left without a teacher; so one day I attached myself to a playmate
and went to school,--an “American” school. I gave my name and my
age, and was told to sit in a long row of benches with some sixty
other children. The teacher stood at the blackboard and wrote “March
5, 1887.” We all read it after her, chanting the singsong with the
teacher. Each morning we did the same thing; that is, repeated lessons
after the teacher. That first day and the second day were alike, and so
were the years that followed. “If one yard of goods cost three cents,
how much will twenty-five yards cost?” If one yard costs three cents,
then twenty-five yards will cost twenty-five times three cents, or
seventy-five cents. The explanation could not vary, or it might not be
true or logical.
But there was one thing that was impressed more strongly than this
routine. I had always been a sickly, thin, pale-faced child. I did not
like to sit still. I wanted to play, to talk, to move about. But if I
did any of these things, I was kept after school as a punishment. This
would not do. I had to get out of the room, and frequently I endured
agonies because the teacher would not permit me to leave the room
whenever I wanted to. Many times I went home sick and lay abed.
Soon I discovered that the boys who sat quietly, looked straight ahead
and folded their arms behind their backs, and even refused to talk to
their neighbors, were allowed the special privilege of leaving the room
for one minute, not longer. So I sat still, very still, for hours and
hours, so that I might have the one minute. Throughout my whole school
life this picture remains uppermost. I sat still, repeated words, and
then obtained my minute allowance.
For ten years I did this, and because I learned words I was able to
go from the first year of school through the last year of college. My
illness and the school discipline had helped after all. They had made
my school life shorter by several years than it otherwise might have
been.
The colony life of the city’s immigrants is an attempt to continue the
village traditions of the mother country. In our neighborhood there
were hundreds of families that had come from the same part of Italy. On
summer nights they gathered in groups on the sidewalks, the stoops, the
courtyards, and talked and sang and dreamed. In winter the men and boys
built Roman arches out of the snow.
But gradually the families grew in size. The neighborhood became
congested. A few families moved away. Ours was one of them. We began
to be a part of the new mass instead of the old. The city with its
tremendous machinery, its many demands, its constant calling, calling,
began to take hold. What had been intimate, quaint, beautiful, ceased
to appeal.
I went to school, father went to work, mother looked after the house.
When evening came, instead of sitting about the fire, talking and
reliving the day, we sat, each in his own corner. One nursed his tired
bones, another prepared his lessons for the morrow. The demands of
the school devoured me; the work world exhausted my father. The long
evenings of close contact with my home people were becoming rare. I was
slipping away from my home; home was slipping away from me.
Yet my father knew what he was about. While the fathers of most of the
boys about me were putting their money into business or into their
houses, mine put his strength, his love, his money, his comforts into
making me better than himself. The spirit of the crusaders should live
again in his son. He wanted me to become a priest: I wanted to become a
doctor.
During all the years that he worked for me, I worked for myself. While
his hopes were centred in the family, mine were extending beyond it.
I worked late into the nights, living a life of which my father was
not a part. This living by myself tended to make me forget, indeed to
undervalue, the worth of my people. I was ashamed sometimes because my
folk did not look or talk like Americans.
When most depressed by the feeling of living crudely and poorly, I
would go out to see my father at work. I would see him high up on a
scaffold a hundred feet in the air, and my head would get dizzy and my
heart would rise to my throat. Then I would think of him once more as
the poet story-teller with the strong, soothing voice and the far-off
visioned eye, and would see why on two-dollar-a-day wages he sent me to
college.
Proud of his strength, I would strengthen my moral fibre and respond to
his dream. Yet not as he dreamed; for when he fell fifty feet down a
ladder and was ill for a whole year, I went to work at teaching.
AN IMMIGRANT AND THE CHILDREN
The schools will change for the better when their life is made
basically different from what it has been.
They are pointed in the direction of the fundamentals of knowledge,
but working with the tools of the classicists. They have developed
and developed until we find life on one side,--that is, outside the
school,--and learning on the other side,--that is, inside the school.
Now the schools must be pointed so that life and the school become one.
To begin with, better school conditions must be provided for the
youngest children. The first steps in child teaching must be sound. The
primary years of school must be worth while. Unless the basic structure
is real, soul satisfying, higher education will be halting and futile.
The child is entitled to a fine start in his life’s journey if he is to
have a fair chance of carrying his head high and his shoulders straight.
He comes to school a distinct personality. He is joyous, spontaneous,
natural, free. But from the first day, instead of watching, encouraging
that personality, the school begins to suppress it and keeps up the
process year in and year out. By and by we begin to search for the
individuality that has been submerged. We make tempting offers to the
student in the high school and in the college--we give him better
teachers, better equipment, greater freedom, more leisure, smaller
classes, direct experiences. We call upon him to stand out, to face the
problems of life honestly, squarely,--to be himself. How blind we are!
First we kill, and then we weep for that which we have slain.
We do not look upon the children as an important economic factor.
Children are a problem to the parent and teacher, but not to the race.
