Hungry Hearts

by Anzia Yezierska

  A little later Hanneh Breineh again came into Mrs. Pelz’s kitchen, holding Sammy in one arm and in the other an apronful of potatoes. Putting the child down on the floor, she seated herself on the unmade kitchen-bed and began to peel the potatoes in her apron.

  “Woe to me!” sobbed Hanneh Breineh. “To my bitter luck there ain’t no end. With all my other troubles, the stove got broke. I lighted the fire to boil the clothes, and it’s to get choked with smoke. I paid rent only a week ago, and the agent don’t want to fix it. A thunder should strike him! He only comes for the rent, and if anything has to be fixed, then he don’t want to hear nothing.

  “Why comes it to me so hard?” went on Hanneh Breineh, the tears streaming down her cheeks. “I can’t stand it no more. I came into you for a minute to run away from my troubles. It’s only when I sit myself down to peel potatoes or nurse the baby that I take time to draw a breath, and beg only for death.”

  Mrs. Pelz, accustomed to Hanneh Breineh’s bitter outbursts, continued her scrubbing.

  “Ut!” exclaimed Hanneh Breineh, irritated at her neighbor’s silence, “what are you tearing up the world with your cleaning? What’s the use to clean up when everything only gets dirty again?”

  “I got to shine up my house for the holidays.”

  “You’ve got it so good nothing lays on your mind but to clean your house. Look on this little blood-sucker,” said Hanneh Breineh, pointing to the wizened child, made prematurely solemn from starvation and neglect. “Could anybody keep that brat clean? I wash him one minute, and he is dirty the minute after.” Little Sammy grew frightened and began to cry. “Shut up!” ordered the mother, picking up the child to nurse it again. “Can’t you see me take a rest for a minute?”

  The hungry child began to cry at the top of its weakened lungs.

  “Na, na, you glutton.” Hanneh Breineh took out a dirty pacifier from her pocket and stuffed it into the baby’s mouth. The grave, pasty-faced infant shrank into a panic of fear, and chewed the nipple nervously, clinging to it with both his thin little hands.

  “For what did I need yet the sixth one?” groaned Hanneh Breineh, turning to Mrs. Pelz. “Wasn’t it enough five mouths to feed? If I didn’t have this child on my neck, I could turn myself around and earn a few cents.” She wrung her hands in a passion of despair. “Gottuniu! The earth should only take it before it grows up!”

  “Shah! Shah!” reproved Mrs. Pelz. “Pity yourself on the child. Let it grow up already so long as it is here. See how frightened it looks on you.” Mrs. Pelz took the child in her arms and petted it. “The poor little lamb! What did it done you should hate it so?”

  Hanneh Breineh pushed Mrs. Pelz away from her.

  “To whom can I open the wounds of my heart?” she moaned. “Nobody has pity on me. You don’t believe me, nobody believes me until I’ll fall down like a horse in the middle of the street. Oi weh! Mine life is so black for my eyes! Some mothers got luck. A child gets run over by a car, some fall from a window, some burn themselves up with a match, some get choked with diphtheria; but no death takes mine away.”

  “God from the world, stop cursing!” admonished Mrs. Pelz. “What do you want from the poor children? Is it their fault that their father makes small wages? Why do you let it all out on them?” Mrs. Pelz sat down beside Hanneh Breineh. “Wait only till your children get old enough to go to the shop and earn money,” she consoled. “Push only through those few years while they are yet small; your sun will begin to shine; you will live on the fat of the land, when they begin to bring you in the wages each week.”

  Hanneh Breineh refused to be comforted.

  “Till they are old enough to go to the shop and earn money they’ll eat the head off my bones,” she wailed. “If you only knew the fights I got by each meal. Maybe I gave Abe a bigger piece of bread than Fanny. Maybe Fanny got a little more soup in her plate than Jake. Eating is dearer than diamonds. Potatoes went up a cent on a pound, and milk is only for millionaires. And once a week, when I buy a little meat for the Sabbath, the butcher weighs it for me like gold, with all the bones in it. When I come to lay the meat out on a plate and divide it up, there ain’t nothing to it but bones. Before, he used to throw me in a piece of fat extra or a piece of lung, but now you got to pay for everything, even for a bone to the soup.”

