“What is your work?” I asked, more and more drawn by some hidden power
of this simple peasant.
“I’m a presser by pants.”
Now I understood the cause of the stooped, rounded shoulders. It must
have come from pounding away with a heavy iron at an ironing board,
day after day, year after year. But for all the ravages of poverty,
of mean, soul-crushing drudgery that marked this man, something big
and indomitable in him fascinated me. His was the strength knitted and
knotted from the hardiest roots of the earth. Filled with awe, I looked
up at him. Here was a man submerged in the darkness of illiteracy--of
pinch and scraping and want--yet untouched--unspoiled, with the same
simplicity of spirit that was his as a wide-eyed, dreamy youth in the
green fields of Russia.
We had our first lesson, and, though I needed every cent I could earn,
I felt like a thief taking his precious pennies. But he would pay.
“It’s worth to me more than a quarter only to learn how to hold up the
pencil,” he exulted as he gripped the pencil upright in his thick fist.
All the yearning, the intense desire for education were in the big,
bulging eyes that he raised towards me. “No wonder I could never make
those little black hooks for words; I was always grabbing my pencil
like a fork for sticking up meat.”
With what sublime absorption he studied me as I showed him how to
shape the letters for his name! Eyes wide--mouth open--his huge,
stoop-shouldered body leaning forward--quivering with hunger to grasp
the secret turnings of “the little black hooks” that signified his name.
“M-o-i-s-h-e-h,” he repeated after me as I guided his pencil.
“Now do it alone,” I urged.
Moisheh rolled up his sleeve like one ready for a fray. The sweat
dripped from his face as he struggled for the muscular control of his
clumsy fingers.
Night after night he wrestled heroically with the “little black hooks.”
At last his efforts were rewarded. He learned how to shape the letters
without any help.
“God from the world!” he cried with childishly pathetic joy as he wrote
his name for the first time. “This is me--Moisheh!” He lifted the paper
and held it off and then held it close, drunk with the wonder of the
“little black hooks.” They seemed so mysterious to him, and his eyes
loomed large--transfigured with the miracle of seeing himself for the
first time in script.
It was the week after that he asked me to write his letter, and this
time it was from my eyes that the unheeding tears dropped as I wrote
the words he dictated.
“To my dear Loving Mother, and to my worthy Honourable Brother Feivel,
the Doctor, and to my youngest brother, the joy from my life, the
light from mine eyes, Berel the Book-keeper!
“Long years and good luck to you all. Thanks the highest One in Heaven
that you are alive. Don’t worry for nothing. So long I have yet my
two strong hands to work you will yet live to have from everything
plenty. For all those starving days in Russia, you will live to have
joy in America.
“You, Feivel, will yet have a grand doctor’s office, with an electric
dentist sign over your door, and a gold tooth to pull in the richest
customers. And you, Berel, my honourable book-keeper, will yet live to
wear a white starched collar like all the higher-ups in America. And
you, my loving mother, will yet shine up the block with the joy from
your children.
“I am sending you another box of things, and so soon as I get from you
the word, I’ll send for you the ship tickets, even if it costs the
money from all the banks in America.
“Luck and blessings on your dear heads. I am going around praying and
counting the minutes till you are all with me together in America.”
Our lessons had gone on steadily for some months and already he was
able to write the letters of the alphabet. One morning before I was out
of bed he knocked at my door.
“Quick only! A blue letter printed from Russia!” he shouted in an
excited voice.
Through the crack of the door he shoved in the cablegram. “Send ship
tickets or we die--pogrom,” I read aloud.
“_Weh--weh!_” A cry of a dumb, wounded animal broke from the
panic-stricken Moisheh.
The cup of coffee that Hanneh Breineh lifted to her lips dropped with a
crash to the floor. “Where pogrom?” she demanded, rushing in.