Part 4
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 all the ravages of poverty, of mean, soul-crushing drudgery that marked this man, something big and indomitable in him fascinated me. His was the strength knitted and knotted from the hardiest roots of the earth. Filled with awe, I looked up at him. Here was a man submerged in the darkness of illiteracy--of pinch and scraping and want--yet untouched--unspoiled, with the same simplicity of spirit that was his as a wide-eyed, dreamy youth in the green fields of Russia.
We had our first lesson, and, though I needed every cent I could earn, I felt like a thief taking his precious pennies. But he would pay. “It’s worth to me more than a quarter only to learn how to hold up the pencil,” he exulted as he gripped the pencil upright in his thick fist. All the yearning, the intense desire for education were in the big, bulging eyes that he raised towards me. “No wonder I could never make those little black hooks for words; I was always grabbing my pencil like a fork for sticking up meat.”
With what sublime absorption he studied me as I showed him how to shape the letters for his name! Eyes wide--mouth open--his huge, stoop-shouldered body leaning forward--quivering with hunger to grasp the secret turnings of “the little black hooks” that signified his name.
“M-o-i-s-h-e-h,” he repeated after me as I guided his pencil.
“Now do it alone,” I urged.
Moisheh rolled up his sleeve like one ready for a fray. The sweat dripped from his face as he struggled for the muscular control of his clumsy fingers.
Night after night he wrestled heroically with the “little black hooks.” At last his efforts were rewarded. He learned how to shape the letters without any help.
“God from the world!” he cried with childishly pathetic joy as he wrote his name for the first time. “This is me--Moisheh!” He lifted the paper and held it off and then held it close, drunk with the wonder of the “little black hooks.” They seemed so mysterious to him, and his eyes loomed large--transfigured with the miracle of seeing himself for the first time in script.
It was the week after that he asked me to write his letter, and this time it was from my eyes that the unheeding tears dropped as I wrote the words he dictated.
“To my dear Loving Mother, and to my worthy Honourable Brother Feivel, the Doctor, and to my youngest brother, the joy from my life, the light from mine eyes, Berel the Book-keeper!
“Long years and good luck to you all. Thanks the highest One in Heaven that you are alive. Don’t worry for nothing. So long I have yet my two strong hands to work you will yet live to have from everything plenty. For all those starving days in Russia, you will live to have joy in America.
“You, Feivel, will yet have a grand doctor’s office, with an electric dentist sign over your door, and a gold tooth to pull in the richest customers. And you, Berel, my honourable book-keeper, will yet live to wear a white starched collar like all the higher-ups in America. And you, my loving mother, will yet shine up the block with the joy from your children.
“I am sending you another box of things, and so soon as I get from you the word, I’ll send for you the ship tickets, even if it costs the money from all the banks in America.
“Luck and blessings on your dear heads. I am going around praying and counting the minutes till you are all with me together in America.”
Our lessons had gone on steadily for some months and already he was able to write the letters of the alphabet. One morning before I was out of bed he knocked at my door.
“Quick only! A blue letter printed from Russia!” he shouted in an excited voice.
Through the crack of the door he shoved in the cablegram. “Send ship tickets or we die--pogrom,” I read aloud.
“_Weh--weh!_” A cry of a dumb, wounded animal broke from the panic-stricken Moisheh.
The cup of coffee that Hanneh Breineh lifted to her lips dropped with a crash to the floor. “Where pogrom?” she demanded, rushing in.
I re-read the cablegram.
“Money for ship tickets!” stammered Moisheh. He drew forth a sweaty moneybag that lay hid beneath his torn grey shirt and with trembling hands began counting the greasy bills. “Only four hundred and thirty-three dollars! Woe is me!” He cracked the knuckles of his fingers in a paroxysm of grief. “It’s six hundred I got to have!”
“_Gottuniu!_ Listen to him only!” Hanneh Breineh shook Moisheh roughly. “You’d think he was living by wild Indians--not by people with hearts....”
“Boarders!” she called. “Moisheh’s old mother and his two brothers are in Smirsk where there’s a pogrom.”
The word “pogrom” struck like a bombshell. From the sink, the stove, they gathered, in various stages of undress, around Moisheh, electrified into one bond of suffering brotherhood.
