Hungry Hearts
"Oi weh! My bitter heart!" I yet see before me the anguish of my
mother's face as she turned her head away from the charity lady.
My father's eyes sank to the floor. I could feel him shrink in upon
himself like one condemned.
The bite of food turned to gall in my throat.
"How long have you been in America? Where were you born?" She
questioned by rote, taking out pad and pencil.
The silence of the room was terrible. The woman who had invited us for
supper slunk into the bedroom, unable to bear our shame.
"How long have you been in America?" repeated the charity lady.
Choked silence.
"Is there any one here who can speak?" She translated her question
into Yiddish.
"A black year on Gedalyeh Mindel, the liar!" my mother burst out
at last. "Why did we leave our home? We were among our own. We were
people there. But what are we here? Nobodies--nobodies! Cats and dogs
at home ain't thrown in the street. Such things could only happen in
America--the land without a heart--the land without a God!"
"For goodness' sakes! Is there any one here intelligent enough to
answer a straight question?" The charity lady turned with disgusted
impatience from my mother to me. "Can you tell me how long you have
been in this country? Where were you born?"
"None of your business!" I struck out blindly, not aware of what I
was saying.
"Why so bold? We are only trying to help you and you are so
resentful."
"To the Devil with your help! I'm sick no longer. I can take care
of my mother--without your charity!"
The next day I went back to the shop--to the same long hours--to
the same low wages--to the same pig-eyed, fat-bellied boss. But I
was no longer the same. For the first time in my life I bent to the
inevitable. I accepted my defeat. But something in me, stronger than I,
rose triumphant even in my surrender.
"Yes, I must submit to the shop," I thought. "But the shop shall
not crush me. Only my body I must sell into slavery--not my heart--not
my soul.
"To any one who sees me from without, I am only a dirt-eating worm,
a grub in the ground, but I know that above this dark earth-place in
which I am sunk is the green grass--and beyond the green grass, the sun
and sky. Alone, unaided, I must dig my way up to the light!"
* * * * *
Lunch-hour at the factory. My book of Shelley's poems before me and
I was soon millions of miles beyond the raucous voices of the hungry
eaters.
"Did you already hear the last news?" Yetta tore my book from me in
her excitement.
"What news?" I scowled at her for waking me from my dreams.
"We're going to have electricity by the machines. And the
forelady says that the new boss will give us ten cents more on a dozen
waists!"
"God from the world! How did it happen--electricity--better pay?"
I asked in amazement. For that was the first I had heard of improved
conditions of work.
But little by little, step by step, the sanitation improved. Open
windows, swept floors, clean wash-rooms, individual drinking-cups
introduced a new era of factory hygiene. Our shop was caught up in the
general movement for social betterment that stirred the country.
It was not all done in a day. Weary years of struggle passed before the
workers emerged from the each-for-himself existence into an organized
togetherness for mutual improvement.
At last, with the shortened hours of work, I had enough vitality
left at the end of the day to join the night-school. Again my
dream flamed. Again America beckoned. In the school there would be
education--air, life for my cramped-in spirit. I would learn to form
the thoughts that surged formless in me. I would find the teacher that
would make me articulate.
Shelley was English literature.
So I joined the literature class. The course began with the "De
Coverley Papers." Filled with insatiate thirst, I drank in every line
with the feeling that any minute I would get to the fountain-heart of
revelation.
Night after night I read with tireless devotion. But of what? The
manners and customs of the eighteenth century, of people two hundred
years dead.
One evening after a month's attendance, when the class had dwindled
from fifty to four and the teacher began scolding us who were left for
those who were absent, my bitterness broke.
"Do you know why all the girls are dropping away from the
class? It's because they have too much sense to waste themselves
on the 'De Coverley Papers.' Us four girls are four fools. We
could learn more in the streets. It's dirty and wrong, but it's
life. What are the 'De Coverley Papers'? Dry dust fit for the ash
can."
"Perhaps you had better tell the board of education your ideas of the
standard classics," she scoffed, white with rage.
"Classics? If all the classics are as dead as the 'De Coverley
Papers,' I'd rather read the ads in the papers. How can I learn
from this old man that's dead two hundred years how to live my
life?"
That was the first of many schools I had tried. And they were all the
same. A dull course of study and the lifeless, tired teachers--no
more interested in their pupils than in the wooden benches before
them--chilled all my faith in the American schools.
More and more the all-consuming need for a friend possessed me. In the
street, in the cars, in the subways, I was always seeking, ceaselessly
seeking, for eyes, a face, the flash of a smile that would be light in
my darkness.
I felt sometimes that I was only burning out my heart for a shadow,
an echo, a wild dream. But I couldn't help it. Nothing was real to me
but my hope of finding a friend.
One day my sister Bessie came home much excited over her new
high-school teacher. "Miss Latham makes it so interesting!" she
exclaimed. "She stops in the middle of the lesson and tells us
things. She ain't like a teacher. She's like a real person."
