Hanneh Breineh wiped her lips with the corner of her apron and faced him indignantly. “You ain’t yet finished with your first meal in America and already you’re blowing from yourself like it’s coming to you yet better.”
“But why come to America?” defended Berel, the poet, “unless it gives you what’s lacking in other lands? Even in the darkest days in Russia the peasants had light and air.”
“Hey, Mr. Greenhorn Doctor—and you, young feller,” broke in Zaretsky, the block politician, “if you don’t like it here, then the President from America will give you a free ride back on the same ship on which you came from.”
Silenced by Zaretsky’s biting retort, the doctor lit a cigarette and sent leisurely clouds of smoke ceilingward.
Moisheh, who had been too absorbed in his food to follow the talk, suddenly looked up from his plate. Though unable to grasp the trend of the conversation, he intuitively sensed the hostile feeling in the room.
“Why so much high language,” he asked, “when there’s yet the nuts and raisins and the almonds to eat?”
A few months later Hanneh Breineh came into my room while peeling potatoes in her apron. “Greenhorns ain’t what greenhorns used to be,” she said, as she sat down on the edge of my cot. “Once when greenhorns came, a bone from a herring, a slice from an onion, was to them milk and honey; and now pour golden chicken fat into their necks, and they turn up their nose like it’s coming to them yet better.”
“What is it now?” I laughed.
Hanneh Breineh rose. “Listen only to what is going on,” she whispered, as she noiselessly pushed open the door and winked to me to come over and hear.