Hanneh Breineh, hand convulsively clutching her breast, began an impassioned appeal. “Which from us here needs me to tell what’s a pogrom? It drips yet the blood from my heart when I only begin to remember. Only nine years old I was--the _pogromschiks_ fell on our village.... Frightened!... You all know what’s to be frightened from death--frightened from being burned alive or torn to pieces by wild wolves--but what’s that compared to the cold shiverings that shook us by the hands and feet when we heard the drunken Cossacks coming nearer and nearer our hut. The last second my mother, like a crazy, pushed me and my little sister into the chimney. We heard the house tremble with shots--cries from my mother--father--then stillness. In the middle of the black night my little sister and I crawled ourselves out to see----” Hanneh Breineh covered her eyes as though to shut out the hideous vision.
Again Hanneh Breineh’s voice arose. “I got no more breath for words--only this--the last bite from our mouths, the last shirt from our backs we got to take away to help out Moisheh. It’s not only Moisheh’s old mother that’s out there--it’s our own old mother--our own flesh-and-blood brothers.... Even I--beggar that I am--even I will give my only feather bed to the pawn.”
A hush, and then a tumult of suppressed emotion. The room seethed with wild longings of the people to give--to help--to ease their aching hearts sharing Moisheh’s sorrow.
Shoolem, a grey, tottering ragpicker, brought forth a grimy cigar-box full of change. “Here is all the pennies and nickels and dimes I was saving and saving myself for fifteen years. I was holding by life on one hope--the hope that some day I would yet die before the holy walls from Jerusalem.” With the gesture of a Rothschild he waved it in the air as he handed it over. “But here you got it, Moisheh. May it help to bring your brothers in good luck to America!”
Sosheh, the finisher, turned aside as she dug into her stocking and drew forth a crisp five-dollar bill. “That all I got till my next pay. Only it should help them,” she gulped. “I wish I had somebody left alive that I could send a ship ticket to.”
Zaretsky, the matchmaker, snuffed noisily a pinch of tobacco and pulled from his overcoat pocket a book of War Savings stamps. “I got fourteen dollars of American Liberty. Only let them come in good luck and I’ll fix them out yet with the two grandest girls in New York.”
* * * * *
The ship bearing Moisheh’s family was to dock the next morning at eleven o’clock. The night before Hanneh Breineh and all of us were busy decorating the house in honour of the arrivals. The sound of hammering and sweeping and raised, excited voices filled the air.
Sosheh, the finisher, standing on top of a soap box, was garnishing the chandelier with red-paper flowers.
Hanneh Breineh tacked bright, checked oilcloth on top of the washtubs.
Zaretsky was nailing together the broken leg of the table.
“I should live so,” laughed Sosheh, her sallow face flushed with holiday joy. “This kitchen almost shines like a parlour, but for only this----” pointing to the sagging lounge where the stained mattress protruded.
“_Shah!_ I’ll fix this up in a minute so it’ll look like new from the store.” And Hanneh Breineh took out the red-flowered, Sabbath tablecloth from the bureau and tucked it around the lounge.
Meantime Moisheh, his eyes popping with excitement, raised clouds of dust as he swept dirt that had been gathering since Passover from the corners of the room.
Unable to wait any longer for the big moment, he had been secretly planning for weeks, zip! under the bed went the mountain of dirt, to be followed by the broom, which he kicked out of sight.
“Enough with the cleaning!” he commanded. “Come only around,” and he pulled out from the corner his Russian steamer basket.
“Oi--oi--oi--oi, and ai--ai!” the boarders shouted, hilariously. “Will you treat us to a holiday cake maybe?”
“Wait only!” He gesticulated grandly as he loosened the lock.
One by one he held up and displayed the treasured trousseau which little by little he had gathered together for his loved ones.
A set of red-woollen underwear for each of the brothers, and for his mother a thick, grey shirt. Heavy cotton socks, a blue-checked apron, and a red-velvet waist appeared next. And then--Moisheh was reduced to guttural grunts of primitive joy as he unfolded a rainbow tie for Feivel, the doctor, and pink suspenders for his “baby” brother.
