Leah's Journey (12 page)

“I can’t get used to the idea that some of the girls are frightened of me,” Leah said sadly.

“I know it’s not a pleasant feeling,” he replied. “We will see you then at the meeting tomorrow night?”

She nodded and he shook hands with her gravely before disappearing into the factory. Leah, following him a moment later, looked up and saw Arnold Rosenblatt staring down at her from his office window. The owner’s eyes were narrow although his lips were creased in a thin smile, and when she entered the building, he tossed his cigar butt from the window with such force that it fell into a pool of sunlight well beyond the ailanthus tree.

The meeting was held in Eli Feinstein’s small room on Catherine Street and every available space was occupied when Leah finally arrived. She had been delayed at home by Malcha’s worried questions and a disturbing incident with Aaron.

“To a man’s room you’re going? A single man? Leah, what kind of thing is that to be doing?” Malcha’s eyes were permanently wreathed with lines of puzzlement. Everything in this new world bewildered her—the streets which teemed with activity from early morning till late at night, the schools which were miraculously free for all children, the libraries which offered books for loan, the subways which swept her in minutes from one end of the enormous city to the other, her clean-shaven husband—but Leah, her own sister, was the most consistent source of puzzlement.

Leah’s earnings sustained the household and it was Leah who examined the bills and arranged for their payment. Sarah Ellenberg had told Malcha that Leah earned more than her own husband. And Leah was increasingly content to leave the running of the house to Malcha, who had quickly mastered the mystery of the labyrinthine streets of the east side and scurried expertly from the Essex Street market to the open stalls of Hester Street. This division of duties did not trouble Malcha, but she believed that when Leah came home at night she should remain in the apartment and not go to classes or lectures at the settlement house or, as she was now preparing to do, rush off to a meeting. The children needed her. Aaron was growing more and more withdrawn, hiding from his mother as though she were a stranger yet obsessed with her arrivals and departures. Rebecca was a sweet child but headstrong and stubborn, always demanding her own way, unlike Malcha’s own children, Yankele and Chana, who clung to their mother, following her obediently about the house, helping with the chores, and trailing behind her when she did her shopping.

“Little ghosts,” Masha named the pale, quiet children, but then Masha had been very unpleasant since Shimon Hartstein’s wife had arrived from Russia, and it was a relief to everyone in the flat that she was planning to move to California where a distant cousin had opened a drapery shop.

Aaron, too, had delayed Leah as she hurried to dress for the meeting.

“Mama, can I talk to you for a minute?” he asked, standing in the doorway and watching Leah brush her dark hair.

Impatiently she turned around, expertly spinning the mass of dark hair into a loose knot that rested against the pale-blue fabric of a new dress she had finished sewing only the night before. She did not mean to dress especially for the meeting, but it was pleasant to slip on a new dress and she remembered now how Yaakov had loved the color blue. It was a strange coincidence that Eli Feinstein so often wore shirts of a shade similar to the one Yaakov had favored.

“I haven’t much time, Aaron,” she replied. “Can you tell me tomorrow?”

“You won’t have time tomorrow either. You never have any time,” the boy said accusingly, scraping the floor with his scuffed shoes.

Leah looked hard at him, the anger rising hot within her. Her cheeks burned and her palms were moist. Aaron was almost ten now, tall for his age and stocky. He seldom smiled and when he spoke his voice was laced with a moody harshness.

“The boy is lonely,” David maintained when Leah mentioned his sulkiness, but where her husband saw sadness, Leah sensed an anger and hostility which, like a magnetic force, attracted her own.

“Why don’t I have time?” she shouted now. “I don’t have time because I am working day and night. I’m working for you, Aaron, and for your sister and your father so that your lives will be better than mine. Do you think I like getting up when it’s still dark and sitting all day in a factory? Do you? Answer me, Aaron! Do you?”

The boy stared at her wide-eyed with fear. His mother had always spoken to him in tones of quiet restraint, of indifferent reason. Sometimes, when he was smaller, he had courted her anger, almost hoping for a sudden burst of temper which would violate the removed calm, the cool control with which she spoke to him. Sarah Ellenberg shouted at Joshua with fierce fury and embraced him with equal fierceness, her anger somehow inexplicably linked to her love. But Leah’s sudden burst of fury bewildered Aaron now and tears flooded his eyes, shaming him into new misery so that he fled his mother’s bedroom, his shoulders shaking with small silent sobs he could not control.

