Children of Loneliness

BY
ANZIA YEZIERSKA
Author of “Hungry Hearts,” “Salome of the Tenements,” etc.

CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD
London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne

First published 1923

Copyright, 1923, by
Funk & Wagnalls Company

Printed in Great Britain

To
Mrs. HENRY OLLESHEIMER
and
Mr. R. J. CUDDIHY

CONTENTS

CHILDREN OF LONELINESS

MOSTLY ABOUT MYSELF

I feel like a starved man who is so bewildered by the first sight of food that he wants to grab and devour the ice-cream, the roast and the entrée all in one gulp. For ages and ages, my people in Russia had no more voice than the broomstick in the corner. The poor had no more chance to say what they thought or felt than the dirt under the feet.

And here, in America, a miracle has happened to me. I can lift up my head like a person. After centuries of suppression I am allowed to speak. Is it a wonder that I am too excited to know where to begin?

All the starved, unlived years crowd into my throat and choke me. I don’t know whether it is joy or sorrow that hurts me so. I only feel my release is wrung with the pain of all those back of me who lived and died, their dumbness pressing down on them like stories on the heart.

My mother, who dried out her days fighting at the pushcarts for another potato, another onion into the bag, wearing out her heart and soul and brain with the one unceasing worry—how to get food for the children a penny cheaper—and my father, a Hebrew scholar and dreamer who was always too much up in the air to come down to such sordid thoughts as bread and rent, and the lost and wasted lives of my brothers and sisters and my grandfather and grandmother, and all those dumb generations back of me, are crying in every breath of every word that is struggling itself out of me.

I am the mad mob at a mass meeting, shouting, waving with their hands and stamping with their feet, to their leader: “Speech! Speech!” And I am also the bewildered leader struggling to say something and make myself heard through the deafening noise of a thousand clamouring voices.

I envy the writers who can sit down at their desks in the clear, calm security of their vision and begin their story at the beginning and work it up logically, step by step, till they get to the end.

With me, the end and the middle and the beginning of my story whirl before me in a mad blur. And I cannot sit still inside myself till the vision becomes clear and whole and sane in my brain. I’m too much on fire to wait till I understand what I see and feel. My hands rush out to seize a word from the end, a phrase from the middle, or a sentence from the beginning. I jot down any fragment of a thought that I can get hold of. And then I gather these fragments, words, phrases, sentences, and I paste them together with my own blood.

Think of the toil it takes to wade through a dozen pages that you must cut down into one paragraph. Sometimes the vivisection I must commit on myself to create one little living sentence leaves me spent for days.

I thought when the editor asked me to write mostly about myself, telling of my own life, it would be so simple the thing would write itself. And just look at me at my desk! Before me are reams of jumbled pages of madness and inspiration, and I am trying to make a little sense of it all.

What shall I keep, and what shall I throw away? Which is madness, and which is inspiration? I never know. I pick and choose things like a person feeling his way in the dark. I never know whether the thoughts I’ve discarded are not perhaps better than the thoughts I’ve kept. With all the physical anguish I put into my work, I am never sure of myself. But I am sure of this, that the utterance of the ignorant like me is something like the utterance of the dying. It’s mixed up and incoherent, but it has in it the last breath of life and death.

I am learning to accept the torture of chaos and confusion and doubt through which my thoughts must pass, as a man learns to accept a hump on his back, or the loss of an arm, or any affliction which the fates thrust upon him.

I am learning, as I grow older, to be tolerant with my own inadequacy. I am learning slowly to stop wasting myself trying to make myself over on the pattern of some better organized, more educated person than I am. I no longer waste precious time wishing for the brains of a George Eliot, or the fluency of a George Sand, or the marvellous gift of words of a May Sinclair. Here I am as I am, and life is short and work is long. With this limited brain of my inadequate self I must get the most work done. I can only do the best I can and leave the outcome in the hands of the Higher Powers.

I am aware that there’s a little too much of I—I—I, too much of self-analysis and introspection in my writing. But this is because I was forced to live alone with myself so much. I spent most of my youth at work I hated, work which called only for the use of the hands, the strength of my body—not my heart, not my brain. So my thoughts, instead of going out naturally to the world around me, were turned in upon myself.

I look upon my self-analysis and introspection as so much dirt through which I have to dig before I can come into the light of objectivity and see the people of the worlds around me.

Writing is to me a confession—not a profession. I know a man, a literary hack who calls himself a dealer in words. He can write to order on any subject he is hired to write about. I often marvel at the swift ease with which he can turn from literary criticism to politics, or psycho-analysis. A fatal fluency enables him to turn out thousands of words a day in the busy factory of his brain, without putting anything of himself into it.

