were spent in a wild orgy of shopping. Not only was
Rebecca to be made presentable to the higher society in which generous
Abe was anxious she should shine, but Minnie was also preparing herself
for a month’s vacation in Cataline Islands with some of Abe’s new
real estate friends. As Abe’s wife it was a matter of business that
she should be more richly dressed than the wives of his prosperous
competitors.
For the first time in her life Rebecca saw things bought, not because
they were needed, but because they appealed to her sister’s insatiable
eye.
“When will you ever have enough things?” Rebecca remonstrated. “Why are
we going from store to store like a couple of drunkards from bar to
bar? The more you buy, the more drunk you get to buy more.”
“Just only this one dress. That’s the newest thing in style and so
becoming.”
“But you have so much already. Your closet is so stacked full.”
“I saw Mrs. Rosenbaum wear something like it. And Abe wouldn’t want she
should come dressed better than I.”
At last Rebecca was to meet her sister’s society friends. Although
Minnie and Abe despaired of making little Rebecca stylish, they were
satisfied by Friday night that at least she could be introduced without
her Delancey Street background too evident.
The dining-room table covered with green baize was piled high with
pyramids of poker chips. Packs of cards were on the table. A mahogany
cellarette laden with Scotch, cognac, bottles of White Rock and
high-ball glasses stood near by.
Minnie was radiant in a black-and-gold spangled dress. The shine of
Abe’s cheeks outshone the diamond that glistened from his shirt front.
Moe, who had arrived before the rest of the guests, had brought Rebecca
another heart-shaped gift, containing “the most smelly perfume in the
whole drug store.”
Before the guests arrived Moe devoted himself to showing Rebecca the
sequence of the cards, but try as she would she could make no sense out
of it.
“It’s such a waste of time. It’s so foolish, so brainless....”
“Is it foolish, brainless, to win five hundred, a thousand, in one
little night?” cried Moe, the ring of the cash register in his voice.
“It’s not only to win money,” broke in Minnie. “Cards are life to me.
When I play I get so excited I forget about everything. There’s no
past, no future--only the now, the life of the game.”
“Just the same,” put in Abe doggedly. “When you win you’re crazy to
grab in more, and when you lose you’re crazy to stake it all to win
again.”
Dimly Rebecca began to see the lure of gambling. It was as contagious
as small-pox. Minnie had caught the poison from Abe and his friends.
In a world where there was no music, no books, no spiritual stimulus,
where people had nothing but money, what else was there to fill the
eternal emptiness but excitement?
The guests arrived. Mrs. Rosenbaum and her husband, the biggest
department store owner of Los Angeles. Mr. and Mrs. Soikolsky, real
estate owners of half of Hollywood. Mr. Einstein, the Tecla of
California, whose wife and children had just sailed for the Orient.
As Rebecca was introduced to one solid citizen after another, she was
unable to distinguish between them. The repellently prosperous look of
the “all-rightnik” stamped them all. The vulgar boastfulness of the
man who had forced his way up in the world only to look down with smug
superiority upon his own people.
“Always with your thoughts in the air,” chuckled Moe, a stubby hand
tenderly reaching towards her.
The sad eyes of the little greenhorn stirred vague memories in
his heart. Warming things welled up in him to say to her. But Abe
interrupted by calling the guests to their places.
A wave of expectancy swept over the gathering as they elbowed
themselves about the table. Eyes sharp. Measuring glances shot from one
to the other. A business-like air settled upon the group.
Abe poured a generous drink of whisky for each. “_Nu_, my friends, only
get yourself drunk enough so I can have a chance to win once from you.”
A fresh pack of cards was opened. The deal fell to the tight-laced,
high-bosomed Mrs. Rosenbaum, whose fat fingers flashed with diamonds as
she dealt.
“You got to sit here, by me, all evening to bring me luck,” Moe
whispered in Rebecca’s ear, and drew a chair for her alongside of him.
An audible silence pervaded the room. The serious business of the game
began.
Unconsciously Rebecca was caught by the contagion of their excitement.
She even began to hope that Minnie would win, that she would bring luck
to the well-meaning Moe.
“Usual limit five dollars,” Abe declared.
Moe explained that the white chips represented one dollar, the blue
two, the red five, and the yellow ten.
Slowly the air became filled with smoke and the smell of alcohol. The
betting rose higher and higher. Rebecca could stand it no longer and
rushed from the room to the parlour. She looked with sharp distaste at
the gaudy furnishings. Till now she had been taken in by the glamour
of her sister’s wealth. But now the crowded riches of the place choked
her. Who had chosen all this? Her sister or her sister’s husband? Here
and there was a beautiful pillow or finely woven rug, but its beauty
was killed by the loud clash of colour, the harsh glare of cheap gilt.
Cheapness and showiness stuck like varnish over the costly fabrics of
the room. It was a sort of furniture display Rebecca had often seen in
department stores. It smelled cloaks and suits.
The vivid pale face of the poet, with eyes that burned with the fire of
beauty, gazed accusingly at the rich velvet hangings and overstuffed
furniture that had won Minnie away from him.
How different Minnie’s home would have been if she had married the
poet! A small room in a tenement. A bare floor. A bare table. A room
that lacked beautiful things but was filled with beautiful thoughts.
Felix Weinberg’s flaming presence, the books he read, the dreams he
dreamed, the high thoughts that lit up his face would have filled the
poorest room with sunshine.
The shrill voices of the dining-room startled her.
“Ach! What’s the matter?” Rebecca gasped in a panic. “Are they killing
themselves?” and hurried in.
She could hardly distinguish the faces, so thick was the air with smoke
and whisky fumes. The look of wild animals distorted their features.
Mrs. Rosenbaum’s hair had slipped from its net. Her own sister was
flushed, dishevelled. Moe’s face was set in sullen, bitter lines as he
called for more money. A scoffing devil of greed seemed to possess them
all. It was Bedlam let loose.
“No use showing that you come from Division Street, even if you did
lose a couple of hundred,” Minnie shrilled savagely at Moe.
“You’re worse than that push-cart, Kike,” leered the half-drunken Abe.
“What a wife! What a wife! She’d steal the whites out from my eyes.
She’d grab the gold out of my teeth.”
There followed an avalanche of abuse between her sister, her husband
and the sodden Moe. Rebecca had never heard such language used.
“They’re only drunk. They don’t know what they’re saying,” she
apologized for them herself.
Thank God, her mother, her father couldn’t see what cloaks and suits
had made of Minnie. Her own sister a common card-player! Where was that
gentle bud of a girl that Felix had loved? How was that fine spirit
of hers lost in this wild lust for excitement? And these people whom
she called friends, this very Moe whom she had picked out for her to
marry--what were they? All-rightniks--the curse of their people, the
shame of their race, Jews dehumanized, destroyed by their riches.
Glutted stomachs--starved souls, escaped from the prison of poverty to
smother themselves in the fleshpots of plenty.
It was towards noon the next day that Minnie with dull, puffy eyes and
aching head stumbled into Rebecca’s room. The half-filled valise was
on the bed, clothes were piled on chairs, and the trunk open as though
ready for packing.
“What’s this? Are you eloping with Moe?” Minnie was too spent from the
night of excitement to be surprised at anything, but a closer look at
Rebecca’s tear-stained face aroused her from her apathy. “_Yok!_ Can’t
you speak?” she demanded irritably.
“My God! How can you stand it here--this life of the flesh? What have
you here, in this land of plenty, but overeating, oversleeping----”
“Why shouldn’t I over-eat?” Minnie hurled back. “I was starved enough
all my youth. Never knew the taste of meat or milk till I came here. I
slaved long enough in the sweat-shop. The world owes me a little rest.”
Her face grew hard with bitter memories. “I don’t know how I stood it
there, in the dirt of Delancey Street, ten people in three rooms, like
herrings in a barrel, without a bath-tub, without----”
“Marble bath-tubs--bathing yourself morning and night don’t yet keep
your soul alive. How could you have sunk yourself into such drunken
card-playing?”
“If not for cards I’d be dead from loneliness. Are there any people
to talk to here?” She threw out bediamonded hands in a gesture of
helplessness. “I hate Abe like poison when he’s home so much of the
time. Cards and clothes help me run away from myself--help me forget
my terrible emptiness.” Minnie reached out imploringly to her sister.
“Here you see how I’m dying before your eyes, and yet you want to leave
me.”
Rebecca felt herself growing hard and inhuman. Didn’t she love her
sister enough to respond to her cry of loneliness? But the next moment
she knew that though it tore the heart out of her body she could never
stand this bloated ease of the flesh into which Minnie was trying to
beguile her.
“Would you want me to marry Moe and bury myself alive in cloaks and
suits like you? I’d rather starve on dry crusts where life is real,
where there’s still hope for higher things. It would kill me to stay
here another day. Your fine food, your fresh air, your velvet limousine
smothers me.... It’s all a desert of emptiness painted over with money.
Nothing is real. The sky is too blue. The grass is too green. This
beauty is all false paint, hiding dry rot. There’s only one hope for
you. Leave your killing comforts and come with me.”
