Abraham Cahan

“ He recalled the old man’s carriage, the melancholy nod of his head, his deep sigh upon taking snuff from the time-honoured birch bark which Jake had known as long as himself; and his heart writhed with pity and with the acutest pangs of homesickness. “And it was evening and it was morning, the sixth day. And the heavens and the earth were finished.” As the Hebrew words of the Sanctification of the Sabbath resounded in Jake’s ears, in his father’s senile treble, he could see his gaunt figure swaying over a pair of Sabbath loaves. It is Friday night. ”

“ For several minutes at a time, while kicking at his treadle, he would see, reddening before him, Gitl’s bandana kerchief and her prominent gums, or hear an un-American piece of Yiddish pronounced with Gitl’s peculiar lisp—that very lisp, which three years ago he used to mimic fondly, but which now grated on his nerves and was apt to make his face twitch with sheer disgust, insomuch that he often found a vicious relief in mocking that lisp of hers audibly over his work. But can it be that he is doomed for life? ”

“ Kavarsky remonstrated distressedly, at the same moment releasing her prisoner, who forthwith dived into the bedroom to bury her face in a pillow, and to give way to a stream of tears. Then she made a few steps toward Jake, and speaking in an undertone she proceeded to take him to task. “Another man would consider himself happy to have such a wife,” she said. “Such a quiet, honest woman! And such a housewife! Why, look at the way she keeps everything—like a fiddle. It is simply a treat to come into your house. ”

“ Gitl thought Heaven knows what revelations awaited her.
“That you are a lump of horse and a greenhorn and nothing else!” (Gitl felt much relieved.) “That piece of ugliness should try and come to my house! Then she would know the price of a pound of evil. I should open the door and—march to eighty black years! Let her go to where she came from! America is not Russia, thanked be the Lord of the world. Here one must only know how to handle a husband. ”

“ He did, lots of times,” he concluded gravely, touched by the anxiety of the poor woman.
She left Bernstein’s room all thrilling with joy, and repentant for her excess of communicativeness. “A wife must not tell other people what happens to her husband,” she lectured herself, in the best of humours. Still, the words “Your husband knows many nice ladas,” kept echoing at the bottom of her soul, and in another few minutes she was at Mrs. Kavarsky’s, confidentially describing Mamie’s visit as well as her talk with the boarder, omitting nothing save the latter’s compliments to her looks. ”

“ But since you came I thought she would have God in her heart, and be ashamed of people. Not she! She be ashamed! You may sling a cat into her face and she won’t mind it. The black year knows where she grew up. I tell you there is not a girl in the whole dancing school but can not bear the sight of that Polish lizard!”
“Why, do they meet and kiss?” Gitl moaned out. “Tell me, do tell me all, my little crown, keep nothing from me, tell me my whole dark lot.”
“Ull right, but be sure not to speak to anybody. I’ll tell you the truth: My name is not Rosy Blank at all. It is Fanny Scutelsky. ”

“ For, indeed, at the bottom of her heart she felt herself far from desolate, being conscious of the existence of a man who was to take care of her and her child, and even relishing the prospect of the new life in store for her. Already on her way from the rabbi’s house, while her soul was full of Jake and the Polish girl, there had fluttered through her imagination a picture of the grocery business which she and Bernstein were to start with the money paid to her by Jake. ”

“ It is like the nature I have; I can not bear to see anybody in trouble. Other people would not care, but I do. Such is my nature. So I thought to myself I must go and tell Mrs. Podkovnik all about it, in order that she might know what to do.”
For several moments Gitl sat speechless, her head hung down, and her bosom heaving rapidly. Then she fell to swaying her frame sidewise, and vehemently wringing her hands.
“Oi! Oi! Little mother! A pain to me!” she moaned. “What is to be done? Lord of the world, what is to be done? Come to the rescue! People, do take pity, come to the rescue!” ”

“ At one moment she took a firm resolve to pluck up courage and cast away the kerchief and the wig; but at the next she reflected that God would be sure to punish her for the terrible sin, so that instead of winning Jake’s love the change would increase his hatred for her. It flashed upon her mind to call upon some “good Jew” to pray for the return of his favour, or to seek some old Polish beggar woman who could prescribe a love potion. But then, alas! who knows whether there are in this terrible America any good Jews or beggar women with love potions at all! ”

“ In the excitement of the scene called forth by the appearance of the bundles, Jake’s gloomy mood had melted away. Nevertheless, while his machine was delivering its first shrill staccatos, his heart recited a vow: “As soon as I get my pay I shall call on the installment man and give him a deposit for a ticket.” The prospective ticket was to be for a passage across the Atlantic from Hamburg to New York. And as the notion of it passed through Jake’s mind it evoked there the image of a dark-eyed young woman with a babe in her lap. ”

“ Dot’sh a’ kin’ a man I am!” One day, in the course of an intimate conversation with Joe, Jake, dropping into a philosophical mood, remarked:
“It’s something like a baker, ain’t it? The more cakes he has the less he likes them. You and I have a lot of girls; that’s why we don’t care for any one of them.”
But if his attachment for the girls of his acquaintance collectively was not coupled with a quivering of his heart for any individual Mamie, or Fanny, or Sarah, it did not, on the other hand, preclude a certain lingering tenderness for his wife. ”

“ After a slight pause Bernstein could not forbear a remark which he had stubbornly repressed while Jake was challenging him to a debate on the education of baseball players: “Look here, Jake; since fighters and baseball men are all educated, then why don’t you try to become so? Instead of spending your money on fights, dancing, and things like that, would it not be better if you paid it to a teacher?” ”

