Hungry Hearts

by Anzia Yezierska

  For a moment Mr. and Mrs. Pelz were hypnotized by the sweep of her words. Then Hanneh Breineh sank into a chair in utter exhaustion. She began to weep bitterly, her body shaking with sobs.

  “Woe is me! For what did I suffer and hope on my children? A bitter old age—my end. I’m so lonely!”

  All the dramatic fire seemed to have left her. The spell was broken. They saw the Hanneh Breineh of old, ever discontented, ever complaining even in the midst of riches and plenty.

  “Hanneh Breineh,” said Mrs. Pelz, “the only trouble with you is that you got it too good. People will tear the eyes out of your head because you’re complaining yet. If I only had your fur coat! If I only had your diamonds! I have nothing. You have everything. You are living on the fat of the land. You go right back home and thank God that you don’t have my bitter lot.”

  “You got to let me stay here with you,” insisted Hanneh Breineh. “I’ll not go back to my children except when they bury me. When they will see my dead face, they will understand how they killed me.”

  Mrs. Pelz glanced nervously at her husband. They barely had enough covering for their one bed; how could they possibly lodge a visitor?

  “I don’t want to take up your bed,” said Hanneh Breineh. “I don’t care if I have to sleep on the floor or on the chairs, but I’ll stay here for the night.”

  Seeing that she was bent on staying, Mr. Pelz prepared to sleep by putting a few chairs next to the trunk, and Hanneh Breineh was invited to share the rickety bed with Mrs. Pelz.

  The mattress was full of lumps and hollows. Hanneh Breineh lay cramped and miserable, unable to stretch out her limbs. For years she had been accustomed to hair mattresses and ample woolen blankets, so that though she covered herself with her fur coat, she was too cold to sleep. But worse than the cold were the creeping things on the wall. And as the lights were turned low, the mice came through the broken plaster and raced across the floor. The foul odors of the kitchen-sink added to the night of horrors.

  “Are you going back home?” asked Mrs. Pelz, as Hanneh Breineh put on her hat and coat the next morning.

  “I don’t know where I’m going,” she replied, as she put a bill into Mrs. Pelz’s hand.

  For hours Hanneh Breineh walked through the crowded ghetto streets. She realized that she no longer could endure the sordid ugliness of her past, and yet she could not go home to her children. She only felt that she must go on and on.

  In the afternoon a cold, drizzling rain set in. She was worn out from the sleepless night and hours of tramping. With a piercing pain in her heart she at last turned back and boarded the subway for Riverside Drive. She had fled from the marble sepulcher of the Riverside apartment to her old home in the ghetto; but now she knew that she could not live there again. She had outgrown her past by the habits of years of physical comforts, and these material comforts that she could no longer do without choked and crushed the life within her.

  A cold shudder went through Hanneh Breineh as she approached the apartment-house. Peering through the plate glass of the door she saw the face of the uniformed hall-man. For a hesitating moment she remained standing in the drizzling rain, unable to enter, and yet knowing full well that she would have to enter.

  Then suddenly Hanneh Breineh began to laugh. She realized that it was the first time she had laughed since her children had become rich. But it was the hard laugh of bitter sorrow. Tears streamed down her furrowed cheeks as she walked slowly up the granite steps.

  “The fat of the land!” muttered Hanneh Breineh, with a choking sob as the hall-man with immobile face deferentially swung open the door—“the fat of the land!”

  MY OWN PEOPLE

  With the suitcase containing all her worldly possessions under her arm, Sophie Sapinsky elbowed her way through the noisy ghetto crowds. Pushcart peddlers and pullers-in shouted and gesticulated. Women with market-baskets pushed and shoved one another, eyes straining with the one thought—how to get the food a penny cheaper. With the same strained intentness, Sophie scanned each tenement, searching for a room cheap enough for her dwindling means.

  In a dingy basement window a crooked sign, in straggling, penciled letters, caught Sophie’s eye: “Room to let, a bargain, cheap.”

  The exuberant phrasing was quite in keeping with the extravagant dilapidation of the surroundings. “This is the very place,” thought Sophie. “There couldn’t be nothing cheaper in all New York.”

  At the foot of the basement steps she knocked.