“And what about the children?” Minnie leaped to her feet in quick
defence. “I want them to have a chance in life. I couldn’t bear to have
them go through the misery and dirt that nearly killed me. You’re not a
mother. You don’t know a mother’s heart.”
“Your mother’s heart--it’s only selfishness! You’re only trying to save
yourself the pain of seeing your children go through the struggle that
made you what you are. No,” she corrected, “that made you what you once
were.”
Rebecca towered over her sister like the living spirit of struggle
revolting against the deadening inertia of ease.
“What is this chance that you are giving your children? To rub sleeves
with millionaire children? Will that feed their hungry young hearts?
Fire their spirits for higher things? Children’s hands reach out for
struggle. Their youth is hungry for hardships, for danger, for the
rough fight with life even more than their bodies are hungry for bread.”
Minnie looked at her little sister. From where came that fire, that
passion? She saw again Felix Weinberg’s flaming eyes. She heard again
his biting truths, the very cadence of his voice.
Minnie buried her throbbing head in the pillows. As surely as Rebecca
sold ribbons over the counter at ten cents a yard, so surely Minnie
knew that she had sold her own soul for the luxuries which Abe’s money
had bought. And now it was out of her power to call this real part of
her back. The virus of luxury had eaten into her body and soul till she
could no longer exist without it.
“If I could only go back with you,” she sobbed impotently, “if I could
only go back.”
* * * * *
Love and hate tore at Rebecca’s heart--love of Minnie and hatred of
the fleshpots that were destroying her sister. The days and nights
of journey home were spent in tortured groping for the light.
Ach--sisters! Flesh of one flesh, blood of one blood, aching to help
one another in the loneliness of life, yet doomed like strangers to
meet only to part again.
If she could only talk out her confusion to someone. Felix Weinberg!
How he could make her clear! And suddenly she knew--knew with burning
certainty that after ten years of worshipping him at a distance she
must come to him face to face. Truth itself was driving her to him.
As she got off the train, her feet instinctively led her to the cellar
café on East Broadway, where far into the morning hours Felix Weinberg
and his high-thinking friends were to be found.
Even before she caught sight of him at a corner table surrounded by his
followers, she felt a vast release. She looked in through the grated
window. How different these--her own people--from the dollar-chasers
she had just left! The dirt, the very squalor of the place was life to
her, as the arrogant cleanliness, the strutting shirt-fronts of cloaks
and suits had deadened her. Here rags talked high thoughts and world
philosophies, like princes at a royal court. Here only what was in your
heart and head counted, not your bank account or the shine of your
diamonds.
Even the torn wall-plaster in this palace of dreams had a magic all its
own. The pictures, the poems, the fragmentary bits of self-expression
that were scribbled everywhere were marks of the vivid life that surged
about--clamouring to be heard.
She never knew how she got inside, but as in a dream she heard herself
talking to _him_--looking straight into Felix’s eyes in a miraculously
natural way as though her whole life was but a leading up to this grand
moment.
The youth who used to light up their little kitchen with his flaming
presence was gone. In his place had come a man grown strong with
suffering. Fine as silk and strong as steel shone every feature. He
was scarred with all the hurts of the world--hurts that lay like whip
lashes on the furrows of his face. She felt nothing would be too small
or too big for him to understand.
“Years ago when I was only that big at your feet,” Rebecca measured the
table height with her hand, “your words were life to me. Now I come
three thousand miles to talk my heart out with you.” And she told him
everything, her doubt of herself, her hard intolerance of the plain
bread-and-butter people, her revolt against her own flesh and blood.
His face lit with quick comprehension. He stopped sipping his glass
of tea and leaned towards her across the table. With every word, with
every gesture she revealed herself as one of his own kind! This girl
of whose existence he had scarcely been aware all these years seemed
suddenly to have grown up under his very eyes, and he had not seen her
till now.
“Don’t you see, little heart,” he responded warmly, “the dollars are
their dreams. They eat the fleshpots with the same passionate intensity
that they once fasted in faith on the Day of Atonement. They’ve been
hungry for so many centuries. Let them eat! Give them only a chance
for a few generations. They’ll find their souls again. The deeper down
under the surface you get, the more you see that the dollar-chasers are
also pursuing a dream, but their dream is different from ours, that is
all.”
“Where did you get to feel and know so much?” she breathed adoringly.
He did not answer. But his eyes dwelt on her in ardent reverie,
marvelling at the gift of the gods that she was. Through unceasing
frustration of the things for which he had striven, he had come to a
point of understanding the materialists no less than the dreamers. He
had learned to forgive even Minnie who had turned from his love for the
security of wealth. But here was the glowing innocence of a girl with
the heart and brain of a woman--a woman in his own poet’s world, one
who had rejected the fleshpots of her own free will. It was as though
after years of parching thirst life had suddenly brought him a draught
of wine, a heady vintage of youth, of living poetry, of love perhaps.
Straining closer to her, he abandoned himself to the exaltation that
swept him and kissed her hand.
“No--no! It was Minnie you always loved,” Rebecca gasped, frightened at
his ardour.
“Minnie I loved as a dreaming youth, a half-fledged poet,” he flashed
back at her. “But you--you----”
She knew now why she had come back home again--back to the naked
struggle for bread--back to the crooked, narrow streets filled
with shouting children, the haggling push-carts and bargaining
housewives--back to the relentless, penny-pinched poverty--but a
poverty rich in romance, in dreams--rich in its very hunger of
unuttered, unsung beauty.
THE SONG TRIUMPHANT
_The Story of Beret Pinsky, Poet of the People, who Sold his Soul for
Wealth_
§ 1
“Where went your week’s wages?” demanded Hanneh Breineh, her bony back
humping like an angry cat’s as she bent over the washtub.
Terrified, Moisheh gazed wildly at the ceiling, then dropped his eyes
to the floor.
“Your whole week’s wages--where went it?” insisted Hanneh.
She turned from the tub and brandished her hands in his face.
“The shoes--Berel’s shoes,” Moisheh stumblingly explained. “I--I had to
buy him shoes for his feet--not new shoes--only second-hand.”
“Shoes yet for such a loafer? I’d drive him out naked--barefoot. Let
him get the chills--the fever--only to get rid from him quick!”
None of the roomers of Hanneh Breineh’s lodging-house could escape her
tyrannous inquisition. Had she not been a second mother to Moisheh,
the pants presser, and to Berel, his younger brother? Did she not cook
their supper for them every night, without any extra charge? In return
for this motherly service she demanded a precise account of their
expenditures of money or time, and of every little personal detail of
their lives.
Red glints shot from Hanneh Breineh’s sunken eyes.
“And for what more did you waste out my rent money?”
“Books--he got to have ’em--more’n eating--more’n life!”
“Got to have books?” she shrieked. “Beggars--_schnorrers_--their rent
not paid--their clothes falling from them in rags--and yet they buy
themselves books!” Viciously slapping the board with the shirt she had
been rubbing, she straightened and faced Moisheh menacingly. “I been
too good to you. I cooked and washed for you, and killed myself away to
help you for nothing. So that’s my thanks!”
The door opened. A lean youth with shining eyes and a dishevelled mass
of black hair rushed in.
“_Ach_, Moisheh! Already back from the shop? My good luck--I’m choking
to tell you!”
The two drab figures huddled in the dim kitchen between the washtub
and the stove gazed speechless at the boy. Even Hanneh Breineh was
galvanized for the moment by the ecstatic, guileless face, the erect,
live figure poised bird-like with desire.
“_Oi_, golden heart!” The boy grasped Moisheh’s arm impetuously. “A
typewriter! It’s worth fifty dollars--maybe more yet--and I can get it
for ten, if I grab it quick for cash!”
Moisheh glanced from the glowering landlady to his ardent brother. His
gentle heart sank as he looked into Berel’s face, with its undoubting
confidence that so reasonable a want would not be denied him.
“Don’t you think--maybe--ain’t there something you could do to earn the
money?”
“What more can I do than I’m already doing? You think only pressing
pants is work?”
“Berel,” said Moisheh, with frank downrightness, “you got your
education. Why don’t you take up a night school? They’re looking for
teachers.”
“Me a teacher? Me in that treadmill of deadness? Why, the dullest hand
in a shop got more chance to use his brains than a teacher in their
schools!”
“Well, then, go to work in a shop--only half-days--the rest of the time
give yourself over to your dreams in the air.”
“Brother, are you gone crazy?” Berel gesticulated wildly. “I should go
into that terrible sweat and grind of the machines? All the fire that
creates in me would die in a day!”
The poet looked at the toil-scarred face of his peasant brother. For
all his crude attempts at sympathy, how could he, with the stink of
steam soaked into his clothes, with his poverty-crushed, sweatshop
mind--how could he understand the anguish of thwarted creation, of
high-hearted hopes that died unvoiced?
“But everybody got to work,” Moisheh went on. “All your poetry is
grand, but it don’t pay nothing.”