But I can never touch the surfaces of things. I can only write from the depths. I feel myself always under the aching weight of my thoughts. And words are luring lights that beckon to me through the thick mist of vague, dumb thoughts that hang over me and press down on me.

I am so in love with the changing lights and shades of words that I almost hate their power over me, as you hate the tyranny of the people you love too much. I almost hate writing, because I love so passionately to express the innermost and outermost of my thoughts and feelings. And the words I write are never what I started out to express, but what came out of my desire for expression.

Often I read my own writing as though it were somebody else’s. My own words mock at me with their glaring unreality. Where is that burning vividness of things that possessed me when I began? Why did I kill myself so for nothing? Are these stiff, stilted words me?

I stare at the pages that represent so many days and nights of labour more bitter, more violent, than childbirth. What has happened? Has my terrific passion for giving out my experiences only built a barrier of barren words against the experience that I held so close?

It’s as if every kiss, every embrace of the lover and the beloved instead of fusing them into a closer oneness only drew them farther and farther apart. Every written word instead of bringing the vision nearer only pushed it farther and farther away.

But the sense of failure never stops me. It only spurs my sleeping senses with ever new inexhaustible energy to do the one thing over and over and over again till I touch nearer the edge of that flaming reality just beyond reach.

Writing is ordinarily the least part of a man. It is all there is of me. I want to write with every pulse of my blood and every breath of my spirit. I want to write waking or dreaming, year in and year out. I burn up in this all-consuming desire my family, my friends, my loves, my clothes, my food, my very life.

And yet the minute my writing gets into print I hate the sight of it. I have all the patience in the world to do over a page a thousand times. But the moment it gets out of my hand I can’t bear to touch it with a pitchfork. The minute a manuscript gets into print it’s all dead shells of the past to me.

I know some people who hate the books I write, and because they hate my books they hate me. I want to say to them now that I, too, hate the stuff I write. Can’t we be friends and make the mutual hatred of my books a bond instead of a barrier? My books are not me.

Is this a contradiction of anything I said in the page above? I do not claim to be logical or consistent. I do not claim to think things out; I only feel out my feelings, and the only thing true about feelings is that they change and become different in the very process of utterance. The minute I say a thing with the absolute sincerity of my being, up rushes another thought that hits my most earnest sincerity in the face and shows it up for a lie.

I am alive, and the only thing real in my aliveness is the vitality of unceasing change. Sometimes I wake up in the morning with a fresh new thought that sweeps out of the window all of the most precious thoughts of the day before.

Perhaps by the time I shall have reached the end of this little sketch I shall have refuted every statement I tried to make at the beginning. I cannot help it. I am not attempting to write a story to fit into the set mould of a magazine. I am trying to give you the changing, baffling, contradictory substance of which my life is made.

I remember my mother’s ecstatic face when she burst into the house and announced proudly that, though she never had had a chance to learn the alphabet, she could read the names of the streets and she could find her way to the free dispensary without having to be led by us.

“I’m no longer blind,” she cried, tossing up her market basket in a gesture of triumph. “The signs of the streets are like pictures before my eyes. Delancey Street has the black hooks one way, and Essex Street has black hooks the other way.” She tore off her blue-checked apron. “I can also be a lady and walk without having to beg people to show me the way.”

Something of my mother’s wonder was mine when, without knowing the first alphabet of literature, I had discovered that Beauty was anywhere a person tries to think out his thoughts. Beauty was no less in the dark basement of a sweat-shop than in the sunny, spacious halls of a palace. So that I, buried alive in the killing blackness of poverty, could wrest the beauty of reality out of my experiences no less than the princess who had the chance to live and love and whose only worry was which of her adorers should she choose for a husband.

I did not at first think it as clearly as I write it now. In fact, I did not think then at all. I only felt. And it gave me a certain power over the things that weighed over me, merely saying out on paper what I felt about them.

My first alphabet of self-expression was hatred, wrath and rebellion. Once during lunch-hour while the other girls in the shop were eating and talking and laughing, I wrote out on my greasy lunch-bag the thoughts that were boiling in me for a long, long time.

“I hate beautiful things,” I began. “All day long I handle beautiful clothes, but not for me—only for others to wear. The bloated rich with nothing but cold cash can buy the beautiful things made with the sweat of my hands, while I choke in ugliness.” Merely writing out the wildness running through my head enabled me to wear the rags I had to wear with a certain bitter defiance.

But after a while, raving at things in the air ceased to bring me relief. I felt a little like my mother yelling and cursing at the children and the worries around her without knowing what or where. I felt like a woman standing in the middle of her upset house in the morning—beds not made, dishes not washed, dirty clothes and rags hanging over the chairs, all the drawers pushed out in mixed-up disorder, the broom with the dirt in the middle of the floor—and she not knowing where to begin.