Leah stared at herself in the mirror as though seeking to recognize, within her own reflection, that mysterious unpredictable stranger who shouted at a child without reason. Heavy-hearted, she continued to dress, and before she left the apartment she went to Aaron’s room. The boy’s narrow bed was empty. The words of regret remained frozen in her mind and a nagging sorrow added its weight to the fatigue that always cloaked her.

A half-hour later Leah stood uneasily in the doorway at Eli Feinstein’s room and listened to the voices around her. The meeting was well under way and to her surprise almost every employee of any importance at Rosenblatt and Sons was present. Sam Abramowitz, the general foreman, sat on the narrow cot with Moe Cohen who managed piece goods and Salvatore Visconti who headed the traffic department. The three men were all smoking small cigars and passing a single battered aluminum ashtray from hand to hand. Several machine operators and finishers sat cross-legged on the floor and Eleanor Greenstein, Rosenblatt’s designer, elegant in a green organdy dress, occupied the only chair. Eli Feinstein himself was perched on a corner of a shaky bridge table, piled high with papers and pamphlets.

The room, small and dark, its single window looking across to a blank brick wall where a crippled dumbwaiter dangled, was similar to the rooms Leah rented to her boarders, but every inch of space was packed with books. Wooden crates overflowed with worn volumes and piles of journals, looped with twine, were ranged in every corner of the room. Someone pulled out a stool and handed it to Leah. She set it down where she could lean against the wall and, grateful for the support, she sat back and listened to the heated talk around her.

Some in the room had been involved in organizational activity, working quietly, for a considerable time. Salvatore Visconti, his English spiced with a heavy Italian accent, small particles of tobacco glinting in his thick brown moustache, told the group that every worker with whom he had spoken was prepared to sign up for a union shop.

“They know it’s the only way we get any rights,” he said. “The girls, they go to church to say Mass on Ash Wednesday. They come a half-hour late and Rosenblatt tells them they got to stay overtime to make it up. We say freedom of religion in this country. That’s why we come over here. And the rich boss, he can’t give maybe a half-hour a year for this freedom? Pah!” Visconti’s tongue curled upward in a gesture of contempt and licked at a golden flake of tobacco which he spat into his hand.

“That’s gravy, Visconti,” Sam Abramowitz interposed. “A couple of hours off for church or shul is nothing. It’s safety I’m worried about. You people don’t see it but I know for a fact that there isn’t a single safe fire exit in the whole damn place―begging your pardon, ladies, but this gets me excited.” The little man bowed to Leah and Eleanor Greenstein and continued. “I had trouble getting through the front door yesterday. I had a delivery and the damn cartons were too big. So I get a brainstorm—I thought. We’ll get them up through the windows. Only the windows on the second floor are locked tight. Some of them nailed down. Rosenblatt says the girls get enough air from the fans and he needs the security against break-ins. Well, he’d better get a watchman and get those windows open because if anything ever happens here they’ll be calling him a murderer.”

His harsh words left the room stunned into silence until Eleanor Greenstein leaned forward. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were dangerously bright.

“Sam Abramowitz is right. Protection is the most important thing. We must fight for it.” Her voice trembled and Leah stared at her, surprised at the older woman’s intensity.

“Well, it’s not only fires I’m worried about,” Moe Cohen said thoughtfully. “I’m worried about the wear and tear of every day, never mind emergencies. I don’t know about you, Mrs. Goldfeder, but I lose half my people every year. They get sick or they get fed up with not having any benefits or holidays, and just when I get them trained they’re off to one of Dubinsky’s union shops. And I don’t blame them. I tried talking to Rosenblatt about it but he squints up his eyes and starts yammering about laziness and pilfering.”

Leah nodded. Her turnover rate was also disturbing. Her girls grew ill or found better jobs. Bonnie Eckstein was the fourth girl to work her embroidery machine in as many months.

“I too have talked to Rosenblatt,” Eli Feinstein said. “The word union makes him crazy. He told me that once before, in his father’s time, there was union talk in this factory. The old man had a lockout when he heard about it. He didn’t open and the workers were out in the street. It was winter. They had no money for coal or food and after a week they came crawling back to him, begging him to open. He took out of their wages the losses from his own lockout. Some of them paid back for months. And Rosenblatt says he’ll do the same thing.”

