Bread Givers. Anzia Yezierska
on you, little heart!” Muhmenkeh’s old eyes smiled into mine. “Go, make yourself for a person. Pick yourself out twenty-five herring at a penny apiece. You can easy sell them at two cents, and maybe the ones that ain’t squeezed for three cents.”
On the corner of the most crowded part of Hester Street I stood myself with my pail of herring.
“Herring! Herring! A bargain in the world! Pick them out yourself. Two cents apiece.”
My voice was like dynamite. Louder than all the pushcart peddlers, louder than all the hollering noises of bargaining and selling, I cried out my herring with all the burning fire of my ten old years.
So loud was my yelling, for my little size, that people stopped to look at me. And more came to see what the others were looking at.
“Give only a look on the saleslady,” laughed a big fat woman with a full basket.
“Also a person,” laughed another, “also fighting already for the bite in the mouth.”
“How old are you, little skinny bones? Ain’t your father working?”
I didn’t hear. I couldn’t listen to their smartness. I was burning up inside me with my herring to sell. Nothing was before me but the hunger in our house, and no bread for the next meal if I didn’t sell the herring. No longer like a fire engine, but like a houseful of hungry mouths my heart cried, “Herring—herring! Two cents apiece!”
First one woman bought. And then another and another. Some women didn’t even stop to pick out the herring, but let me wrap it up for them in the newspaper, without even a look if it was squashed or not. And before the day was over my last herring was sold.
I counted my greasy fifty pennies. Twenty-five cents profit. Richer than Rockefeller, I felt.
I was always saying to myself, if I ever had a quarter or a half dollar in my hand, I’d run away from home and never look on our dirty house again. But now I was so happy with my money, I didn’t think of running away, I only wanted to show them what I could do and give it away to them.
It began singing in my heart, the music of the whole Hester Street. The pushcart peddlers yelling their goods, the noisy playing of children in the gutter, the women pushing and shoving each other with their market baskets—all that was only hollering noise before melted over me like a new beautiful song.
It began dancing before my eyes, the twenty-five herring that earned me my twenty-five cents. It lifted me in the air, my happiness. I couldn’t help it. It began dancing under my feet. And I couldn’t stop myself. I danced into our kitchen. And throwing the fifty pennies, like a shower of gold, into my mother’s lap, I cried, “Now, will you yet call me crazy-head? Give only a look what ‘Blood-and-iron’ has done.”
Chapter II. The Speaking Mouth of the Block
“Even butchers and bakers and common money-makers have sometimes their use in the world,” said Father.
He had just come home free from the court. And Mother was telling him how the butcher and baker and Zalmon the fish-peddler left their work to bail him out. And how they raised the money together for the best American-born lawyer to take his part.
“Nu? Why shouldn’t they take my part?” said Father. “Am I not their light? The whole world would be in thick darkness if not for men like me who give their lives to spread the light of the Holy Torah.”
It was like a holiday all over the block when they had Father’s trial. The men stopped their work. The women left their cooking and washing and marketing, and with babies on their arms, and babies hanging on to their skirts, they crowded themselves into the court to hear the trial.
In high American language the lawyer made a speech to the judge and showed with his hands all those people who looked up to Father as the light of their lives. And then he told the Court to look on Father’s face, how it shined from him, like from a child, the goodness from the holy life of prayer.
“He couldn’t hurt a fly,” the lawyer said. “Reb Smolinsky would turn aside not to step on the littlest worm under the feet.” And he called on the neighbors to give witness how Father loved only stillness and peace and his learning from his books. And if he hit the landlady, it was only because she burst into the house in the midst of his prayers, and knocked his Bible out of his hands and stepped on it with her feet.
“It’s a lie!” cried the collector lady.
Then our smart lawyer asked the judge to have made a print of her foot on a white piece of paper. And when he showed up together the page in the Bible where her wet, muddy foot stepped, and the print on the white paper, everybody could see it was the same shoe.
For a minute it was so still in that court, as if somebody had just died and everybody was scared to draw his breath.
“Prisoner discharged!” said the judge.
The crowd got so excited, yelling and shouting with gladness, they almost carried Father home over their heads.
For weeks after, everybody was talking about Father. By the butcher, by the baker, by the fish market, everybody was telling everybody over and over again, as you tell fairy tales, how Father hit the landlady when she stepped on the Holy Torah.
In the evening, when everybody sat out on the stoop, the women nursing their babies, the men smoking their pipes, and the girls standing around with their young men, their only talk was how Father was the speaking mouth of the block. Not only did he work for the next world, but he was even fighting for the people their fight in this world.
Everybody was scared to death when the landlord came around. And Father hitting the landlord’s collector lady was like David killing Goliath, the giant.
Shprintzeh Gittel put the baby down in the gutter, stuck a nipple into its mouth to keep it quiet, and right before everybody on the stoop, acted out, like on the stage, the way Father hit the landlady first on one cheek and then on the other.
All the people stamped their feet and clapped their hands, with pleasure of getting even, once in their lives, with someone over them that was always stepping on them.
“She deserves it yet worse—the fresh thing!” said the rag-picker. “She insults enough the people.”
“But a man shouldn’t hit a lady,” said Shprintzeh Gittel’s Americanized daughter who was standing around with her American-born young man.
“A collector for the landlord ain’t a lady,” cried Shprintzeh Gittel. “For insulting her own religion they should tear her flesh in pieces. They should boil her in oil and freeze her in ice. . . .”
“I hate the landlord worse as a pawnbroker,” said Hannah Hayyeh, the washwoman. “Every month of your life, whether you’re working or not working, whether you’re sick or dying, you got to squeeze out so much blood to give the leech for black walls that walk away, alive with bedbugs and roaches and mice.”
“He lives himself on Riverside Drive, and his windows open out into the sunshine from the park, so why should he worry if it’s to get choked with smoke in my dark kitchen every time I got to light the fire to cook something,” said the shoemaker’s wife from the basement.
“If the landlord wills himself another diamond on his necktie, or if his wife wants a thicker fur coat, all he got to do is to raise our rent.”
“But you people are unreasonable,” said the book-keeper, who was always wearing a white, starched collar on his neck.
“Poor people are yet too much reasonable, because they can’t help themselves,” interrupted Hannah Hayyeh. “It’s the landlords who don’t want to fix or paint the houses and yet keep on raising the rent what are unreasonable.”
“But the landlord has to pay taxes. And when they raise his taxes, he must raise the rent. . . .”
“Taxes? Rich people