Do you raise pigs? The government is almost tearful in its solicitude
for their health and welfare. The Agricultural Bureau sends you
scientific data gathered at great pains and expense. But do you raise
children? Ah! They are very expensive. And there are so many of them!
One teacher to fifty is the best we can do for you. Teachers who are
specialists in their profession? Oh, now really! You know we could
never afford that. We must pay for high-priced teachers for the high
schools and upper grades, but for the little children--all you want is
a pleasant personality that is able to teach the rudiments of learning.
There’s not much to do in those grades--just the rudiments, you know.
There’s no disciplining to do there, the children are so easily
suppressed. It’s only in the upper grades we have the trouble!
Stupid and topsy-turvy!
We need the scientist, the child specialist, the artist, in the first
year of school. We need few children to a teacher and plenty of space
to move about in.
It’s there the teacher should eagerly, anxiously, reverently, watch for
the little spark of genius, of soul, of individuality, and so breathe
the breath of life upon it that it can never again be crushed or
repressed.
We must spend more money on elementary education if the money we
now spend on higher education is to bring forth results that are
commensurate with our national needs. We spend fifty dollars a year on
the education of a child and ten times that amount on the education of
a young college man....
Do we really believe in children? Can we say with the Roman mother,
“These are my jewels”? How long ago is it that the state legislature
passed a bill enabling the canneries to employ children and women
twelve hours a day? Fifty children to a teacher, adulterated foods,
military discipline, are not beliefs in children. Enslaving mothers is
not a belief in children.
Our belief in children, like our belief in many other good things, is
mainly a word belief. What we need is a practical belief. We are still
at the stage where we separate work and thought, action and theory,
practice and ethics. If we would be saved, we must follow the child’s
way of life. His way is the direct way. He learns from contact with the
forces about him. He feels them, he sees them, he knows what they do
to him. He thinks and does and discovers all in one continuous flow of
energy.
The child says: “I am of things as they are. I am the fighter for the
things that ought to be. I was the beginning of human progress, and
I am the progress of the world. I drive the world on. I invent, I
achieve, I reform. About me is always the glory of mounting. I have no
fear of falling, of slipping down, down. I have no fear of being lost.
I am truth. I am reality, and always I question chaos.”
When the child begins to question the wisdom of the group, its
religion, its literature, its dress, its tastes, its method of
government, its standard of judgment, that moment the group should
begin to take heed. It should take the child’s questioning seriously.
When the group fails to do this, it gives up its existence, it ceases
to grow because it looks back, it worships tradition, it makes history
in terms of the past rather than in terms of the future.
Belief in evolution is a belief in the child.
What the race needs is a principle of growth, spiritual growth, that
can never be denied. Such a principle it will find in the child,
because the spirit of the child is the one factor of the group
existence that in itself keeps changing, growing. The child is nature’s
newest experiment in her search for a better type, and the race will be
strong as it determines that the experiment shall be successful.
We develop national characteristics in accord with our adherence to
a common ideal. We must therefore surrender ourselves for the common
good, and the common good to which we should surrender is epitomized in
the child idea.
I feel that the attitude towards the school and the child is the
ultimate attitude by which America is to be judged. Indeed, the
distinctive contribution America is to make to the world’s progress is
not political, economical, religious, but educational, the child our
national strength, the school as the medium through which the adult is
to be remade.
What an ideal for the American people!
When my father came to America, he thought of America only as a
temporary home. He learned little or no English. As the years went
by he would say, “It is enough; my children know English.” Then more
years rolled by. One day he came to me and asked me to help him get
his citizenship papers. He and I began reading history together. Month
after month we worked, laboring, translating, questioning, until the
very day of his examination.
That day I hurried home from college to find a smiling, happy father.
“Did you get them?” I asked.
“Yes, and the judge wanted to know how I knew the answers so well,
and I told him my son who goes to college taught me, and the judge
complimented me.”
I have been a part of many movements to Americanize the foreigner,
but I see that the child is the only one who can carry the message
of democracy if the message is to be carried at all. If the child
fails to make the connection between the ideals of the school and the
fundamental beliefs of the people, there is none other to do it. The
children are the chain that must bind people together.
I have told about parents growing because they sought growth for their
children. I saw them grow through the initiative of the school. These
were tenement dwellers. Would this thing hold where the parents are
well to do, and the streets are clean and music is of the best, and
home ideals are of the highest and the social life of the neighborhood
is intimate? Is it still necessary for the school to gather the parents
about itself? Is it still necessary for the school to go out into the
community and get the parents to consciously work as a group for the
children’s interest, to consciously shape their philosophy of life in
conformity with the dynamic philosophy that childhood represents?
More necessary! If not to save the children, it should be done to save
the parents.
No matter who the people are, they need the school as a humanizing
force, so that they may feel the common interest, revive their visions,
see the fulfillment of their dreams in terms of their children, so
that they may be made young once more. Americanize the foreigner, nay,
through the child let us fulfill our destiny and Americanize America.
ANZIA YEZIERSKA
Anzia Yezierska was born in a Polish province of Russia in the year
1886, and migrated, when nine years old, to New York City, where
she was sent to work in an East Side sweatshop at a dollar and a
half a week. Her life in America has been a heroic struggle for
self-expression both in a literary and spiritual sense.
