Part 2
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.