The Rise of David Levinsky (25 page)

“What do you want City College for?” Jake would argue. “Why not take up medicine at once?”

“Once I am to be an educated man I want to be the genuine article,” I would reply.

Every bit of new knowledge I acquired aroused my enthusiasm. I was in a continuous turmoil of exultation.

My plan of campaign was to keep working until I had saved up six hundred dollars, by which time I was to be eligible to admission to the junior class of the College of the City of New York, commonly known as City College, where tuition is free. The six hundred dollars was to last me two years—that is, till graduation, when I might take up medicine, engineering, or law. During the height of the cloak season I might find it possible to replenish my funds by an occasional few days at the sewing-machine, or else it ought not to be difficult to support myself by joining the army of private instructors who taught English to our workingmen at their homes.

The image of the modest college building was constantly before me. More than once I went a considerable distance out of my way to pass the comer of Lexington Avenue and Twenty-third Street, where that edifice stood. I would pause and gaze at its red, ivy-clad walls, mysterious high windows, humble spires; I would stand watching the students on the campus and around the great doors, and go my way, with a heart full of reverence, envy, and hope, with a heart full of quiet ecstasy.

It was not merely a place in which I was to fit myself for the battle of life, nor merely one in which I was going to acquire knowledge. It was a symbol of spiritual promotion as well. University-bred people were the real nobility of the world. A college diploma was a certificate of moral as well as intellectual aristocracy.

My old religion had gradually fallen to pieces, and if its place was taken by something else, if there was something that appealed to the better man in me, to what was purest in my thoughts and most sacred in my emotions, that something was the red, church-like structure on the southeast corner of Lexington Avenue and Twenty-third Street.

It was the synagogue of my new life. Nor is this merely a figure of speech: the building really appealed to me as a temple, as a House of Sanctity, as we call the ancient Temple of Jerusalem. At least that was the term I would fondly apply to it, years later, in my retrospective broodings upon the first few years of my life in America.

I was impatiently awaiting the advent of the slack season, and when it came at last I applied myself exclusively to the study of subjects required for admission to college. To accelerate matters I engaged, as my instructor in mathematics and geography, the son of our tough-looking presser. I paid him twenty-five cents an hour.

My geography lessons were rapidly dispelling the haze that had enshrouded the universe from me. I beheld the globe hanging in space, a vast independent world and yet a mere speck among countless myriads of other worlds. Its rotations were so vivid in my mind that I seemed to hear it hum as it spun round and round its axis. The phenomena producing day and night and the four seasons were as real to me as the things that took place in my restaurant. The earth was being disclosed to my mental vision as a whole and in detail. Order was coming out of chaos. Continents, seas, islands, mountains, rivers, countries, were defining themselves out of a misty jumble of meaningless names. Light was breaking all around me. Life was becoming clearer. I was broadening out. I was overborne by a sense of my growing perspicacity.

My keenest pleasure was to do geometrical problems, preferably such as contained puzzles in construction. On one occasion I sat up all night and far into the following day 169 over a riddle of this kind. It was about 2 o’clock when I dressed and went to lunch, which was also my breakfast. The problem was still unsolved. I hurried back home as soon as I had finished my meal, went at the problem again, and did not let go until it surrendered. Odd as it may seem, I found a certain kind of similarity between the lure of these purely mental exercises and the appeal of music. In both cases I was piqued and harassed by a personified mystery. If a tune ran in my mind it would appear as though somebody, I knew not who, was saying something, I knew not what. What was he saying? Who was he? What had happened to him? Was he reciting some grievance, bemoaning some loss, or threatening vengeance? What was he nagging me about? Questions such as these would keep pecking at my heart, and this pain, this excruciating curiosity, I would call keen enjoyment.

In like manner every difficult mathematical problem seemed to shelter some unknown fellow who took pleasure in teasing me and daring me to find him. It was the same mischievous fellow, in fact, who used to laugh in my face when I had a difficult bit of Talmud to unravel.

“Why, geometry is even deeper than Talmud,” I once exclaimed to Jake.

