Leah's Journey

by Gloria Goldreich

  “I care, Mr. Feinstein. I care about my husband and my children. I do not like words like comrade. You see, I was in Odessa in 1919,” she said. Again, she was telling this man something she had not meant to reveal, thrusting out secrets of her past in defense against a future she did not want.

  “I too am from Odessa. My wife was killed in that pogrom,” Eli Feinstein replied. “I was away that day. In Karkov. Karkov.” He offered the name of the town as though only that gave reality to all that had happened. Leah remembered now Moshe and Henia’s neighbors, whose three children had been murdered when a mob raided the apartment while their mother was out shopping.

  “I went down for flour and brown sugar. I needed a kilo of brown sugar,” the woman had said over and over again, clinging to the memory of that sugar in its mesh sack as though it represented her sanity, her grasp on reality. Leah, remembering the terror of a distant summer day, often thought of the dress she had been wearing. It had been of yellow cotton, dotted with sprigs of tiny red roses. Karkov. Brown sugar. Yellow cotton with tiny red roses. Small weights of facts to anchor them lest they drown in the whirlpools of horror.

  “I’m sorry,” she said softly.

  “No matter.” Eli Feinstein stared at his tea. “I do not talk of communism and brave new worlds. I talk only of Rosenblatts and girls like young Bonnie. You know that Rosenblatts is one of the few larger factories that is still not unionized.”

  “Yes. I know that.”

  “It is because Rosenblatt frightens off those workers who try to organize and buys off others. You, I have the feeling, he can neither frighten nor buy. And there are others like you. Am I right to have such a feeling about you, Mrs. Goldfeder?”

  Leah sipped again at the tea, cold now, and allowed her eyes to rise from the scarred linoleum-topped table and meet Feinstein’s searching gaze.

  “You must understand something, Mr. Feinstein,” she said. “I am working to support my family. My husband is studying for entrance into medical school and we have two small children. Only my salary buys our food and clothing, pays the rent. I do not think I can risk my husband’s future and my children’s needs.”

  “But you wouldn’t have to.” He leaned forward eagerly and continued. “Look, there are a few important workers who make it possible for Rosenblatt to run that factory and keep his good-for-nothing brother traveling around Europe, his father in an old age home, his wife on Park Avenue, and his mistress on Fifth Avenue. Without them he’d have to close down.”

  “So he would close down for a week, two weeks even. Until he found new workers and then it would be the same thing all over again. Only you and I and the others who joined with us would not have jobs.”

  “But that’s not true,” Eli Feinstein protested. “The organizers for the United Hebrew Trade Unions have found out a few things. Like, for instance, Mr. Rosenblatt has a lot of creditors who watch what’s going on with him very carefully. If he closed down, even for a day, they’d all be demanding their money and that would finish him.”

  Eli Feinstein fumbled in his pocket and found a folded sheet of paper which he spread out in front of Leah. It was a list of company names; some of them she recognized as the names of fabric companies whose cartons she frequently handled, and others as names of leading dealers in trimming and threads. Many of the names were unfamiliar to her but the figures next to them were staggering. Arnold Rosenblatt owed hundreds of thousands of dollars. The paunchy little man in expensive dark suits, whose chauffeured car waited for him each evening, who clipped his cigars with a small gold scissors, was in debt in every part of New York. His survival, she supposed, on a much grander scale, was not unlike that of her brother-in-law Shimon, who had established his own small business which existed largely on credit.

  “How can you owe everyone so much money?” Malcha had asked worriedly, but her husband had winked and laughed.

  “The man who sells me threads doesn’t know that Label Katz from the trimming store also gives me credit. Blumberg, from the fabrics, I pay absolutely on time, and he tells Weinstein from the machines what a good customer I am, so Weinstein I can let ride for two, three months. Like in a circle, Malcha, I juggle,” Shimon had replied with relish, and Leah had wondered if he would enjoy being in business so much if it were not such a game.

  “In a circus, sometimes a ball gets dropped,” David had observed dryly, looking up from a textbook.

  “Just so long as it’s only one ball, I’m okay,” Shimon had replied.

  But if Rosenblatt were unable to maintain the business for even a day, all the manufacturers with whom he dealt would become aware of his precarious situation and his delicate balancing act would be over, Leah realized, scanning Eli Feinstein’s list again.

  “These important workers you talk about—all of them are in agreement with you?” Leah asked.