I wanted order, order in my head. But then I was too mixed up with too many thoughts to put anything in its place. In a blind sort of way, in groping for order I was groping for beauty. I felt no peace in what I wrote unless I could make my words laugh and cry with the life of the poor I was living. I was always digging, digging for the beauty that I sensed back of the dirt and the disorder. Until I could find a way to express the beauty of that reality there was no rest in me. Like the woman who makes the beds or sweeps the house and lets the rest go, so I took hold of one idea at a time and pushed all the other ideas out of my head. And day and night I burned up my body and brain with that one idea till it got light all around me—the light of an idea that shaped itself in a living picture of living people.

When I saw my first story in print I felt bigger than Columbus who discovered the New World. I felt bigger than the man who built Brooklyn Bridge or the highest skyscraper in New York. I walked the streets, holding the magazine tight in my hands, laughing and crying to myself: “I had an idea and I thought it out. I did it, I did it! I’m not a crazy fool, I’m not a crazy fool!”

But the next day all my fiery gladness turned cold. I saw how far from the whole round circle of the idea was my printed story. And I was burning to do the same thing over again from another side, to show it up more.

Critics have said that I have but one story to tell, and that I tell that one story in different ways each time I write. That is true. My one story is hunger. Hunger driven by loneliness.

But is not all of human life but the story of our hunger, our loneliness? What is at the root of economics, sociology, literature and all art but man’s bread hunger and man’s love hunger?

When I first started to write I could only write one thing—different phases of the one thing only—bread hunger. At last I’ve written out my bread hunger. And now I can write only the different phases of the one thing only—loneliness, love hunger, the hunger for people.

In the days of poverty I used to think there was no experience that tears through the bottom of the earth like the hunger for bread. But now I know, more terrible than the hunger for bread is the hunger for people.

I used to be more hungry after a meal than before. Years ago, the food I could afford to buy only whetted my appetite for more food. Sometimes after I had paid down my last precious pennies for a meal in one of those white-tiled restaurants, I’d get so mad with hunger I’d want to dash the empty dishes at the heads of the waiters and cry out like a lunatic: “Don’t feed me with plates and forks and tablecloths. I want real food. I want to bite into huge chunks of meat. I want butter and quarts of milk and eggs—dozens of eggs. I want to fill up for once in my life.”

This unacted madness used to be always flying through my brain, morning, noon and night. Whenever I wanted to think, my thoughts were swept away by the sight of thick, juicy steaks and mounds of butter and platters full of eggs.

Now I no longer live in a lonely hall-room in a tenement. I have won many friends. I am invited out to teas and dinners and social affairs. And I wonder, is my insatiable hunger for people so great because for so many centuries my race has been isolated in Ghettos, shut out of contact with others? Here in America for the first time races, classes and creeds are free to meet and mingle on planes as high and wide as all humanity and its problems. And I am aching to touch all the different races, classes and creeds at all possible points of contact, and I never seem to have enough of people.

When I first came to America the coldness of the Americans used to rouse in me the fury of a savage. Their impersonal, non-committal air was like a personal insult to me. I longed to shake them out of their aloofness, their frozen stolidity. But now when I meet an Anglo-Saxon I want to cry out to him: “We’re friends, we’re friends, I tell you! We understand the same things, even though we seem to be so different on the outside.”

Sometimes a man and a woman are so different that they hate each other at first sight. Their intense difference stabs a sharp sword of fear into each heart. But when this fear that froze each into his separate oppositeness ever has a chance for a little sun of understanding, then the very difference that drew them apart pulls them closer than those born alike. Perhaps that accounts for the devouring affinity between my race and the Anglo-Saxon race.

In my early childhood my people hammered into me defeat, defeat, because that was the way they accepted the crushing weight of life. Life had crushed my mother, so without knowing it she fed defeat with the milk of her bosom into the blood and bone of her children. But this thing that stunted the courage, the initiative, of the other children roused the fighting devils in me.

When yet barely able to speak, I began to think and question the justice of the world around me and to assert my rights.

“Mamma,” I asked out of a clear sky, “why does Masha Stein have butter on her bread every morning, and why is our bread always hard and dry, and nothing on it?”

“Butter wills itself in you!” shrieked my mother, as she thrust the hash of potato peelings in front of me for my noonday meal. “Have you got a father a business man, a butcher or a grocer, a breadgiver, like Masha Stein’s father? You don’t own the dirt under Masha’s doorstep. You got a father a scholar. He holds himself all day with God; he might as well hang the beggar’s bag on his neck and be done with it.”

At the time I had no answer. I was too young to voice my revolt against my mother’s dark reasoning. But the fact that I did not forget this speech of so many years ago shows how her black pessimism cut against my grain.

I have a much clearer memory of my next rebellion against the thick gloom in which my young years were sunk.

