Children of loneliness

BY ANZIA YEZIERSKA Author of “Hungry Hearts,” “Salome of the Tenements,” etc.
CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
First published 1923
Copyright, 1923, by Funk & Wagnalls Company
Printed in Great Britain
To Mrs. HENRY OLLESHEIMER and Mr. R. J. CUDDIHY
CHILDREN OF LONELINESS
I feel like a starved man who is so bewildered by the first sight of food that he wants to grab and devour the ice-cream, the roast and the entrée all in one gulp. For ages and ages, my people in Russia had no more voice than the broomstick in the corner. The poor had no more chance to say what they thought or felt than the dirt under the feet.
And here, in America, a miracle has happened to me. I can lift up my head like a person. After centuries of suppression I am allowed to speak. Is it a wonder that I am too excited to know where to begin?
All the starved, unlived years crowd into my throat and choke me. I don’t know whether it is joy or sorrow that hurts me so. I only feel my release is wrung with the pain of all those back of me who lived and died, their dumbness pressing down on them like stories on the heart.
My mother, who dried out her days fighting at the pushcarts for another potato, another onion into the bag, wearing out her heart and soul and brain with the one unceasing worry—how to get food for the children a penny cheaper—and my father, a Hebrew scholar and dreamer who was always too much up in the air to come down to such sordid thoughts as bread and rent, and the lost and wasted lives of my brothers and sisters and my grandfather and grandmother, and all those dumb generations back of me, are crying in every breath of every word that is struggling itself out of me.
I am the mad mob at a mass meeting, shouting, waving with their hands and stamping with their feet, to their leader: “Speech! Speech!” And I am also the bewildered leader struggling to say something and make myself heard through the deafening noise of a thousand clamouring voices.