“When I was a little hungry boy in the gutters of the ghetto, the only songs I heard were the bargaining cries over pennies. Even when I worked myself up to a clothing store in Division Street they were still tearing my flesh in pieces, squeezing out cheaper, another dime, another nickel from a suit.” But the eloquent story of his rise in the world till now—here he was king of clothing—fell upon deaf ears. Rebecca had ceased to listen.
She saw again their kitchen on Sunday night. Felix Weinberg’s pale face under the sputtering gas jet, her sister leaning eagerly forward, her hand instinctively reaching towards him across the table, her face alight with the inner radiance that glowed from him like a burning sun. She, Rebecca, close to him, at his feet, all a-tremble with the nearness of him. The children on his knees, clutching at his neck, peering from behind his shoulder. The eternal cadences of Keats and Shelley, the surging rhythm of their song playing upon their hearts, holding them enthralled with a music that they felt all the more deeply because they did not understand.
Even mother, clattering busily with the pots at the stove, would pause in her work, drawn by the magic of the enraptured group.
“Nu, with a clean apron I’m also a person to listen,” she said as she tore from her the soiled rag which she wore around the stove and reached for a clean blue-checked apron that she wore only for holidays.
“Ah, Mammeniu!” Felix would respond. “In honour of this shining beautifulness, I’ll read something special for you,” and he would, opening his Browning. At the words Rabbi Ben Ezra, Mammeniu’s sigh was the joy of a child in fairyland.
“Grow old along with me. The best is yet to be,
The last of life for which the first was made.”
Then like a child repeating its well-loved lesson for the hundredth time, “Nu, I didn’t yet live out my years,” she would breathe happily. “It will only begin my real life when my children work themselves up in America.”
What matter if they had only potato-soup for supper—only the flavour of fried onions in a little suet to take the place of meat? What matter if the only two chairs were patched with boards and the rickety table had for its support a potato barrel? Wonder and beauty filled the room. Voices of poets and prophets of all time were singing in their hearts.
And all that Minnie had given up. For what? For silver platters with gefulta fish. For roast squabs. For spiced jellies. And the dollar music from cash registers.