“Mamma, what’s a birthday?” I cried, bursting into the house in a whirl of excitement. “Becky, the pawnbroker’s girl on the block, will have a birthday to-morrow. And she’ll get presents for nothing, a cake with candles on it, and a whole lot of grand things from girls for nothing—and she said I must come. Could I have a birthday, too, like she?”

“Woe is to me!” cried my mother, glaring at me with wet, swollen eyes. “A birthday lays in your head? Enjoyments lays in your head?” she continued bitterly. “You want to be glad that you were born into the world? A whole lot you got to be glad about. Wouldn’t it be better if you was never born already?”

At the harsh sound of my mother’s voice all my dreams took wing. In rebellion and disappointment I thrust out my lips with a trembling between retort and tears. It was as if the devil himself urged my mother thus to avenge herself upon her helpless children for the aches and weariness of her own life. So she went on, like a horse bolting downhill, feeling the pressure of the load behind him.

“What is with you the great joy? That you ain’t got a shirt on your back? That you ain’t got no shoes on your feet? Why are you with yourself so happy? Is it because the landlord sent the moving bill, and you’ll be laying in the street to-morrow, already?”

I had forgotten that we had received a notice of eviction, for unpaid rent, a few days before. A frenzy of fear had taken possession of my mother as she anticipated the horror of being thrown into the street. For hours at a time I would see her staring at the wall with the glassy stare of a madwoman.

“With what have you to be happy, I ask only?” she went on. “Have you got money laying in the bank? Let the rich people enjoy themselves. For them is the world like made to order. For them the music plays. They can have birthdays. But what’s the world to the poor man? Only one terrible, never-stopping fight with the groceryman and the butcher and the landlord.”

I gazed at my mother with old, solemn eyes, feeling helplessly sucked into her bitterness and gloom.

“What’s a poor man but a living dead one?” she pursued, talking more to herself than to me. “You ought to light a black candle on your birthday. You ought to lie on your face and cry and curse the day you was born!”

Crushed by her tirade, I went out silently. The fairy dream of the approaching birthday had been rudely shattered. Blinded with tears, I sat down on the edge of the gutter in front of our tenement.

“Look, these are the pink candles for the birthday cake!” A poke in the back from Becky startled me. “Aren’t they grand? And mamma will buy me a French doll, and papa said he’d give me a desk, and my aunt will give me a painting set, and every girl that comes will bring me something different.”

“But what’s the use?” I sobbed. “I ain’t got nothing for no present, and I can’t come—and my mother is so mean she got mad and hollered like hell because I only asked her about the birthday, and——”

A passionate fit of sobbing drowned my words.

In an instant Becky had her arms about me. “I want you to come without a present,” she said. “I will have a lot of presents, anyhow.”

Assured of her welcome I went the next day. But as I opened the door fear seized me. I paused trembling, holding the knob in my hand, too dazed by the sight before me to make a step. More than the strangeness of the faces awed me. Ordinary home comforts, cushioned chairs, green ferns between white curtains, the bright rugs on the floor were new and wonderful to me. Timorously I edged my way into the room, so blinded by the shimmering colours of the cakes and fruits and candies that covered the table that I did not see Becky approaching me with outstretched arms.

“Mamma, this is that little immigrant girl who never had a birthday,” she said, “so I wanted to show her mine.”

Becky’s father glanced at her all in white, with pink ribbons on her curls, as she stood beside me in my torn rags reeking with the grime of neglect. A shudder of revulsion went through him at the sight of me.

“See what Becky has to mix up with on the block,” he whispered to his wife. “For God’s sake, give her a nickel, give her some candy, give her anything, but let her run along.”

Street child that I was, my instinct sensed the cold wave of his thought without hearing the exact words. Breaking away from Becky’s detaining hand I made for the door.

“I want to go home! I want to go home!” I sobbed as I ran out of the room.

Whitman has said, “It is as lucky to die as it is to be born.” And I put his thought into my own words, “It is as lucky not to have advantages as it is to have them.” I mean that facing my disadvantages—the fears, the discouragements, the sense of inferiority—drove me to fight every inch of the way for things I demanded out of life. And, as a writer, the experience of forcing my way from the bottomest bottom gave me the knowledge of the poor that no well-born writer could possibly have.

I am thinking, for instance, of Victor Hugo and his immortal book, “Les Misérables.” It’s great literature, but it isn’t the dirt and the blood of the poor that I saw and that forced me to write. Or take the American, Jack London: when he wrote about tramps he roused the sense of reality in his readers, because he had been a tramp. But later, when he tried to make stories of the great unwashed of the cities—again this was only literature.

The clear realization that literature is beyond my reach, that I must either be real or nothing, enables me to accept my place as the cobbler who must stick to his last, and gives my work any merit it may have. I stand on solid ground when I write of the poor, the homeless and the hungry.