  “Never mind; you’ll yet come out from all your troubles. Just as soon as your children get old enough to get their working papers the more children you got, the more money you’ll have.”

  “Why should I fool myself with the false shine of hope? Don’t I know it’s already my black luck not to have it good in this world? Do you think American children will right away give everything they earn to their mother?”

  “I know what is with you the matter,” said Mrs. Pelz. “You didn’t eat yet to-day. When it is empty in the stomach, the whole world looks black. Come, only let me give you something good to taste in the mouth; that will freshen you up.” Mrs. Pelz went to the cupboard and brought out the saucepan of gefülte fish that she had cooked for dinner and placed it on the table in front of Hanneh Breineh. “Give a taste my fish,” she said, taking one slice on a spoon, and handing it to Hanneh Breineh with a piece of bread. “I wouldn’t give it to you on a plate because I just cleaned up my house, and I don’t want to dirty up more dishes.”

  “What, am I a stranger you should have to serve me on a plate yet!” cried Hanneh Breineh, snatching the fish in her trembling fingers.

  “Oi weh! How it melts through all the bones!” she exclaimed, brightening as she ate. “May it be for good luck to us all!” she exulted, waving aloft the last precious bite.

  Mrs. Pelz was so flattered that she even ladled up a spoonful of gravy.

  “There is a bit of onion and carrot in it,” she said, as she handed it to her neighbor.

  Hanneh Breineh sipped the gravy drop by drop, like a connoisseur sipping wine.

  “Ah-h-h! A taste of that gravy lifts me up to heaven!” As she disposed leisurely of the slice of onion and carrot she relaxed and expanded and even grew jovial. “Let us wish all our troubles on the Russian Czar! Let him burst with our worries for rent! Let him get shriveled with our hunger for bread! Let his eyes dry out of his head looking for work!

  “Shah! I’m forgetting from everything,” she exclaimed, jumping up. “It must be eleven or soon twelve, and my children will be right away out of school and fall on me like a pack of wild wolves. I better quick run to the market and see what cheaper I can get for a quarter.”

  Because of the lateness of her coming, the stale bread at the nearest bakeshop was sold out, and Hanneh Breineh had to trudge from shop to shop in search of the usual bargain, and spent nearly an hour to save two cents.

  In the meantime the children returned from school, and, finding the door locked, climbed through the fire-escape, and entered the house through the window. Seeing nothing on the table, they rushed to the stove. Abe pulled a steaming potato out of the boiling pot, and so scalded his fingers that the potato fell to the floor; where upon the three others pounced on it.

  “It was my potato,” cried Abe, blowing his burned fingers, while with the other hand and his foot he cuffed and kicked the three who were struggling on the floor. A wild fight ensued, and the potato was smashed under Abe’s foot amid shouts and screams. Hanneh Breineh, on the stairs, heard the noise of her famished brood, and topped their cries with curses and invectives.

  “They are here already, the savages! They are here already to shorten my life! They heard you all over the hall, in all the houses around!”

  The children, disregarding her words, pounced on her market-basket, shouting ravenously: “Mamma, I’m hungry! What more do you got to eat?”

  They tore the bread and herring out of Hanneh Breineh’s basket and devoured it in starved savagery, clamoring for more.

  “Murderers!” screamed Hanneh Breineh, goaded beyond endurance. “What are you tearing from me my flesh? From where should I steal to give you more? Here I had al
ready a pot of potatoes and a whole loaf of bread and two herrings, and you swallowed it down in the wink of an eye. I have to have Rockefeller’s millions to fill your stomachs.”

  All at once Hanneh Breineh became aware that Benny was missing. “Oi weh!” she burst out, wringing her hands in a new wave of woe, “where is Benny? Didn’t he come home yet from school?”

  She ran out into the hall, opened the grime-coated window, and looked up and down the street; but Benny was nowhere in sight.

  “Abe, Jake, Fanny, quick, find Benny!” entreated Hanneh Breineh, as she rushed back into the kitchen. But the children, anxious to snatch a few minutes’ play before the school-call, dodged past her and hurried out.

  With the baby on her arm, Hanneh Breineh hastened to the kindergarten.

  “Why are you keeping Benny here so long?” she shouted at the teacher as she flung open the door. “If you had my bitter heart, you would send him home long ago and not wait till I got to come for him.”

