Anzia Yezierska

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Despair was in the look she fixed upon her husband’s lofty brow—a brow untouched by time [Pg 269] 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 171] my life and the lives of my people to them. And life draws life. In only writing about the Ghetto I found America. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 245] 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 50] 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”