Chapter II: Part 2

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.”

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.”

“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 out. I’m yet too much of a dummox----”

“What’s in us must come out. I feel America needs you and me as much as she needs her Rockefellers and Morgans. Rockefellers and Morgans only pile up mountains of money; we bring to America the dreams and desires of ages--the youth that never had a chance to be young--the choked lives that never had a chance to live.”

A shadow filmed Moisheh’s brooding eyes. “I can’t begin yet to think from myself for a few years. First comes my brothers. If only Feivel would work for himself up for a big doctor and Berel for a big writer then I’ll feel myself free to do something....

“Shah! I got great news for you,” Moisheh announced. “Feivel has already his doctor’s office.”

“Where did he get all the money?”

“On the instalment plan I got him the chair and the office things. Now he’s beginning to earn already enough to pay almost half his rent.”

“Soon he’ll be for dinner.” The old lady jumped up. “I got to get his eating ready before he comes.” And she hastened back to the kitchen stove.

“And Berel--what does he do?” I inquired.

“Berel ain’t working yet. He’s still writing from his head,” explained Moisheh. “Wait only and I’ll call him. He’s locked himself up in his bedroom; nobody should bother him.”

“Berel!” he called, tapping respectfully at the door.

“_Yuk!_” came in a voice of nervous irritation. “What is it?”

“The _teacherin_ is here,” replied Moisheh.

“Only a minute.”

“It’s me,” I added. “I’d like to see you.”

Berel came out, hair dishevelled, with dreamy, absent look, holding pencil and paper in his hand. “I was just finishing a poem,” he said in greeting to me.

“I have been looking for your name in the magazines. Have you published anything yet?”

“I--publish in the American magazines?” he flung, hurt beyond words. “I wouldn’t mix my art with their empty drivel.”

“But, surely, there are some better magazines,” I protested.

“Pshah! Their best magazines--the pink-and-white jingles that they call poetry are not worth the paper they’re printed on. America don’t want poets. She wants plumbers.”

“But what will you do with the poetry you write?”

“I’ll publish it myself. Art should be free, like sunlight and beauty. The only compensation for the artist is the chance to feed hungry hearts. If only Moisheh could give me the hundred dollars I’d have my volume printed at once.”

“But how can I raise all that money when I’m not yet paid out with Feivel’s doctor’s office?” remonstrated Moisheh. “Don’t you think if--maybe you’d get a little job?”

An expression of abstraction came over Betel’s face, and he snapped, impatiently: “Yes--yes--I told you that I would look for a job. But I must write this while I have the inspiration.”

“Can’t you write your inspiration out in the evening?” faltered Moisheh. “If you could only bring in a few dollars a week to help pay ourselves out to the instalment man.”

Berel looked at his brother with compassionate tolerance. “What are to you the things of the soul? All you care for is money--money--money! You’d want me to sell my soul, my poetry, my creative fire--to hand you a few dirty dollars.”

The postman’s whistle and the cry, “Berel Cinski!”

Moisheh hurried downstairs and brought back a large return envelope.

“Another one of those letters back,” deplored the mother, untactfully. “You’re only for making the post office rich with the stamps from Moisheh’s blood money.”

“Dammit!” Defeat enraged the young poet to the point of brutality. “Stop nagging me and mixing in with things you don’t understand!” He struck the rude table with his clenched fist. “It’s impossible to live with you thickheads--numskulls--money-grubbing worms.”

He threw on his hat and coat and paused for a moment glowering in the doorway. “Moisheh,” he demanded, “give me a quarter for car fare. I have to go uptown to the library.” Silently the big brother handed him the money, and Berel flung himself out of the room.

The door had no sooner closed on the poet than the doctor sauntered into the room. After a hasty “Hallo!” he turned to Moisheh. “I’ve had a wonderful opportunity offered me--but I can’t take advantage of it.”

“What!” cried Moisheh, his face brightening.

“My landlord invited me to his house to-night, to meet his only daughter.”

“Why not go?” demanded Moisheh.