In my early childhood my people hammered into me defeat, defeat, because that was the way they accepted the crushing weight of life. Life had crushed my mother, so without knowing it she fed defeat with the milk of her bosom into the blood and bone of her children. But this thing that stunted the courage, the initiative, of the other children roused the fighting devils in me.
When yet barely able to speak, I began to think and question the justice of the world around me and to assert my rights.
“Mamma,” I asked out of a clear sky, “why does Masha Stein have butter on her bread every morning, and why is our bread always hard and dry, and nothing on it?”
“Butter wills itself in you!” shrieked my mother, as she thrust the hash of potato peelings in front of me for my noonday meal. “Have you got a father a business man, a butcher or a grocer, a breadgiver, like Masha Stein’s father? You don’t own the dirt under Masha’s doorstep. You got a father a scholar. He holds himself all day with God; he might as well hang the beggar’s bag on his neck and be done with it.”
At the time I had no answer. I was too young to voice my revolt against my mother’s dark reasoning. But the fact that I did not forget this speech of so many years ago shows how her black pessimism cut against my grain.
I have a much clearer memory of my next rebellion against the thick gloom in which my young years were sunk.
“Mamma, what’s a birthday?” I cried, bursting into the house in a whirl of excitement. “Becky, the pawnbroker’s girl on the block, will have a birthday to-morrow. And she’ll get presents for nothing, a cake with candles on it, and a whole lot of grand things from girls for nothing—and she said I must come. Could I have a birthday, too, like she?”
“Woe is to me!” cried my mother, glaring at me with wet, swollen eyes. “A birthday lays in your head? Enjoyments lays in your head?” she continued bitterly. “You want to be glad that you were born into the world? A whole lot you got to be glad about. Wouldn’t it be better if you was never born already?”
At the harsh sound of my mother’s voice all my dreams took wing. In rebellion and disappointment I thrust out my lips with a trembling between retort and tears. It was as if the devil himself urged my mother thus to avenge herself upon her helpless children for the aches and weariness of her own life. So she went on, like a horse bolting downhill, feeling the pressure of the load behind him.