“Here you got it, a letter. I hope it’s such good luck in it as the paper is fine.”
“What’s the matter?” cried Hanneh Breineh in alarm at the girl’s sudden pallor as the empty envelope fluttered from limp fingers.
For answer Sophie held up the cheque.
“Five hundred dollars,” she cried, “and the winner of the first prize!”
Hanneh Breineh felt the cheque. She read it. It was actually true. Five hundred dollars! In a flurry of excitement she called the neighbours in the hall-ways, and then hurried to the butcher, pushing through the babbling women who crowded around the counter. “People listen only! My roomerkeh got a five-hundred-dollar prize!”
“Five hundred dollars?” The words leaped from lips to lips like fire in the air. “Ach! only the little bit of luck! Did she win it on the lotteree?”
“Not from the lottery. Just wrote something from her head. And you ought to see her, only a dried-up bone of a girl, and yet so smart.”
In a few moments Sophie was mobbed in her cellar by the gesticulating crowd of women who hurried in to gaze upon the miracle of good luck. With breathless awe hands felt her, and, reverently, the cheque. Yes, even mouths watered with an envy that was almost worship. They fell on her neck and kissed her.
“May we all live to have such luck to get rich quick!” they chorused.
The following day Sophie’s picture was in the Jewish evening paper. The Ghetto was drunk with pride because one of their number, and “only a dried-up bone of a girl,” had written a story good enough to be printed in a magazine of America. Their dreams of romance had found expression in the overwhelming success of this greenhorn cook.