The Rise of David Levinsky (26 page)

If I came across a street faker and he spoke with a foreign accent I would pass on; if, however, his English struck me as that of a “real American,” I would pause and listen to his “lecture,” sometimes for more than an hour. People who were born to speak English were superior beings. Even among fallen women I would seek those who were real Americans.

I
WAS reading
Pendennis.
The prospect of returning to work was a hideous vision. The high wages in store for me had lost their magnetism. I often wondered whether I might not be able to secure some pupils in English or Hebrew, and drop cloak-making at once. I dreamed of enlisting the interest of a certain Maecenas, a German-American Jew who financed many a struggling college student of the Ghetto. Thoughts of a “college match” would flash through my mind—that is, of becoming engaged to some girl who earned good wages and was willing to support me through college. This form of matrimonial arrangement, which has been mentioned in an earlier chapter, is not uncommon among our immigrants. Alliances of this sort naturally tend to widen the intellectual chasm between the two parties to the contract, and often result in some of the tragedies or comedies that fill the swift-flowing life of American Ghettos. But the ambition to be the wife of a doctor, lawyer, or dentist is too strong in some of our working-girls to be quenched by the dangers involved.

One of the young women I had in mind was Gussie, the cloak-finisher mentioned above, who saved for a marriage portion too energetically to make a marriage. She was a good girl, and no fool, either, and I thought to myself that she would make me a good wife, even if she was plain and had a washed-out appearance and was none too young. I was too passionately in love with my prospective
alma mater
to care whether I could love my fiancée or not.

“I have a fellow for you,” I said to Gussie, under the guise of pleasantry, meeting her in the street one day. “Something fine.”

“Who is it—yourself?” she asked, quickly.

“You have guessed it right.”

“Have I? Then tell your fellow to go to all the black devils.”

“Why?”

“Because.”

“If I could go to college—”

“You want me to pay your bills, do you?”

“Wouldn’t you like to be the wife of a doctor? You would take rides in my carriage—”

“ You mean the other way around: you would ride in my carriage and I should have to start a breach-of-promise case against ‘Dr. Levinsky.’ You’ll have to look for a bigger fool than I,” she concluded, with a smile.

It was an attractive smile, full of good nature and common sense. A smile of this kind often makes a homely face pretty. Gussie’s did not. The light it shed only served to publish her ugliness. But I did not care. The infatuation I had brought with me from Antomir had not yet completely faded out, anyhow. And so I harbored vague thoughts that some day, when I saw fit to press my suit, Gussie might yield.

I was getting impatient. The idea of having to go back to work became more hateful to me every day. I was in despair. Finally I decided to consider my career as a cloak-maker closed; to cut my expenses to the veriest minimum, to live on my savings, look for some source of income that would not interfere with my studies, take the college examination as soon as I was ready for it, and let the future take care of itself.

In the heart of the Jewish neighborhood I found an attic for half of what I was paying the Irish family. Moreover, it was a neighborhood where everything was cheaper than in any other part of New York, the only one in which it was possible for a man to have a “room” to himself and live on four dollars a week. So I moved to that attic, a step for which, as I now think of it, I cannot but be thankful to fate, for it brought me in touch with a quaint, simple man who is my warm friend to this day, perhaps the dearest friend I have had in America.

The house was a rickety, two-story frame structure, the smallest and oldest-looking on the block. Its ground floor was used as a tailoring shop by the landlord himself, a white-headed giant of a man whom I cannot recall other- 178 wise than as smiling wistfully and sighing. His name was Esrah Nodelman. His wife, who was a dwarf beside him, ruled him with an iron hand.

Mrs. Nodelman gave me breakfasts, and I soon felt like one of the family. She was a veritable chatter-box, her great topic of conversation being her son Meyer, upon whom she doted, and his American-born wife, whose name she scarcely ever uttered without a malediction. She told me how she, Meyer’s mother, her sister, and a niece had turned out their pockets and pawned their jewelry to help Meyer start in business as a clothing-manufacturer.