“Is my heart cry nothing, then? Nothing to struggle by day and by night
for the right word in this strange English, till I bleed away from the
torture of thoughts that can’t come out?”
Berel stopped, and his eyes seemed transfigured with an inner light.
His voice grew low and tense. Each word came deliberately, with the
precision he used when swayed by poetic feeling.
“_Ach_, if I could only tell you of the visions that come to me! They
flash like burning rockets over the city by night. Lips, eyes, a
smile--they whisper to me a thousand secrets. The feelings that leap in
my heart are like rainbow-coloured playthings. I toss them and wrestle
with them; and yet I must harness them. Only then can they utter the
truth, when they are clear and simple so that a young child could
understand.”
Turning swiftly, the words hissed from the poet’s lips.
“Why do I have to bite the dirt for every little crumb you give me? I,
who give my life, the beat of my heart, the blood of my veins, to bring
beauty into the world--why do I have to beg--beg!”
He buried his face in his hands, utterly overcome.
Moisheh, with an accusing glance at Hanneh Breineh, as if she was in
some measure to blame for this painful outburst, soothed the trembling
Berel as one would a child.
“_Shah!_” He took from his pocket all his money. “Two dollars is all I
yet got left, and on this I must stick out till my wages next Monday.
But here, Berel, take half.”
Shamed by Moisheh’s generosity, and embittered by the inadequacy of the
sum, Berel’s mood of passionate pleading gave way to sullenness.
“Keep it!” he flung over his shoulder, and left the room.
§ 2
Berel’s thoughts surged wildly as he raced through the streets.
“Why am I damned and despised by them all? What is my crime? That I
can’t compromise? That I fight with the last breath to do my work--the
work for which I was born?”
Instinctively his feet led him to the public library, his one sanctuary
of escape from the sordidness of the world. But now there seemed no
peace for him even here.
“Money--money!” kept pounding and hammering in his ears. “Get money or
be blotted out!”
A tap on his shoulder. Berel turned and looked into a genial face,
sleeked and barbered into the latest mould of fashion.
“Jake Shapiro!” cried the poet.
Five years ago these two had met on the ship bound for America. What
dreams they had dreamed together on that voyage--Berel Pinsky, the
poet, and Shapiro, the musician!
“What are you doing for a living? Still writing poetry?” asked Shapiro,
as he glanced appraisingly at the haggard-eyed youth. In one swift
look he took in the shabby garments that covered the thin body, the
pride and the eagerness of the pale, hungry face. “I guess,” added the
musician, “your poetry ain’t a very paying proposition!”
Incensed at the unconscious gibe, Berel turned with a supercilious curl
of his lips.
“What’s a sport like you doing here in the library?”
Shapiro pointed to a big pile of books from the copyright office.
“Chasing song titles,” he said. “I’m a melody writer. I got some
wonderful tunes, and I thought I’d get a suggestion for a theme from
these catalogues.”
“_Oi weh_, if for ideas you have to go to copyright catalogues!”
“Man, you should see the bunch of lyric plumbers I have to work with.
They give me jingles and rhymes, but nothing with a real heart
thrill.” He turned on Berel with sudden interest. “Show us some of your
soul stuff.”
Berel handed several pages to the composer. One after another, Shapiro
read.
“Highbrow--over the heads of the crowd,” was his invariable comment.
Suddenly he stopped.
“By heck, there’s a good idea for a sob song! What a title--‘Aching
Hearts’!” He grasped Berel’s hand with genuine friendliness. “Your
lines have the swing I’ve been looking for. Only a little more zip, a
change here and there, and----”
“Change this?” Berel snatched the verses and put them back in his
pocket. “There’s my heart’s blood in every letter of it!”
“Yes, it’s heart stuff all right,” placated the composer, realizing
a good thing, and impatient as a hound on the scent. “Come along!”
He took Berel by the arm. “I want to read your sob stuff to a little
friend.”
Flattered, but vaguely apprehensive, Berel followed Shapiro to the
delectable locality known as Tin Pan Alley, and into the inner shrine
of one of the many song houses to be found there.
“Maizie!” cried Shapiro to a vaudeville star who had been waiting none
too patiently for his return. “I’ve found an honest-to-God poet!”
He introduced Berel, who blushed like a shy young girl.
“So you’re a poet?” said Maizie.
Her eyes were pools of dancing lights as she laughed, aware of her
effect on the transfixed youth. Berel stared in dazzled wonder at
the sudden apparition of loveliness, of joy, of life. Soft, feminine
perfume enveloped his senses. Like a narcotic, it stole over him. It
was the first time he had ever been touched by the seductive lure of
woman.
Shapiro sat down at a piano, and his hands brought from the tortured
instrument a smashing medley of syncopated tunes.
“This needs lyric stuff with a heartbeat in it,” he flung over his
shoulder; “and you have just the dope.”
His eyes met Maizie’s significantly, and then veered almost
imperceptibly in the direction of Berel.
“Go ahead, kid--vamp him! We’ve got to have him,” was the message they
conveyed to her.
Maizie put her hand prettily on the youth’s arm.
“With an air like that, and the right lines--oh, boy, I’d flood
Broadway with tears!”
Berel stood bewildered under the spell of her showy beauty.
Unconsciously his hand went to his pocket, where lay his precious
verses.
“I--I can’t change my lines for the mob,” he stammered.
But Maizie’s little hand crept down his arm until it, too, reached his
pocket, while her face was raised alluringly to his.
“Let’s see it, Mr. Poet--do, please!”
Suddenly, with a triumphant ripple of laughter, she snatched the pages
and glanced rapidly through the song. Then, with her highly manicured
fingers, she grasped the lapels of Berel’s coat, her eyes dancing with
a coquettish little twinkle.
“It’s wonderful!” she flattered. “Just give me the chance to put it
over, and all the skirts from here to Denver will be singing it!”
Shapiro placed himself in front of Berel and said with businesslike
directness:
“I’ll advance you two hundred bucks on this song, if you’ll put a kick
in it.”
Two hundred dollars! The suddenness of the overwhelming offer left
Berel stunned and speechless.
“Money--_ach_, money! To get a breath of release from want!” he
thought. “Just a few weeks away from Hanneh Breineh’s cursing and
swearing! A chance to be quiet and alone--a place where I can have a
little beauty!”
Shapiro, through narrowed lids, watched the struggle that was going on
in the boy. He called for his secretary.
“Write out a contract,” he ordered. “Words by Berel Pinsky--my melody.”
Then he turned to the poet, who stood nervously biting his lips.
“If this song goes over, it’ll mean a big piece of change for you. You
get a cent and a half on every copy. A hit sometimes goes a million
copies. Figure it out for yourself. I’m not counting the mechanical end
of it--phonograph records--pianola rolls--hurdy-gurdies.”
At the word “hurdy-gurdy” an aching fear shot through the poet’s heart.
His pale face grew paler as he met the smooth smile of the composer.
“Only to get a start,” he told himself, strengthening his resolve to
sell his poem with an equal resolve never to do so again.
“Well?” chuckled Shapiro.
He drew out a thick wallet from his pocket, and began counting out the
fresh, green bills.
“I’ll do it this once,” said Berel, in a scarcely audible voice, as he
pocketed the money.
“Gassed with gold!” exulted Shapiro to Maizie after Berel left. “He’s
ours body and soul--bought and paid for!”
§ 3
Hanneh Breineh’s lodging-house was in a hubbub of excitement. A
limousine had stopped before the dingy tenement, and Berel--a Berel
from another world--stepped into the crowded kitchen.
How he was dressed! His suit was of the latest cut. The very quality
of his necktie told of the last word in grooming. The ebony cane
hanging on his arm raised him in the eyes of the admiring boarders to
undreamed-of heights of wealth.
There was a new look in his eyes--the look of the man who has arrived
and who knows that he has. Gone was the gloom of the insulted and the
injured. Success had blotted out the ethereal, longing gaze of the
hungry ghetto youth. Nevertheless, to a discerning eye, a lurking
discontent, like a ghost at a feast, still cast its shadow on Berel’s
face.
“He’s not happy. He’s only putting on,” thought Moisheh, casting
sidelong glances at his brother.
“You got enough to eat, and it shows on you so quick,” purred Hanneh
Breineh, awed into ingratiating gentleness by Berel’s new prosperity.
With a large-hearted gesture, Berel threw a handful of change into the
air for the children. There was a wild scramble of tangled legs and
arms, and then a rush to the street for the nearest pushcart.
“Oi weh!” Hanneh Breineh touched Berel with reverent gratitude. “Give a
look only how he throws himself around with his money!”
Berel laughed gleefully, a warm glow coming to his heart at this
bubbling appreciation of his generosity.
“Hanneh Breineh,” he said, with an impressive note in his voice, “did
you ever have a twenty-dollar gold piece in your hand?”
An intake of breath was the only answer.
“Here it is.”
Berel took from his pocket a little satin case and handed it to her,
his face beaming with the lavishness of the gift.
Hanneh Breineh gazed at the gold piece, which glistened with
unbelievable solidity before her enraptured eyes. Then she fell on
Berel’s neck.
