Part 3

“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 the new America that I’m to conquer.”

Answering her impulse, her feet led her to the familiar Ghetto streets. On the corner of the block where her parents lived she paused, torn between the desire to see her people and the fear of their nagging reproaches. The old Jewish proverb came to her mind: “The wolf is not afraid of the dog, but he hates his bark.” “I’m not afraid of their black curses for sin. It’s nothing to me if they accuse me of being an anti-Semite or a murderer, and yet why does it hurt me so?”

Rachel had prepared herself to face the usual hail-storm of reproaches and accusations, but as she entered the dark hallway of the tenement, she heard her father’s voice chanting the old familiar Hebrew psalm of “The Race of Sorrows”:

“Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my cry come unto Thee.

“For my days are consumed like smoke, and my bones are burned as an hearth.

“I am like a pelican of the wilderness.

“I am like an owl of the desert.

“I have eaten ashes like bread and mingled my drink with weeping.”

A faintness came over her. The sobbing strains of the lyric song melted into her veins like a magic sap, making her warm and human again. All her strength seethed to flow out of her in pity for her people. She longed to throw herself on the dirty, ill-smelling tenement stairs and weep: “Nothing is real but love--love. Nothing so false as ambition.”

Since her early childhood she remembered often waking up in the middle of the night and hearing her father chant this age-old song of woe. There flashed before her a vivid picture of him, huddled in the corner beside the table piled high with Hebrew books, swaying to the rhythm of his jeremiad, the sputtering light of the candle stuck in a bottle throwing uncanny shadows over his gaunt face. The skull-cap, the side-locks, and the long grey beard made him seem like some mystic stranger from a far-off world and not a father. The father of the daylight who ate with a knife, spat on the floor, and who was forever denouncing America and Americans was different from this stranger of the mystic spirit who could thrill with such impassioned rapture.

Thousands of years of exile, thousands of years of hunger, loneliness, and want swept over her as she listened to her father’s voice. Something seemed to be crying out to her to run in and seize her father and mother in her arms and hold them close.

“Love, love--nothing is true between us but love,” she thought.

But why couldn’t she do what she longed to do? Why, with all her passionate sympathy for them, should any actual contact with her people seem so impossible? No, she couldn’t go in just yet. Instead, she ran up on the roof, where she could be alone. She stationed herself at the air-shaft opposite their kitchen window, where for the first time since she had left in a rage she could see her old home.

_Ach!_ what sickening disorder! In the sink were the dirty dishes stacked high, untouched, it looked, for days. The table still held the remains of the last meal. Clothes were strewn about the chairs. The bureau-drawers were open, and their contents brimmed over in mad confusion.

“I couldn’t endure it, this terrible dirt!” Her nails dug into her palms, shaking with the futility of her visit. “It would be worse than death to go back to them. It would mean giving up order, cleanliness, sanity, everything that I’ve striven all these years to attain. It would mean giving up the hope of my new world--the hope of Frank Baker.”

The sound of the creaking door reached her where she crouched against the air-shaft. She looked again into the murky depths of the room. Her mother had entered. With arms full of paper bags of provisions, the old woman paused on the threshold, her eyes dwelling on the dim figure of her husband. A look of pathetic tenderness illumined her wrinkled features.

“I’ll make something good to eat for you, yes?”

Reb Ravinsky only dropped his head on his breast. His eyes were red and dry, sandy with sorrow that could find no release in tears. Good God! never had Rachel seen such profound despair. For the first time she noticed the grooved tracings of withering age knotted on his face and the growing hump on her mother’s back.

“Already the shadow of death hangs over them,” she thought as she watched them. “They’re already with one foot in the grave. Why can’t I be human to them before they’re dead? Why can’t I?”

Rachel blotted away the picture of the sordid room with both hands over her eyes.

“To death with my soul! I wish I were a plain human being with a heart instead of a monster of selfishness with a soul.”

But the pity she felt for her parents began now to be swept away in a wave of pity for herself.

“How every step in advance costs me my heart’s blood! My greatest tragedy in life is that I always see the two opposite sides at the same time. What seems to me right one day seems all wrong the next. Not only that, but many things seem right and wrong at the same time. I feel I have a right to my own life, and yet I feel just as strongly that I owe my father and mother something. Even if I don’t love them, I have no right to step over them. I’m drawn to them by something more compelling than love. It is the cry of their dumb, wasted lives.”

Again Rachel looked into the dimly lighted room below. Her mother placed food upon the table. With a self-effacing stoop of humility, she entreated, “Eat only while it is hot yet.”

With his eyes fixed almost unknowingly, Reb Ravinsky sat down. Her mother took the chair opposite him, but she only pretended to eat the slender portion of the food she had given herself.

