Leah's Journey

by Gloria Goldreich

  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.

  “Aaron,” she said softly, and the boy’s body relaxed as his hand dropped hers.

  Slowly she went into the living room where David had fallen asleep over an anatomy text. Carefully she walked him to bed, his body as yielding as a child’s beneath her supporting arms.

  5

  THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED were busy ones for Leah. She could not, of course, match the pace of Eli Feinstein and Salvatore Visconti, who worked tirelessly, inviting one worker after another to share their corner tables at the Cafe Royale or the Italian coffee shop on Mott Street. The two men spoke with a swift urgency and an earnest sense of concern that moved their listeners. Stirring sodden granules of sugar in their empty coffee cups, one Rosenblatt employee after another agreed to join the effort. Some were hesitant, even fearful, but others burned with enthusiasm. The young were the easiest to convince. They were not worried about families and responsibilities. Their lives lay in the future and they pledged themselves to improving that future with as much zeal as even Eli Feinstein could wish for.

  Leah, too, spoke with the girls in her shop, inviting a few of them to her apartment where they talked under Malcha’s disapproving eye and Shimon’s open scorn. David, when she told him of the union effort, had approached it with his usual gentle concern.

  “You are sure such work will not upset you?” he asked. “You have faith in this man, Feinstein?”

  Leah nodded. She did not tell her husband how her eyes followed Eli Feinstein when they happened to be in the same area of the factory or how she would suddenly recall the words of a conversation she had had with him days before. She recreated in her mind his gestures and expressions, the way he tossed his head so that his black hair grew tousled or the habit he had of smoothing his thick dark eyebrows as he argued a point. Several times they had met by chance during the lunch break and sat together beneath the ailanthus tree, watching the shadowed pattern of the leaves and talking softly.

 
Near them, other workers, their eyes webbed with lines of worry, read the stark headlines of economic disasters. Two Wall Street investment firms closed suddenly that month. A philanthropist from a renowned German Jewish family, who had given enormous sums toward the support of the Irvington Settlement House, jumped to his death when his family business collapsed. The settlement house closed on the day of the funeral and women and children stood grouped in bewilderment and grief on its steps, awaiting the cortege. In accordance with Jewish tradition, the hearse and its attendant caravan of black cars paused at the building which had given meaning to the man’s life.

  The widow remained in the car, but a small girl, who had plucked a cluster of morning glories from a vine which grew wild in the back of the bath house on Attorney Street, had thrust the flowers into the car’s open window. A black gloved hand had reached out to take the purple flowers and to stroke the child’s cheek.

  An east side savings society had gone bankrupt and the director of another had absconded with the life savings of the families who had trusted him. Among those who lost their tediously accumulated savings was Leah’s boarder Bryna. The girl had been planning a wedding in one of the new wedding halls on lower Broadway, putting off her marriage from month to month until there would be money enough to pay for the arrangements of pink roses which would in turn match the tablecloths and the bridesmaids’ dresses. Enough luxury and opulence to last a lifetime would be crowded into that wedding day, to be captured in sepia photographs, bound into an album which would become a bulwark of memories, reviewed and relived. But in the end Bryna sold her wedding dress and she was married in the Goldfeder parlor with Malcha and Leah serving the guests tea and sandwiches. The bride, pale and subdued, stared at the corsage of carnations awkwardly pinned to her light-blue wedding suit and listened without interest as her furrier groom described the loft he had just rented.

  “The Depression can’t last forever,” he said emphatically, but no one in that strangely quiet wedding party believed him.

  Sam Ellenberg had been laid off and sat motionless in the kitchen all day, his jollity lost in worry, absently fingering the flap of flesh that lay where his ear might have been. The family’s board was paid with the hoarded coins that Joshua, even in the worst of times, managed to bring home. Shimon Hartstein’s newly established shirt business was struggling for survival. While the wedding guests munched their sponge cake and sipped small glasses of cognac, a family sat on the street below, surrounded by trunks, cartons, and battered furniture. Leah, drawing the drapes, wondered where they would go and was relieved, when she looked out the window after the wedding party, to see that they had in fact gone. Only a child’s armless doll remained on the pavement.

  The situation was similar all over the country, she knew. Charles Ferguson, returning at last from the long-anticipated visit to the plains of his birth, had visited the Goldfeders and shown them his sketchbook. In broad black crayon strokes he had created the world of those who lived in cardboard shacks sheltered by billboards, of thin, large-eyed children who wore wads of newspapers around their feet in place of shoes, and gaunt nursing mothers who milked their breasts to provide nourishment for their older children, sometimes even cooking with the thin mother’s milk.

  “Perhaps 1929 is not a very good time to start a union,” Leah said dryly to Eli Feinstein the next day.

  “There is never a good time to start a union,” he replied. “And when things are so bad they must get better. And I think that because Rosenblatt himself is struggling to survive he will be more prepared to negotiate with us than in a year when things were good and nothing hung over his head.”

  A union organizer at David Dubinsky’s International Ladies Garment Workers Union confirmed Eli’s analysis. Leah joined Eli and Salvatore Visconti for the meeting with the professional labor leader, who looked like a prosperous lawyer in his double-breasted suit.