“You diamond prince!” she gushed. “Always I stood for your part when
they all said you was crazy!”
The lean, hungry-faced boarders drank him in, envious worship in their
eyes.
“Rockefeller--Vanderbilt!”
Exclamations of wonder and awe leaped from lip to lip as they gazed at
this Midas who was once a _schnorrer_ in their midst.
Basking in their adulation like a bright lizard in the sun, Berel, with
feigned indifference, lighted a thick cigar. He began to hum airily one
of his latest successes.
“Ten thousand dollars for my last song!” he announced casually, as he
puffed big rings of smoke to the ceiling.
“Riches rains on you!” Hanneh Breineh threw up her hands in an abandon
of amazement. “Sing to me only that millionaires’ song!”
Lifting her ragged skirts, she began to step in time to the tune that
Berel hummed.
Out of all the acclaimers Moisheh remained the only unresponsive figure
in the room.
“Why your long face?” Hanneh Breineh shrieked. “What thunder fell on
you?”
Moisheh shifted uncomfortably.
“I don’t know what is with me the matter. I don’t get no feelings from
the words. It’s only boom--boom--nothing!”
“Is ten thousand dollars nothing?” demanded the outraged Hanneh
Breineh. “Are a million people crazy? All America sings his songs, and
you turn up your nose on them. What do you know from life? You sweat
from morning till night pressing out your heart’s blood on your ironing
board, and what do you get from it? A crooked back--a dried out herring
face!”
“‘The prosperity of fools slayeth them,’” quoted Moisheh in Hebrew.
Berel turned swiftly on his brother.
“It’s the poets who are slain and the fools who are exalted. Before I
used to spend three months polishing one little cry from the heart.
Sometimes I sold it for five dollars, but most of the time I didn’t.
Now I shoot out a song in a day, and it nets me a fortune!”
“But I would better give you the blood from under my nails than you
should sell yourself for dollars,” replied Moisheh.
“Would you want me to come back to this hell of dirt and beg from you
again for every galling bite of bread?” cried Berel, flaring into
rage. “Your gall should burst, you dirt-eating muzhik!” he shouted with
unreasoning fury, and fled headlong from the room.
This unaccountable anger from the new millionaire left all but Hanneh
Breineh in a stupor of bewilderment.
“Muzhik! Are we all muzhiks, then?” she cried. A biting doubt of the
generosity of her diamond prince rushed through her. “Twenty dollars
only from so many thousands? What if he did dress out his stingy
present in a satin box?”
She passed the gold piece around disdainfully.
“After all, I can’t live on the shine from it. What’ll it buy me--only
twenty dollars? I done enough for him when he was a starving beggar
that he shouldn’t be such a piker to me!”
§ 4
A night of carousing had just ended. Berel Pinsky looked about his
studio. Wineglasses were strewn about. Hairpins and cigarette ashes
littered the floor. A woman’s rainbow-coloured scarf, reeking with
tobacco smoke and perfume, lay wantonly across the piano keys.
He strode to the window and raised the shade, but quickly pulled it
down again. The sunlight hurt him. The innocent freshness of the
morning blew accusingly against his hot brow.
He threw himself on the couch, but he could not rest. Like a distorted
mirror, his mind reflected the happenings of the night before.
A table decked with flowers and glittering with silver and glass swam
in vinous streaks of purple and amber. Berel saw white shoulders and
sinuous arms--women’s soft flesh against the black background of men’s
dress coats.
One mocking moment rose out of the reeling picture. A bright head
pressed against his breast. His arms encircled a slender silken body.
Pinnacled high above the devouring faces of his guests, hectic verses
sputtered from his lips with automatic fluency.
It was this scene, spurting out of his blurred vision, that stabbed him
like a hidden enemy within his soul. He had prostituted the divine in
him for the swinish applause of the mob!
“God help me! God help me!” His body swayed back and forth in dumb,
driven helplessness. “My sin!” he moaned, and sank to his knees.
Unconsciously he recalled the ritual chant of the Hebrews on the Day
of Atonement--a chant he had not heard since he was a little child in
Russia.
“‘My sin--the sin I committed wilfully and the sin without will.
Behold, I am like a vessel filled with shame and confusion!’”
As he repeated the chant, beating his breast, his heart began to swell
and heave with the old racial hunger for purging, for cleanness.
“My sin!” he cried. “I took my virgin gift of song and dragged it
through the mud of Broadway!”
His turbulent penance burst into sobs--broke through the parched waste
within him. From afar off a phrase fragrant as dew, but vague and
formless, trembled before him. With a surge of joy, he seized pencil
and paper. Only to catch and voice the first gush of his returning
spirit!
“Wake up, you nut!”
Shapiro had come in unobserved, and stood before him like a grinning
Mephistopheles. Berel looked up, startled. The air boiled before him.
“See here--we got the chance of our life!” Shapiro, in his enthusiasm,
did not notice Berel’s grim mood. He shook the poet by the shoulder.
“Ten thousand bucks, and not a worry in your bean! Just sign your name
to this.”
With a shudder of shame, Berel glanced at the manuscript and flung it
from him.
“Sign my name to this trash?”
“Huh! You’re mighty squeamish all of a sudden!”
“I can’t choke no more my conscience.”
“Conscience, rot! If we can’t get the dope from you, I tell you, we got
to get it from somebody else till you get back on the job!”
A cloud seemed to thicken Berel’s glance.
“Here,” he said, taking from his desk his last typewritten songs, “I’ve
done my level best to grind this out.”
Shapiro grasped the sheets with quickening interest. He read, and then
shook his head with grieved finality.
“It’s no use. It’s not in you any more. You’ve lost the punch.”
“You mean to tell me that my verses wouldn’t go?”
Berel’s eyes shone like hot coals out of his blanched face.
“Look here, old pal,” replied Shapiro, with patronizing pity. “You’ve
just gone dry.”
“You ghoul!” Berel lifted his fist threateningly. “It’s you who worked
me dry--made of my name nothing but a trade-mark!”
“So that’s what I get for all I done for you!” Revulsion at the boy’s
ingratitude swept through Shapiro like a fury. “What do you think I am?
Business is business. If you ain’t got the dope no more, why, you ain’t
better than the bunch of plumbers that I chucked!”
With a guttural cry, Berel hurled himself forward like a tiger.
“You bloodsucker, you!”
A shriek from Maizie standing in the doorway. A whirling figure in
chiffon and furs thrust itself between them, the impact pushing Shapiro
back.
“Baby darling, you’re killing me!” Soft arms clung about Berel’s neck.
“You don’t want to hurt nobody--you know you don’t--and you make me
cry!”
Savagely Berel thrust the girl’s head back and looked into her eyes.
His face flashed with the shame of the betrayed manhood in him.
“I was a poet before you smothered my fire with your jazz!”
For an instant Maizie’s features froze, terrified by an anger that she
could not comprehend. Then she threw herself on his shoulder again.
“But it’s in rehearsal--booked to the coast. It’s all up with me unless
you sign!”
He felt her sobs pounding away his anger. A hated tenderness slowly
displaced his fury. Unwillingly, his arms clasped her closer.
“This once, but never again,” he breathed in her ear as he crushed her
to him.
Gently Maizie extricated herself, with a smile shining through her
tear-daubed face.
“You darling old pet! I’ll be grateful till I die,” she said, thrusting
the pen into Berel’s hand.
With tragic acceptance of his weakness, Berel scrawled his well-known
signature on one sheet after another. With a beaten look of hatred he
handed them to Shapiro, now pacified and smiling.
* * * * *
Long after they had gone, Berel still sat in the same chair. He made no
move. He uttered no sound. With doubled fists thrust between his knees,
he sat there, his head sunk on his breast.
In the depths of his anguish a sudden light flashed. He picked up the
rejected songs and read them with regained understanding. All the cheap
triteness, the jazz vulgarity of the lines, leaped at him and hit him
in the face.
“Pfui!” he laughed with bitter loathing, as he flung the tawdry verses
from him.
Like a prisoner unbound, he sprang to his feet. He would shake himself
free from the shackles of his riches! All this clutter of things about
him--this huge, stuffy house with its useless rooms--the servants--his
limousine--each added luxury was only another bar shutting him out from
the light.
For an instant he pondered how to get rid of his stifling wealth.
Should he leave it to Moisheh or Hanneh Breineh? No--they should not be
choked under this mantle of treasure that had nearly choked the life in
him.
A flash of inspiration--Maizie! God help her, poor life-loving Maizie!
He would give it to her outright--everything, down to the last kitchen
pot--only to be a free man again!
As quick as thought Berel scribbled a note to his lawyer, directing him
to carry out this reckless whim. Then he went to the closet where, out
of some strange, whimsical sentiment, he still kept his shabby old coat
and hat. In a moment he was the old Berel again. Still in his frenzy,
he strode towards the door.
“Back--back to Hanneh Breineh--to Moisheh--back to my own people!
Free--free!”