“ English was the official language of the academy, where it was broken and mispronounced in as many different ways as there were Yiddish dialects represented in that institution. “Dot’sh de vay, look!” With which Jake seized from Charley a lanky fourteen-year-old Miss Jacobs, and proceeded to set an example of correct waltzing, much to the unconcealed delight of the girl, who let her head rest on his breast with an air of reverential gratitude and bliss, and to the embarrassment of her cavalier, who looked at the evolutions of Jake’s feet without seeing. ”

“ Here one is to-day in New York and to-morrow in Chicago; do you understand? As if there were any shame or decency here! A father is no father, a wife, no wife—not’ing! Go now, my baby! Go and throw away your rag and be a nice woman, and everything will be ull right.” And so hurrying Gitl to go, she detained her with ever a fresh torrent of loquacity for another ten minutes, till the young woman, standing on pins and needles and scarcely lending an ear, plucked up courage to plead her household duties and take a hasty departure.
She found Jake fast asleep. ”

“ Kavarsky. “Another woman would dance for joy, and here she is whining, the cudgel. What is it you are snivelling about? That you have got rid of an unclean bone and a dunce, and that you are going to marry a young man of silk who is fit to be a rabbi, and is as smart and ejecate as a lawyer? You would have got a match like that in Povodye, would you? I dare say a man like Mr. Bernstein would not have spoken to you there. You ought to say Psalms for your coming to America. ”

“ Nor is there a tenement house but harbours in its bosom specimens of all the whimsical metamorphoses wrought upon the children of Israel of the great modern exodus by the vicissitudes of life in this their Promised Land of to-day. You find there Jews born to plenty, whom the new conditions have delivered up to the clutches of penury; Jews reared in the straits of need, who have here risen to prosperity; good people morally degraded in the struggle for success amid an unwonted environment ”

“ A nice entertainment, indeed! Just like little children—playing ball! And yet people say America is a smart country. I don’t see it.”
“’F caush you don’t, becaush you are a bedraggled greenhorn, afraid to budge out of Heshter Shtreet.” As Jake thus vented his bad humour on his adversary, he cast a glance at Bernstein, as if anxious to attract his attention and to re-engage him in the discussion.
“Look at the Yankee!” the presser shot back.
“More of a one than you, anyhoy.”
“He thinks that shaving one’s mustache makes a Yankee!” ”

“ In the conversation which followed Mamie did most of the talking. With a nervous volubility often broken by an irrelevant giggle, and violently rocking with her chair, she expatiated on the charms of America, prophesying that her hostess would bless the day of her arrival on its soil, and went off in ecstasies over Joey. She spoke with an overdone American accent in the dialect of the Polish Jews, affectedly Germanized and profusely interspersed with English, so that Gitl, whose mother tongue was Lithuanian Yiddish, could scarcely catch the meaning of one half of her flood of garrulity. ”

“ Kavarsky was too deeply touched to laugh. She proceeded to examine her pupil, in whispers, upon certain details, and thereupon her interest in Gitl’s answers gradually superseded her commiseration for the unhappy woman.
“And how does he behave toward the boy?” she absently inquired, after a melancholy pause.
“Would he were as kind to me!”
“Then it is ull right! Such things will happen between man and wife. It is all humbuk. It will all come right, and you will some day be the happiest woman in the world. You shall see. Remember that Mrs. Kavarsky has told you so. ”

“ It is only here that it is possible for a blacksmith’s wife to marry a learned man, who is a blessing both for God and people. And yet you are not saresfied! Cry away! If Bernstein refuses to go under the wedding canopy, Mrs. Kavarsky will no more bodder her head about you, depend upon it. It is not enough for her that I neglect business on her account,” she appealed to the bystanders.
“Really, what are you crying about, Mrs. Podkovnik?” one of the neighbours interposed. “You ought to bless the hour when you became free.” ”

“ She was neighbourly enough, and as she was the most prosperous and her establishment the best equipped in the whole tenement, many a woman would come to borrow some cooking utensil or other, or even a few dollars on rent day, which Mrs. Kavarsky always started by refusing in the most pointed terms, and almost always finished by granting.
She started to listen to Gitl’s report with a fierce mien which gradually thawed into a sage smile. When the young neighbour had rested her case, she first nodded her head, as who should say, “What fools this young generation be!” ”

“ JAKE AND YEKL.
The operatives of the cloak-shop in which Jake was employed had been idle all the morning. It was after twelve o’clock and the “boss” had not yet returned from Broadway, whither he had betaken himself two or three hours before in quest of work. The little sweltering assemblage—for it was an oppressive day in midsummer—beguiled their suspense variously. A rabbinical-looking man of thirty, who sat with the back of his chair tilted against his sewing machine, was intent upon an English newspaper. ”

“ Then shaking with the child backward and forward, and intoning her words as Jewish women do over a grave, she went on: “Ai, you have no papa any more, Joeyelé! Yoselé, little crown, you will never see him again! He is dead, taté is!” Whereupon Yoselé, following his mother’s example, let loose his stentorian voice.
“Shurr-r up!” Mrs. Kavarsky whispered, stamping her foot. “You want Mr. Bernstein to leave you, too, do you? No more is wanted than that he should get wind of your crying.”
“Nobody will tell him,” one of the neighbours put in, resentfully. ”

“ The first letter which reached Jake after the scene at Joe Peltner’s dancing academy came so unusually close upon its predecessor that he received it from his landlady’s hand with a throb of misgiving. He had always laboured under the presentiment that some unknown enemies—for he had none that he could name—would some day discover his wife’s address and anonymously represent him to her as contemplating another marriage, in order to bring Gitl down upon him unawares. ”