Hungry Hearts
turning with me. I didn't see the crowds. I didn't see the
pushcart peddlers with their bargains. I didn't hear the noises or
anything. My eyes were on the sky, praying: "Gottuniu! Send me only
the little bit of luck!"
"Nu? Nu? What need you?" asked Mr. Zaretzky when I entered.
I got red with shame in the face the way he looked at me. I turned up
my head. I was too proud to tell him for what I came. Before I walked
in I thought to tell him everything. But when I looked on his face
and saw his hard eyes, I couldn't say a word. I stood like a yok
unable to move my tongue. I went to the matchmaker with my heart, and
I saw before me a stone. The stone was talking to me--but--but--he was
a stone!
"Are you looking for a shidduch?" he asked.
"Yes," I said, proud, but crushed.
"You know I charge five dollars for the stepping in," he bargained.
It got cold by my heart. It wasn't only to give him the five dollars,
nearly a whole week's wages, but his thick-skinness for being only
after the money. But I couldn't help myself--I was like in his fists
hypnotized. And I gave him the five dollars.
I let myself go to the door, but he called me back.
"Wait, wait. Come in and sit down. I didn't question you yet."
"About what?"
"I got to know how much money you got saved before I can introduce
you to anybody."
"Oh--h--h! Is it only depending on the _money_?"
"Certainly. No move in this world without money," he said, taking
a pinch of snuff in his black, hairy fingers and sniffing it up in
his nose.
I glanced on his thick neck and greasy, red face. "And to him people
come looking for love," I said to myself, shuddering. Oh, how it
burned in my heart, but still I went on, "Can't I get a man in
America without money?"
He gave a look on me with his sharp eyes. Gottuniu! What a look! I
thought I was sinking into the floor.
"There are plenty of _young_ girls with money that are begging
themselves the men to take them. So what can you expect? _Not young,
not lively, and without money, too?_ But, anyhow, I'll see what I can
do for you."
He took out a little book from his vest-pocket and looked through the
names.
"What trade do you go on your hands?" he asked, turning to
me. "Sometimes a dressmaker or a hairdresser that can help make a
living for a man, maybe--"
I couldn't hear any more. It got black before my eyes, my voice
stopped inside of me.
"If you want to listen to sense from a friend, so I have a good
match for you," he said, following me to the door. "I have on
my list a widower with not more than five or six children. He has a
grand business, a herring-stand on Hester Street. He don't ask for
no money, and he don't make an objection if the girl is in years, so
long as she knows how to cook well for him."
How I got myself back to my room I don't know. But for two days and
for two nights I lay still on my bed, unable to move. I looked around
on my empty walls, thinking, thinking, "Where am I? Is this the
world? Is this America?"
Suddenly I sprang up from bed. "What can come from pitying
yourself?" I cried. "If the world kicks you down and makes nothing
of you, you bounce yourself up and make something of yourself." A
fire blazed up in me to rise over the world because I was downed by
the world.
"Make a person of yourself," I said. "Begin to learn English.
Make yourself for an American if you want to live in America.
American girls don't go to matchmakers. American girls don't
run after a man: if they don't get a husband they don't
think the world is over; they turn their mind to something else.
"Wake up!" I said to myself. "You want love to come to you? Why
don't you give it out to other people? Love the women and children,
everybody in the street and the shop. Love the rag-picker and the
drunkard, the bad and the ugly. All those whom the world kicks down you
pick up and press to your heart with love."
As I said this I felt wells of love that choked in me all my life
flowing out of me and over me. A strange, wonderful light like a
lover's smile melted over me, and the sweetness of lover's arms
stole around me.
The first night I went to school I felt like falling on everybody's
neck and kissing them. I felt like kissing the books and the
benches. It was such great happiness to learn to read and write the
English words.
Because I started a few weeks after the beginning of the term, my
teacher said I might stay after the class to help me catch up with my
back lessons. The minute I looked on him I felt that grand feeling:
"Here is a person! Here is America!" His face just shined with high
thoughts. There was such a beautiful light in his eyes that it warmed
my heart to steal a look on him.
At first, when it came my turn to say something in the class, I got so
excited the words stuck and twisted in my mouth and I couldn't give
out my thoughts. But the teacher didn't see my nervousness. He only
saw that I had something to say, and he helped me say it. How or what
he did I don't know. I only felt his look of understanding flowing
into me like draughts of air to one who is choking.
Long after I already felt free and easy to talk to him alone after the
class, I looked at all the books on his desk. "Oi weh!" I said to
him, "if I only knew half of what is in your books, I couldn't any
more sit still in the chair like you. I'd fly in the air with the joy
of so much knowledge."
"Why are you so eager for learning?" he asked me.
"Because I want to make a person of myself," I answered. "Since
I got to work for low wages and I can't be young any more, I'm
burning to get among people where it's not against a girl if she is
in years and without money."
His hand went out to me. "I'll help you," he said. "But you
must first learn to get hold of yourself."