He waved his hands exultantly. The walls resounded with his triumphant
laughter. Grasping his shabby old cap in his hand, he raised it high
over his head and slammed the gold-panelled door behind him with a
thundering crash.
§ 5
“Last lot cheap! Apples sweet like honey!”
“Fish, live, fresh fish!”
“Shoe laces, matches, pins!”
The raucous orchestra of voices rose and fell in whining, blatant
discord. Into the myriad sounds the rumbling Elevated bored its roaring
thunder. Dirty, multi-coloured rags--the pinions of poverty--fluttered
from the crowded windows. Streams of human atoms surged up and down the
side-walk littered with filth. Horses and humans pounded and scuttled
through the middle of the street.
Berel’s face shone exultant out of the crowd. In the quickening warmth
of this old, familiar poverty his being expanded and breathed in huge
drafts of air. The jostling mass of humanity that pressed about him
was like the close embrace of countless friends.
_Ach_, here in this elemental struggle for existence was the reality he
was seeking! It cried to him out of the dirty, driven faces. Here was
the life that has never yet been fully lived. Here were the songs that
have not yet been adequately sung.
“A black year on you, robber, swindler! If I go to buy rotten apples,
should you charge me for fruit from heaven?”
The familiar voice shot like a bolt to his awakening heart. He looked
up to see Hanneh Breineh’s ragged figure wedged in between two
pushcarts, her face ecstatic with the zest of bargaining.
“Hanneh Breineh!” he cried, seizing her market basket, and almost
throwing himself on her neck in a rush of exuberant affection. “I’ve
come back to you and Moisheh!”
“God from the world! What’s this--you in rags?” A quick look of
suspicion crept into her face. “Did you lose your money? Did you maybe
play cards?”
“I left it all to her--you know--every cent of the ill-gotten money.”
“Left your money to that doll’s face?”
Hanneh clutched her head and peered at him out of her red-lidded eyes.
“Where’s Moisheh?” Berel asked.
He came closer to her, his whole face expressing the most childlike
faith in her acceptance of his helplessness, in the assurance of her
welcome.
“Don’t you yet know the pants pressers was on a strike, and he owed me
the rent for so long he went away from shame?”
“But where is he--my brother?” cried Berel in despair.
“The devil knows, not me. I only know he owes me the rent!”
“Moisheh gone?” He felt the earth slipping from under him. He seized
Hanneh Breineh’s hand imploringly. “You can squeeze me in with the
other boarders--put me up on chairs--over the washtub--anywhere. I got
no one but you!”
“No one but me?” Thrusting him down to his knees, she towered above
him like some serpent-headed fury. “What did you ever done for me when
you had it good that I should take pity on you now? Why was you such a
stingy to me when you were rolling yourself in riches?”
Her voice came in thick gusts of passion, as the smouldering feeling
of past neglect burst from her in volcanic wrath. “You black-hearted
_schnorrer_, you!”
A crowd of neighbours and passers-by, who had gathered at her first
cursing screams, now surged closer. With her passion for harangue,
she was lifted to sublime heights of vituperative eloquence by her
sensation-hungry audience.
“People! Give a look only! This soft idiot throws away all his money
on a doll’s face, and then wants me to take the bread from the mouths
of my own children to feed him!” She shook her fist in Berel’s face.
“Loafer--liar! I was always telling you your bad end!”
A hoarse voice rose from the crowd.
“Pfui! the rotten rich one!”
“He used to blow from himself like a Vanderbilt!”
“Came riding around in automobiles!”
All the pent-up envy that they never dared express while he was in
power suddenly found voice.
“He’s crazy--_meshugeh_!”
The mob took up the abuse and began to press closer. A thick piece of
mud from an unknown hand flattened itself on the ashen cheek of the
shaken poet. Instantly the lust for persecution swept the crowd. Mud
rained on the crouching figure in their midst. Hoarse invectives,
shrieks, infamous laughter rose from the mob, now losing all control.
With the look of a hunted beast, Berel drove his way through the
merciless crowd. His clothing swirled in streaming rags behind him as
he fled on, driven by the one instinct to escape alive.
When he had outdistanced those who pursued, he dropped in a dark
hallway of an alley. Utter exhaustion drained him of all thought, all
feeling.
Dawn came. Still Berel slept. From the near-by street the clattering of
a morning milk wagon roused him slightly. He stirred painfully, then
sank back into a dream which grew as vivid as life.
He saw himself a tiny, black ant in an ant-hill. While plodding
toilfully with the teeming hive, he suddenly ventured on a path of his
own. Then a huge, destroying force overwhelmed and crushed him, to the
applause of the other ants, slaves of their traditional routine.
The pounding of a hammer rang above his head. He opened his eyes. A
man was nailing a sign to the doorway into which he had sunk the night
before. Berel rubbed his heavy-lidded eyes and, blinking, read the
words:
MACHINE HANDS WANTED
“Food! _Oi weh_, a bite to eat! A job should I take?”
The disjointed thoughts of his tired brain urged him to move. He tried
to rise, but he ached in every limb. The pain in his stiff body brought
back to him the terror through which he had lived the day before. More
than starvation, he feared the abyss of madness that yawned before him.
“Machine hand--anything,” he told himself. “Only to be sane--only to be
like the rest--only to have peace!”
This new humility gave him strength. He mounted the stairs of the
factory and took his place in the waiting line of applicants for work.
§ 6
For weeks Berel Pinsky worked, dull and inanimate as the machines he
had learned to drive. Work, eat, sleep--eat, sleep, work. Day after day
he went to and from his hall bedroom, day after day to and from the
shop.
He had ceased to struggle. He had ceased to be an individual, a soul
apart. He was a piece of a mass, a cog of a machine, an ant of an ant
hill. Individually he was nothing--they were nothing. Together they
made up the shop.
So he went on. Inert, dumb as a beast in a yoke, he brushed against
his neighbours. He never talked. As if in a dream, he heard the shrill
babble of the other shop hands rise above the roaring noises of the
machines.
One day, while eating his scanty lunch, lost in a dull, wandering
daydream, he felt a movement at his elbow. Looking up, he saw Sosheh,
the finisher, furtively reaching for a crust that had dropped from his
thick slice of bread.
“You don’t want it yet?” she questioned, her face colouring with
confusion.
“No,” he answered, surprised out of his silence. “But didn’t you have
any lunch?”
“I’m saving myself from my lunches to buy me a red feather on my new
spring hat.”
He looked at Sosheh curiously, and noticed for the first time the
pinched look of the pale young face.
“Red over that olive paleness!” he mused. “How bright and singing that
colour would be!”
Moved by an impulse of friendliness, he pushed an apple towards her.
“Take it,” he said. “I had one for my lunch already.”
He watched her with smiling interest as she bit hungrily into the juicy
fruit.
“Will your feather be as red as this apple?” he asked.
“_Ach!_” she said, with her mouth full. “If you could only give a look
how that feather is to me becoming! The redness waves over my black
hair like waves from red wine!”
“Why, that girl is a poet!” he thought, thrilled by the way her mind
leaped in her dumb yearning for beauty.
The next noon she appeared with a paper bag in her hand. Reverently she
drew forth a bright red cock’s feather.
“Nu, ain’t it grand? For two weeks my lunch money it is.”
“How they want to shine, the driven things, even in the shop!” he
mused. “Starving for a bit of bright colour--denying themselves food
for the shimmering touch of a little beauty!”
One morning, when he had risen to go to work in the grey dawn, he
found his landlady bending over an ironing board in the dim gaslight,
pressing a child’s white dress. She put down the iron to give Berel his
breakfast.
“My little Gittel is going to speak a piece to-day.” Her face glowed as
she showed him the frock. “Give a look only on those flowers I stitched
out myself on the sash. Don’t they smell almost the fields to you?”
He gazed in wonder at the mother’s face beaming down at him. How could
Tzipeh Yenteh still sense the perfume of the fields in this dead grind
of work? How could his care-crushed landlady, with seven hungry mouths
to feed--how could she still reach out for the beautiful? His path to
work was lit up by Tzipeh Yenteh’s face as she showed him her Gittel’s
dress in all its freshness.
Little by little he found himself becoming interested in the people
about him. Each had his own hidden craving. Each one longed for
something beautiful that was his and no one else’s.
Beauty--beauty! _Ach_, the lure of it, the tender hope of it! How it
filled every heart with its quickening breath! It made no difference
what form it took--whether it was the craving for a bright feather, a
passion for an ideal, or the love of man for woman. Behind it all was
the same flaming hope, the same deathless outreaching for the higher
life!
God, what a song to sing! The imperishable glamour of beauty, painting
the darkest sweatshop in rainbow colours of heaven, splashing the gloom
of the human ant-hill with the golden pigments of sunrise and sunset!
Lifted to winged heights by the onrush of this new vision, Berel swept
home with the other toilers pouring from shops and factories.