Like many immigrants who expected to find America a realized Utopian dream, I had my disillusions. I quote here from an article which was published in Good Housekeeping in June, 1920.

When the editor told me that he would give me the chance to speak to the Americans out of my heart and say freely, not what I ought to feel—not what the Americans want me to feel—but what I actually do feel—something broke loose in me—a tightness that had held me strained like one whose fists are clenched—resisting—resisting——

Resisting what? Had I not come to America with open, outstretched arms, all my earthly possessions tied up in a handkerchief and all the hopes of humanity singing in my heart?

Had I not come to join hands with all those thousands of dreamers who had gone before me in search of the Golden Land? As I rushed forward with hungry eagerness to meet the expected welcoming, the very earth danced under my feet. All that I was, all that I had, I held out in my bare hands to America, the beloved, the prayed-for land.

But no hand was held out to meet mine. My eyes burned with longing—seeking—seeking for a comprehending glance. Where are the dreamers? cried my heart. My hands dropped down, my gifts unwanted.

I found no dreamers in America. I found rich men, poor men, educated men, ignorant men—struggling—all struggling—for bread, for rent, for banks, for mines. Rich and poor, educated and ignorant—straining—straining—wearing out their bodies, their brains, for the possession of things—money, power, position—their dreams forgotten.

I found in this rich land man still fighting man, as in the poorest part of the old country. Just as the starving Roumanian Jews, who had nothing to eat in their homeland but herring, when they became millionaires still ate herring from gold plates at banquets, so, throughout America, the dollar fight that grew up like a plague in times of poverty, killing the souls of men, still goes on in times of plenty.

I had expected to work in America, but work at the thing I loved—work with my mind, my heart, prepared for my work by education. I had dreamed of free schools, free colleges, where I could learn to give out my innermost thoughts and feelings to the world. But no sooner did I come off the ship than hunger drove me to the sweatshop, to become a “hand”—not a brain—not a soul—not a spirit—but just a “hand”—cramped, deadened into a part of a machine—a hand fit only to grasp, not to give.

Time came when I was able to earn my bread and rent. I earned what would have been wealth to me in Poland. My knotted nerves relaxed. I begun to breathe like a free human being. Ach! Maybe I could yet be at home in America. Maybe I could yet make something of myself. My choked-in spirit revived. There was a new light in my eyes, new strength in my arms and fingers. New hopes, new dreams beckoned to me. Should I take a night course in college, or buy myself the much-longed-for books, or treat myself to a little vacation to have time to think?

Then the landlady came with the raise in rent. The loaf of bread that was five cents became ten. Milk that was eight cents a quart became eighteen. Shoes, clothes, everything doubled and tripled in price. I felt like one put on a rack—thumb-screws torturing my flesh—pay—pay—pay!

What had been enough to give me comfort yesterday became starvation to-day. Always the cost of living leaping over the rise in wages. Never free from poverty—even in America.

And then I clenched my hands and swore that I would hold my dream of America—and fight for it. I refuse to accept the America where men make other men poor—create poverty where God has poured out wealth. I refuse to accept the America that gives the landlord the right to keep on raising my rent and to drive me to the streets when I do not earn enough to meet his rapacious demands.

I cry out in this wilderness for America—my America—different from all other countries. In this America promised to the oppressed of all lands, there is enough so that man need not fight man for his bread, but work with man, building the beauty that for hundreds of years, in thousands of starved villages of Europe, men have dreamed was America—beautiful homes—beautiful cities—beautiful lives reaching up for higher, ever higher visions of beauty.

I know you will say what right have I to come here and make demands upon America. But are not my demands the breath, the very life of America? What, after all, is America, but the response to the demands of immigrants like me, seeking new worlds in which their spirits may be free to create beauty? Were not the Pilgrim Fathers immigrants demanding a new world in which they could be free to live higher lives?

Yes, I make demands—not in arrogance, but in all humility. I demand—driven by my desire to give. I want to give not only that which I am, but that which I might be if I only had the chance. I want to give to America not the immigrant you see before you—starved, stunted, resentful, on the verge of hysteria from repression. I want to give a new kind of immigrant, full grown in mind and body—loving, serving, upholding America.

By writing out my protests and disillusions, I aired and clarified them. Slowly, I began to understand my unreasoning demands upon America and what America had to offer. I saw that America was a new world in the making, that anyone who has something real in him can find a way to contribute himself in this new world. But I saw I had to fight for my chance to give what I had to give, with the same life-and-death earnestness with which a man fights for his bread.

What had I with my empty hands and my hungry heart to give to America? I had my hunger, my homelessness, my dumbness, my blind searchings and gropings for what I knew not. I had to give to America my aching ignorance, my burning desire for knowledge. I had to give to America the dirt and the ugliness of my black life of poverty and my all-consuming passion for beauty.