Rachel’s heart swelled. Yes, it had always been like that. Her mother had taken the smallest portion of everything for herself. Complaints, reproaches, upbraidings, abuse, yes, all these had been heaped by her upon her mother; but always the juiciest piece of meat was placed on her plate, the thickest slice of bread; the warmest covering was given to her, while her mother shivered through the night.

“Ah, I don’t want to abandon them!” she thought; “I only want to get to the place where I belong. I only want to get to the mountain-tops and view the world from the heights, and then I’ll give them everything I’ve achieved.”

Her thoughts were sharply broken in upon by the loud sound of her father’s eating. Bent over the table, he chewed with noisy gulps a piece of herring, his temples working to the motion of his jaws. With each audible swallow and smacking of the lips, Rachel’s heart tightened with loathing.

“Their dirty ways turn all my pity into hate.” She felt her toes and her fingers curl inward with disgust. “I’ll never amount to anything if I’m not strong enough to break away from them once and for all.” Hypnotizing herself into her line of self-defence, her thoughts raced on: “I’m only cruel to be kind. If I went back to them now, it would not be out of love, but because of weakness--because of doubt and unfaith in myself.”

Rachel bluntly turned her back. Her head lifted. There was iron will in her jaws.

“If I haven’t the strength to tear free from the old, I can never conquer the new. Every new step a man makes is a tearing away from those clinging to him. I must get tight and hard as rock inside of me if I’m ever to do the things I set out to do. I must learn to suffer and suffer, walk through blood and fire, and not bend from my course.”

For the last time she looked at her parents. The terrible loneliness of their abandoned old age, their sorrowful eyes, the wrung-dry weariness on their faces, the whole black picture of her ruined, desolate home, burned into her flesh. She knew all the pain of one unjustly condemned, and the guilt of one with the spilt blood of helpless lives upon his hands. Then came tears, blinding, wrenching tears that tore at her heart until it seemed that they would rend her body into shreds.

“God! God!” she sobbed as she turned her head away from them, “if all this suffering were at least for something worth while, for something outside myself! But to have to break them and crush them merely because I have a fastidious soul that can’t stomach their table manners, merely because I can’t strangle my aching ambitions to rise in the world!”

She could no longer sustain the conflict which raged within her higher and higher at every moment. With a sudden tension of all her nerves she pulled herself together and stumbled blindly down the stairs and out of the house. And she felt as if she had torn away from the flesh and blood of her own body.

§ 3

Out in the street she struggled to get hold of herself again. Despite the tumult and upheaval that racked her soul, an intoxicating lure still held her up--the hope of seeing Frank Baker that evening. She was indeed a storm-racked ship, but within sight of shore. She need but throw out the signal, and help was nigh. She need but confide to Frank Baker of her break with her people, and all the dormant sympathy between them would surge up. His understanding would widen and deepen because of her great need for his understanding. He would love her the more because of her great need for his love.

Forcing back her tears, stepping over her heartbreak, she hurried to the hotel where she was to meet him. Her father’s impassioned rapture when he chanted the psalms of David lit up the visionary face of the young Jewess.

“After all, love is the beginning of the real life,” she thought as Frank Baker’s dark, handsome face flashed before her. “With him to hold on to, I’ll begin my new world.”

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 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. They belong to their fathers and mothers; they belong to their relatives and friends. They are human even without a man’s love. I don’t belong; I’m not human. Only a man’s love can save me and make me human again.”

It was the busy dinner-hour at the fashionable restaurant. Pausing at the doorway with searching eyes and lips eagerly parted, Rachel’s swift glance circled the lobby. Those seated in the dining-room beyond who were not too absorbed in one another, noticed a slim, vivid figure of ardent youth, but with dark, age-old eyes that told of the restless seeking of her homeless race.

With nervous little movements of anxiety, Rachel sat down, got up, then started across the lobby. Half-way, she stopped, and her breath caught.

“Mr. Baker,” she murmured, her hands fluttering toward him with famished eagerness. His smooth, athletic figure had a cocksureness that to the girl’s worshipping gaze seemed the perfection of male strength.

“You must be doing wonderful things,” came from her admiringly, “you look so happy, so shining with life.”

“Yes”--he shook her hand vigorously--“I’ve been living for the first time since I was a kid. I’m full of such interesting experiences. I’m actually working in an East Side settlement.”

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! My conception of these people has greatly changed since I’ve been visiting their homes.” He launched into a glowing account of the East Side as seen by a twenty-five-year-old college graduate.

“I thought them mostly immersed in hard labour, digging subways or slaving in sweatshops,” he went on. “But think of the poetry which the immigrant is daily living!”

“But they’re so sunk in the dirt of poverty, what poetry do you see there?”

“It’s their beautiful home life, the poetic devotion between parents and children, the sacrifices they make for one another----”

“Beautiful home life? Sacrifices? Why, all I know of is the battle to the knife between parents and children. It’s black tragedy that boils there, not the pretty sentiments that you imagine.”