How thankful he was for the joy of his bleak little room! He shut the
door, secure in his solitude. Voices began to speak to him. Faces began
to shine for him--the dumb, the oppressed, the toil-driven multitudes
who lived and breathed unconscious of the cryings-out in them. All the
thwarted longings of their lives, all the baffled feelings of their
hearts, all the aching dumbness of their lips, rose to his sympathetic
lips, singing the song of the imperishable soul in them.
Berel thought how Beethoven lay prone on the ground, his deaf ears
hearing the beat of insects’ wings, the rustle of grass, the bloom of
buds, all the myriad voices of the pregnant earth. For the first time
since the loss of his gift in the jazz pit of Tin Pan Alley, the young
poet heard the rhythm of divine creation.
He drew a sheet of white paper before his eyes. From his trembling
fingers flowed a poem that wrote its own music--every line a song--the
whole a symphony of his regeneration.
“To think that I once despised them--my own people!” he mused. “_Ach_,
I was too dense with young pride to see them then!”
His thoughts digging down into the soil of his awakened spirit, he
cried aloud:
“Beauty is everywhere, but I can sing it only of my own people. Some
one will find it even in Tin Pan Alley--among Maizie’s life-loving
crowd; but I, in this life, must be the poet of the factories--of my
own East Side!”
§ 7
“It’s me--Hanneh Breineh!”
A loud thumping at the door and a shrill chatter of voices broke in
upon Berel’s meditations.
“Me--Moisheh!”
“Come in!” he cried, welcoming this human inbreak after his long vigil.
“Here we got him!” Berel was smothered in Hanneh Breineh’s gushing
embrace. “Where did you run away that time, you crazy? Don’t you yet
know my bitter heart? I never mean nothing when I curse.”
“For months it dried out our eyes from our heads looking for you,”
gulped Moisheh, tearing him from Hanneh’s greedy arms.
Berel fell on his brother’s neck, weeping out the whole rush and tide
of his new-born humility.
“Mine own brother, with the old shine from his eyes!”
Moisheh held Berel off, then crushed him in another long hug. Hanneh
Breineh, with ostentatious importance, held up her capacious market
basket and drew forth a greasy bundle.
“Let’s make from it a holiday, for good luck. It’s only a bargain, this
apple strudel,” she said apologetically, breaking it in pieces and
giving one to each.
Berel’s tears rang out in laughter.
“My own hearts--my own people!”
“_Mazeltuf!_ Good luck!” chanted Hanneh Breineh, sipping hungrily the
last drops of luscious juice that oozed from the apple strudel.
Raising his piece on high, Moisheh chimed in:
“Good luck and the new life!”
THE LORD GIVETH
One glance at his wife’s tight-drawn mouth warned Reb Ravinsky of the
torrent of wrath about to burst over his head.
“Nu, my bread-giver? Did you bring me the rent?” she hurled at him
between clenched teeth.
Reb Ravinsky had promised to borrow money that morning to ward off
their impending eviction for unpaid rent, but no sooner had he
stepped out of his house than all thought of it fled from his mind.
Instinctively, he turned to the synagogue where he had remained all
day absorbed in the sacred script. It was easier to pray and soar the
heights with the prophets of his race than to wrestle with sordid,
earthly cares.
“Holy Jew! Why didn’t you stay away a little longer?” She tore at her
wig in her fury. “Are you a man like other men? Does your wife or your
child lay in your head at all? I got to worry for rent. I got to worry
for bread. If you got to eat you eat. If you ain’t got to eat you ain’t
hungry. You fill yourself only with high thoughts. You hold yourself
only with God. Your wife and your child can be thrown in the street to
shame and to laughter. But what do you care? You live only for the next
world. You got heaven in your head. The rest of your family can rot in
the streets.”
Reb Ravinsky stood mute and helpless under the lash of her tongue. But
when she had exhausted her store of abuse, he cast upon her a look of
scorn and condemnation.
“_Ishah Rah!_ Evil woman!” he turned upon her like an ancient prophet
denouncing ungodliness.
“_Ishah Rah!_” he repeated. His voice of icy passion sent shivers up
and down her spine.
“_Ishah Rah!_” came for the third time with the mystic solemnity that
subdued her instantly into worshipful subjection. “Tear away your man
from God! Tear him away from the holy Torah! Lose the one precious
thing in life, the one thing that makes a Jew stand out over all other
nations of the world, the one thing that the Tsar’s _pogroms_ and all
the sufferings and murders of the Jews could not kill in the Jew--the
hope for the next world!”
Like a towering spirit of righteousness afire with the Word of God he
loomed over her.
“I ask you by your conscience, should I give up the real life, the true
life, for good eating, good sleeping, for a life in the body like the
_Amoratzim_ here in America? Should I make from the Torah a pick with
which to dig for you the rent?”
Adjusting his velvet skull-cap, the last relic of his rabbinical days,
he caught the woman’s adoring look. Memories of his past splendour in
Russia surged over him. He saw his people coming to him from far and
near to learn wisdom from his lips. Drawing himself to his full height,
he strode across the room and faced her.
“Why didn’t you marry yourself to a tailor, a shoemaker, a thick-head,
a money-maker--to a man of the flesh--a rabbi who can sell his religion
over the counter as a butcher sells meat?”
Mrs. Ravinsky gazed with fear and contrition at her husband’s
God-kindled face. She loved him because he was _not_ a man of this
world. Her darkest moments were lit up with pride in him, with the hope
that in the next world the reflected glory of his piety might exalt her.
It wrung her heart to realize that against her will she was dragging
him down with her ceaseless demands for bread and rent. Ach! Why was
there such an evil thing as money in this world? Why did she have to
torture her husband with earthly needs when all she longed for was to
help him win a higher place in heaven?
Tears fell from her faded eyes. He could have wept with her--it hurt
him so to make her suffer. But once and for all he must put a stop to
her nagging. He must cast out the evil spirit of worry that possessed
her lest it turn and rend him.
“Why are you killing yourself so for this life? _Ut!_ See, death is
already standing over you. One foot is already in the grave. Do you
know what you’ll get for making nothing from the Torah? The fires of
hell are waiting for you! Wait--wait! I warn you!”
And as though to ward off the evil that threatened his house, he rushed
to his shrine of sacred books and pulled from its niche a volume of his
beloved Talmud. With reverence he caressed its worn and yellowed pages
as he drank in hungrily the inspired words. For a few blessed moments
he took refuge from all earthly storms.
* * * * *
In Schnipishock, Reb Ravinsky had been a _porush_, a pensioned scholar.
The Jews of the village so deeply appreciated his learning and piety
that they granted him an allowance, so as to free the man of God from
all earthly cares.
Arrived in the new world, he soon learned that there was no honoured
pension forthcoming to free him from the world of the flesh. For a time
he eked out a bare living by teaching Hebrew to private scholars. But
the opening of the Free Hebrew Schools resulted in the loss of most of
his pupils.
He had been chosen by God to spread the light of the Torah--and
a living must come to him, somehow, somewhere, if he only served
faithfully.
In the meantime, how glorious it was to suffer hunger and want, even
shame and derision, yet rise through it all as Job had risen and
proclaim to the world: “I know that my Redeemer liveth!”
Reb Ravinsky was roused from his ecstasy by his wife’s loud sobbing.
Thrust out from the haven of his Torah, he closed the book and began to
pace the floor.
“Can fire and water go together? Neither can godliness and an easy
life. If you have eyes of flesh and are blind, should I fall into your
blindness? You care only for what you can put in your mouth or wear on
your back; I struggle for the life that is together with God!”
“My rent--have you my rent? I warned you!” The landlord pushed through
the half-open door flaunting his final dispossess notice under Reb
Ravinsky’s nose. “I got orders to put you out,” he gloated, as he
motioned to his men to proceed with the eviction.
Reb Ravinsky gripped the back of a chair for support.
“Oi-i-i! Black is me! Bitter is me!” groaned his wife, leaning limply
against the wall.
For weeks she had been living in momentary dread of this catastrophe.
Now, when the burly moving men actually broke into her home, she
surrendered herself to the anguish of utter defeat. She watched
them disconnect the rusty stove and carry it into the street. They
took the bed, the Passover dishes prayerfully wrapped to avoid the
soil of leavened bread. They took the brass samovar and the Sabbath
candlesticks. And she stood mutely by--defenceless--impotent!
“What did I sin?” The cry broke from her. “God! God! Is there a God
over us and sees all this?”
The men and the things they touched were to Reb Ravinsky’s far-seeing
eyes as shadows of the substanceless dream of life in the flesh. With
vision focused on the next world, he saw in dim blurs the drama enacted
in this world.
Smash to the floor went the sacred Sabbath wineglass! Reb Ravinsky
turned sharply, in time to see a man tumble ruthlessly the sacred
Hebrew books to the floor.
A flame of holy wrath leaped from the old man’s eyes. His breath came
in convulsive gasps as he clutched with emaciated fingers at his heart.
The sacrilege of the ruffians! He rushed to pick up the books, kissing
each volume with pious reverence. As he gathered them in his trembling
arms, he looked about confusedly for a safe hiding-place. In his
anxiety for the safety of his holy treasure, he forgot the existence
of his wife and ran with his books to the synagogue as one runs from
a house on fire. So overwrought was he that he nearly fell over his
little daughter running up the stairs.