“Do you think so?” he answered, indifferently.

“I think an interesting geometrical problem is more delicious than the best piece of meat.”

“Why don’t you live on problems, then? Why spend money on dinners?”

“Smart boy, aren’t you?”

“Is doing problems as sweet as being in love?” he demanded, with sheepish earnestness.

“ You are in love with Madame Klesmer. You ought to know.”

He made no answer.

On the day when I began these studies I had thirty-six dollars besides the hundred which I kept in the savings-bank. Of this I was now spending, including tuition fees, less than six dollars a week. Every time I changed a dollar my heart literally sank within me. Finally, when my cash was all gone, I borrowed some money of Joe, my “rabbi” at the art of cloak-making. Breaking the round sum total of my savings-bank account was out of the question. Joe advanced me money more than cheerfully. He was glad to have me in his debt as a pledge of my continuing to work for him. His motive was obvious, and yet I went on borrowing of him rather than draw upon my bank account.

One day it crossed my mind that it would be a handsome thing if I looked up Gitelson and paid him the ten dollars I owed him. It was sweet to picture myself telling him how much his ten dollars had done and was going to do for me. I was impatient to call on him, and so I borrowed ten dollars of Joe and betook myself to the factory where I had visited Gitelson several times before. As he was a sample-maker, his work knew no seasons. When I called at that factory I found that he had given up his job there, that he had married and established a small custom-tailor shop somewhere up-town, nobody seemed to know where. Joe had not even heard of his marriage. Meanwhile, my enthusiasm for paying him his debt was gone, and I was rather glad that I had not found him.

 

It was the middle of July. The great “winter season” was developing. I felt perfectly competent to make a whole garment unaided. It was doubtful, however, whether I should be readily accepted as an independent mechanic in the shop where I was employed now and where one was in the habit of regarding me as a mere apprentice. So I was determined to seek employment elsewhere. Joe was suspicious. Not that I betrayed my plans in any way. He took them for granted. And so he visited me every day, on all sorts of pretexts, dined me and wined me (if the phrase may be applied to a soda-water dinner), and watched my every step.

Finally I wearied of it all, and one afternoon, as we were seated in the restaurant, I picked a quarrel with him.

“I don’t want your dinners,” I burst out, “and I don’t want to be watched by you as if I were a recruit in the Russian army and you were my ‘little uncle.’ I’ll pay you what I owe you and leave me alone.”

“As if I were uneasy about those few dollars!” he said, ingratiatingly.

“I know you are not. That’s just it.”

He took fire. “What am I after, then? You think I get rich on your work, don’t you?”

Our altercation waxed violent. At one point he was about to lapse into a conciliatory tone again, but his dignity prevailed.

“I would not keep you if you begged me,” he declared. “I hate to deal with an ingrate. But I want my money at once.”

“ I shall pay it to you when work begins.”

“No, sirrah. I want it at once.”

An ugly scene followed. He seized me by my coat lapels and threatened to have me arrested.

Finally the restaurant-keeper and Gussie, the homely finisher girl whom we all respected, made peace between us, and things were arranged more or less amicably.

I obtained employment in an “inside” place, a factory owned by twin brothers named Manheimer.

I was in high feather. My sense of advancement and independence reminded me of the days when I had just been graduated from the Talmudic Academy and went on studying as an “independent scholar.” I had not, however, begun to work in my new place when a general strike of the trade was declared.

T
HE Cloak-makers’ Union had been a weak, insignificant organization, but at the call for a general strike it suddenly burst into life. There was a great rush for membership cards. Everybody seemed to be enthusiastic, full of fight. To me, however, the strike was a sheer calamity. I laid it all to my own hard luck. It seemed as though the trouble had been devised for the express purpose of preventing me from being promoted to full pay; for the express purpose of upsetting my financial calculations in connection with my college plans. Everybody was saying that prices were outrageously low, that the manufacturers were taking advantage of the weakness of the union, and that they must be brought to terms. All this was lost upon me. The question of prices did not interest me, because the wages I was going to receive were by far the highest I had ever been paid. But the main thing was that I looked upon the whole business of making cloaks as a temporary occupation. My mind was full of my books and my college dreams. All I wanted was to start the “season” as soon as possible, to save up the expected sum, and to reach the next period of freedom from physical toil, when I should be able to spend day and night on my studies again. But going to work as a strike-breaker was out of the question. A new kind of Public Opinion had suddenly sprung up among the cloak-makers: a man who did not belong to the union was a traitor, worse than an apostate, worse than the worst of criminals.