Moisheh did not remove his clothes--no sleep for him that night. It was still dark when the sound of his heavy shoes, clumping around the kitchen as he cooked his breakfast, woke the rest of us.
“You got to come with me--I can’t hold myself together with so much joy,” he implored. There was no evading his entreaties, so I promised to get away as soon as I could and meet him at the dock.
I arrived at Ellis Island to find Moisheh stamping up and down like a wild horse. “What are they holding them so long?” he cried, mad with anxiety to reach those for whom he had so long waited and hungered.
I had to shake him roughly before I could make him aware of my presence, and immediately he was again lost in his eager search of the mob that crowded the gates.
The faces of the immigrants, from the tiniest babe at its mother’s breast to the most decrepit old grey-haired man, were all stamped with the same transfigured look--a look of those who gazed for the first time upon the radiance of the dawn. The bosoms of the women heaved with excitement. The men seemed to be expanding, growing with the surge of realized hopes, of dreams come true. They inhaled deeply, eager to fill their stifled bodies and souls with the first life-giving breath of free air. Their eyes were luminous with hope, bewildered joy and vague forebodings. A voice was heard above the shouted orders and shuffling feet--above the clamour of the pressing crowds--“_Gott sei dank!_” The pæan of thanksgiving was echoed and re-echoed--a pæan of nations released--America.
I had to hold tight to the bars not to be trampled underfoot by the crowd that surged through the gates. Suddenly a wild animal cry tore from Moisheh’s throat. “_Mammeniu! Mammeniu!_” And a pair of gorilla-like arms infolded a gaunt, wasted little figure wrapped in a shawl.
“Moisheh! my heart!” she sobbed, devouring him with hunger-ravaged eyes.
“_Ach!_” She trembled--drawing back to survey her first-born. “From the bare feet and rags of Smirsk to leather shoes and a suit like a Rothschild!” she cried in Yiddish. “_Ach!_--I lived to see America!”
A dumb thing laughing and crying he stood there, a primitive figure, pathetic, yet sublime in the purity of his passionate love, his first love--his love for his mother.
The toil-worn little hand pulled at his neck as she whispered in Moisheh’s ear, and as in a dream he turned with outstretched arms to greet his brothers.
“Feivel--_mein_ doctor!” he cried.
“Yes, yes, we’re here,” said the high-browed young doctor in a tone that I thought was a little impatient. “Now let’s divide up these bundles and get started.” Moisheh’s willing arms reached out for the heaviest sack.
“And here is my _teacherin_!” Moisheh’s grin was that of a small boy displaying his most prized possession.
Berel, the baby, with the first down of young manhood still soft on his cheeks, shyly enveloped my hand in his long, sensitive fingers. “How nice for you to come--a _teacherin_--an _Amerikanerin_!”
“Well--are we going?” came imperiously from the doctor.
“Yeh--yeh!” answered Moisheh. “I’m so out of my head from joy, my feet don’t work.” And, gathering the few remaining lighter packages together, we threaded our way through the crowded streets--the two newly arrived brothers walking silently together.
“Has Moisheh changed much?” I asked the doctor as I watched the big man help his mother tenderly across the car tracks.
“The same Moisheh,” he said, with an amused, slightly superior air.
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.”
Elated with this opportunity to show off his superior knowledge, he went on: “I learned myself to sign my name in America. Stop only and I’ll read for you the sign from the lamp-post,” and he spelled aloud, “W-a-l-l--Wall.”
“And what street is this?” asked the doctor, as we came to another corner.
Moisheh coloured with confusion, and the eyes he raised to his brother were like the eyes of a trapped deer pleading to be spared. “L-i-b----” He stopped. “Oh, _weh_!” he groaned, “the word is too long for me.”
“Liberty,” scorned the doctor. “You are an _Amerikaner_ already and you don’t know Liberty?”
His own humiliation forgot in pride of his brother’s knowledge, Moisheh nodded his head humbly.
“Yeh--yeh! You a _greener_ and yet you know Liberty. And I, an _Amerikaner_, is stuck by the word.” He turned to me with a pride that brought tears to his eyes. “Didn’t I tell you my brothers were high educated? Never mind--they won’t shame me in America.”