“Murderer!” screamed Mrs. Ravinsky, after him. “Run, run to the
synagogue! Holy Jew! See where your religion has brought us. Run--ask
God to pay your rent!”
She turned to her little Rachel who burst into the room terrified.
“See, my heart! See what they’ve done to us! And your father ran to
hide himself in the synagogue. You got no father--nobody to give you
bread. A lost orphan you are.”
“Will the charity lady have to bring us eating again?” asked Rachel,
her eyes dilated with dread. “Wait only till I get old enough to go
to the shop and earn money.” And she reached up little helpless arms
protectingly.
The child’s sympathy was as salt on the mother’s wounds.
“For what did we come to America?”
The four walls of her broken home stared back their answer.
Only the bundles of bedding remained, which Rachel guarded with fierce
defiance as though she would save it from the wreckage.
Pushing the child roughly aside, the man slung it over his shoulder.
Mrs. Ravinsky, with Rachel holding on to her skirts, felt her way after
him down the dark stairway.
“My life! My blood! My feather bed!” she cried, as he tossed the
family heirloom into the gutter. “Gevalt!” prostrate, she fell on it.
“How many winters it took my mother to pick together the feathers! My
mother’s wedding present....”
From the stoops, the alleys and the doorways the neighbours gathered.
Hanneh Breineh, followed by her clinging brood, pushed through the
throng, her red-lidded eyes big with compassion. “Come the while in by
me.”
She helped the grief-stricken woman to her feet. “We’re packed like
herrings in a barrel, but there’s always room for a push-in of a few
more.”
Lifting the feather bed under her arm she led the way to her house.
“In a few more years your Rachel will be old enough to get her working
papers and all your worries for bread will be over,” she encouraged, as
she opened the door of her stuffy little rooms.
The commotion on the street corner broke in upon the babble of
gossiping women in the butcher shop. Mr. Sopkin paused in cutting the
meat.
“Who did they make to move?” he asked, joining the gesticulating mob at
the doorway.
“_Oi weh!_ Reb Ravinsky?”
“God from the sky! Such a good Jew! Such a light for the world!”
“Home, in Russia, they kissed the ground on which he walked, and in
America they throw him in the street!”
“Who cares in America for religion? In America everybody has his head
in his belly.”
“Poor little Rachel! Such a smart child! Writes letters for everybody
on the block.”
“Such a lazy do-nothing! All day in the synagogue!” flung the
pawnbroker’s wife, a big-bosomed woman, her thick fingers covered with
diamonds. “Why don’t he go to work in a shop?”
A neighbour turned upon her. “Hear! Hear her only! Such a pig-eater!
Such a fat-head! She dares take Reb Ravinsky’s name in her mouth.”
“Who was she from home? A water-carrier’s wife, a cook! And in America
she makes herself for a person--shines up the street with her diamonds.”
“Then leave somebody let know the charities.” With a gesture of
self-defence, the pawnbroker’s wife fingered her gold beads. “I’m a
lady-member from the charities.”
“The charities? A black year on them!” came a chorus of angry voices.
“All my enemies should have to go to the charities for help.”
“Woe to anyone who falls into the charities’ hands!”
“One poor man with a heart can help more than the charities with all
their money.”
Mr. Sopkin hammered on his chopping-block, his face purple with
excitement. “_Weiber!_ with talk alone you can’t fill up the pot.”
“_Takeh! Takeh!_” Eager faces strained forward. “Let’s put ourselves
together for a collection.”
“I’m not yet making Rockefeller’s millions from the butcher business,
but still, here’s my beginning for good luck.” And Mr. Sopkin tossed a
dollar bill into the basket on the counter.
A woman, a ragged shawl over her head, clutched a quarter in her gaunt
hand. “God is my witness! To tear out this from my pocket is like
tearing off my right hand. I need every cent to keep the breath in the
bodies of my _kinder_, but how can we let such a holy Jew fall in the
street?”
“My enemies should have to slave with such bitter sweat for every penny
as me.” Hannah Hayyeh flung out her arms still wet with soapsuds and
kissed the ten-cent piece she dropped into the collection.
Mr. Sopkin walked to the sidewalk and shook the basket in front of the
passers-by. “Take your hand out from your pocket! Take your bite away
from your mouth! Who will help the poor if not the poor?”
A shower of coins came pouring in. It seemed not money--but the flesh
and blood of the people--each coin a part of a living heart.
The pawnbroker’s wife, shamed by the surging generosity of the crowd,
grudgingly peeled a dollar from the roll of bills in her stocking and
started to put it into the collection.
A dozen hands lifted in protest.
“No--no! Your money and our money can’t mix together!”
“Our money is us--our bodies! Yours is the profits from the pawnshop!
Hold your _trefah_ dollar for the charities!”
* * * * *
Only when the Shammes, the caretaker of the synagogue, rattling his
keys, shook Reb Ravinsky gently and reminded him that it was past
closing time did he remember that somewhere waiting for him--perhaps
still in the street--were his wife and child.
The happening of the day had only deepened the intensity with which he
clung to God and His Torah. His lips still moved in habitual prayer as
with the guidance of neighbours he sought the new flat which had been
rented for a month with the collection money.
Bread, butter, milk and eggs greeted his gaze as he opened the door.
“_Nu_, my wife? Is there a God over us?” His face kindled with
guileless faith. “The God that feeds the little fishes in the sea and
the birds in the air, has He not fed us? You see, the Highest One
takes care of our earthly needs. Our only business here is to pray for
holiness to see His light!”
A cloud of gloom stared up at him out of his wife’s darkening eyes.
“Why are you still so black with worry?” he admonished. “If you would
only trust yourself on God, all good would come to us yet.”
“On my enemies should fall the good that has come to us,” groaned Mrs.
Ravinsky. “Better already death than to be helped again by the pity
from kind people.”
“What difference how the help comes, so long we can keep up our souls
to praise God for His mercy on us?”
Despair was in the look she fixed upon her husband’s lofty brow--a brow
untouched by time or care, smooth, calm and seamless as a child’s.
“No wonder people think that I’m your mother. The years make you
younger. You got no blood in your body--no feelings in your heart. I
got to close my eyes with shame to pass in the street the people what
helped me, while you--you--shame cannot shame you--poverty cannot crush
you----”
“Poverty? It stands in the Talmud that poverty is an ornament on a Jew
like a red ribbon on a white horse. Those whom God chooses for His next
world can’t have it good here.”
“Stop feeding me with the next world!” she flung at him in her
exasperation. “Give me something on this world.”
“Wait only till our American daughter will grow up. That child has my
head on her,” he boasted with a father’s pride. “Wait only, you’ll see
the world will ring from her yet. With the Hebrew learning I gave her,
she’ll shine out from all other American children.”
“But how will she be able to lift up her head with other people alike
if you depend yourself on the charities?”
“Woman! Worry yourself not for our Rachel! It stands in the Holy Book,
the world is a wheel, always turning. Those who are rich get poor; if
not they, then their children or children’s children. And those who
are poor like us, go up higher and higher. Our daughter will yet be so
rich, she’ll give away money to the charities that helped us. Isaiah
said----”
“Enough--enough!” broke in Mrs. Ravinsky, thrilled in spite of herself
by the prophecies of her holy man. “I know already all your smartness.
Go, go, sit yourself down and eat something. You fasted all day.”
* * * * *
Mrs. Ravinsky hoarded for her husband and child the groceries the
neighbours had donated. For herself she allowed only the left-overs,
the crumbs and crusts.
The following noon, after finishing her meagre meal, she still felt the
habitual gnawing of her under-nourished body, so she took a sour pickle
and cut off another slice of bread from the dwindling loaf. But this
morsel only sharpened her craving for more food.
The lingering savour of the butter and eggs which she had saved for her
family tantalized her starved nerves. Faint and weak from the struggle
to repress her hunger, she grew reckless and for once in her life
abandoned herself to the gluttonous indulgence of the best in her scant
larder.
With shaking hand she stealthily opened the cupboard, pilfered a
knife-load of butter and spread it thickly on a second slice of bread.
Cramming the whole into her mouth, she snatched two eggs and broke them
into the frying-pan. The smell of the sizzling eggs filled the air with
the sweet fragrance of the Sabbath. “Ach! How the sun would shine in my
heart if I could only allow myself the bite in my mouth!”
Memories of _gefüllte_ fish and the odour of freshly-baked apple
strudel dilated her nostrils. She saw herself back in Russia setting
the Sabbath table when she was the honoured wife of Reb Ravinsky.
The sudden holiday feeling that thrilled her senses smote her
conscience. “Oi weh! Sinner that I am! Why should it will itself in me
to eat like a person when my man don’t earn enough for dry bread? What
will we do when this is used up? Suppose the charities should catch me
feasting myself with such a full hand?”
Bent ravenously over the eggs--one eye on the door--she lifted the
first spoonful to her watering mouth as Rachel flew in, eyes wide with
excitement.
