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 got enough money for taxes and other pleasures. I should only have the worry for paying taxes on a million dollars.”
And 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
