J.
Even our in-law Yoneh the baker doesn’t take up his old trade of baking. Why not? It’s the same story. In order to open a bakery here, you need to have Rothschild’s fortune. And besides that, you need to belong to the yoonyeh, and he’s too old for that. He’s afraid of working for someone who doesn’t belong to a yoonyeh in case there’s a strike, which happens in America every day, and for which he might get his head split open. It looks bad. What can he do? He also receives advice that instead of baking bread and challah he should make knishes, homemade knishes, dairy knishes with cheese, or parve knishes with cabbage. What can I say? Our in-law isn’t doing badly at all, not at all! His knishes have a reputation all over the East Side. If you go down Essex Street, you’ll see a sign in a window written in large Yiddish letters — HOMEMADE KNISHES SOLD HERE — and you’ll know that’s our in-law, my brother Elyahu’s father-in-law, Yoneh the baker. And if you see on the same street, right across the way, another Yiddish sign with the same large letters — HOMEMADE KNISHES SOLD HERE — you’ll know it isn’t our in-law Yoneh the baker. He now has a competitor, so don’t go there. Better go to our in-law, to my brother Elyahu’s father-in-law. You’ll know who he is as soon as you come in. Our in-law has an angry face. If you don’t recognize him, you’ll recognize his wife Rivele. She has a double chin and wears coral beads. You’ll certainly know my sister-in-law Bruche. She has big feet. Her little sister, a pimply faced girl with a pigtail, is there too. Her name is Alteh, and they once talked about her being a match for me. But we’ll talk about her another time.
VIII
WE LOOK FOR JOBS
A.
We can’t complain. We are very welcome guests at our neighbors Fat Pessi and Moishe’s home. It isn’t bad at all for us, and it’s lively enough. And on Sunday, the day the gang isn’t working, it’s really lively. We gather together, all the young folk and my friend Mendl, and we go to the theater — I mean, the moving pictures. It costs a nickel apiece, and you see wonders to make your head spin! If I were the son of a king or Jacob Schiff’s grandson, I’d sit all day and all night at the moving pictures. I’d never leave. My friend Mendl feels the same way. So does Vashti, who is now called Harry.
But if you talk to my brother Elyahu, he will tell you it’s all a bunch of nonsense. It’s a big nothing, he says, made for children. You may ask, if it’s for children, then why does our friend Pinni run there all the time, and his wife Teibl, and my sister-in-law Bruche? My brother has an explanation for everything. The women, he says, have as much sense as children, and Pinni runs there all the time just to spite him. He rails against the moving pictures, until one Sunday he decides to come along with us and see for himself. From that time on, he never misses a Sunday at the moving pictures. We all go, young and old, big and small, even Pessi and Moishe and our in-laws — all of us. Only my mother doesn’t go. Her husband, she says, is lying in the ground, so how can she go to the movies? Her enemies will never live to see the day!
B.
It isn’t bad at all at our neighbors’, but it isn’t a solution to be a guest. You have to do something with yourself, to “get a job.” In America everyone has to make a living. So says my brother Elyahu. He goes around looking more worried than anyone. Every day he comes back from his father-in-law Yoneh the baker’s and sits down with my mother to talk about the future. Bruche sits with them, as does our friend Pinni. Pinni has endless plans and projects, but they are worthless. They aren’t really that bad, but my brother Elyahu doesn’t like them. And if my brother Elyahu likes them, Bruche doesn’t. For example, Pinni had the idea that the men and their wives become tailors in a sewing machine shop. Here they’re called operators. But Bruche feels it wasn’t worth leaving their home and risking their lives crossing the ocean to become tailors in their later years. My brother Elyahu says he doesn’t know which is better, selling knishes on Essex Street or working at a sewing machine. Bruche is insulted that my brother Elyahu looks down on selling knishes. She lets him know that if not for her father’s knishes on Essex Street, they’d all be starving.
C.
I love our friend Pinni for the way he talks. When he gets excited, it’s a pleasure to hear him. Having heard out everyone’s arguments, he jumps up, waves his hands, and delivers a passionate speech. I remember every word he says:
Oh, miserable, ignorant people that you are! You still have deeply rooted inside yourselves the Jewish exile from that darkest land of the czar, may his name be obliterated and forgotten! But America is not a land of swines! All the millionaires and the millionairesses in America worked long and hard when they were young, some in shops and some on the street. Just ask Rockefeller, Carnegie, Rothschild, Morgan, or Vanderbilt what they once were. Didn’t they sweep the streets? Didn’t they hawk papers? Didn’t they shine people’s shoes for a nickel? Take, for example, the king of the automobiles, Mr. Ford, and ask him if he wasn’t once a chauffeur or a taxi driver. Or take the really great people—
Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt — were they born great people, presidents? Even our President Wilson, may he forgive me, wasn’t he just a teacher?”
D.
This my brother Elyahu can no longer take. He cuts Pinni short. “Eh, Pinni, now you’re really blaspheming! You forget that Wilson is now our king.”
But Pinni is a terror when he gets excited. He bursts out laughing. “Ha ha! King? What kind of king? There is no king in America! It’s a free country, a democracy!”
“So he’s not king, he’s president, what’s the difference?” my brother Elyahu protests.
But Pinni cuts him off. “There’s a big difference! There’s as much difference between a king and a president as there is between Cain and Abel! A king is a king and a president is a president! A king inherits his title from his father, and a president is elected. If we wish Wilson to be president for another four years, we will elect him again. If we don’t, he goes back to being a teacher. And do you know that in a few years I can also be a president?”
“You? A president?”
“I — a president!”
E.
As long as I’ve known my brother, I have never seen him laugh so hard. As you know, my brother Elyahu is, in general, a worried, gloomy man who rarely laughs, and even when he does laugh, it’s not wholeheartedly. This time he is caught up in such a fit of laughter that my mother becomes frightened for him.
But there really is something to laugh about. All you have to do is see our friend Pinni, how he thrusts his hands into the pockets of his too-short pants that barely reach the top of his new American shoes, how Teibl is forever trying unsuccessfully to straighten his too-short necktie, how his small American cap refuses to stay in one place, and especially how his pointy nose seems always to be peering down into his mouth as his nearsighted eyes squint at you.