As long as I kept stretching out my hands begging, begging for others to understand me, for friendship, for help—as long as I kept begging them to give me something—so long I was shut out from America. But the moment I understood America well enough to tell her about herself as I saw her—the moment I began to express myself—America accepted my self-expression as a gift from me, and from everywhere hands reached out to help me.

With the money I earned writing out stories of myself and my people, I was enabled to go abroad and to take another look around the Old World. I travelled from city to city. My special purpose was to talk to the poor people in the different countries and see how their chance to live compared with the chances of those in America.

I find that in no other country has the new-comer such a direct chance to come to the front and become a partner in the making of the country. Not where you come from, but what is in you and what you are, counts in America.

In no other country is there such healthy rebellion, such vital discontent, as there is among the poor in America. And the rebellion and discontent of the poor is in proportion to how well off they are. The poor people demand more of America than they ever dared to demand of their homeland, because America is brimming over with riches enough for everybody.

Life in America is a swift, sharp adventure. In the old countries things are more or less settled. In America the soil is young, and the people are young blossoming shoots of a new-grown civilization.

The writers of Europe can only be stylists, because life and traditions are fixed with them. In America life is yet unexplored, and lived new by each new-comer. And that is why America is such virgin stuff for the novelist.

Fiction is a mirror of life as it is being lived at the moment. And the moments are more static in Europe than in America. I admit that art is not so good in America as in Europe, because art is a decoration, and America is a young country too turbulent with life to take time to decorate itself.

I who used to be the most violent rebel of an immigrant, I now find myself the most ardent defender of America. I see every flaw of America perhaps more clearly than ever before. I know the ruthless commercialism of our big cities, the grabbing greed of landlords since the war making the thought of home almost impossible to the poor. I know that the gospel of success which rules in America hurts itself, because failure and defeat have revelations for humanity’s deeper growth, to which success is deaf and dumb and blind.

I know how often the artists, the makers of beauty, in America are driven to the wall by the merciless extortion of those who sell the means of existence. But I know, too, that those of the artists who survive are vitalized by the killing things which had failed to kill them. America has no place for the dawdling, soft-spined, make-believe artists that swarm in the Paris cafés.

In the sunshine of the opportunities that have come to me, I am always aware of those around me and behind me who lacked the terrific vitality, the brutal self-absorption with which I had to fight for my chance or be blotted out. My eyes will always turn back with loneliness and longing for the old faces and old scenes that I loved more than my life. But though it tears my heart out of my body to go on, I must go on.

There’s no going back to the Old World for anyone who has breathed the invigorating air of America. I return to America with the new realization that in no other country would a nobody from nowhere—one of the millions of lonely immigrants that pour through Ellis Island—a dumb thing with nothing but hunger and desire, get the chance to become articulate that America has given me.

CHILDREN OF LONELINESS

§ 1

“Oh, mother, can’t you use a fork?” exclaimed Rachel as Mrs. Ravinsky took the shell of the baked potato in her fingers and raised it to her watering mouth.

“Here, teacherin mine, you want to learn me in my old age how to put the bite in my mouth?” The mother dropped the potato back into her plate, too wounded to eat. Wiping her hands on her blue-checked apron, she turned her glance to her husband, at the opposite side of the table.

“Yankev,” she said bitterly, “stick your bone on a fork. Our teacherin said you dassn’t touch no eatings with the hands.”

“All my teachers died already in the old country,” retorted the old man. “I ain’t going to learn nothing new no more from my American daughter.” He continued to suck the marrow out of the bone with that noisy relish that was so exasperating to Rachel.

“It’s no use,” stormed the girl, jumping up from the table in disgust; “I’ll never be able to stand it here with you people.”

“‘You people’? What do you mean by ‘you people’?” shouted the old man, lashed into fury by his daughter’s words. “You think you got a different skin from us because you went to college?”

“It drives me wild to hear you crunching bones like savages. If you people won’t change, I shall have to move and live by myself.”

Yankev Ravinsky threw the half-gnawed bone upon the table with such vehemence that a plate broke into fragments.

“You witch you!” he cried in a hoarse voice tense with rage. “Move by yourself! We lived without you while you was away in college, and we can get on without you further. God ain’t going to turn his nose on us because we ain’t got table manners from America. A hell she made from this house since she got home.”

“Shah! Yankev leben,” pleaded the mother, “the neighbours are opening the windows to listen to our hollering. Let us have a little quiet for a while till the eating is over.”