“He’s now worth a hundred thousand dollars—may no evil eye hit him,” she said. “He’s a good fellow, a lump of gold. If God had given him a better wife (may the plague carry off the one he has) he would be all right. She has a meat-ball for a face, the face of a murderess. She always was a murderess, but since Meyer became a manufacturer there is no talking to her at all. The airs she is giving herself! And all because she was born in America, the frog that she is.”

I soon made Meyer’s acquaintance. He was a dark man of forty, with Oriental sadness in his eyes. To lend his face capitalistic dignity he had recently grown a pair of side-whiskers, but one day, a week or two after I met him, he saw a circus poster of “Jo Jo, the human dog,” and then he hastened to discard them.

“I don’t want to look like a man-dog,” he explained, gaily, to his mother, who was unpleasantly surprised by the change.

“ Man-dog nothing,” she protested, addressing herself to me. “He was as handsome as gold in those whiskers. He looked like a regular monarch in them.” And then to him: “I suppose it was that treasure of a wife you have who told you to have them taken off. It’s a lucky thing she does not order you to have your foolish head taken off.”

“You better shut up, mamma,” he said, sternly. And she did.

He called to see his parents quite frequently, sometimes with some of his children, but never with his wife, at least not while I lived there.

Crassly illiterate save for his ability to read some Hebrew, without knowing the meaning of the words, he enjoyed a considerable degree of native intellectual alertness, and in his crude, untutored way was a thinker.

One evening he took to quizzing me on my plans, partly in Yiddish and partly in broken English, which he uttered with a strong Cockney accent, a relic of the several years he had spent in London.

“And what will you do after you finish (he pronounced it ”fiendish”) college?” he inquired, with a touch of derision.

“I shall take up some higher things,” I rejoined, reluctantly.

“And what do you call ‘higher things’?” he pursued in his quizzical, browbeating way. “Are you going to be a philosopher?”

“Yes, I shall be a doctor of philosophy,” I answered, frostily.

“What’s that? You want to be both a doctor and a philosopher? But you know the saying, ‘Many trades—few blessings.”’

“I am not going to be a doctor
and
a philosopher, but a doctor
of
philosophy,” I said, with a sneer.

“And how much will you make?”

“Oh, let him alone, Meyer,” his mother intervened. “He is an educated fellow, and he doesn’t care for money at all.”

“Doesn’t care for money, eh?” the younger Nodelman jeered.

“Do you think money is really everything?” I shot back. “One might be able to find a thing or two which could not be bought with it.”

“Not even at Ridley’s,
^b
he jested, but he was manifestly beginning to resent my attitude and to take our passage at arms rather seriously.

“Not even at Ridley’s. You can’t get brains there, can you?”

“Well, I never learned to write, but I have a learned fellow in my office. He’s chuck full of learning and that sort of thing. Yet who is working for whom—I for him or he for me? So much for education—for the stuff that’s in a man’s head. And now let’s take charity—the stuff that’s in a man’s heart. I don’t care what you say, but of what use is a good heart unless he has some jinglers
^c
to go with it? You can’t shove your hand into your heart and pull out a few dollars for a poor friend, can you? You can help him out of your pocket, though—that is, provided it is not empty.”

My bewigged little landlady was feasting her eyes on her son.

Meyer went on with his argument: “What is a man without capital? Nothing! Nobody cares for him. He is like a beast. A beast can’t talk, and he can’t. ‘Money talks,’ as the Americans say.”

His words and manner put me in a socialist mood. He was hateful to me. I listened in morose silence. He felt piqued, and he wilted. The ginger went out of his voice. My taciturnity continued, until, gradually, he edged over to my side of the controversy, taking up the cudgels for education and spiritual excellence with the same force with which he had a short while ago tried to set forth their futility.

