Through the crack of the door he shoved in the cablegram. “Send ship tickets or we die—pogrom,” I read aloud.
“Weh—weh!” A cry of a dumb, wounded animal broke from the panic-stricken Moisheh.
The cup of coffee that Hanneh Breineh lifted to her lips dropped with a crash to the floor. “Where pogrom?” she demanded, rushing in.
I re-read the cablegram.
“Money for ship tickets!” stammered Moisheh. He drew forth a sweaty moneybag that lay hid beneath his torn grey shirt and with trembling hands began counting the greasy bills. “Only four hundred and thirty-three dollars! Woe is me!” He cracked the knuckles of his fingers in a paroxysm of grief. “It’s six hundred I got to have!”
“Gottuniu! Listen to him only!” Hanneh Breineh shook Moisheh roughly. “You’d think he was living by wild Indians—not by people with hearts....”
“Boarders!” she called. “Moisheh’s old mother and his two brothers are in Smirsk where there’s a pogrom.”
The word “pogrom” struck like a bombshell. From the sink, the stove, they gathered, in various stages of undress, around Moisheh, electrified into one bond of suffering brotherhood.
Hanneh Breineh, hand convulsively clutching her breast, began an impassioned appeal. “Which from us here needs me to tell what’s a pogrom? It drips yet the blood from my heart when I only begin to remember. Only nine years old I was—the pogromschiks fell on our village.... Frightened!... You all know what’s to be frightened from death—frightened from being burned alive or torn to pieces by wild wolves—but what’s that compared to the cold shiverings that shook us by the hands and feet when we heard the drunken Cossacks coming nearer and nearer our hut. The last second my mother, like a crazy, pushed me and my little sister into the chimney. We heard the house tremble with shots—cries from my mother—father—then stillness. In the middle of the black night my little sister and I crawled ourselves out to see——” Hanneh Breineh covered her eyes as though to shut out the hideous vision.
Again Hanneh Breineh’s voice arose. “I got no more breath for words—only this—the last bite from our mouths, the last shirt from our backs we got to take away to help out Moisheh. It’s not only Moisheh’s old mother that’s out there—it’s our own old mother—our own flesh-and-blood brothers.... Even I—beggar that I am—even I will give my only feather bed to the pawn.”