And so, feeling like a school-boy in Antomir when he is made to furnish the very rod with which he is to be chastised, I went to the headquarters of the union, paid my initiation fee, and became a member. It was on a Friday afternoon. The secretaries of the organization were seated at a long table in the basement of a meeting-room building on Rivington Street. The basement and the street outside were swarming with cloak-makers. A number of mass meetings had been arranged to take place in several halls, with well-known Socialists for speakers, but I had not even the curiosity to attend them. When some of my shopmates reproached me for my indifference I said, sullenly:

“I’ve joined the union. What more do you want?”

One of them, a Talmudist like myself, spoke of capital and labor, of the injustice of the existing economic order. He had recently, through the strike, been converted to Socialism. He made a fiery appeal to me. He spoke with the exaltation of a new proselyte. But his words fell on deaf ears. I had no mind for anything but my college studies.

“ Do you think it right that millions of people should toil and live in misery so that a number of idlers might roll in luxury?” he pleaded.

“ I haven’t made the world, nor can I mend it,” was my retort.

 

 

The manufacturers yielded almost every point. The “season” began with a rush.

My pay-envelope for the first week contained thirty-two dollars and some cents. I knew the union price, of course, and I had figured out the sum before I received it, yet when I beheld the two figures on the envelope the blood surged to my head. Thirty-two dollars! Why, that meant sixty-four rubles! I was tempted to write Naphtali about it.

The next week brought me an even fatter envelope. I worked sixteen hours a day. Reading and studying had to be suspended till October. I lived on five dollars a week. My savings, and with them my sense of my own importance in the world, grew apace. As there was no time to go to the savings-bank, I had to carry what I deemed a great sum on my person (in a money-belt that I had improvised for the purpose). This was a constant source of anxiety as well as of joy. No matter how absorbed I might have been in my work or in thought, the consciousness of having that wad of paper money with me was never wholly absent from my mind. It loomed as a badge of omnipotence. I felt in the presence of Luck, which was a living spirit, a goddess. I was mostly grave. The frivolities of the other men in the factory seemed so fatuous, so revolting. A great sense of security and self-confidence swelled my heart. When I walked through the American streets I would feel at home in them, far more so than I had ever felt before. At the same time danger was constantly hovering about me—the danger of the street crowds seizing that magic wad from me.

The image of the college building loomed as a bride-elect of mine. But that, somehow, did not seem to have anything to do with my money-belt, as though I expected to go to college without encroaching upon my savings—a case of eating the cake and having it.

 

The cloak-makers were so busy they had no time to attend meetings, and being little accustomed to method and discipline, they suffered their organization to melt away. By the time the “season” came to a close the union was scarcely stronger than it had been before the strike. As there was no work now, and no prices to fix, one did not miss its protection.

The number of men employed in the trade in those years did not exceed seven thousand. The industry was still in its infancy.

 

I resumed my studies with a passion amounting to a frenzy. I would lay in a supply of coarse rye bread, cheese, and salmon to last me two or even three days, and never leave my lair during that length of time. I dined at the Delancey Street restaurant every third or fourth day, and did not go to the theater unless Jake was particularly insistent. But then I religiously attended Felix Adler’s ethical-culture lectures, at Chickering Hall, on Sunday mornings. I valued them for their English rather than for anything else, but their spirit, reinforced by the effect of organ music and the general atmosphere of the place, would send my soul soaring. These gatherings and my prospective alma mater appealed to me as being of the same order of things, of the same world of refined ways, new thoughts, noble interests.