her weakness and dumbness and helplessness, Father began letting out all his preaching on her poor head. “I always told you your bad end. I told you with your empty head and pretty face no good could come to you. Any man who falls in love with a pretty face don’t think to marry himself. If a man wants a wife, he looks for one who can cook for him, and wash for him, and carry the burden of his house for him. I always told you that a man who plays on the Sabbath has no fear of God. And if he don’t fear God, then how could you trust him anything he said?”
More and more I began to see that Father, in his innocent craziness to hold up the Light of the Law to his children, was as a tyrant more terrible than the Tsar from Russia. As he drove away Bessie’s man, so he drove away Mashah’s lover. And each time he killed the heart from one of his children, he grew louder with his preaching on us all.
We’d come home worn and tired from working hard all day and there was Father with a clear head from his dreams of the Holy Torah, and he’d begin to preach to each and every one of us our different sins that would land us in hell. He remembered the littlest fault of each and every one of us, from the time we were born. And he’d begin hammering these faults into us till it got black and red for our eyes.
Sometimes when I’d come home, the mere sound of Father’s voice would get me so nervous that I’d want to scream and pull my hair and cry out like a lunatic, “I can’t stand it! I can’t stand it anymore in this house!”
I began to feel I was different from my sisters. They couldn’t stand Father’s preaching any more than I, but they could suffer to listen to him, like dutiful children who honor and obey and respect their father, whether they like him or not. If they ever had times when they hated Father, they were too frightened of themselves to confess their hate.
I too was frightened the first time I felt I hated my father. I felt like a criminal. But could I help it what was inside of me? I had to feel what I felt even if it killed me.
I’d wake up in the middle of the night when all were asleep, and cry into the deaf, dumb darkness, “I hate my father. And I hate God most of all for bringing me into such a terrible house.”
More and more I began to think inside myself, I don’t want to sell herring for the rest of my days. I want to learn something. I want to do something. I want some day to make myself for a person and come among people. But how can I do it if I live in this hell house of Father’s preaching and Mother’s complaining?
And when I get a lover I don’t want Father questioning out his wages, or calling him a meshumid because he played the piano on the Sabbath.
And then I thought, what kind of a man could I get if I smell from selling herring? A son from Zalmon the fish-peddler?
No! No one from Essex or Hester Street for me. I don’t want a man like Berel Bernstein whose head was all day on making money from the sweatshop. No, I wouldn’t even want one like Jacob Novak, even if he was a piano-player, if he ate the bread of his father who bossed him. I’d want an American-born man who was his own boss. And would let me be my boss. And no fathers, and no mothers, and no sweatshops, and no herring!
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