Some people have all the luck! As Bruche says, “God grants this one a lot and another He grants a lot of nothing.”
E.
When Pinni comes into the shop, the Heissen tailor goes up to him. He peers at him through his spectacles, puts a hand out to Pinni, and says, “Hallo, londsmon! How do you do?”
Our friend Pinni looks at him with his nearsighted eyes. Who is this buffoon? He does not recognize him at all. Not until he mentions the ship Prince Albert does Pinni recall who this is. It’s as if someone shot three holes in his heart! The Heissen tailor has done nothing to offend him, yet Pinni cannot bear looking at him. Even if he were to earn a thousand dollars an hour, he would not stay in this shop another minute! Add to that the accident with the sewn-up sleeve.
F.
In short, Pinni is no longer an operator. He’s beginning as an apprentice presser in another shop. Once he learns the work, he’ll move higher and higher. How far can he go?
“You never know,” says Pinni. “No one knows what tomorrow will bring. Carnegie and Vanderbilt and Rockefeller didn’t know they would become what they are today.”
In the meantime Pinni has new problems on account of his habit of doing things too impulsively, in addition to his nearsightedness. He comes home every day burned by the iron.
One day he comes home with his nose burned by the iron. What happened? How did the iron get to his nose? Pinni says his nose didn’t wait for the iron to kindly reach up but consented to reach down to the iron. How did the nose get to the iron? Apparently Pinni was groping for a piece of material, and since he is nearsighted, he bent down too close to the ironing board, and the tip of his nose hit the red-hot iron.
“When a shlimazel falls down in the snow, he manages to hit a rock,” says someone. I won’t tell you, but I’m sure you’ll guess it’s Bruche. My sister-in-law can really hurt a person with her barbs.
G.
Bruche is not happy, nor is my mother, nor Teibl. Have you ever known women to be happy? They lament that we men have to work so hard in America to make a living. No easy thing, working in a shop! At half past seven in the morning you must already be at work. It takes an hour to get there. You have to grab a bite to eat, and you certainly must recite your daily prayers. You figure out what time we have to get up. And you may not be so much as a minute late, because if you are, they deduct half a day’s pay for every five minutes you’re late. How do they know if you’re late? In America every shop has a kind of clock. As soon as you arrive you have to “punch the clock,” as they call it here, so they know exactly when you started work. That’s America for you.
H.
We aren’t going to get old working at this shop, I’m afraid. My brother Elyahu says the workers are having problems with the “foreman.” Every shop has a foreman, an elder, an overseer. On every floor there’s a foreman. On the floor where my brother Elyahu works, the foreman is a Haman. He used to be an operator but he worked himself up and became a foreman. The workers say he is worse than the “boss.”
The word goes around in the shop that the foreman is moving the clock so that no matter what time you arrive, it says you’re late. What do you say to such a bastard? Our friend Pinni has even better stories to tell about his foreman. He doesn’t let his workers so much as look at a newspaper. If you do, your life is in danger! As for smoking, forget about it. Talking to another person is out of the question. Pinni says you can hear a pin drop! The only sound is the clattering and whirring of the machines.
There’s another nuisance — the irons are heated by gas, which stinks to high heaven.
I.
The reeking smell of the gas gives the workers bad headaches that make them become faint and stop working. It comes off their pay at the end of the week, leaving a big hole in their salaries. If you are five minutes late — off with half a day. If you leave too early — off with half a day. If you feel faint and cannot work — there goes a whole day.
No, we can’t take it anymore. We must call a strike.
X
WE STRIKE!
A.
Personally, I think there’s nothing better in the world than striking. It’s like studying with a teacher who beats you and punishes you too hard and then they take the students away from him and look for another teacher. In the meantime you don’t go to school.
My brother Elyahu and our friend Pinni stop going to work. Our house feels different now that they’re home. We used to see them once a week — on Sundays, because, as I told you, when you work in a shop, you have to get up before dawn in order not to be late, and when they come home, I’m already asleep. Why am I asleep? It’s because they’re working overtime, which means all the other workers go home and our men stay on at the shop working, not because they’re forced to but in order to earn more. But when it came to paying them, the company deducted days for who knows what. “It’s as if we’ve been attacked by thieves!” my brother Elyahu says. Bruche says that if she were there, all the foremen and all the bosses would bite the dust, and you can believe her. Bruche can do it!
B.
She cools down, however, when all the shops declare a strike. All the tailors and pressers in New York lay down their scissors and irons and — goodbye! Oh my, what goes on then, at home, on the street, and in halls! A hall is a large room or a theater. All the tailors gather from all over New York for a meeting, and they talk, talk, and more talk. You hear words you’ve never heard in your life: general strike, union, organized, forty-eight hours, higher wages, better conditions, scabs, strikebreakers, pickets, and many more words I don’t understand. My friend Mendl says he does understand them, but he won’t explain them. When you get older, Mendl says, you’ll understand. It’s possible, but for now I’m watching how the crowd gets all stirred up and my fingers are itching to put the striking tailors all down on paper, to draw each one, what he looks like, what he’s doing, how he’s standing, and how he’s speaking.
C.
My brother Elyahu doesn’t speak so much as a word. He goes from group to group and sticks his nose in, or cocks an ear, biting his nails nervously. I like it when my brother nods in agreement with every speaker. He agrees with them all, no matter what they say. A tailor with a boil on the left side of his head comes up to him, grabs him by the lapel, and shakes him, trying to convince him that all this fuss is a waste of time. The tailors won’t accomplish anything with their strike, because the “association of manufacturers” is too strong for us! My brother Elyahu nods in agreement. I’m afraid my brother knows what association of manufacturers means as much as I do. Another tailor approaches my brother Elyahu, this one with the face of a duck, smacking his lips as he speaks. He grabs my brother Elyahu by a coat button and cries out, “No! We must fight, fight to the end!” My brother Elyahu nods in agreement to him too. It’s too bad Bruche isn’t here. She would certainly give him the needle.
D.
The story with our friend Pinni is different. Whoever hasn’t heard him speak at a meeting has missed something really special. He loves to name-drop famous people and use fancy words. Now imagine him all fired up, speaking to an audience of a thousand people who really don’t want to hear him. He begins his speech all the way back with Columbus and how he discovered America, and soon he’s talking about the United States, prepared to go on and on and on, but they won’t let him continue.