“My dear child”--he waved aside her objection--“you’re too close to judge dispassionately. This very afternoon, on one of my friendly visits, I came upon a dear old man who peered up at me through horn-rimmed glasses behind his pile of Hebrew books. He was hardly able to speak English, but I found him a great scholar.”

“Yes, a lazy old do-nothing, a bloodsucker on his wife and children.”

Too shocked for remonstrance, Frank Baker stared at her.

“How else could he have time in the middle of the afternoon to pore over his books?” Rachel’s voice was hard with bitterness. “Did you see his wife? I’ll bet she was slaving for him in the kitchen. And his children slaving for him in the sweatshop.”

“Even so, think of the fine devotion that the women and children show in making the lives of your Hebrew scholars possible. It’s a fine contribution to America, where our tendency is to forget idealism.”

“Give me better a plain American man who supports his wife and children, and I’ll give you all those dreamers of the Talmud.”

He smiled tolerantly at her vehemence.

“Nevertheless,” he insisted, “I’ve found wonderful material for my new book in all this. I think I’ve got a new angle on the social types of your East Side.”

An icy band tightened about her heart. “Social types,” her lips formed. How could she possibly confide to this man of the terrible tragedy that she had been through that very day? Instead of the understanding and sympathy that she had hoped to find, there were only smooth platitudes, the sight-seer’s surface interest in curious “social types.”

Frank Baker talked on. Rachel seemed to be listening, but her eyes had a far-off, abstracted look. She was quiet as a spinning-top is quiet, her thoughts and emotions revolving within her at high speed.

“That man in love with me? Why, he doesn’t see me or feel me. I don’t exist to him. He’s only stuck on himself, blowing his own horn. Will he never stop with his ‘I,’ ‘I,’ ‘I’? Why, I was a crazy lunatic to think that just because we took the same courses in college he would understand me out in the real world.”

All the fire suddenly went out of her eyes. She looked a thousand years old as she sank back wearily in her chair.

“Oh, but I’m boring you with all my heavy talk on sociology.” Frank Baker’s words seemed to come to her from afar. “I have tickets for a fine musical comedy that will cheer you up, Miss Ravinsky----”

“Thanks, thanks,” she cut in hurriedly. Spend a whole evening sitting beside him in a theatre when her heart was breaking? No. All she wanted was to get away--away where she could be alone. “I have work to do,” she heard herself say. “I’ve got to get home.”

Frank Baker murmured words of polite disappointment and escorted her back to her door. She watched the sure swing of his athletic figure as he strode away down the street, then she rushed upstairs.

Back in her little room, stunned, bewildered, blinded with her disillusion, she sat staring at her four empty walls.

Hours passed, but she made no move, she uttered no sound. Doubled fists thrust between her knees, she sat there, staring blindly at her empty walls.

“I can’t live with the old world, and I’m yet too green for the new. I don’t belong to those who gave me birth or to those with whom I was educated.”

Was this to be the end of all her struggles to rise in America, she asked herself, this crushing daze of loneliness? Her driving thirst for an education, her desperate battle for a little cleanliness, for a breath of beauty, the tearing away from her own flesh and blood to free herself from the yoke of her parents--what was it all worth now? Where did it lead to? Was loneliness to be the fruit of it all?

Night was melting away like a fog; through the open window the first lights of dawn were appearing. Rachel felt the sudden touch of the sun upon her face, which was bathed in tears. Overcome by her sorrow, she shuddered and put her hand over her eyes as though to shut out the unwelcome contact. But the light shone through her fingers.

Despite her weariness, the renewing breath of the fresh morning entered her heart like a sunbeam. A mad longing for life filled her veins.

“I want to live,” her youth cried. “I want to live, even at the worst.”

Live how? Live for what? She did not know. She only felt she must struggle against her loneliness and weariness as she had once struggled against dirt, against the squalor and ugliness of her Ghetto home.

Turning from the window, she concentrated her mind, her poor tired mind, on one idea.

“I have broken away from the old world; I’m through with it. It’s already behind me. I must face this loneliness till I get to the new world. Frank Baker can’t help me; I must hope for no help from the outside. I’m alone; I’m alone till I get there.

“But am I really alone in my seeking? I’m one of the millions of immigrant children, children of loneliness, wandering between worlds that are at once too old and too new to live in.”

BROTHERS

I had just begun to unpack and arrange my things in my new quarters when Hanneh Breineh edged herself confidingly into my room and started to tell me the next chapter in the history of all her lodgers.