“Only he can’t do it.” Eleanor Greenstein’s voice was cool and controlled now and there was certainty in her tone.

She was a handsome woman who had designed Rosenblatt’s line of inexpensive dresses for two decades and it was rumored that she had been mistress to both Arnold Rosenblatt and his father. Her ash-blonde hair was licked with silver and she wore it in a loose chignon which she patted occasionally with an impeccably manicured hand, her fingernails painted a pale pink. Leah, who often saw her in Arnold Rosenblatt’s office when she delivered designs or time sheets, had been surprised to see the designer at the meeting in Eli Feinstein’s small room. She listened attentively as the older woman spoke.

“There isn’t a supplier Rosenblatt doesn’t owe money to. And they’re beginning to talk to each other and realize it. So far he’s been able to calm them with talk of a successful fall line. And he does have good items for the fall. But if there’s a strike and there’s no fall line, there’s no profit. No profit, no payments—and those suppliers will go after him. I think he’d rather have a union shop than a bankrupt shop. Believe me, I know. I have all the figures here. Arnold Rosenblatt needs us more than we need him.” Eleanor Greenstein patted her notebook and smoothed her skirt. Her gray eyes met Leah’s gaze and she smiled at her.

“All right. So it seems we’re all agreed. What do we do now?” asked one of the younger machinists. He had been sitting crosslegged on the floor, but rose to stretch his legs and reach impatiently for a cigarette.

“Now we break down into committees and do separate jobs,” Eli Feinstein replied. “We have to feel out all the workers and find out how committed they are. Most, I think, will go along with us, but we have to be careful. Very careful. When we’re certain enough of our people, a committee will go to Rosenblatt. We’ll tell him that we’re through asking for our rights. Now we’re demanding them. The right to a union. The right to safety. The right to decent benefits and decent pay. If we are all together, nothing and no one can stop us.”

There was a brief outbreak of applause and Leah joined in, stirred by the restrained passion in Feinstein’s voice. She remembered Yaakov, so young, so full of hope, making similar speeches in rooms even smaller than this one, rooms where a burnished samovar bubbled in a corner and a tiny crude press hurtled ink-blurred pamphlets onto the sawdust-covered floor. It was a long time since she had been to such a meeting, a long time since she had heard such calls for hope and solidarity.

Eli quickly proceeded to divide the group into smaller working teams. Eleanor was excepted because her position was too vulnerable. He himself would work with Leah and Salvatore Visconti. They would serve as liaison to Dubinsky’s union, which might lend them support. The others in the room would canvass their fellow workers.

It was late when the meeting disbanded and Leah stood on the stoop for a moment, breathing the clear, fresh air. A group of girls jumped rope in front of the house, delaying the hour when they would crawl into a bed shared by other siblings in bedrooms crowded with cots and cribs.

Rosie my darling, Rosie my own,

Climb into my pushcart, I’ll take you home.

Tomorrow is the Sabbath, we’ll eat gefilte fish

Rosie, oh Rosie, you are my favorite dish.

They sang as the worn piece of clothesline turned rhythmically, and Leah smiled at a small girl whose braids bobbed up and down as she jumped. She turned to see Eleanor Greenstein standing beside her.

“Do you have children, Mrs. Goldfeder?” the designer asked.

“Yes. A boy and a girl.”

“You’re very fortunate. I had a daughter.” The words were soft, almost a whisper. “Your work is very good, Mrs. Goldfeder. You should be doing much more designing. But of course you will. You know that.” Lightly she touched Leah’s arm and disappeared around the corner.

Leah hurried home, worried suddenly about what David would think about her involvement in the union and how Malcha would react to the frequent meetings. When she reached the house she glanced up at the window, but although a dim light burned within, no small face topped with fiery curls was framed within the casement. A sudden shaft of fear shot through her and she hurried up the stairs, but when she reached the children’s room, Aaron lay curled up in bed, his body tense and rigid even in sleep. Rebecca lay in the bed next to him and a smile briefly lit her sleeping face. Leah drew the blanket around her daughter and hesitantly put her hand on her son’s. At her touch, he reached out and his fingers curled about hers, pressing them lightly.