Hungry Hearts

by Anzia Yezierska

  “Is this ‘lovers’ land’?” was calling in my heart. “Where are my dreams that were so real to me in the old country?”

  Often in the middle of the work I felt like stopping all the machines and crying out to the world the heaviness that pressed on my heart. Sometimes when I walked in the street I felt like going over to the first man I met and cry out to him: “Oh, I’m so lonely! I’m so lonely!”

  One day I read in the Jewish “Tageblatt” the advertisement from Zaretzky, the matchmaker. “What harm is it if I try my luck?” I said to myself. “I can’t die away an old maid. Too much love burns in my heart to stand back like a stone and only see how other people are happy. I want to tear myself out from my deadness. I’m in a living grave. I’ve got to lift myself up. I have nobody to try for me, and maybe the matchmaker will help.”

  As I walked up Delancey Street to Mr. Zaretzky, the street was turning with me. I didn’t see the crowds. I didn’t see the pushcart peddlers with their bargains. I didn’t hear the noises or anything. My eyes were on the sky, praying: “Gottuniu! Send me only the little bit of luck!”

  “Nu? Nu? What need you?” asked Mr. Zaretzky when I entered.

  I got red with shame in the face the way he looked at me. I turned up my head. I was too proud to tell him for what I came. Before I walked in I thought to tell him everything. But when I looked on his face and saw his hard eyes, I couldn’t say a word. I stood like a yok unable to move my tongue. I went to the matchmaker with my heart, and I saw before me a stone. The stone was talking to me—but—but—he was a stone!

  “Are you looking for a shidduch?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, proud, but crushed.

  “You know I charge five dollars for the stepping in,” he bargained.

  It got cold by my heart. It wasn’t only to give him the five dollars, nearly a whole week’s wages, but his thick-skinness for being only after the money. But I couldn’t help myself—I was like in his fists hypnotized. And I gave him the five dollars.

  I let myself go to the door, but he called me back.

  “Wait, wait. Come in and sit down. I didn’t question you yet.”

  “About what?”

  “I got to know how much money you got saved before I can introduce you to anybody.”

  “Oh—h—h! Is it only depending on the money?”

  “Certainly. No move in this world without money,” he said, taking a pinch of snuff in his black, hairy fingers and sniffing it up in his nose.

  I glanced on his thick neck and greasy, red face. “And to him people come looking for love,” I said to myself, shuddering. Oh, how it burned in my heart, but still I went on, “Can’t I get a man in America without money?”

  He gave a look on me with his sharp eyes. Gottuniu! What a look! I thought I was sinking into the floor.

  “There are plenty of young girls with money that are begging themselves the men to take them. So what can you expect? Not young, not lively, and without money, too? But, anyhow, I’ll see what I can do for you.”

  He took out a little book from his vest-pocket and looked through the names.

  “What trade do you go on your hands?” he asked, turning to me. “Sometimes a dressmaker or a hairdresser that can help make a living for a man, maybe—”

  I couldn’t hear any more. It got black before my eyes, my voice stopped inside of me.

  “If you want to listen to sense from a friend, so I have a good match for you,” he said, following me to the door. “I have on my list a widower with not more than five or six children. He has a grand business, a herring-stand on Hester Street. He don’t ask for no money, and he don’t make an objection if the girl is in years, so long as she knows how to cook well for him.”

  How I got myself back to my room I don’t know. But for two days and for two nights I lay still on my bed, unable to move. I looked around on my empty walls, thinking, thinking, “Where am I? Is this the world? Is this America?”

  Suddenly I sprang up from bed. “What can come from pitying yourself?” I cried. “If the world kicks you down and makes nothing of you, you bounce yourself up and make something of yourself.” A fire blazed up in me to rise over the world because I was downed by the world.

  “Make a person of yourself,” I said. “Begin to learn English. Make yourself for an American if you want to live in America. American girls don’t go to matchmakers. American girls don’t run after a man: if they don’t get a husband they don’t think the world is over; they turn their mind to something else.

  “Wake up!” I said to myself. “You want love to come to you? Why don’t you give it out to other people? Love the women and children, everybody in the street and the shop. Love the rag-picker and the drunkard, the bad and the ugly. All those whom the world kicks down you pick up and press to your heart with love.”

  As I said this I felt wells of love that choked in me all my life flowing out of me and over me. A strange, wonderful light like a lover’s smile melted over me, and the sweetness of lover’s arms stole around me.

  The first night I went to school I felt like falling on everybody’s neck and kissing them. I felt like kissing the books and the benches. It was such great happiness to learn to read and write the English words.

  Because I started a few weeks after the beginning of the term, my teacher said I might stay after the class to help me catch up with my back lessons. The minute I looked on him I felt that grand feeling: “Here is a person! Here is America!” His face just shined with high thoughts. There was such a beautiful light in his eyes that it warmed my heart to steal a look on him.

  At first, when it came my turn to say something in the class, I got so excited the words stuck and twisted in my mouth and I couldn’t give out my thoughts. But the teacher didn’t see my nervousness. He only saw that I had something to say, and he helped me say it. How or what he did I don’t know. I only felt his look of understanding flowing into me like draughts of air to one who is choking.