  “Come in!” a voice answered.

  As she opened the door she saw an old man bending over a pot of potatoes on a shoemaker’s bench. A group of children in all degrees of rags surrounded him, greedily snatching at the potatoes he handed out.

  Sophie paused for an instant, but her absorption in her own problem was too great to halt the question: “Is there a room to let?”

  “Hanneh Breineh, in the back, has a room.” The old man was so preoccupied filling the hungry hands that he did not even look up.

  Sophie groped her way to the rear hall. A gaunt-faced woman answered her inquiry with loquacious enthusiasm. “A grand room for the money. I’ll let it down to you only for three dollars a month. In the whole block is no bigger bargain. I should live so.”

  As she talked, the woman led her through the dark hall into an airshaft room. A narrow window looked out into the bottom of a chimney-like pit, where lay the accumulated refuse from a score of crowded kitchens.

  “Oi weh!” gasped Sophie, throwing open the sash. “No air and no light. Outside shines the sun and here it’s so dark.”

  “It ain’t so dark. It’s only a little shady. Let me only turn up the gas for you and you’ll quick see everything like with sunshine.”

  The claw-fingered flame revealed a rusty, iron cot, an inverted potato barrel that served for a table, and two soap-boxes for chairs.

  Sophie felt of the cot. It sagged and flopped under her touch. “The bed has only three feet!” she exclaimed in dismay.

  “You can’t have Rockefeller’s palace for three dollars a month,” defended Hanneh Breineh, as she shoved one of the boxes under the legless corner of the cot. “If the bed ain’t so steady, so you got good neighbors. Upstairs lives Shprintzeh Gittle, the herring-woman. You can buy by her the biggest bargains in fish, a few days older…. What she got left over from the Sabbath, she sells to the neighbors cheap…. In the front lives Shmendrik, the shoemaker. I’ll tell you the truth, he ain’t no real shoemaker. He never yet made a pair of whole shoes in his life. He’s a learner from the old country—a tzadik, a saint; but every time he sees in the street a child with torn feet, he calls them in and patches them up. His own eating, the last bite from his mouth, he divides up with them.”

  “Three dollars,” deliberated Sophie, scarcely hearing Hanneh Breineh’s chatter. “I will never find anything cheaper. It has a door to lock and I can shut this woman out … I’ll take it,” she said, handing her the money.

  Hanneh Breineh kissed the greasy bills gloatingly. “I’ll treat you like a mother! You’ll have it good by me like in your own home.”

  “Thanks—but I got no time to shmoos. I got to be alone to get my work done.”

  The rebuff could not penetrate Hanneh Breineh’s joy over the sudden possession of three dollars.

  “Long years on you! May we be to good luck to one another!” was Hanneh Breineh’s blessing as she closed the door.

  Alone in her room—her room, securely hers—yet with the flash of triumph, a stab of bitterness. All that was hers—so wretched and so ugly! Had her eager spirit, eager to give and give, no claim to a bit of beauty—a shred of comfort?

  Perhaps her family was right in condemning her rashness. Was it worth while to give up the peace of home, the security of a regular job—suffer hunger, loneliness, and want—for what? For something she knew in her heart was beyond her reach. Would her writing ever amount to enough to vindicate the uprooting of her past? Would she ever become articulate enough to express
beautifully what she saw and felt? What had she, after all, but a stifling, sweatshop experience, a meager, night-school education, and this wild, blind hunger to release the dumbness that choked her?

  Sophie spread her papers on the cot beside her. Resting her elbows on the potato barrel, she clutched her pencil with tense fingers. In the notebook before her were a hundred beginnings, essays, abstractions, outbursts of chaotic moods. She glanced through the titles: “Believe in Yourself,” “The Quest of the Ideal.”

  Meaningless tracings on the paper, her words seemed to her now—a restless spirit pawing at the air. The intensity of experience, the surge of emotion that had been hers when she wrote—where were they? The words had failed to catch the life-beat—had failed to register the passion she had poured into them.

  Perhaps she was not a writer, after all. Had the years and years of night-study been in vain? Choked with discouragement, the cry broke from her, “O—God—God help me! I feel—I see, but it all dies in me—dumb!”

