Bread Givers. Anzia Yezierska
so it kept on. And the arguments always ended with, “Long years on Reb Smolinsky to fight the landlords for the people!”
Soon everybody from all around knew us so well, it got easy for us to rent the front room. First one came, then another, and then a third. And when Mother wanted to squeeze in another boarder, they said they’d better each pay yet another quarter a week more and not have another boarder in the same room.
Things began to get better with us. Bessie, Fania, and Mashah got work. But still I kept on peddling herring. Earning twenty-five and sometimes thirty to fifty cents a day made me feel independent, like a real person. It was already back of me to pick coal from ash cans. I felt better to earn the money and pay out my own earned money for bought coal.
Mother began to fix up the house like other people. The instalment man trusted us now. We got a new table with four feet that were so solid it didn’t spill the soup all over the place. Mashah got a new looking glass from the second-hand man. It had a crack in the middle but it was so big she could see herself from the head to the feet. Mother even bought regular towels. Every time we wiped our faces on them it seemed so much behind us the time we had only old rags for towels.
We bought a new soup pot and enough plates and spoons and forks and knives so we could all sit down by the table at the same time and eat like people. It soon became natural, as if we were used from always to eat with separate knives and forks instead of from the pot to the hand as we once did.
Once in a while we even had butter on our bread. And when eggs were cheap and Mother got a bargain at a pushcart, a lot of cracked eggs, then we had eggs for breakfast just like the boarders. Now all of us had meat for the Sabbath—not only Father. And sometimes Mother had a half chicken for Father.
But the more people get, the more they want. We no sooner got used to regular towels than we began to want toothbrushes, each for himself like Mashah. We got the toothbrushes and we began wanting tooth-powder to brush our teeth with, instead of ashes. And more and more we wanted more things, and really needed more things the more we got them.
With the regular wages coming in each week, Mother became a new person. There was a new look in her eyes, and a new sound in her voice when she went to the grocery store, with the dollar in her hand, and bought what she wanted for cash, instead of having to beg them to trust her.
Sometimes almost a whole day would pass without a curse or a scream from Mother. She even began to laugh, once in a while, and make jokes about soon buying a house and a fur coat for winter.
When we sat down to our dinner she’d begin to tell us of the years back when she was a young girl.
“Who’d believe me, here in America, where I have to bargain by the pushcarts over a penny that I once had it so plenty in my father’s house? Pots full of fat, barrels full of meat, and boilers full of jelly we had packed away in our cellar. I used to make cake for the Sabbath with cream so thick you could cut it with a knife.”
Her eyes looked far away like in a dream.
“When I’d go to a fair, everywhere I’d pass, people would draw in their breath, they’d stop their bargaining and selling and stand back with sudden stillness, only to give a look on my face. See me only! Cheeks like red apples, skin softer and finer as pink velvet. Long, thick braids to my knees. Eyes dancing out of my head with the life in me. And such life as I once had! Wherever I gave a step, the whole earth burned under my feet, Give only a look on Mashah. That’s the picture of me how I was. Only I was a hundred times healthier. In my face was all the sunshine and fresh air of the open fields.”
I looked on Mother’s faded eyes, her shape like a squashed barrel of yeast, and her face black and yellow with all the worries from the world.
“You looked like Mashah?” I asked.
“Where do you suppose Mashah got her looks? From the air? Mashah never had such colour in her cheeks, such fire in her eyes. And my shape was something to look on—not the straight up and down like the beauties make themselves in America.”
The kitchen walls melted away to the far-off times in Russia, as Mother went on and on with her fairy tales till late hours of the night.
“I was known in all the villages around not only for my beauty: I was the first dancer on every wedding. You don’t see in America such dancing like mine. The minute I’d give a step in they’d begin clapping their hands and stamping their feet, the fiddlers began to play, and sing the song they played. And the whole crowd, old and young, would form a ring around me and watch with open mouth how I lifted myself in the air, dancing the kozatzkeh.”
Once Mother got started she couldn’t stop herself, telling more and more. She was like drunk with the memories of old times.
“When I got fourteen years old, the matchmakers from all the villages, far and near, began knocking on our doors, telling my father the rich men’s sons that were crazy to marry themselves to me. But Father said, he got plenty of money himself. He wanted to buy himself honor in the family. He wanted only learning in a son-in-law. Not only could he give his daughter a big dowry, but he could promise his son-in-law twelve years’ free board and he wouldn’t have to do anything but sit in the synagogue and learn.
“When the matchmaker brought your father to the house the first time, so my father could look him over and hear him out his learning, they called me in to give a look on him, but I was so ashamed I ran out of the house. But my father and the matchmaker stayed all day and all night. And one after another your father chanted by heart Isaiah, Jeremiah, the songs of David, and the Book of Job.
“In the morning Father sent messengers to all the neighbors to come and eat with him cake and wine for his daughter’s engagement that was to be the next day. I didn’t give a look on your father till the day of the engagement, and then I was too bashful to really look on him. I only stole a glance now and then, but I could see how it shined from his face the high learning, like from an inside sun.
“Nobody in all the villages around had dowry like mine. Six feather beds and twelve pillows. I used to sit up nights with all the servants to pluck the down from the goose feathers. So full of down were my pillows that you could blow them away with a breath.
“I went special to Warsaw to pick out the ticking for my bedding. All my sheets had my name embroidered with a beautiful wreath of flowers over it. All my towels were half covered with red and blue embroidery and on each was some beautiful words embroidered such as, ‘Happy sunshine,’ ‘Good-morning!’ or ‘Good-night!’
“My curtains alone took me a whole year to knit, on sticks two yards long. But the most beautiful thing of my whole dowry was my hand-crocheted tablecloth. It was made up of little knitted rings of all colors: red, blue, yellow, green, and purple. All the colors of the rainbow were in that tablecloth. It was like dancing sunshine lighting up the room when it was spread on the table for the Sabbath. Ach! There ain’t in America such beautiful things like we had home.”
“Nonsense, Mamma!” broke in Mashah. “If you only had the money to go on Fifth Avenue you’d see the grand things you could buy.”
“Yes, buy!” repeated Mother. “In America, rich people can only buy, and buy things made by machines. Even Rockefeller’s daughter got only store-bought, ready-made things for her dowry. There was a feeling in my tablecloth——”
“But why did you leave that rainbow tablecloth and come to America?” I asked.
“Because the Tsar of Russia! Worms should eat him! He wanted for himself free soldiers to make pogroms. He wanted to tear your father away from his learning and make him a common soldier—to drink vodka with the drunken mouzhiks, eat pig, and shoot the people. . . .
“There was only one thing to do, go to the brass-buttoned butchers and buy him out of the army. The pogromshchiks, the minute they smelled money, they were like wild wolves on the smell of blood. The more we gave them, the more they wanted. We had to sell out everything, and give them all we had, to the last cent, to shut them up.
“Then, suddenly, my father