  Long after I already felt free and easy to talk to him alone after the class, I looked at all the books on his desk. “Oi weh!” I said to him, “if I only knew half of what is in your books, I couldn’t any more sit still in the chair like you. I’d fly in the air with the joy of so much knowledge.”

  “Why are you so eager for learning?” he asked me.

  “Because I want to make a person of myself,” I answered. “Since I got to work for low wages and I can’t be young any more, I’m burning to get among people where it’s not against a girl if she is in years and without money.”

  His hand went out to me. “I’ll help you,” he said. “But you must first learn to get hold of yourself.”

  Such a beautiful kindness went out of his heart to me with his words! His voice, and the goodness that shone from his eyes, made me want to burst out crying, but I choked back my tears till I got home. And all night long I wept on my pillow: “Fool! What is the matter with you? Why are you crying?” But I said, “I can’t help it. He is so beautiful!”

  My teacher was so much above me that he wasn’t a man to me at all. He was a God. His face lighted up the shop for me, and his voice sang itself in me everywhere I went. It was like healing medicine to the flaming fever within me to listen to his voice. And then I’d repeat to myself his words and live in them as if they were religion.

  Often as I sat at the machine sewing the waists I’d forget what I was doing. I’d find myself dreaming in the air. “Ach!” I asked myself, “what was that beautifulness in his eyes that made the lowest nobody feel like a somebody? What was that about him that when his smile fell on me I felt lifted up to the sky away from all the coldness and the ugliness of the world? Gottunui!” I prayed, “if I could only always hold on to the light of high thoughts that shined from him. If I could only always hear in my heart the sound of his voice I would need nothing more in life. I would be happier than a bird in the air.

  “Friend,” I said to him once, “if you could but teach me how to get cold in th
e heart and clear in the head like you are!”

  He only smiled at me and looked far away. His calmness was like the sureness of money in the bank. Then he turned and looked on me, and said: “I am not so cold in the heart and clear in the head as I make-believe. I am bound. I am a prisoner of convention.”

  “You make-believe—you bound?” I burst out. “You who do not have foreladies or bosses—you who do not have to sell yourself for wages—you who only work for love and truth—you a prisoner?”

  “True, I do not have bosses just as you do,” he said. “But still I am not free. I am bound by formal education and conventional traditions. Though you work in a shop, you are really freer than I. You are not repressed as I am by the fear and shame of feeling. You could teach me more than I could teach you. You could teach me how to be natural.”

  “I’m not so natural like you think,” I said. “I’m afraid.”

  He smiled at me out of his eyes. “What are you afraid of?”

  “I’m afraid of my heart,” I said, trying to hold back the blood rushing to my face. “I’m burning to get calm and sensible like the born Americans. But how can I help it? My heart flies away from me like a wild bird. How can I learn to keep myself down on earth like the born Americans?”

  “But I don’t want you to get down on earth like the Americans. That is just the beauty and the wonder of you. We Americans are too much on earth; we need more of your power to fly. If you would only know how much you can teach us Americans. You are the promise of the centuries to come. You are the heart, the creative pulse of America to be.”

  I walked home on wings. My teacher said that I could help him; that I had something to give to Americans. “But how could I teach him?” I wondered; “I who had never had a chance to learn anything except what he taught me. And what had I to give to the Americans, I who am nothing but dreams and longings and hunger for love?”

  When school closed down for vacation, it seemed to me all life stopped in the world. I had no more class to look forward to, no more chance of seeing my teacher. As I faced the emptiness of my long vacation, all the light went out of my eyes, and all the strength out of my arms and fingers.

  For nearly a week I was like without air. There was no school. One night I came home from the shop and threw myself down on the bed. I wanted to cry, to let out the heavy weight that pressed on my heart, but I couldn’t cry. My tears felt like hot, burning sand in my eyes.

  “Oi-i-i! I can’t stand it no more, this emptiness,” I groaned. “Why don’t I kill myself? Why don’t something happen to me? No consumption, no fever, no plague or death ever comes to save me from this terrible world. I have to go on suffering and choking inside myself till I grow mad.”

  I jumped up from the bed, threw open the window, and began fighting with the deaf-and-dumb air in the air-shaft.

  “What is the matter with you?” I cried. “You are going out of your head. You are sinking back into the old ways from which you dragged yourself out with your studies. Studies! What did I get from all my studies? Nothing. Nothing. I am still in the same shop with the same shirt-waists. A lot my teacher cares for me once the class is over.”

  A fire burned up in me that he was already forgetting me. And I shot out a letter to him:

  “You call yourself a teacher? A friend? How can you go off in the country and drop me out of your heart and out of your head like a read-over book you left on the shelf of your shut-down classroom? How can you enjoy your vacation in the country while I’m in the sweatshop? You learned me nothing. You only broke my heart. What good are all the books you ever gave me? They don’t tell me how to be happy in a factory. They don’t tell me how to keep alive in emptiness, or how to find something beautiful in the dirt and ugliness in which I got to waste away. I want life. I want people. I can’t live inside my head as you do.”