But the accumulated hurts and insults that the old man had borne in the one week since his daughter’s return from college had reached the breaking-point. His face was convulsed, his eyes flashed, and his lips were flecked with froth as he burst out in a volley of scorn:

“You think you can put our necks in a chain and learn us new tricks? You think you can make us over for Americans? We got through till fifty years of our lives eating in our own old way——”

“Woe is me, Yankev leben!” entreated his wife. “Why can’t we choke ourselves with our troubles? Why must the whole world know how we are tearing ourselves by the heads? In all Essex Street, in all New York, there ain’t such fights like by us.”

Her pleadings were in vain. There was no stopping Yankev Ravinsky once his wrath was roused. His daughter’s insistence upon the use of a knife and fork spelled apostasy, anti-Semitism, and the aping of the gentiles.

Like a prophet of old condemning unrighteousness, he ran the gamut of denunciation, rising to heights of fury that were sublime and godlike, and sinking from sheer exhaustion to abusive bitterness.

“Pfui on all your American colleges! Pfui on the morals of America! No respect for old age. No fear for God. Stepping with your feet on all the laws of the holy Torah. A fire should burn out the whole new generation. They should sink into the earth, like Korah.”

“Look at him cursing and burning! Just because I insist on their changing their terrible table manners. One would think I was killing them.”

“Do you got to use a gun to kill?” cried the old man, little red threads darting out of the whites of his eyes.

“Who is doing the killing? Aren’t you choking the life out of me? Aren’t you dragging me by the hair to the darkness of past ages every minute of the day? I’d die of shame if one of my college friends should open the door while you people are eating.”

“You—you——”

The old man was on the point of striking his daughter when his wife seized the hand he raised.

“Mincha! Yankev, you forgot Mincha!”

This reminder was a flash of inspiration on Mrs. Ravinsky’s part, the only thing that could have ended the quarrelling instantly. Mincha was the prayer just before sunset of the orthodox Jews. This religious rite was so automatic with the old man that at his wife’s mention of Mincha everything was immediately shut out, and Yankev Ravinsky rushed off to a corner of the room to pray.

“Ashrai Yoishwai Waisahuh!

“Happy are they who dwell in Thy house. Ever shall I praise Thee. Selah! Great is the Lord, and exceedingly to be praised; and His greatness is unsearchable. On the majesty and glory of Thy splendour, and on Thy marvellous deeds, will I meditate.”

The shelter from the storms of life that the artist finds in his art, Yankev Ravinsky found in his prescribed communion with God. All the despair caused by his daughter’s apostasy, the insults and disappointments he suffered, were in his sobbing voice. But as he entered into the spirit of his prayer, he felt the man of flesh drop away in the outflow of God around him. His voice mellowed, the rigid wrinkles of his face softened, the hard glitter of anger and condemnation in his eyes was transmuted into the light of love as he went on:

“The Lord is gracious and merciful; slow to anger and of great loving-kindness. To all that call upon Him in truth He will hear their cry and save them.”

Oblivious to the passing and repassing of his wife as she warmed anew the unfinished dinner, he continued:

“Put not your trust in princes, in the son of man in whom there is no help.” Here Reb Ravinsky paused long enough to make a silent confession for the sin of having placed his hope on his daughter instead of on God. His whole body bowed with the sense of guilt. Then in a moment his humility was transfigured into exaltation. Sorrow for sin dissolved in joy as he became more deeply aware of God’s unfailing protection.

“Happy is he who hath the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the Lord his God. He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds.”

A healing balm filled his soul as he returned to the table, where the steaming hot food awaited him. Rachel sat near the window pretending to read a book. Her mother did not urge her to join them at the table, fearing another outbreak, and the meal continued in silence.

The girl’s thoughts surged hotly as she glanced from her father to her mother. A chasm of four centuries could not have separated her more completely from them than her four years at Cornell.

“To think that I was born of these creatures! It’s an insult to my soul. What kinship have I with these two lumps of ignorance and superstition? They’re ugly and gross and stupid. I’m all sensitive nerves. They want to wallow in dirt.”

She closed her eyes to shut out the sight of her parents as they silently ate together, unmindful of the dirt and confusion.

“How is it possible that I lived with them and like them only four years ago? What is it in me that so quickly gets accustomed to the best? Beauty and cleanliness are as natural to me as if I’d been born on Fifth Avenue instead of in the dirt of Essex Street.”

A vision of Frank Baker passed before her. Her last long talk with him out under the trees in college still lingered in her heart. She felt that she had only to be with him again to carry forward the beautiful friendship that had sprung up between them. He had promised to come shortly to New York. How could she possibly introduce such a born and bred American to her low, ignorant, dirty parents?

“I might as well tear the thought of Frank Baker out of my heart,” she told herself. “If he just once sees the pigsty of a home I come from, if he just sees the table manners of my father and mother, he’ll fly through the ceiling.”

Timidly, Mrs. Ravinsky turned to her daughter.