A look of adoration drank in the wonder of his beloved family. Overcome with a sense of his own unworthiness, he exclaimed, “Look only on me--a nothing and a nobody.” He breathed in my ear, “And such brothers!” With a new, deeper tenderness, he pressed his mother’s slight form more closely to him.
“More Bolsheviki!” scoffed a passer-by.
“Trotzky’s ambassadors,” sneered another.
And the ridicule was taken up by a number of jeering voices.
“Poor devils!” came from a richly dressed Hebrew, resplendent in his fur collar and a diamond stud. There was in his eyes a wistful, reminiscent look. Perhaps the sight of these immigrants brought back to him the day he himself had landed, barefoot and in rags, with nothing but his dreams of America.
The street was thronged with hurrying lunch seekers as we reached lower Broadway. I glanced at Moisheh’s brothers, and I could not help noticing how different was the calm and carefree expression of their faces from the furtive, frantic acquisitive look of the men in the financial district.
But the moment we reached our block the people from the stoops and windows waved their welcome. Hanneh Breineh and all the boarders, dressed up in their best, ran to meet us.
“Home!” cried the glowing Moisheh. “_Mazel-tuff!_ Good luck!” answered Hanneh Breineh.
Instantly we were surrounded by the excited neighbours whose voices of welcome rose above the familiar cries of the hucksters and pedlars that lined the street.
“Give a help!” commanded Hanneh Breineh as she seized the bundles from Moisheh’s numbed arms and divided them among the boarders. Then she led the procession triumphantly into her kitchen.
The table, with a profusion of festive dishes, sang aloud its welcome.
“Rockefeller’s only daughter couldn’t wish herself grander eatings by her own wedding,” bragged the hostess as she waved the travellers to the feast. A brass pot filled with _gefulte_ fish was under the festooned chandelier. A tin platter heaped high with chopped liver and onions sent forth its inviting aroma. _Tzimmes_--_blintzes_--a golden-roasted goose swimming in its own fat ravished the senses. Eyes and mouths watered at sight of such luscious plenty.
“White bread!--_Ach!_--white bread!” gasped the hunger-ravaged old mother. Reaching across the table, she seized the loaf in her trembling hands. “All those starving years--all those years!” she moaned, kissing its flaky whiteness as though it were a living thing.
“Sit yourself down--_mutterel_!” Hanneh Breineh soothed the old woman and helped her into the chair of honour. “White bread--even white bread is nothing in America. Even the charities--a black year on them!--even the charities give white bread to the beggars.”
Moisheh, beaming with joy of his loved ones’ nearness, was so busy passing and repassing the various dishes to his folks that he forgot his own meal.
“_Nu_--ain’t it time for you also to sit yourself down like a person?” urged Hanneh Breineh.
“_Tekeh--tekeh!_” added his mother. “Take something to your mouth.”
Thereupon Moisheh rolled up his sleeves and with the zest of a hungry caveman attacked the leg of a goose. He no sooner finished than he bent ravenously over the meat platter, his forehead working in rhythm to his jaws.
“Excuse me,” stammered Moisheh, wiping his lips with the end of his shirt-sleeve and sticking the meat on a fork.
“What’s the difference how you eat so long you got what to eat?” broke in Zaretsky, grabbing the breast of the goose and holding it to his thick lips.
His sensibilities recoiling at this cannibalistic devouring of food, Berel rose and walked to the air-shaft window. His arms shot out as though to break down the darkening wall which blotted out the daylight from the little room. “Plenty of food for the body, but no light for the soul,” he murmured, not intending to be heard.
Feivel, the doctor, lit a cigarette and walked up and down the room restlessly. He stopped and faced his younger brother with a cynical smile. “I guess America is like the rest of the world--you get what you take--sunlight as well as other things----”
“How take sunlight? What do you mean?”
“I mean America is like a dish of cheese _blintzes_ at a poor house. The beggars who are the head of the table and get their hands in first, they live and laugh----”
Hanneh Breineh wiped her lips with the corner of her apron and faced him indignantly. “You ain’t yet finished with your first meal in America and already you’re blowing from yourself like it’s coming to you yet better.”
“But why come to America?” defended Berel, the poet, “unless it gives you what’s lacking in other lands? Even in the darkest days in Russia the peasants had light and air.”