“Of course it’s nice to be educated,” he said. “A man without writing is just like a deaf mute. What’s the difference? The man who can’t write has speech in his mouth, but he is dumb with his fingers, while the deaf mute he can’t talk with his mouth, but he can do so with his fingers. Both should be pitied. I do like education. Of course I do. Don’t I send my boy to college? I am an ignorant boor myself, because my father was poor, but my children shall have all the wisdom they can pile in. We Jews have too many enemies in the world. Everybody is ready to shed our blood. So where would we be if many of our people were not among the wisest of the wise? Why, they would just crush us like so many flies. When I see an educated Jew I say to myself, ‘That’s it!’”

When he heard of my ambition to give lessons he said:

“I tell you what. I’ll be your first pupil. I mean it.” he added, seriously.

My heart gave a leap. “Very well. I’ll try my best,” I replied.

“Mind you, I don’t want to be a philosopher. I just want you to fix me up in reading, writing, and figuring a little bit. That’s all. You don’t think it’s too late, do you?”

“Too late!” I chuckled, hysterically. “Why?”

“I can sign or indorse a check, and, thank God, for a good few dollars, too—but when it comes to fixing in the stuffing, there is trouble. I know how to write the figures, but not the words. I can write almost any number. If I was worth all the money I can put down in figures I should be richer than Vanderbilt.”

To insure secrecy I was to give him his lessons in my attic room.

“I don’t want my kids to know their pa is learning like a little boy, don’t you know,” he explained. “American kids have not much respect for their fathers, anyhow.”

As a preliminary to his initial lesson Nodelman offered to show me what he could do. When I brought pen and ink and some paper he cleared his throat, screwed up a solemn mien, and took hold of the pen. In trying to shake off some of the ink he sent splashes all over the table. At last he proceeded to write his name. He handled the pen as he would a pitchfork. It was quite a laborious proceeding, and his first attempt was a fizzle, for he reached the end of the paper before he finished the “m” in Nodelman. He tried again, and this time he was successful, but it was three minutes before the task was completed. It left him panting and wiping his ink-stained fingers on his hair.

“A man who has to work as hard as that over his signature has no business to be seen among decent people,” he said, with sincere disgust. “I ought to be a horse-driver, not a manufacturer.”

So speaking, he submitted his signature for my inspection, without, however, letting go of the sheet.

“Tell me how rotten it is,” he said, bashfully.

When I protested that it was not “rotten” at all he grunted something to the effect that once I was to instruct him he would expect to pay me, not for empty compliments, but for the truth. At this he lighted a match and applied it to the sheet of paper containing his signature.

“A signature is no joke,” he explained, as he watched it burn. “Put a few words and some figures on top of it and it is a note, as good as cash. When a fellow is a beggar he has nothing to fear, but when he is in business he had better be careful.”

When he asked me how much I was going to charge him and I said twenty-five cents an hour, he smiled.

“I’ll pay you more than that. You just try your best forme, will you?”

At the end of the first week he handed me two dollars for three lessons.

I was the happiest man in New York that day. If I had had to choose between earning ten dollars a week in tuition fees and a hundred dollars as wages or profits I should, without the slightest hesitation, have decided in favor of the ten dollars, and now, behold! that coveted source of income seemed nearer at hand than I had dared forecast. Once a start had been made, I might expect to procure other pupils, even if they could not afford to pay so lavish a price as two dollars for three lessons.

But alas! My happiness was not to last long.

I was giving Nodelman his fifth lesson. We were spelling out some syllables in a First Reader. Presently he grew absent-minded and then, suddenly pushing the school-book from him, said:

“Too late! Too late! Those black little dots won’t get through my forehead. It has grown too hard for them, I suppose.”

I attempted to reassure him, but in vain.

When the next cloak season came I slunk back to work. I felt degraded. But I earned high wages and my good spirits soon returned. I firmly made up my mind, come what might, to take the college-entrance examination the very next fall. I expected to have four hundred dollars by then, but I was determined to enter college even if I had much less. “I sha’n’t starve,” I said to myself. “And, if I don’t get enough to eat, hunger is nothing new to me.”

The very firmness of my purpose was a source of encouragement and joy.