  The teacher turned calmly and consulted her record-cards.

  “Benny Safron? He wasn’t present this morning.”

  “Not here?” shrieked Hanneh Breineh. “I pushed him out myself he should go. The children didn’t want to take him, and I had no time. Woe is me! Where is my child?” She began pulling her hair and beating her breast as she ran into the street.

  Mrs. Pelz was busy at a pushcart, picking over some spotted apples, when she heard the clamor of an approaching crowd. A block off she recognized Hanneh Breineh, her hair disheveled, her clothes awry, running toward her with her yelling baby in her arms, the crowd following.

  “Friend mine,” cried Hanneh Breineh, falling on Mrs. Pelz’s neck, “I lost my Benny, the best child of all my children.” Tears streamed down her red, swollen eyes as she sobbed. “Benny! mine heart, mine life! Oi-i-i!”

  Mrs. Pelz took the frightened baby out of the mother’s arms.

  “Still yourself a little! See how you’re frightening your child.”

  “Woe to me! Where is my Benny? Maybe he’s killed already by a car. Maybe he fainted away from hunger. He didn’t eat nothing all day long. Gottuniu! Pity yourself on me!”

  She lifted her hands full of tragic entreaty.

  “People, my child! Get me my child! I’ll go crazy out of my head! Get me my child, or I’ll take poison before your eyes!”

  “Still yourself a little!” pleaded Mrs. Pelz.

  “Talk not to me!” cried Hanneh Breineh, wringing her hands. “You’re having all your children. I lost mine. Every good luck comes to other people. But I didn’t live yet to see a good day in my life. Mine only joy, mine Benny, is lost away from me.”

  The crowd followed Hanneh Breineh as she wailed through the streets, leaning on Mrs. Pelz. By the time she returned to her house the children were back from school; but seeing that Benny was not there, she chased them out in the street, crying:

  “Out of here, you robbers, gluttons! Go find Benny!” Hanneh Breineh crumpled into a chair in utter prostration. “Oi weh! he’s lost! Mine life; my little bird; mine only joy! How many nights I spent nursing him when he had the measles! And all that I suffered for weeks and months when he had the whooping-cough! How the eyes went out of my head till I learned him how to walk, till I learned him how to talk! And such a smart child! If I lost all the others, it wouldn’t tear me so by the heart.”

  She worked herself up into such a hysteria, crying, and tearing her hair, and hitting her head with her knuckles, that at last she fell into a faint. It took some time before Mrs. Pelz, with the aid of neighbors, revived her.

  “Benny, mine angel!” she moaned as she opened her eyes.

  Just then a policeman came in with the lost Benny.

  “Na, na, here you got him already!” said Mrs. Pelz. “Why did you carry on so for nothing? Why did you tear up the world like a crazy?”

  The child’s face was streaked with tears as he cowered, frightened and forlorn. Hanneh Breineh sprang toward him, slapping his cheeks, boxing his ears, before the neighbors could rescue him from her.

  “Woe on your head!” cried the mother. “Where did you lost yourself? Ain’t I got enough worries on my head than to go around looking for you? I didn’t have yet a minute’s peace from that child since he was born!”

  “See a crazy mother!” remonstrated Mrs. Pelz, rescuing Benny from another beating. “Such a mouth! With one breath she blesses him when he is lost, and with the other breath she curses him when he is found.”

  Hanneh Breineh took from the window-sill a piece of herring covered with swarming flies, and putting it on a slice of dry bread, she filled a cup of tea that had been stewing all day, and dragged Benny over to the table to eat.

  But the child, choking with tears, was unable to touch the food.

  “Go eat!” commanded Hanneh Breineh. “Eat and choke yourself eating!”

  “Maybe she won’t remember me no more. Maybe the servant won’t let me in,” thought Mrs. Pelz, as she walked by the brownstone house on Eighty-Fourth Street where she had been told Hanneh Breineh now lived. At last she summoned up enough courage to climb the steps. She was all out of breath as she rang the bell with trembling fingers. “Oi weh! even the outside smells riches and plenty! Such curtains! And shades on all windows like by millionaires! Twenty years ago she used to eat from the pot to the hand, and now she lives in such a palace.”

  A whiff of steam-heated warmth swept over Mrs. Pelz as the door opened, and she saw her old friend of the tenements dressed in silk and diamonds like a being from another world.

