§ 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.”