“And this last one what sleeps in the kitchen,” she finished, “he’s such a stingy--Moisheh the Schnorrer they call him. He washes himself his own shirts and sews together the holes from his socks to save a penny. Think only! He cooks himself his own meat once a week for the Sabbath and the rest of the time it’s cabbage and potatoes or bread and herring. And the herring what he buys are the squashed and smashed ones from the bottom of the barrel. And the bread he gets is so old and hard he’s got to break it with a hammer. For why should such a stingy grouch live in this world if he don’t allow himself the bite in the mouth?”

It was no surprise to me that Hanneh Breineh knew all this, for everybody in her household cooked and washed in the same kitchen, and everybody knew what everybody else ate and what everybody else wore down to the number of patches on their underwear.

“And by what do you work for a living?” she asked, as she settled herself on my cot.

“I study at college by day and I give English lessons and write letters for the people in the evening.”

“Ach! So you are learning for a _teacherin_?” She rose, and looked at me up and down and down and up, her red-lidded eyes big with awe. “So that’s why you wanted so particular a room to yourself? Nobody in my house has a room by herself alone just like you. They all got to squeeze themselves together to make it come out cheaper.”

By the evening everybody in that house knew I was a _teacherin_, and Moisheh the Schnorrer was among my first applicants for instruction.

“How much will you charge me for learning me English, a lesson?” he blurted, abrupt because of his painful bashfulness.

I looked up at the tall, ungainly creature with round, stooping shoulders, and massive, shaggy head--physically a veritable giant, yet so timid, so diffident, afraid almost of his own shadow.

“I wanna learn how to sign myself my name,” he went on. “Only--you’ll make it for me a little cheaper--yes?”

“Fifty cents an hour,” I answered, drawn by the dumb, hunted look that cried to me out of his eyes.

Moisheh scratched his shaggy head and bit the nails of his huge, toil-worn hand. “Maybe--could you yet--perhaps--make it a little cheaper?” he fumbled.

“Aren’t you working?”

His furrowed face coloured with confusion. “Yes--but--but my family. I got to save myself together a penny to a penny for them.”

“Oh! So you’re already married?”

“No--not married. My family in Russia--_mein_ old mother and Feivel, _mein_ doctor brother, and Berel the baby, he was already learning for a book-keeper before the war.”

The coarse peasant features were transformed with tenderness as he started to tell me the story of his loved ones in Russia.

“Seven years ago I came to America. I thought only to make quick money to send the ship tickets for them all, but I fell into the hands of a cockroach boss.

“You know a cockroach boss is a _landsman_ that comes to meet the greenhorns by the ship. He made out he wanted to help me, but he only wanted to sweat me into my grave. Then came the war and I began to earn big wages; but they were driven away from their village and my money didn’t get to them at all. And for more than a year I didn’t know if my people were yet alive in the world.”

He took a much-fingered, greasy envelope from his pocket. “That’s the first letter I got from them in months. The book-keeper boarder read it for me already till he’s sick from it. Only read it for me over again,” he begged as he handed it to me upside down.

The letter was from Smirsk, Poland, where the two brothers and their old mother had fled for refuge. It was the cry of despair--food--clothes--shoes--the cry of hunger and nakedness. His eyes filled and unheeding tears fell on his rough, trembling hands as I read.

“That I should have bread three times a day and them starving!” he gulped. “By each bite it chokes me. And when I put myself on my warm coat, it shivers in me when I think how they’re without a shirt on their backs. I already sent them a big package of things, but until I hear from them I’m like without air in my lungs.”

I wondered how, in their great need and in his great anxiety to supply it, he could think of English lessons or spare the little money to pay for his tuition.

He divined my thoughts. “Already seven years I’m here and I didn’t take for myself the time to go night school,” he explained. “Now they’ll come soon and I don’t want them to shame themselves from their _Amerikaner_ brother what can’t sign his own name, and they in Russia write me such smart letters in English.”

“Didn’t you go to school like your brothers?”

“Me--school?” He shrugged his toil-stooped shoulders. “I was the only breadgiver after my father he died. And with my nose in the earth on a farm how could I take myself the time to learn?”

His queer, bulging eyes with their yearning, passionate look seemed to cling to something beyond--out of reach. “But my brothers--_ach_! my brothers! They’re so high-educated! I worked the nails from off my fingers, but only they should learn--they should become people in the world.”

And he deluged me with questions as to the rules of immigrant admission and how long it would take for him to learn to sign his name so that he would be a competent leader when his family would arrive.

“I ain’t so dumb like I look on my face.” He nudged me confidentially. “I already found out from myself which picture means where the train goes. If it’s for Brooklyn Bridge, then the hooks go this way”--he clumsily drew in the air with his thick fingers--“and if it’s for the South Ferry, then the words twist the other way around.”

I marvelled at his frank revelation of himself.

“What is your work?” I asked, more and more drawn by some hidden power of this simple peasant.

“I’m a presser by pants.”