Bread Givers

“Woman! when will you stop darkening the house with your worries?”

“When I’ll have a man who does the worrying. Does it ever enter your head that the rent was not paid the second month? That today we’re eating the last loaf of bread that the grocer trusted me?” Mother tried to squeeze the hard, stale loaf that nobody would buy for cash. “You’re so busy working for Heaven that I have to suffer here such bitter hell.”

“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 know I’m a fool. But I cannot help it. I haven’t the courage to live for myself. My own life is knocked out of me. No wonder Father called me the burden bearer.”

“That’s just what you are, a ‘burden bearer.’ Here you got a chance to lift your head and become a person, and you want to stay in your slavery.”

“But you see, Father never worked in his life. He don’t know how to work. How could I leave them to starve?”

“Starve? He won’t starve. He’ll have to go to work. It’s you who are to blame for his laziness and his rags. So long as he gets from you enough to eat, he’ll hang on your neck, and bluff away his days with his learning and his prayers.”

Bessie stopped crying and looked straight at Berel Bernstein. “I couldn’t marry a man that don’t respect my father.”

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.

“A writer, a poet you want for a husband? Those who sell the papers at least earn something. But what earns a poet? Do you want starvation and beggary for the rest of your days? Who’ll pay your rent? Who’ll buy you your bread? Who’ll put shoes on the feet of your children, with a husband who wastes his time writing poems of poverty instead of working for a living?”

“Your wife ain’t yet cold in the grave,” said Father. “Why are you in such a hurry to tie yourself with another woman on your hands? Can’t you have a little rest?”

“Well, I can’t stand it anymore from the children. They’re always fighting and running wild in the streets. There wasn’t a cooked meal in the house since my wife died. The dirt grows like yeast. The children eat only what you buy from cans. I eat in the restaurant. But I can’t take the children with me. It would cost too much. I like it better to have my meals cooked for me, in my own house. So I got to have a wife.”

“Of course I could leave my wife and daughter in the store. But you know women have long hair and small brains. It needs a man’s head to run a business. If I had a good customer, I think I’d rather sell my store. So if you’re still looking to buy it—”

“Why do you make such a holler on me over two cents, when you, yourself, gave away four hundred dollars to a crook for empty shelves?”

“Blood-and-iron! How dare you question your father his business? What’s the world coming to in this wild America? No respect for fathers. No fear of God.” His eyes flamed as he shook his fist at me. “Only dare open your mouth to me again! Here I struggle to work up a business and she gives away all the profits of my goods. No heart. No conscience. Two cents here and two cents there. That’s how all my hard-earned dollars bleed away.”

I leaped back and dashed for the door. The Old World had struck its last on me.

He sat down and his angry eyes bulged at me. “Right after breakfast, home you go.”

“I’m not going home,” I said, without looking up.

“But you’ll not stay here.” He pointed to Yenteh, tying a red ribbon on her hair. “I got enough trouble on my hands with my own girl going wild! I don’t want another Americanerin in my house.”

“Where will you live? What will you do? With Moe for my bread giver I’m too dirt-poor to help you.”

A quietness within me soothed my tortured nerves. I turned to my books on the table, and with fierce determination to sink myself into my head, I began my lessons again.

“Don’t worry. I’ll even get married some day. But to marry myself to a man that’s a person, I must first make myself for a person.”

“Why don’t you read the way you used to when you were home?” I asked.

“I can’t look at a book. My head stopped with my troubles. Ach! How can you people know what it is to be miserable as I am.”

The proud grand lady crumpled before my eyes into nothing but an East Side yenteh, with a broken heart.

So this is what it was to be the wife of a cloaks-and-suits millionaire!

“You hard heart!” Fania threw up her hands at me. “Come, Bessie. Let’s leave her to her mad education. She’s worse than Father with his Holy Torah.”

I used to say to my loneliness: If it will not kill you, it will be the making of you. All great people have to be alone to work out their greatness. But now all my high talk was hollow and unreal. The loneliness of my little room rose about me like a thick blackness, about to fall on me and crush me.

I had an assurance that I never had before. I was thrilled. Flattered. Ripened for love.

Then why did I let him go?

Hours I sat there, my head in my hands, wondering why. Slowly, one piece of a broken thought began to weave itself together with another. If I’d let myself love him, I’d end by hating him. He only excited me. But that wasn’t enough. Even in the ecstasy of our kisses, I knew he was not my kind.

I looked at the books on my table that had stared at me like enemies a little while before. They were again the life of my life. Ach! Nothing was so beautiful as to learn, to know, to master by the sheer force of my will even the dead squares and triangles of geometry. I seized my books and hugged them to my breast as though they were living things.

Knowledge was what I wanted more than anything else in the world. I had made my choice. And now I had to pay the price. So this is what it cost, daring to follow the urge in me. No father. No lover. No family. No friend. I must go on and on. And I must go on—alone.

Once I had been elated at the thought that a man had wanted me. How much more thrilling to feel that I had made my work wanted! This was the honeymoon of my career!

The undertaker, with a knife in his hand, cut into Father’s coat and he rent his garments according to the Biblical law and ages of tradition. Then he slit my sisters’ waists, and they, too, did as Father had done. Then the man turned to me with the knife in his hand.

“No,” I cried. “I feel terrible enough without tearing my clothes.”

“It has to be done.”

“I don’t believe in this. It’s my only suit, and I need it for work. Tearing it wouldn’t bring Mother back to life again.”

A hundred eyes burned on me their condemnation.

“Look at her, the Americanerin!”

“Heart of stone.”

I had failed to give Mother the understanding of her deeper self during her lifetime. Let me at least give it to Father while he was yet alive. And so, every day, after school, I went to see him.

We fell into a silence. All the secret places of my heart opened at the moment. And then the whole story of my life poured itself out of me to him. Father, Mother, my sisters. And Father’s wife, with her greed for diamond earrings. As I talked my whole dark past dropped away from me. Such a sense of release! Now I could go on and on—I could never again be lonely!

“I understood everything the moment I read that letter,” he said. “It’s queer, how people get to know one another. That mean letter, instead of turning me against you, drew me to you. I knew you weren’t that kind. As for your father, I know just the kind of an old Jew he is. After all, it’s from him that you got the iron for the fight you had to make to be what you are now.”

Tears strained in my throat as I bent over him, offering him some hot tea. But he pushed away the glass, muttering deliriously. In a panic, I left him and ran for the doctor. . . . How could I have hated him and tried to blot him out of my life? Can I hate my arm, my hand that is part of me? Can a tree hate the roots from which it sprang? Deeper than love, deeper than pity, is that oneness of the flesh that’s in him and in me. Who gave me the fire, the passion, to push myself up from the dirt? If I grow, if I rise, if I ever amount to something, is it not his spirit burning in me? . . .