“But am I really alone in my seeking? I’m one of the millions of immigrant children, children of loneliness, wandering between worlds that are at once too old and too new to live in.”
BROTHERS
I had just begun to unpack and arrange my things in my new quarters when Hanneh Breineh edged herself confidingly into my room and started to tell me the next chapter in the history of all her lodgers.
“And this last one what sleeps in the kitchen,” she finished, “he’s such a stingy—Moisheh the Schnorrer they call him. He washes himself his own shirts and sews together the holes from his socks to save a penny. Think only! He cooks himself his own meat once a week for the Sabbath and the rest of the time it’s cabbage and potatoes or bread and herring. And the herring what he buys are the squashed and smashed ones from the bottom of the barrel. And the bread he gets is so old and hard he’s got to break it with a hammer. For why should such a stingy grouch live in this world if he don’t allow himself the bite in the mouth?”
It was no surprise to me that Hanneh Breineh knew all this, for everybody in her household cooked and washed in the same kitchen, and everybody knew what everybody else ate and what everybody else wore down to the number of patches on their underwear.
“And by what do you work for a living?” she asked, as she settled herself on my cot.
“I study at college by day and I give English lessons and write letters for the people in the evening.”
“Ach! So you are learning for a teacherin?” She rose, and looked at me up and down and down and up, her red-lidded eyes big with awe. “So that’s why you wanted so particular a room to yourself? Nobody in my house has a room by herself alone just like you. They all got to squeeze themselves together to make it come out cheaper.”
By the evening everybody in that house knew I was a teacherin, and Moisheh the Schnorrer was among my first applicants for instruction.
“How much will you charge me for learning me English, a lesson?” he blurted, abrupt because of his painful bashfulness.