Such a beautiful kindness went out of his heart to me with his
words! His voice, and the goodness that shone from his eyes, made
me want to burst out crying, but I choked back my tears till I got
home. And all night long I wept on my pillow: "Fool! What is the
matter with you? Why are you crying?" But I said, "I can't help
it. He is so beautiful!"
My teacher was so much above me that he wasn't a man to me at all. He
was a God. His face lighted up the shop for me, and his voice sang
itself in me everywhere I went. It was like healing medicine to the
flaming fever within me to listen to his voice. And then I'd repeat
to myself his words and live in them as if they were religion.
Often as I sat at the machine sewing the waists I'd forget what I
was doing. I'd find myself dreaming in the air. "Ach!" I asked
myself, "what was that beautifulness in his eyes that made the lowest
nobody feel like a somebody? What was that about him that when his
smile fell on me I felt lifted up to the sky away from all the coldness
and the ugliness of the world? Gottunui!" I prayed, "if I could
only always hold on to the light of high thoughts that shined from
him. If I could only always hear in my heart the sound of his voice
I would need nothing more in life. I would be happier than a bird in
the air.
"Friend," I said to him once, "if you could but teach me how to
get cold in the heart and clear in the head like you are!"
He only smiled at me and looked far away. His calmness was like the
sureness of money in the bank. Then he turned and looked on me, and
said: "I am not so cold in the heart and clear in the head as I
make-believe. I am bound. I am a prisoner of convention."
"You make-believe--you bound?" I burst out. "You who do not
have foreladies or bosses--you who do not have to sell yourself for
wages--you who only work for love and truth--you a prisoner?"
"True, I do not have bosses just as you do," he said. "But
still I am not free. I am bound by formal education and conventional
traditions. Though you work in a shop, you are really freer than I. You
are not repressed as I am by the fear and shame of feeling. You could
teach me more than I could teach you. You could teach me how to be
natural."
"I'm not so natural like you think," I said. "I'm afraid."
He smiled at me out of his eyes. "What are you afraid of?"
"I'm afraid of my heart," I said, trying to hold back the blood
rushing to my face. "I'm burning to get calm and sensible like the
born Americans. But how can I help it? My heart flies away from me like
a wild bird. How can I learn to keep myself down on earth like the born
Americans?"
"But I don't want you to get down on earth like the Americans. That
is just the beauty and the wonder of you. We Americans are too much on
earth; we need more of your power to fly. If you would only know how
much you can teach us Americans. You are the promise of the centuries
to come. You are the heart, the creative pulse of America to be."
I walked home on wings. My teacher said that I could help him; that I
had something to give to Americans. "But how could I teach him?" I
wondered; "I who had never had a chance to learn anything except what
he taught me. And what had I to give to the Americans, I who am nothing
but dreams and longings and hunger for love?"
When school closed down for vacation, it seemed to me all life stopped
in the world. I had no more class to look forward to, no more chance
of seeing my teacher. As I faced the emptiness of my long vacation,
all the light went out of my eyes, and all the strength out of my arms
and fingers.
For nearly a week I was like without air. There was no school. One
night I came home from the shop and threw myself down on the bed. I
wanted to cry, to let out the heavy weight that pressed on my heart,
but I couldn't cry. My tears felt like hot, burning sand in my eyes.
"Oi-i-i! I can't stand it no more, this emptiness," I groaned.
"Why don't I kill myself? Why don't something happen to
me? No consumption, no fever, no plague or death ever comes to save me
from this terrible world. I have to go on suffering and choking inside
myself till I grow mad."
I jumped up from the bed, threw open the window, and began fighting
with the deaf-and-dumb air in the air-shaft.
"What is the matter with you?" I cried. "You are going out
of your head. You are sinking back into the old ways from which you
dragged yourself out with your studies. Studies! What did I get from
all my studies? Nothing. Nothing. I am still in the same shop with
the same shirt-waists. A lot my teacher cares for me once the class
is over."
A fire burned up in me that he was already forgetting me. And I shot
out a letter to him:
"You call yourself a teacher? A friend? How can you go off in the
country and drop me out of your heart and out of your head like a
read-over book you left on the shelf of your shut-down classroom? How
can you enjoy your vacation in the country while I'm in the
sweatshop? You learned me nothing. You only broke my heart. What
good are all the books you ever gave me? They don't tell me how
to be happy in a factory. They don't tell me how to keep alive in
emptiness, or how to find something beautiful in the dirt and ugliness
in which I got to waste away. I want life. I want people. I can't
live inside my head as you do."
I sent the letter off in the madness in which I wrote it, without
stopping to think; but the minute after I dropped it in the mail-box my
reason came again to my head. I went back tearing my hair. "What have
I done? Meshugeneh!"
Walking up the stairs I saw my door open. I went in. The sky is
falling to the earth! Am I dreaming? There was my teacher sitting on my
trunk! My teacher come to see me? Me, in my dingy room? For a minute it
got blind before my eyes, and I didn't know where I was any more.
"I had to come," he said, the light of heaven shining on me out of
his eyes. "I was so desolate without you. I tried to say something to