Anzia Yezierska

“ I wanted to cry out: “Take only away my ticket! I don’t want any more America! I don’t want any more my lover!”
But as soon as I got into the train, although my eyes were still looking back to the left-behind faces, and my ears were yet hearing the good-byes and the partings, the thoughts of America began stealing into my heart. I was thinking how soon I’d have my lover and be rich like Hanneh Hayyeh. And with my luck, everybody was going to be happy in Savel. The dead people will stop dying and all the sorrows and troubles of the world will be wiped away with my happiness. ”

“ Hanneh Breineh went over to the pantry-shelf.
“We are going to have a bite right here on the kitchen-table like on Delancey Street. So long there’s no servant to watch us we can eat what we please.”
“Oi! How it waters my mouth with appetite, the smell of the herring and onion!” chuckled Mrs. Pelz, sniffing the welcome odors with greedy pleasure.
Hanneh Breineh pulled a dish-towel from the rack and threw one end of it to Mrs. Pelz.
“So long there’s no servant around, we can use it together for a napkin. It’s dirty, anyhow. How it freshens up my heart to see you!” ”

“ Sophie’s rage broke at last. “You call yourselves Americans? You dare call yourselves Jews? You bosses of the poor! This man Shmendrik, whose house you broke into, whom you made to shame like a beggar—he is the one Jew from whom the Jews can be proud! He gives all he is—all he has—as God gives. He is charity.
“But you—you are the greed—the shame of the Jews! All-right-niks—fat bellies in fur coats! What do you give from yourselves? You may eat and bust eating! Nothing you give till you’ve stuffed yourselves so full that your hearts are dead!” ”

“ You call yourself a teacher? A friend? How can you go off in the country and drop me out of your heart and out of your head like a read-over book you left on the shelf of your shut-down classroom? How can you enjoy your vacation in the country while I’m in the sweatshop? You learned me nothing. You only broke my heart. What good are all the books you ever gave me? They don’t tell me how to be happy in a factory. They don’t tell me how to keep alive in emptiness, or how to find something beautiful in the dirt and ugliness in which I got to waste away. I want life. I want people. ”

“ I can’t stand no more this deadness here. I must get away. And you must give up everything to help me get away. All I need is a chance. I can do a million times better than Hanneh Hayyeh. I got a head. I got brains. I feel I can marry myself to the greatest man in America.”
My mother stopped crying, took up the candlesticks from the mantelpiece and passed her hands over them. “It’s like a piece from my flesh,” she said. “We grew up with this, you children and I, and my mother and my mother’s mother. This and the Saifer Torah are the only things that shine up the house for the Sabbath.” ”

“ And may all Jews who suffer in Goluth from ukazes and pogroms live yet to lift up their heads like me, Gedalyeh Mindel, in America.”
Fifty rubles! A ship-ticket to America! That so much good luck should fall on one head! A savage envy bit me. Gloomy darts from narrowed eyes stabbed Masheh Mindel.
Why should not we too have a chance to get away from this dark land? Has not every heart the same hunger for America? The same longing to live and laugh and breathe like a free human being? America is for all. Why should only Masheh Mindel and her children have a chance to the new world? ”

“ Didn’t I hear you call fourteen cents?” shrieked Hanneh Breineh, exultingly, the spirit of the penny chase surging in her blood. Diplomatically, Hanneh Breineh turned as if to go, and the fisherman seized her basket in frantic fear.
“I should live; I’m losing money on the fish, lady,” whined the peddler. “I’ll let it down to thirteen cents for you only.”
“Two pounds for a quarter, and not a penny more,” said Hanneh Breineh, thrilling again with the rare sport of bargaining, which had been her chief joy in the good old days of poverty.
“Nu, I want to make the first sale for good luck.” ”

“ Inside the ruin of my thwarted life, the unlived visionary immigrant hungered and thirsted for America. I had come a refugee from the Russian pogroms, aflame with dreams of America. I did not find America in the sweatshops, much less in the schools and colleges. But for hundreds of years the persecuted races all over the world were nurtured on hopes of America. When a little baby in my mother’s arms, before I was old enough to speak, I saw all around me weary faces light up with thrilling tales of the far-off “golden country.” ”