  Tedious days passed into weeks. Again Sophie sat staring into her notebook. “There’s nothing here that’s alive. Not a word yet says what’s in me …

  “But it is in me!” With clenched fist she smote her bosom. “It must be in me! I believe in it! I got to get it out—even if it tears my flesh in pieces—even if it kills me!…

  “But these words—these flat, dead words …

  “Whether I can write or can’t write—I can’t stop writing. I can’t rest. I can’t breathe. There’s no peace, no running away for me on earth except in the struggle to give out what’s in me. The beat from my heart—the blood from my veins—must flow out into my words.”

  She returned to her unfinished essay, “Believe in Yourself.” Her mind groping—clutching at the misty incoherence that clouded her thoughts—she wrote on.

  “These sentences are yet only wood—lead; but I can’t help it—I’ll push on—on—I’ll not eat—I’ll not sleep—I’ll not move from this spot till I get it to say on the paper what I got in my heart!”

  Slowly the dead words seemed to begin to breathe. Her eyes brightened. Her cheeks flushed. Her very pencil trembled with the eager onrush of words.

  Then a sharp rap sounded on her door. With a gesture of irritation Sophie put down her pencil and looked into the burning, sunken eyes of her neighbor, Hanneh Breineh.

  “I got yourself a glass of tea, good friend. It ain’t much I got to give away, but it’s warm even if it’s nothing.”

  Sophie scowled. “You mustn’t bother yourself with me. I’m so busy—thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me yet so quick. I got no sugar.” Hanneh Breineh edged herself into the room confidingly. “At home, in Poland, I not only had sugar for tea—but even jelly—a jelly that would lift you up to heaven. I thought in America everything would be so plenty, I could drink the tea out from my sugar-bowl. But ach! Not in Poland did my children starve like in America!”

  Hanneh Breineh, in a friendly manner, settled herself on the sound end of the bed, and began her jeremiad.

  “Yosef, my man, ain’t no bread-giver. Already he got consumption the second year. One week he works and nine weeks he lays sick.”

  In despair Sophie gathered her papers, wondering how to get the woman out of her room. She glanced through the page she had written, but Hanneh Breineh, unconscious of her indifference, went right on.

  “How many times it is tearing the heart out from my body—should I take Yosef’s milk to give to the baby, or the baby’s milk to give to Yosef? If he was dead the pensions they give to widows would help feed my children. Now I got only the charities to help me. A black year on them! They should only have to feed their own children on what they give me.”

  Resolved not to listen to the intruder, Sophie debated within herself: “Should I call my essay ‘Believe in Yourself,’ or wouldn’t it be stronger to say, ‘Trust Yourself’? But if I say, ‘Trust Yourself,’ wouldn’t they think that I got the words from Emerson?”

  Hanneh Breineh’s voice went on, but it sounded to Sophie like a faint buzzing from afar. “Gotteniu! How much did it cost me my life to go and swear myself that my little Fannie—only skin and bones—that she is already fourteen! How it chokes me the tears every morning when I got to wake her and push her out to the shop when her eyes are yet shutting themselves with sleep!”

  Sophie glanced at her wrist-watch as it ticked away the precious minutes. She must get rid of the woman! Had she not left her own sister, sacrificed all comfort, all association, for solitude and its golden possibilities? For the first time in her life she had the chance to be by herself and think. And now, the thoughts which a moment ago had seemed like a flock of fluttering birds had come so close—and this woman with her sordid wailing had scattered them.

  “I’m a savage, a beast, but I got to ask her to get out—this very minute,” resolved Sophie. But before she could summon the courage to do what she wanted to do, there was a timid knock at the door, and the wizened little Fannie, her face streaked with tears, stumbled in.

  “The inspector said it’s a lie. I ain’t yet fourteen,” she whimpered.

  Hanneh Breineh paled. “Woe is me! Sent back from the shop? God from the world—is there no end to my troubles? Why didn’t you hide yourself when you saw the inspector come?”

  “I was running to hide myself under the table, but she caught me and she said she’ll take me to the Children’s Society and arrest me and my mother for sending me to work too soon.”