Since upon every hand one hears the cry that more should be required
of the immigrants in the way of preparation for citizenship, in
loyalty and in service, it is very fitting that this book of
selections should close with that touching passage of her story,
“How I Found America,” which sets forth the immigrants’ yearning
for fellowship with native Americans and their passionate desire
to serve. Will not here be found the two master keys--fellowship
and service--to the successful accomplishment of the work
of Americanization; in fact, without which all attempts at
Americanization will prove futile?
The writings of the immigrants have hitherto been largely historical
and sociological in character. Miss Yezierska’s work suggests the
unlimited artistic possibilities of the newer elements in our
national life,--gifts on which we should not lay violent hands,
but which we should carefully conserve as a part of the heritage
of America to the future. It is interesting to note that one of
her stories was selected by Edward J. O’Brien as the best piece of
imaginative writing in short form produced during the year 1919.
That part of the story that follows is taken from the issue of _The
Century_ for November, 1920. The same story in longer and somewhat
different form is found in a volume of her collected writings
recently published by Houghton Mifflin under the title, “Hungry
Hearts.”
HOW I FOUND AMERICA
Times changed. The sweat-shop conditions that I had lived through had
become a relic of the past. Wages had doubled, tripled, and went up
higher and higher, and the working day became shorter and shorter. I
began to earn enough to move my family uptown into a sunny, airy flat
with electricity and telephone service. I even saved up enough to buy a
phonograph and a piano.
My knotted nerves relaxed. At last I had become free from the worry
for bread and rent, but I was not happy. A more restless discontent
than ever before ate out my heart. Freedom from stomach needs only
intensified the needs of my soul.
I ached and clamored for America. Higher wages and shorter hours of
work, mere physical comfort, were not yet America. I had dreamed
that America was a place where the heart could grow big with living.
Though outwardly I had become prosperous, life still forced me into an
existence of mere getting and getting.
_Ach!_ how I longed for a friend, a real American friend, some one to
whom I could express the thoughts and feelings that choked me! In the
Bronx, the uptown ghetto, I felt myself farther away from the spirit
of America than ever before. In the East Side the people had yet
alive in their eyes the old, old dreams of America, the America that
would release the age-old hunger to give; but in the prosperous Bronx
good eating and good sleeping replaced the spiritual need for giving.
The chase for dollars and diamonds deadened the dreams that had once
brought them to America.
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. America was not America to me unless I
could find an American that would make America real.
The hunger of my heart drove me to 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 think, to form
the thoughts that surged formless in me. I would find the teacher that
would make me articulate.
I joined the literature class. They were reading “The De Coverley
Papers.” Filled with insatiate thirst, I drank in every line with
the feeling that any moment 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 present
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 than 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 principal your ideas of the standard
classics,” she scoffed, white with rage.
“All right,” I snapped, and hurried down to the principal’s office.
I swung open the door.
“I just want to tell you why I’m leaving. I--”
“Won’t you come in?” The principal rose and placed a chair for me
near her desk. “Now tell me all.” She leaned forward with an inviting
interest.
I looked up, and met the steady gaze of eyes shining with light. In
a moment all my anger fled. “The De Coverley Papers” were forgotten.
The warm friendliness of her face held me like a familiar dream. I
couldn’t speak. It was as if the sky suddenly opened in my heart.
“Do go on,” she said, and gave me a quick nod. “I want to hear.”
The repression of centuries rushed 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 Gedalyah Mindel’s
letter, of our hopes in coming to America, and my search for an
American who would make America real.
“I am so glad you came to me,” 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. You have so
much to give--”
“Give--that’s what I was hungering and thirsting all these years--to
give out what’s in me. I was dying in the unused riches of my soul.”
“I know; I know just what you mean,” she said, putting her hand on mine.
My whole being seemed to change in the warmth of her comprehension. “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.
“Yes, indeed. My mother, like so many mothers,”--and her eyebrows
lifted humorously whimsical,--“claims we’re descendants of the Pilgrim
Fathers, and that one of our lineal ancestors came over in the
_Mayflower_.”
“For all your mother’s pride in the Pilgrim Fathers, you yourself are
as plain from the heart as an immigrant.”
“Weren’t the Pilgrim Fathers immigrants two hundred years ago?”
She took from her desk a book and read to me.
Then she opened her arms to me, and breathlessly I felt myself drawn
to her. Bonds seemed to burst. A suffusion of light filled my being.
Great choirings lifted me in space. I walked out unseeingly.
All the way home the words she read flamed before me: “We go forth all
to seek America. And in the seeking we create her. In the quality of
our search shall be the nature of the America that we create.”
So all those lonely years of seeking and praying were not in vain.
How glad I was that I had not stopped at the husk, a good job, a good
living! Through my inarticulate groping and reaching out I had found
the soul, the spirit of America.
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
Footnotes have been moved to the end of each chapter and relabeled
consecutively through the document.
Punctuation has been made consistent.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation were retained as they appear in
the original publication, except that obvious typographical errors have
been corrected.