“ You are an artist—an artist laundress.”
“What mean you an artist?”
“An artist is so filled with love for the beautiful that he has to express it in some way. You express it in your washing just as a painter paints it in a picture.”
“Paint?” exclaimed Hanneh Hayyeh. “If you could only give a look how I painted up my kitchen! It lights up the whole tenement house for blocks around. The grocer and the butcher and all the neighbors were jumping in the air from wonder and joy when they seen how I shined up my house.” ”

“ Hanneh Breineh took Sophie by the arm. “Who’ll say no in this black life to cake and wine?”
Young throats burst into shrill cries: “Cake and wine—wine and cake—raisins and nuts—nuts and raisins!” The words rose in a triumphant chorus. The children leaped and danced in time to their chant, almost carrying the old man bodily into his room in the wildness of their joy.
The contagion of this sudden hilarity erased from Sophie’s mind the last thought of work and she found herself seated with the others on the cobbler’s bench.
From under his cot the old man drew forth a wooden box. ”

“ Any one can be clean,” this last time, something burst within me.
I felt the suppressed wrath of all the unwashed of the earth break loose within me. My eyes blazed fire. I didn’t care for myself, nor the dean, nor the whole laundered world. I had suffered the cruelty of their cleanliness and the tyranny of their culture to the breaking point. I was too frenzied to know what I said or did. But I saw clean, immaculate, spotless Miss Whiteside shrivel and tremble and cower before me, as I had shriveled and trembled and cowered before her for so many years.
Why did she give me my diploma? ”

“ I looked out from my window on the fire-escapes, full with bedding and garbage-cans, and on the wash-lines full with the clothes. All these ugly things was grand in my eyes. Even the high brick walls all around made me feel like a bird what just jumped out from a cage. And I cried out, “Gott sei dank! Gott sei dank!”
THE MIRACLE Like all people who have nothing, I lived on dreams. With nothing but my longing for love, I burned my way through stone walls till I got to America. And what happened to me when I became an American is more than I can picture before my eyes, even in a dream. ”

“ When a mother needs a vacation, why must they tear the insides out from her first, by making her come down to the charity office? Why drag us from the charity office through the streets? And when we live through the shame of the charities and when we come already to the vacation house, for why do they boss the life out of us with so many rules and bells? ”

“ God knows how hard I tried to civilize her so as not to have to blush with shame when I take her anywhere. I dressed her in the most stylish Paris models, but Delancey Street sticks out from every inch of her. Whenever she opens her mouth, I’m done for. You fellows had your chance to rise in the world because a man is free to go up as high as he can reach up to; but I, with all my style and pep, can’t get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother. ”

“ The brush dropped from her hand. “He—he is the beating in my heart! He is the life in me—the hope in me—the breath of prayer in me! If not for him in me, then what am I? Deadness—emptiness—nothingness! You are going out of your head. You are living only on rainbows. He is no more real—
“What is real? These rags I wear? This pail? This black hole? Or him and the dreams of him?” She flung her challenge to the murky darkness.
“Shenah Pessah! A black year on you!” ”

“ Make yourself for an American if you want to live in America. American girls don’t go to matchmakers. American girls don’t run after a man: if they don’t get a husband they don’t think the world is over; they turn their mind to something else.
“Wake up!” I said to myself. “You want love to come to you? Why don’t you give it out to other people? Love the women and children, everybody in the street and the shop. Love the rag-picker and the drunkard, the bad and the ugly. All those whom the world kicks down you pick up and press to your heart with love.” ”

“ Take off your shawl,” urged Hanneh Breineh.
But Mrs. Pelz only drew her shawl more tightly around her, a keen sense of her poverty gripping her as she gazed, abashed by the luxurious wealth that shone from every corner.
“This shawl covers up my rags,” she said, trying to hide her shabby sweater.
“I’ll tell you what; come right into the kitchen,” suggested Hanneh Breineh. “The servant is away for this afternoon, and we can feel more comfortable there. I can breathe like a free person in my kitchen when the girl has her day out.” ”