  “Arrest me?” shrieked Hanneh Breineh, beating her breast. “Let them only come and arrest me! I’ll show America who I am! Let them only begin themselves with me!… Black is for my eyes … the groceryman will not give us another bread till we pay him the bill!”

  “The inspector said …” The child’s brow puckered in an effort to recall the words.

  “What did the inspector said? Gotteniu!” Hanneh Breineh wrung her hands in passionate entreaty. “Listen only once to my prayer! Send on the inspector only a quick death! I only wish her to have her own house with twenty-four rooms and each of the twenty-four rooms should be twenty-four beds and the chills and the fever should throw her from one bed to another!”

  “Hanneh Breineh, still yourself a little,” entreated Sophie.

  “How can I still myself without Fannie’s wages? Bitter is me! Why do I have to live so long?”

  “The inspector said …”

  “What did the inspector said? A thunder should strike the inspector! Ain’t I as good a mother as other mothers? Wouldn’t I better send my children to school? But who’ll give us to eat? And who’ll pay us the rent?”

  Hanneh Breineh wiped her red-lidded eyes with the corner of her apron.

  “The president from America should only come to my bitter heart. Let him go fighting himself with the pushcarts how to get the eating a penny cheaper. Let him try to feed his children on the money the charities give me and we’d see if he wouldn’t better send his littlest ones to the shop better than to let them starve before his eyes. Woe is me! What for did I come to America? What’s my life—nothing but one terrible, never-stopping fight with the grocer and the butcher and the landlord …”

  Suddenly Sophie’s resentment for her lost morning was forgotten. The crying waste of Hanneh Breineh’s life lay open before her eyes like pictures in a book. She saw her own life in Hanneh Breineh’s life. Her efforts to write were like Hanneh Breineh’s efforts to feed her children. Behind her life and Hanneh Breineh’s life she saw the massed ghosts of thousands upon thousands beating—beating out their hearts against rock barriers.

  “The inspector said …” Fannie timidly attempted again to explain.

  “The inspector!” shrieked Hanneh Breineh, as she seized hold of Fannie in a rage. “Hellfire should burn the inspector! Tell me again about the inspector and I’ll choke the life out from you—”

  Sophie sprang forward to protect the child from the mother. “She’s only trying to tell you something.”

 
“Why should she yet throw salt on my wounds? If there was enough bread in the house would I need an inspector to tell me to send her to school? If America is so interested in poor people’s children, then why don’t they give them to eat till they should go to work? What learning can come into a child’s head when the stomach is empty?”

  A clutter of feet down the creaking cellar steps, a scuffle of broken shoes, and a chorus of shrill voices, as the younger children rushed in from school.

  “Mamma—what’s to eat?”

  “It smells potatoes!”

  “Pfui! The pot is empty! It smells over from Cohen’s.”

  “Jake grabbed all the bread!”

  “Mamma—he kicked the piece out from my hands!”

  “Mamma—it’s so empty in my stomach! Ain’t there nothing?”

  “Gluttons—wolves—thieves!” Hanneh Breineh shrieked. “I should only live to bury you all in one day!”

  The children, regardless of Hanneh Breineh’s invectives, swarmed around her like hungry bees, tearing at her apron, her skirt. Their voices rose in increased clamor, topped only by their mother’s imprecations. “Gotteniu! Tear me away from these leeches on my neck! Send on them only a quick death!… Only a minute’s peace before I die!”

  “Hanneh Breineh—children! What’s the matter?” Shmendrik stood at the door. The sweet quiet of the old man stilled the raucous voices as the coming of evening stills the noises of the day.

  “There’s no end to my troubles! Hear them hollering for bread, and the grocer stopped to give till the bill is paid. Woe is me! Fannie sent home by the inspector and not a crumb in the house!”

  “I got something.” The old man put his hands over the heads of the children in silent benediction. “All come in by me. I got sent me a box of cake.”

  “Cake!” The children cried, catching at the kind hands and snuggling about the shabby coat.

  “Yes. Cake and nuts and raisins and even a bottle of wine.”

  The children leaped and danced around him in their wild burst of joy.

  “Cake and wine—a box—to you? Have the charities gone crazy?” Hanneh Breineh’s eyes sparkled with light and laughter.