“Mamma! The charity lady is coming! She’s asking the fish-pedlar on
the stoop where we live now.”
“Quick! Hide the frying-pan in the oven! Woe is me! The house not
swept--dishes not washed--everything thrown around! Rachel! Quick
only--sweep together the dirt in a corner. Throw those rags under the
bed! _Oi weh_--quick--hide all those dirty things behind the trunk!”
In her haste to tidy up, she remembered the food in the cupboard. She
stuffed it--broken eggshells and all--into the bureau drawer. “Oi
weh! The charity lady should only not catch us with all these holiday
eatings....”
Footsteps in the hallway and Miss Naughton’s cheery voice: “Here I am,
Mrs. Ravinsky! What can I do to help now?”
With the trained eye of the investigator, she took in the wretched
furniture, scant bedding, the under-nourished mother and child.
“What seems to be wrong?” Miss Naughton drew up a three-legged stool.
“Won’t you tell me, so we can get at the root of the trouble?” She put
her hand on the woman’s apron with a friendly little gesture.
Mrs. Ravinsky bit her lips to force back the choking pressure of tears.
The life, the buoyancy, the very kindness of the “charity lady”
stabbed deeper the barb of her wretchedness.
“Woe is me! On all my enemies my black heart! So many babies and young
people die every day, but no death comes to hide me from my shame.”
“Don’t give way like that,” pleaded Miss Naughton, pained by the
bitterness that she tried in vain to understand. “If you will only tell
me a few things so I may the better know how to help you.”
“Again tear me in pieces with questions?” Mrs. Ravinsky pulled at the
shrunken skin of her neck.
“I don’t like to pry into your personal affairs, but if you only knew
how often we’re imposed upon. Last week we had a case of a woman who
asked us to pay her rent. When I called to investigate, I found her
cooking chicken for dinner!”
The cot on which Mrs. Ravinsky sat creaked under her swaying body.
“You see, we have only a small amount of money,” went on the
unconscious inquisitor, “and it is but fair it should go to the most
deserving cases.”
Entering a few preliminary notes, Miss Naughton looked up inquiringly.
“Where is Mr. Ravinsky?”
“In the synagogue.”
“Has he no work?”
“He can’t do no work. His head is on the next world.”
Miss Naughton frowned. She was accustomed to this kind of excuse.
“People who are not lazy can always find employment.”
Seeing Mrs. Ravinsky’s sudden pallor, she added kindly: “You have not
eaten to-day. Is there no food in the house?”
Mrs. Ravinsky staggered blindly to her feet. “No--nothing--I didn’t yet
eat nothing.”
The brooding grey of Rachel’s eyes darkened with shame as she clutched
protectingly at her mother’s apron. The uncanny, old look of the
solemn little face seemed to brush against Miss Naughton’s very
heartstrings--to reproach the rich vigour of her own glowing youth.
“Have you had any lunch, dear?” The “charity lady’s” hand rested softly
on the tangled mat of hair.
“N-nothing--nothing,” the child echoed her mother’s words.
Miss Naughton rose abruptly. She dared not let her feelings get the
better of her. “I am going to get some groceries.” She sought for an
excuse to get away for a moment from the misery that overwhelmed her.
“I’ll be back soon.”
“Bitter is me!” wailed Mrs. Ravinsky, as the “charity lady” left the
room. “I can never lift up my head with other people alike. I feel
myself lower than a thief, just because I got a husband who holds
himself with God all day.”
She cracked the knuckles of her bony fingers. “_Gottuniu!_ Listen
better to my prayer! Send on him only a quick death. Maybe if I was a
widow, people would take pity on me and save me from this gehenna of
charity.”
* * * * *
Ten minutes later Miss Naughton returned with a bag of supplies. “I am
going to fix some lunch for you.” She measured cocoa into a battered
saucepan. “And soon the boy will come with enough groceries for the
whole week.”
“Please, please,” begged Mrs. Ravinsky. “I can’t eat now--I can’t.”
“But the child? She needs nutritious food at once.”
Rachel’s sunken little chest rose and fell with her frightened
heartbeat as she hid her face in her mother’s lap.
“Small as she is, she already feels how it hurts to swallow charity
eating,” defended Mrs. Ravinsky.
Miss Naughton could understand the woman’s dislike of accepting
charity. She had coped with this pride of the poor before. But she
had no sympathy with this mother who fostered resentment in her
child towards the help that was so urgently needed. Miss Naughton’s
long-suffering patience broke. She turned from the stove and resolutely
continued her questioning.
“Has your husband tried our employment bureau?”
“No.”
“Then send him to our office to-morrow at nine. He can be a janitor--or
a porter----”
“My man? My man a janitor or a porter?” Her eyes flamed. “Do you know
who was my man in Russia? The fat of the land they brought him just for
the pleasure to listen to his learning. Barrels full of meat, pots full
of chicken fat stood packed in my cellar. I used to make boilers of
jelly at a time. The _gefüllte_ fish only I gave away is more than the
charities give out to the poor in a month.”
Miss Naughton could not suppress a smile. “Why did you leave it, then,
if it was all so perfect?”
“My _gefüllte_ fish! Oi-i-i! Oi-i!! My apple strudel!” she kept
repeating, unable to tear herself away from the dream of the past.
“Can you live on the apple strudel you had in Russia? In America a man
must work to support his family----”
“All thick-heads support their families,” defended Reb Ravinsky’s wife.
“Any fat-belly can make money. My man is a light for the world. He
works for God who feeds even the worms under the stone.”
“You send your husband to my office. I want to have a talk with him.”
“To your office? _Gottuniu!_ He won’t go. In Schnipishock they came to
him from the four ends of the world. The whole town blessed itself with
his religiousness.”
“The first principle of religion is for a man to provide for his
family. You must do exactly as we say--or we cannot help you.”
“Please, please!” Mrs. Ravinsky entreated, cringing and begging. “We
got no help from nobody now but you. I’ll bring him to your office
to-morrow.”
The investigator now proceeded with the irk-some duty of her more
formal questions. “How much rent do you pay? Do you keep any boarders?
Does your husband belong to any society or lodge? Have you relatives
who are able to help you?”
“Oi-i-i! What more do you want from me?” shrieked the distracted woman.
Having completed her questions, Miss Naughton looked about the room. “I
am sorry to speak of it, but why is your flat in such disorder?”
“I only moved in yesterday. I didn’t get yet time to fix it up.”
“But it was just as bad in the last place. If you want our help you
must do your part. Soap and water are cheap. Anyone can be clean.”
The woman’s knees gave way under her, as Miss Naughton lifted the lids
from the pots on the stove.
And then--_gevalt_! It grew black before Mrs. Ravinsky’s eyes. She
collapsed into a pathetic heap to the floor. The “charity lady” opened
the oven door and exposed the tell-tale frying-pan and the two eggs!
Eyes of silent condemnation scorched through the terror-stricken
creature whose teeth chattered in a vain struggle to defend herself.
But no voice came from her tortured throat. She could only clutch at
her child in a panic of helplessness.
Without a word, the investigator began to search through every nook
and corner and at last she came to the bureau drawer and found butter,
eggs, cheese, bread and even a jar of jelly.
“For shame!” broke from the wounded heart of the betrayed Miss
Naughton. “You--you ask for charity!”
* * * * *
In the hall below Reb Ravinsky, returning from the synagogue,
encountered a delivery boy.
“Where live the Ravinskys?” the lad questioned.
“I’m Reb Ravinsky,” he said, leading the way, as he saw the box of
groceries.
Followed by the boy, Reb Ravinsky flung open the door and strode
joyfully into the room. “Look only! How the manna is falling from the
sky!”
Ignoring Reb Ravinsky, Miss Naughton motioned to the box. “Take those
things right back,” she commanded the boy.
“How you took me in with your hungry look!” There was more of sorrow
than scorn in her voice. “Even teaching your child to lie--and your
husband a rabbi!--a religious man--too holy to work! What would be left
for deserving cases if we allowed such as you to defraud legitimate
charity?”
With bowed head, Reb Ravinsky closed the door after the departing
visitor. The upbraidings of the woman were like a whip-lash on his
naked flesh. His heart ached for his helpless family. Darkness
suffocated him.
“My hungry little lamb,” wailed his wife, clinging to Rachel. “Where
now can we turn for bread?”
Compassionate hands reached out in prayer over the grief-stricken
mother and child. Reb Ravinsky stood again as he did before his flight
to America, facing his sorrowing people. His wife’s wailing for their
lost store of bread brought back to him the bereaved survivors of the
_pogrom_--the _pogrom_ that snatched away their sons and daughters.
Afire with the faith of his race, he chanted the age-old consolation:
“The Lord giveth; the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the
Lord.”
PRINTED BY CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED, LA BELLE SAUVAGE, LONDON E.C.4.
Transcriber’s Notes
A few minor punctuation errors/omissions were silently corrected.
Page 7: “or consisten” changed to “or consistent”
Page 195: “Delancy Street” changed to “Delancey Street”
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