  “Some are less sure than others,” he answered honestly. “But they are all willing to sit down and talk about it together, to see if it’s possible. And you, are you willing?”

  “I don’t know. So much depends on this job. My husband’s studies. My family. My parents are still in Europe and I want to make enough money to bring them over. The news from there is not good.” She arrayed her objections like a merchant loading a scale and then, her voice still low, she balanced the other weight. “But I know it is wrong for people to work like that. It is dangerous for the girls in the building. I worry about the doors. If we ever had to leave the factory in a hurry, in a case of a pipe busting or a fire, we could never get out safely. And I know that the girls are underpaid. Six days a week—ten hours a day—no holidays. It’s not right.”

  “But will you come to the meeting?” Eli Feinstein asked urgently, seizing a moment when her voice trembled against the uneasy balance of pros and cons.

  The violinist had begun to play again, a mazurka she had often danced to with Yaakov’s fine-boned hands resting lightly on her waist, the movements of his booted feet matching her light, slippered steps. Beneath the table, Eli Feinstein’s feet twitched with remembered rhythms and his eyes grew clouded with the film of memories.

  “Yes, I’ll come to the meeting,” she said. “Give me the address and the time.”

  Briskly he jerked himself free of the spell of the music and scribbled the information on a piece of paper.

  She groped in her purse for change to pay for the tea and cake but impatiently he refused the outstretched coins.

  “You are my guest. I invited you,” he said and rising to his feet, he took her hand in his and his lips brushed her upturned palm.

  “Well, thank you. And good night.”

  She hurried from the café, passing the table where the group of girls still sat, smoking cigarettes now, their pale faces veiled in smoke and their eyes roving to a corner booth where a group of young men argued over steaming glasses of coffee. Near the exit, a bearded poet read his Yiddish verses to listeners who marked his rhythms with bent teaspoons. Softly, as though fearful of snapping the delicate thread of their attention, Leah closed the café door behind her.

  It was late when she reached home and from the street below she saw Aaron at his post in the window, anxiously watching the street. But, as always, he slid into the room when he saw her in the doorway. She waited a moment before entering the apartment, then lifted her hand and allowed her fingers to lightly touch the spot where Eli Feinstein’s dry lips had met her skin.

  *

  Two weeks passed before the meeting which Eli Feinstein was organizing took place. The cool air of early spring melted into a sudden warmth and small shoots of young grass appeared beneath the cracks in the pavements. Through the factory window, where a lone ailanthus tree grew in a barren courtyard, Leah watched the lacy leaves sprout forth, their texture so delicate that the sun filtered through them and dappled shadows fell on the concrete pavement where, once again, small gray sparrows and starlings fluttered.

  Several times, during those two weeks, Eli Feinstein stopped at Leah�
�s worktable. Once he left a Yiddish newspaper folded to a particular page, and when she opened it, she found a story describing a fire in a factory similar to Rosenblatts. Four girls had been burned to death in that fire, and one survivor, a sixteen-year-old, would never walk again. A few days later he left a small pamphlet published by the United Hebrew Trades Association describing the need for organized labor and stressing the fact that organized factories, union shops, resulted in greater profits for the owners.

  “What did you think of the pamphlet?” Feinstein asked Leah a few days later, when they met at the cart of a vendor who peddled cold drinks to the factory workers during the lunch break. They were in the courtyard and the bright sunlight danced across the cutter’s face, sparking golden tones in his green eyes.

  Leah leaned against the ailanthus tree and sipped her cold coffee.

  “It makes it all sound so simple. Too simple,” she said. “If everything were as described in the union pamphlet we could just go up to Rosenblatt and tell him that if we had a union he’d make more money.”

  Eli Feinstein laughed.

  “You’re a smart woman, Leah Goldfeder. Look, isn’t that the girl you told me about??”

  Leah followed his eyes to a corner of the courtyard where Bonnie Eckstein sat with a group of girls. Her face was flushed and she wore her pale blonde hair in the newly popular pageboy fashion. She was singing, a gentle song about a calf with mournful eyes, and the others were following the melody, singing with increased confidence so that soon their voices rose in a sweet chorus that vied with the harsh gong of the factory bell that summoned them back to their machines. Still singing, they gathered their things together and drifted back to work. Some of the tardier ones cast nervous glances at Leah. She and Eli Feinstein remained standing for a moment in the deserted courtyard, listening to the whir of the machines that had so swiftly replaced the sweetness of the singing.

  “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 w
indow 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.”