How thankful he was for the joy of his bleak little room! He shut the door, secure in his solitude. Voices began to speak to him. Faces began to shine for him—the dumb, the oppressed, the toil-driven multitudes who lived and breathed unconscious of the cryings-out in them. All the thwarted longings of their lives, all the baffled feelings of their hearts, all the aching dumbness of their lips, rose to his sympathetic lips, singing the song of the imperishable soul in them.
Berel thought how Beethoven lay prone on the ground, his deaf ears hearing the beat of insects’ wings, the rustle of grass, the bloom of buds, all the myriad voices of the pregnant earth. For the first time since the loss of his gift in the jazz pit of Tin Pan Alley, the young poet heard the rhythm of divine creation.
He drew a sheet of white paper before his eyes. From his trembling fingers flowed a poem that wrote its own music—every line a song—the whole a symphony of his regeneration.
“To think that I once despised them—my own people!” he mused. “Ach, I was too dense with young pride to see them then!”
His thoughts digging down into the soil of his awakened spirit, he cried aloud:
“Beauty is everywhere, but I can sing it only of my own people. Some one will find it even in Tin Pan Alley—among Maizie’s life-loving crowd; but I, in this life, must be the poet of the factories—of my own East Side!”
§ 7
“It’s me—Hanneh Breineh!”
A loud thumping at the door and a shrill chatter of voices broke in upon Berel’s meditations.
“Me—Moisheh!”