  I sent the letter off in the madness in which I wrote it, without stopping to think; but the minute after I dropped it in the mail-box my reason came again to my head. I went back tearing my hair. “What have I done? Meshugeneh!”

  Walking up the stairs I saw my door open. I went in. The sky is falling to the earth! Am I dreaming? There was my teacher sitting on my trunk! My teacher come to see me? Me, in my dingy room? For a minute it got blind before my eyes, and I didn’t know where I was any more.

  “I had to come,” he said, the light of heaven shining on me out of his eyes. “I was so desolate without you. I tried to say something to you before I left for my vacation, but the words wouldn’t come. Since I have been away I have written you many letters, but I did not mail them, for they were like my old self from which I want to break away.”

  He put his cool, strong hand into mine. “You can save me,” he said. “You can free me from the bondage of age-long repressions. You can lift me out of the dead grooves of sterile intellectuality. Without you I am the dry dust of hopes unrealized. You are fire and sunshine and desire. You make life changeable and beautiful and full of daily wonder.”

  I couldn’t speak. I was so on fire with his words. Then, like whirlwinds in my brain, rushed out the burning words of the matchmaker: “Not young, not lively, and without money, too!”

  “You are younger than youth,” he said, kissing my hands. “Every day of your unlived youth shall be relived with love, but such a love as youth could never know.”

  And then how it happened I don’t know; but his arms were around me. “Sara Reisel, tell me, do you love me,” he said, kissing me on my hair and on my eyes and on my lips.

  I could only weep and tremble with joy at his touch. “The miracle!” cried my heart; “the miracle of America come true!”

  WHERE LOVERS DREAM

  For years I was saying to myself—Just so you will act when you meet him. Just so you will stand. So will you look on him. These words you will say to him.

  I wanted to show him that what he had done to me could not down me; that his leaving me the way he left me, that his breaking my heart the way he broke it, didn’t crush me; that his grand life and my pinched-in life, his having learning and my not having learning—that the difference didn’t count so much like it seemed; that on the bottom I was the same like him.

  But he came upon me so sudden, all my plannings for years smashed to the wall. The sight of him was like an earthquake shaking me to pieces.

  I can’t yet see nothing in front of me and can’t get my head together to anything, so torn up I am from the shock.

  It was at Yetta Solomon’s wedding I met him again. She was after me for weeks I should only come.

  “How can I come to such a swell hall?” I told her. “You know I ain’t got nothing decent to wear.”

  “Like you are without no dressing-up, I want you to come. You are the kind what people look in your eyes and not on what you got on. Ain’t you yourself the one what helped me with my love troubles? And now, when everything is turning out happy, you mean to tell me that you ain’t going to be there?”

  She gave me a grab over and kissed me in a way that I couldn’t say “No” to her.

  So I shined myself up in the best I had and went to the wedding.

  I was in the middle from giving my congratulations to Yetta and her new husband, when—Gott! Gott im Himmel! The sky is falling to the earth! I see him—him, and his wife leaning on his arm, coming over.

  I gave a fall back, like something sharp hit me. My head got dizzy, and my eyes got blind.

  I wanted to run away from him, but, ach! everything in me rushed to him.

  I was feeling like struck deaf, dumb, and blind all in one.

  He must have said something to me, and I must have answered back something to him, but how? What? I only remember like in a dream my getting to the cloakroom. Such a tearing, grinding pain was dragging me down to the floor that I had to hold on to the wall not to fall.

  All of a sudden I feel a pull on my arm. It was the janitor with the broom in his hand.

  “Lady, are you sick? The wedding people is all gon
e, and I swept up already.”

  But I couldn’t wake up from myself.

  “Lady, the lights is going out,” he says, looking on me queer.

  “I think I ain’t well,” I said. And I went out.

  Ach, I see again the time when we was lovers! How beautiful the world was then!

  “Maybe there never was such love like ours, and never will be,” we was always telling one another.

  When we was together there was like a light shining around us, the light from his heart on mine, and from my heart on his. People began to look happy just looking on us.

  When we was walking we didn’t feel we was touching the earth but flying high up through the air. We looked on the rest of the people with pity, because it was seeming to us that we was the only two persons awake, and all the rest was hurrying and pushing and slaving and crowding one on the other without the splendidness of feeling for what it was all for, like we was feeling it.

  David was learning for a doctor. Daytimes he went to college, and nights he was in a drug-store. I was working in a factory on shirt-waists. We was poor. But we didn’t feel poor. The waists I was sewing flyed like white birds through my fingers, because his face was shining out of everything I touched.

  David was always trying to learn me how to make myself over for an American. Sometimes he would spend out fifteen cents to buy me the “Ladies’ Home Journal” to read about American life, and my whole head was put away on how to look neat and be up-to-date like the American girls. Till long hours in the night I used to stay up brushing and pressing my plain blue suit with the white collar what David liked, and washing my waists, and fixing up my hat like the pattern magazines show you.