  “Mrs. Pelz, is it you!” cried Hanneh Breineh, overjoyed at the sight of her former neighbor. “Come right in. Since when are you back in New York?”

  “We came last week,” mumbled Mrs. Pelz, as she was led into a richly carpeted reception-room.

  “Make yourself comfortable. Take off your shawl,” urged Hanneh Breineh.

  But Mrs. Pelz only drew her shawl more tightly around her, a keen sense of her poverty gripping her as she gazed, abashed by the luxurious wealth that shone from every corner.

  “This shawl covers up my rags,” she said, trying to hide her shabby sweater.

  “I’ll tell you what; come right into the kitchen,” suggested Hanneh Breineh. “The servant is away for this afternoon, and we can feel more comfortable there. I can breathe like a free person in my kitchen when the girl has her day out.”

  Mrs. Pelz glanced about her in an excited daze. Never in her life had she seen anything so wonderful as a white-tiled kitchen, with its glistening porcelain sink and the aluminum pots and pans that shone like silver.

  “Where are you staying now?” asked Hanneh Breineh, as she pinned an apron over her silk dress.

  “I moved back to Delancey Street, where we used to live,” replied Mrs. Pelz, as she seated herself cautiously in a white enameled chair.

  “Oi weh! What grand times we had in that old house when we were neighbors!” sighed Hanneh Breineh, looking at her old friend with misty eyes.

  “You still think on Delancey Street? Haven’t you more high-class neighbors uptown here?”

  “A good neighbor is not to be found every day,” deplored Hanneh Breineh. “Uptown here, where each lives in his own house, nobody cares if the person next door is dying or going crazy from loneliness. It ain’t anything like we used to have it in Delancey Street, when we could walk into one another’s rooms without knocking, and borrow a pinch of salt or a pot to cook in.”

  Hanneh Breineh went over to the pantry-shelf.

  “We are going to have a bite right here on the kitchen-table like on Delancey Street. So long there’s no servant to watch us we can eat what we please.”

  “Oi! How it waters my mouth with appetite, the smell of the herring and onion!” chuckled Mrs. Pelz, sniffing the welcome odors with greedy pleasure.

  Hanneh Breineh pulled a dish-towel from the rack and threw one end of it to Mrs. Pelz.

  “So long there’s no servant around, we can use it together for a
napkin. It’s dirty, anyhow. How it freshens up my heart to see you!” she rejoiced as she poured out her tea into a saucer. “If you would only know how I used to beg my daughter to write for me a letter to you; but these American children, what is to them a mother’s feelings?”

  “What are you talking!” cried Mrs. Pelz. “The whole world rings with you and your children. Everybody is envying you. Tell me how began your luck?”

  “You heard how my husband died with consumption,” replied Hanneh Breineh. “The five hundred dollars lodge money gave me the first lift in life, and I opened a little grocery store. Then my son Abe married himself to a girl with a thousand dollars. That started him in business, and now he has the biggest shirt-waist factory on West Twenty-Ninth Street.”

  “Yes, I heard your son had a factory.” Mrs. Pelz hesitated and stammered; “I’ll tell you the truth. What I came to ask you—I thought maybe you would beg your son Abe if he would give my husband a job.”

  “Why not?” said Hanneh Breineh. “He keeps more than five hundred hands. I’ll ask him if he should take in Mr. Pelz.”

  “Long years on you, Hanneh Breineh! You’ll save my life if you could only help my husband get work.”

  “Of course my son will help him. All my children like to do good. My daughter Fanny is a milliner on Fifth Avenue, and she takes in the poorest girls in her shop and even pays them sometimes while they learn the trade.” Hanneh Breineh’s face lit up, and her chest filled with pride as she enumerated the successes of her children. “And my son Benny he wrote a play on Broadway and he gave away more than a hundred free tickets for the first night.”

  “Benny? The one who used to get lost from home all the time? You always did love that child more than all the rest. And what is Sammy your baby doing?”

  “He ain’t a baby no longer. He goes to college and quarterbacks the football team. They can’t get along without him.

  “And my son Jake, I nearly forgot him. He began collecting rent in Delancey Street, and now he is boss of renting the swellest apartment-houses on Riverside Drive.”