“Ain’t you going to give a taste the eating?”

No answer.

“I fried the lotkes special for you——”

“I can’t stand your fried, greasy stuff.”

“Ain’t even my cooking good no more neither?” Her gnarled, hard-worked hands clutched at her breast. “God from the world, for what do I need yet any more my life? Nothing I do for my child is no use no more.”

Her head sank; her whole body seemed to shrivel and grow old with the sense of her own futility.

“How I was hurrying to run by the butcher before everybody else, so as to pick out the grandest, fattest piece of brust!” she wailed, tears streaming down her face. “And I put my hand away from my heart and put a whole fresh egg into the lotkes, and I stuffed the stove full of coal like a millionaire so as to get the lotkes fried so nice and brown; and now you give a kick on everything I done——”

“Fool woman,” shouted her husband, “stop laying yourself on the ground for your daughter to step on you! What more can you expect from a child raised up in America? What more can you expect but that she should spit in your face and make dirt from you?” His eyes, hot and dry under their lids, flashed from his wife to his daughter. “The old Jewish eating is poison to her; she must have treifah ham—only forbidden food.”

Bitter laughter shook him.

“Woman, how you patted yourself with pride before all the neighbours, boasting of our great American daughter coming home from college! This is our daughter, our pride, our hope, our pillow for our old age that we were dreaming about. This is our American teacherin! A Jew-hater, an anti-Semite we brought into the world, a betrayer of our race who hates her own father and mother like the Russian Tsar once hated a Jew. She makes herself so refined, she can’t stand it when we use the knife or fork the wrong way; but her heart is that of a brutal Cossack, and she spills her own father’s and mother’s blood like water.”

Every word he uttered seared Rachel’s soul like burning acid. She felt herself becoming a witch, a she-devil, under the spell of his accusations.

“You want me to love you yet?” She turned upon her father like an avenging fury. “If there’s any evil hatred in my soul, you have roused it with your cursed preaching.”

“Oi-i-i! Highest One! pity Yourself on us!” Mrs. Ravinsky wrung her hands. “Rachel, Yankev, let there be an end to this knife-stabbing! Gottuniu! my flesh is torn to pieces!”

Unheeding her mother’s pleading, Rachel rushed to the closet where she kept her things.

“I was a crazy idiot to think that I could live with you people under one roof.” She flung on her hat and coat and bolted for the door.

Mrs. Ravinsky seized Rachel’s arm in passionate entreaty.

“My child, my heart, my life, what do you mean? Where are you going?”

“I mean to get out of this hell of a home this very minute,” she said, tearing loose from her mother’s clutching hands.

“Woe is me! My child! We’ll be to shame and to laughter by the whole world. What will people say?”

“Let them say! My life is my own; I’ll live as I please.” She slammed the door in her mother’s face.

“They want me to love them yet,” ran the mad thoughts in Rachel’s brain as she hurried through the streets, not knowing where she was going, not caring. “Vampires, bloodsuckers fastened on my flesh! Black shadow blighting every ray of light that ever came my way! Other parents scheme and plan and wear themselves out to give their child a chance, but they put dead stones in front of every chance I made for myself.”

With the cruelty of youth to everything not youth, Rachel reasoned:

“They have no rights, no claims over me, like other parents who do things for their children. It was my own brains, my own courage, my own iron will that forced my way out of the sweatshop to my present position in the public schools. I owe them nothing, nothing, nothing.”

§ 2

Two weeks already away from home, Rachel looked about her room. It was spotlessly clean. She had often said to herself while at home with her parents: “All I want is an empty room, with a bed and table and chair. As long as it is clean and away from them, I’ll be happy.”

But was she happy?

A distant door closed, followed by the retreating sound of descending footsteps. Then all was still, the stifling stillness of a lodging-house. The white, empty walls pressed in upon her, suffocated her. She listened acutely for any stir of life, but the continued silence was unbroken save for the insistent ticking of her watch.

“I ran away from home burning for life,” she mused, “and all I’ve found is the loneliness that’s death.” A wave of self-pity weakened her almost to the point of tears. “I’m alone! I’m alone!” she moaned, crumpling into a heap.

“Must it always be with me like this,” her soul cried in terror, “either to live among those who drag me down or in the awful isolation of a hall bed-room? Oh, I’ll die of loneliness among these frozen, each-shut-in-himself Americans! It’s one thing to break away, but, oh, the strength to go on alone! How can I ever do it? The love instinct is so strong in me; I cannot live without love, without people.”

The thought of a letter from Frank Baker suddenly lightened her spirits. That very evening she was to meet him for dinner. Here was hope, more than hope. Just seeing him again would surely bring the certainty.

This new rush of light upon her dark horizon so softened her heart that she could almost tolerate her superfluous parents.

“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.