God help us! This will one day become a president? Try not to laugh!
F.
When my brother Elyahu finishes laughing, he says to my mother, “Well, Pinni has taken care of us. We’ll work in the shop and sew dresses on the sewing machine. And Pinni certainly has his future assured. He will, God willing, become a president. But what about our children?”
He means me and my friend Mendl. He can’t bear to see us idle. He’s furious that we spend our days in the street playing ball and checkers. Do you remember when he grabbed me by the ear and was threatened with a fist under the nose by a burly fellow who told him that in America you can only “fight” with someone who is your equal?
“You should worry more about yourself than the children!” says Moishe the bookbinder. With that he informs us that although we are indeed very welcome guests, it’s high time we did something to earn our own piece of bread.
G.
Do you think we enjoy being dependent on others’ generosity? My mother helps Pessi in the kitchen. She bakes and cooks and washes and dusts. Teibl makes the beds and sweeps the rooms. Pinni helps Moishe with his book stand. Truth be told, he’s not of much help, because when Pinni sees a book, there’s no tearing him away. When he sticks his nose into a book, well, it’s good day! But that in itself wouldn’t matter. He has a habit of scribbling. God sent him a fountain pen from which the ink keeps coming out forever. Paper is cheap here, cheaper than borscht, so he sits and scribbles.
“Are you learning how to write?” my brother Elyahu asks him, but Pinni doesn’t answer. He gathers up his writings and hides them deep in his jacket side pockets, which makes him look swollen.
H.
My friend Mendl and I aren’t sitting around idle either. Until we get a job, we help the gang out as much as possible. I help the older boy Sam carry the paper boxes, and my friend Mendl hangs around Willy in the grocery store and sometimes around Phillip, who hawks Yiddish papers. For our work we don’t get paid at all, except that on Sundays they pay for our moving pictures. When we leave the moving pictures, they treat us to ice cream, which you eat between two chocolate cookies, or else you drink soda water with it. Afterward we take a walk or a stroll in the park, of which there are many in New York, and everywhere they let you in free. What a country this America is! Wherever I want to go, I go, and whatever I want to do, I do.
I.
If I have time, I drop in at my old friend Vashti, now Harry, but his boss at the stand is not happy. She notices that Vashti sometimes sneaks a piece of carob my way and sometimes a few raisins and almonds. “My stand cannot afford two noshers,” she says, so I don’t visit Vashti anymore. I wait till he comes home at night, and he always brings something in his pocket for me to nibble. When Bruche sees me chewing, she tattles on me to my brother Elyahu. He asks me what I’m chewing, and I say, “Chung-gum,” what everyone in America chews. Bruche says it turns her stomach to see all this chewing. My brother Elyahu tells her to pretend they’re cows chewing their cud. Pinni can’t abide my brother Elyahu comparing Americans to cows and says, “You’re comparing the best, the greatest, the cleanest and smartest people in the world, with cows?! I want you to tell me just one thing — where would we be if, God forbid, Columbus had not discovered America?”
“Somebody else would have discovered it!” my brother Elyahu replies very simply, without giving it a thought.
J.
Praised be God, I can tell you the news — we have a job. We won’t have to be idle any longer. We won’t have to eat other people’s bread. We are working in a shop. That is to say, not Mendl or I — they can’t hire us, we’re too young. So far my brother Elyahu and our friend Pinni are working. I will now tell you what their jobs are.
IX
WE WORK IN A SHOP
A.
How you work in a shop I can’t say exactly because I myself don’t know. They don’t allow me to work there because I’m not yet bar mitzvahed. I only know what I hear from my brother Elyahu and our friend Pinni. Every evening when they come home from the shop, exhausted and hungry, they relate wondrous tales. We sit down to eat supper. Bruche hates this word as a pious Jew hates pig. My sister-in-law can’t abide the word window either. She also hates the word stockings. And what do you say to the word dishes? She prefers the Yiddish words for all of these. The same goes for spoon, steak, and fork.
B.
My brother Elyahu and our friend Pinni work in two different shops: my brother as an operator, really a tailor, and Pinni as a presser. An operator doesn’t need to sew by hand. He sews on a machine. But you have to know how to do that too. The machine doesn’t sew by itself. How did my brother Elyahu learn to do it when his father’s father and all his ancestors were never tailors and never saw a sewing machine in their lives?
My mother says we come from a pure line of cantors, rabbis, and sextons. That’s of no help. But this is America, and in America there’s nothing a person cannot learn to do. For example, how do you become a rabbi? To be a rabbi you’ve certainly got to be smart. You have to know how to answer questions. And yet there are rabbis in America (here they’re called reverends) who back home were butchers. My brother Elyahu made the acquaintance of a mohel, a circumciser, a reverend who officiates at brises. At home he was a ladies’ tailor!
Elyahu asked him, “How did that happen?”
He answered, “Only in America!”
C.
How did my brother Elyahu learn to use a sewing machine? How did the ladies’ tailor become a mohel? Poor Elyahu worked very hard. They gave him scraps of material to practice with on the machine. He went over the material back and forth, and it was considered “all right.” The next morning he was already sewing. You can imagine how awful the sewing was. But it was acceptable.
Why can’t Pinni achieve this too? It isn’t because he’s lazy, God forbid! Pinni will accept anything to make a living in America. The problem is, he’s nearsighted and does everything too fast. They sat him down at a machine and also gave him scraps of material to practice with, sewing back and forth. In his enthusiasm he accidentally caught the left sleeve of his jacket in the machine and sewed it up. He was lucky it wasn’t his hand. Oh my, did they laugh at him! His fellow tailors shouted hoorah! They called him a greenhorn. A greenhorn is someone who just got off the boat and doesn’t know which way a door opens. That word is a terrible insult, worse than thief. That wouldn’t have been, as Bruche put it, half bad. But there is more. Just listen.
D.
In the same shop where my brother Elyahu and our friend Pinni are working is Pinni’s old enemy, the Heissen tailor. In this shop the Heissen tailor is a big shot. He’s not an operator working on a machine, but a cutter who cuts the material that the operators sew. But that isn’t enough for him. He says he won’t stay in this business for long. He hopes before long to become a designer. Now that’s really an important position. A designer is the one who draws the patterns for the clothes. A designer earns fifty dollars a week, maybe seventy-five or even a hundred!