Children of loneliness

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...

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 f...

“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...

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...

“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 o...

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 p...

“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...

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 n...

“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?”

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...

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...

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.

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 Rede...