“Hey, Mr. Greenhorn Doctor--and you, young feller,” broke in Zaretsky, the block politician, “if you don’t like it here, then the President from America will give you a free ride back on the same ship on which you came from.”
Silenced by Zaretsky’s biting retort, the doctor lit a cigarette and sent leisurely clouds of smoke ceilingward.
Moisheh, who had been too absorbed in his food to follow the talk, suddenly looked up from his plate. Though unable to grasp the trend of the conversation, he intuitively sensed the hostile feeling in the room.
“Why so much high language,” he asked, “when there’s yet the nuts and raisins and the almonds to eat?”
* * * * *
A few months later Hanneh Breineh came into my room while peeling potatoes in her apron. “Greenhorns ain’t what greenhorns used to be,” she said, as she sat down on the edge of my cot. “Once when greenhorns came, a bone from a herring, a slice from an onion, was to them milk and honey; and now pour golden chicken fat into their necks, and they turn up their nose like it’s coming to them yet better.”
“What is it now?” I laughed.
Hanneh Breineh rose. “Listen only to what is going on,” she whispered, as she noiselessly pushed open the door and winked to me to come over and hear.
“I’m yet in debt over my neck. In God’s name, how could you spend out so much money for only a little pleasure,” remonstrated Moisheh.
“Do you think I’m a _schnorrer_ like you? I’m a man, and I have to live,” retorted the doctor.
“But two dollars for one evening in the opera only, when for ten cents you could have seen the grandest show in the movies!”
The doctor’s contemptuous glance softened into a look of condescending pity. “After all, my presser of pants, what a waste the opera would be on you. Your America is the movies.”
“Two dollars!” cried the little old mother, wringing her hands despairingly. “Moisheh didn’t yet pay out for the ship tickets.”
“Ship tickets--bah!--I wish he had never brought us to this golden country--dirt, darkness, houses like stalls for cattle!” And in a fury of disgust, not unmitigated with shame at his loss of temper, he slammed the door behind him.
“_Oi weh!_” wailed the careworn old mother. “Two dollars for an opera, and in such bad times!”
“_Ach! Mammeniu_,” Moisheh defended, “maybe Feivel ain’t like us. Remember he’s high-educated. He needs the opera like I need the bite of bread. Maybe even more yet. I can live through without even the bite of bread, but Feivel must have what wills itself in him.”
Hanneh Breineh closed the door and turned to me accusingly. “What’s the use from all your education, if that’s what kind of people it makes?”
“Yes,” I agreed with Hanneh Breineh. “Education without heart is a curse.”
Hanneh Breineh bristled. “I wish I should only be cursed with an education. It’s only by the Americans education is nothing. It used to be an honour in Russia to shine a doctor’s shoes for him.”
“So you’re for education, after all?” I ventured, trying the impossible--to pin Hanneh Breineh down.
“Bloodsuckers!” Hanneh Breineh hissed. “Moisheh dries out the marrow from his head worrying for the dollar, and these high-educated brothers sit themselves on top of his neck like leeches. Greenhorns--opera--the world is coming to an end!”
Work with the Immigration Department took me to Washington for almost a year. As soon as I returned to New York I went to the only home I knew--Hanneh Breineh’s lodging-house.
My old friend, Moisheh, greeted me at the door. “_Teacherin!_” he cried, with a shout of welcome, and then called to his mother. “Come quick. See only who is here!”
Sleeves rolled up and hands full of dough, the little soul hurried in. “The sky is falling to the earth!” she cried. “You here? And are you going to stay?”
“Sure will she stay,” said Moisheh, helping me remove my things.
“And where are Hanneh Breineh and the boarders?” I questioned.
“Out on a picnic by Coney Island.”
“And why didn’t you and your mother go?”
“I got to cook Feivel’s dinner,” she gesticulated with doughy palms.
“And I got my Coney Island here,” said Moisheh.
To my great delight I saw he had been reading the life of Lincoln--the book I had left him the day I went away.
“My head is on fire thinking and dreaming from Lincoln. It shines before my face so real, I feel myself almost talking to him.”
Moisheh’s eyes were alive with light, and as I looked at him I felt for the first time a strange psychic resemblance between Moisheh and Lincoln. 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.”