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.
“I ain’t so dumb like I look on my face.” He nudged me confidentially.
“I already found out from myself which picture means where the train
goes. If it’s for Brooklyn Bridge, then the hooks go this way”--he
clumsily drew in the air with his thick fingers--“and if it’s for the
South Ferry, then the words twist the other way around.”