“ Hanneh Breineh pushed Mrs. Pelz away from her.
“To whom can I open the wounds of my heart?” she moaned. “Nobody has pity on me. You don’t believe me, nobody believes me until I’ll fall down like a horse in the middle of the street. Oi weh! Mine life is so black for my eyes! Some mothers got luck. A child gets run over by a car, some fall from a window, some burn themselves up with a match, some get choked with diphtheria; but no death takes mine away.” ”

“ She was worn out from the sleepless night and hours of tramping. With a piercing pain in her heart she at last turned back and boarded the subway for Riverside Drive. She had fled from the marble sepulcher of the Riverside apartment to her old home in the ghetto; but now she knew that she could not live there again. She had outgrown her past by the habits of years of physical comforts, and these material comforts that she could no longer do without choked and crushed the life within her.
A cold shudder went through Hanneh Breineh as she approached the apartment-house. ”

“ Hanneh Breineh sipped the gravy drop by drop, like a connoisseur sipping wine.
“Ah-h-h! A taste of that gravy lifts me up to heaven!” As she disposed leisurely of the slice of onion and carrot she relaxed and expanded and even grew jovial. “Let us wish all our troubles on the Russian Czar! Let him burst with our worries for rent! Let him get shriveled with our hunger for bread! Let his eyes dry out of his head looking for work! ”

“ Preston does make me feel that I’m alike with her,” returned Hanneh Hayyeh, proudly. “Don’t she talk herself out to me like I was her friend? Mrs. Preston says this war is to give everybody a chance to lift up his head like a person. It is to bring together the people on top who got everything and the people on the bottom who got nothing. She’s been telling me about a new word—democracy. It got me on fire. Democracy means that everybody in America is going to be with everybody alike.” ”

“ Preston, baffled and bewildered by Hanneh Hayyeh’s defiance of her proffered aid.
“Change things? There’s got to be a change!” cried Hanneh Hayyeh with renewed intensity. “The world as it is is not to live in any longer. If only my Aby would get back quick. But until he comes, I’ll fight till all America will have to stop and listen to me. You was always telling me that the lowest nobody got something to give to America. And that’s what I got to give to America—the last breath in my body for justice. ”

“ The children seized the last crumbs of cake that Shmendrik handed them and rushed for the street.
“What a killing look was on her face,” said Sophie. “Couldn’t she be a little glad for your gladness?”
“Charity ladies—gladness?” The joy of the grape-wine still rippled in Hanneh Breineh’s laughter. “For poor people is only cornmeal. Ten cents a day—to feed my children!”
Still in her rollicking mood Hanneh Breineh picked up the baby and tossed it like a Bacchante. “Could you be happy a lot with ten cents in your stomach? ”

“ He led her in and over to a corner table. “Chopped herring and onions for two,” he ordered with a flourish.
“Ain’t there some American eating on the card?” interposed Shenah Pessah.
He laughed indulgently. “If I lived in America for a hundred years I couldn’t get used to the American eating. What can make the mouth so water like the taste and the smell from herring and onions?”
“There’s something in me—I can’t help—that so quickly takes on to the American taste. It’s as if my outside skin only was Russian; the heart in me is for everything of the new world—even the eating.” ”

“ Shmendrik groped blindly for the Bible. In a low, quavering voice, he began the chant of the oppressed—the wail of the downtrodden. “I am afraid, and a trembling taketh hold of my flesh. Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, mighty in power?”
Hanneh Breineh and the children drew close around the old man. They were weeping—unconscious of their weeping—deep-buried memories roused by the music, the age-old music of the Hebrew race.
Through the grating Sophie saw the limousine pass. The chant flowed on: “Their houses are safe from fear; neither is the rod of God upon them.” ”

“ Ach, America! Where is America?”
It seemed to me if I could only find some human being to whom I could unburden my heart, I would have new strength to begin again my insatiable search for America.
But to whom could I speak? The people in the laundry? They never understood me. They had a grudge against me because I left them when I tried to work myself up. Could I speak to the college people? ”