  “Now is definitely the right time to go after him. He knows he doesn’t have a chance. Even the whisper of a strike will finish him. And if it should come to a strike, we’ll furnish you with picket signs and placards and whatever financial support we can manage. Our people have been pretty hard hit by the Depression and our welfare funds are getting low. But we’ll do whatever we can. We’re with you,” the official said, and solemnly shook hands with each of them.

  They left the office feeling nervous and exhilarated, knowing that the time of crisis was drawing near. Soon, certainly in the summer, they would have to confront Arnold Rosenblatt.

  Visconti left them on the corner and Eli and Leah continued eastward, walking slowly and savoring the cool of the evening and the brief respite from talk and activity. A small boy stood on a corner selling rainbow-colored Italian ices and Eli stopped and bought two of the frosty sweets encased in thin paper cones. They walked on; they did not speak, and when they finished eating they dropped the wrappers in an open ashcan. Standing beneath the streetlight, Eli wiped his own hands with a large handkerchief and then reached for Leah’s hand, deftly mopping a streak of strawberry ice that had leaked across her palm. Gently he touched each finger with the linen square and then lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. They stood for a moment in the circle of light. Their eyes met and Leah felt suddenly suffused with a calm and tenderness she had not known for many years. She took his hand and, wordlessly, they continued to walk. Together they turned into the doorway of Eli’s boardinghouse and walked up the stairway to the darkened room.

  Inside at last, Leah leaned against the closed door, glad of the darkness that hid the tears which had begun to fall with an inexplicable suddenness. They streaked her face and Eli’s lips dried them as they fell, his face pressed against hers, his hands gently stroking her hair, loosening the pins that held the thick dark coil in place so that it fell in velvety black folds about her shoulders.

  “You are so beautiful,” he said. “So beautiful.”

  “It’s dark. You cannot see me.”

  The tears had stopped now and a shy smile played around her mouth. Her voice was soft, her words the flirtatious whisper of a young girl. She plummeted backward in time and felt her body ache with new awakenings, with the stirring of desire, both distant and familiar.

  Eli pressed her to him, enclosing her in an embrace at once urgent but carefully tender. With a small sigh of release she allowed her body to melt against his and felt his strength press against her.

  They made love on his narrow bachelor cot and when their bodies had exhausted each other and were spent at last, they lay pressed together, their fingers exploring each other’s flesh as though their bodies, encased in twin pallor against the now familiar darkness, contained long-kept secrets which must soon be revealed. They did not talk and when she rose to go, he lay still and watched her as she dressed, rising only when she began to pin her hair in place. Naked, he stood behind her and stretched her hair across his open palms, kissing the exposed nape of her neck as she stood motionless, submissive. He turned her around, at last, and pressed her mouth against his own, then passed his hand gently across her face, dry now of all tears.

  It was very late when she returned home and for once she did not go to the room where her children slept, but undressed quietly and lay down at once beside her husband who stirred but did not move to touch her.

  She saw Eli Feinstein every day after that. He waited for her after work and they walked together through the crowded streets, sometimes stopping at the Cafe Royale for a cold glass of coffee, or at Goodman and Levine’s on East Broadway, where they would munch a slice of dark bread spread with farmer cheese and sliced scallions and listen to earnest young poets, perched on high stools, read their works. The poets, long-haired and too thin, their clothes worn and patched, wrote of a world of freedom where there were neither rich nor poor. They sang of days of peace and plenty, of equity and solidarity when all men lived together. These beardless, bareheaded young men had abandoned the synagogue and they wrote with anger of the harsh yoke of religion, fighting
private battles with their Orthodox fathers in a language those fathers would never comprehend. At eight o’clock, as though by signal, poets and listeners alike would disperse to claim good seats at the lecture halls and settlement house auditoriums. Then Eli would walk Leah halfway home, where she confronted Malcha’s silent stare and the children’s strange shyness, as though she were a stranger to whom they must be polite.

  One evening, Leah and Eli listened as a young poet, still in his teens, his blue eyes harsh with anger and his pale hair falling wildly about his narrow face, read a verse he called “Yom Kippur—The Day of Atonement.”

  Swayed by the winds of prayer,

  My father shivers in the synagogue,

  While I eat of the American dream,

  Bacon, lettuce and tomato on God’s own fast day.

  They pray for mercy;

  I work for peace.

  Eli listened thoughtfully to the small murmurs of shock and approval that followed the reading and watched the poet join a group of friends at a table across the room.

  “He belongs to that world of his fathers more than he knows,” he said. “All of them—our young Communists and Socialists—they think they have left the old Jewish world so far behind but they are wrong. They have taken it with them. What are their dreams of peace and social justice but the messianic vision? For all their eating of pork and bacon, they are religious still, working for the advent of the son of David, working for the day when the lion lies down with the lamb and there are neither rich nor poor.”

  “And you, Eli—are you too a religious messianist?” Leah asked teasingly. The books and pamphlets that crowded his room were political and economic treatises, but among them she had found a biblical commentary in Yiddish, thick volumes in Hebrew which she could not understand.