At supper next evening, Bessie related more wonder stories of
her beloved teacher. "She's so different! She's friends with
us.... To-day, when she gave us out our composition, Mamie Cohen asked
from what book we should read up and she said, 'Just take it out of
your heart and say it.'"
"Just take it out of your heart and say it." The simple words
lingered in my mind, stirring a whirl of hidden thoughts and
feelings. It seemed as if they had been said directly to me.
A few days later Bessie ran in from school, her cheeks flushed, her
eyes dancing with excitement. "Give a look at the new poem teacher
gave me to learn!" It was a quotation from Kipling:
"Then only the Master shall praise us,
And only the Master shall blame,
And no one shall work for money,
And no one shall work for fame;
But each for the joy of the working,
And each in his separate Star,
Shall draw the thing as he sees it
For the God of things as they are."
Only a few brief lines, but in their music the pulses of my being
leaped into life. And so it was from day to day. Miss Latham's
sayings kept turning themselves in my mind like a lingering melody that
could not be shaken off. Something irresistible seemed to draw me to
her. She beckoned to me almost as strongly as America had on the way
over in the boat.
I wondered, "Should I go to see her and talk myself out from my heart
to her?
"Meshugeneh! Where--what? How come you to her? What will you say for
your reason?
"What's the difference what I'll say! I only want to give a look
on her ..."
And so I kept on restlessly debating. Should I follow my heart and go
to her, or should I have a little sense?
Finally the desire to see her became so strong that I could no longer
reason about it. I left the factory in the middle of the day to seek
her out.
All the way to her school I prayed: "God--God! If I could only find
one human soul that cared ..."
I found her bending over her desk. Her hair was gray, but she did not
look tired like the other teachers. She was correcting papers and was
absorbed in her task. I watched her, not daring to interrupt. Presently
she threw back her head and gave a little laugh.
Then she saw me. "Why, how do you do?" She rose. "Come and sit
down."
I felt she was as glad to see me as though she had expected me.
"I feel you can help me," I groped toward her.
"I hope I can." She grasped my outstretched hands and led me to a
chair which seemed to be waiting for me.
A strange gladness filled me.
"Bessie showed me the poem you told her to learn ..." I paused
bewildered.
"Yes?" Her friendly eyes urged me to speak.
"From what Bessie told me I felt I could talk myself out to you
what's bothering me." I stopped again.
She leaned forward with an inviting interest. "Go on! Tell me all."
"I'm an immigrant many years already here, but I'm still
seeking America. My dream America is more far from me than it was
in the old country. Always something comes between the immigrant
and the American," I went on blindly. "They see only his skin,
his outside--not what's in his heart. They don't care if he has a
heart.... I wanted to find some one that would look on me--myself ... I
thought you'd know yourself on a person first off."
Abashed at my boldness I lowered my eyes to the floor.
"Do go on ... I want to hear."
With renewed courage I continued my confessional.
"Life is too big for me. I'm lost in this each-for-himself world. I
feel shut out from everything that's going on.... I'm always
fighting--fighting--with myself and everything around me.... I hate
when I want to love and I make people hate me when I want to make them
love me."
She gave me a quick nod. "I know--I know what you mean. Go on."
"I don't know what is with me the matter. I'm so choked....
Sundays and holidays when the other girls go out to enjoy
themselves, I walk around by myself--thinking--thinking.... My thoughts
tear in me and I can't tell them to no one! I want to do something
with my life and I don't know what."
"I'm glad you came," she said. And after a pause, "You can help
me."
"Help you?" I cried. It was the first time that an American
suggested that I could help her.
"Yes, indeed! I have always wanted to know more of that mysterious
vibrant life--the immigrant. You can help me know my girls."
The repression of centuries seemed to rush out of my heart. I told
her everything--of the mud hut in Sukovoly where I was born, of the
Czar's pogroms, of the constant fear of the Cossack, of Gedalyeh
Mindel's letter and of our hopes in coming to America.
After I had talked myself out, I felt suddenly ashamed for having
exposed so much, and I cried out to her: "Do you think like the
others that I'm all wrapped up in self?"
For some minutes she studied me, and her serenity seemed to project
itself into me. And then she said, as if she too were groping,
"No--no--but too intense."
"I hate to be so all the time intense. But how can I help
it? Everything always drives me back in myself. How can I get myself
out into the free air?"
"Don't fight yourself." Her calm, gray eyes penetrated to the
very soul in me. "You are burning up too much vitality....
"You know some of us," she went on--"not many, unfortunately--have
a sort of divine fire which if it does not find expression
turns into smoke. This egoism and self-centeredness which
troubles you is only the smoke of repression."
She put her hand over mine. "You have had no one to talk to--no one
to share your thoughts."
I marveled at the simplicity with which she explained me to myself. I
couldn't speak. I just looked at her.
"But now," she said, gently, "you have some one. Come to me
whenever you wish."
"I have a friend," it sang itself in me. "I have a friend."
"And you are a born American?" I asked. There was none of that
sure, all-right look of the Americans about her.