Murmuring and gesticulating the crowd dispersed.
Each one knew every one else’s thought: How to get to America. What could they pawn? From where could they borrow for a ship-ticket?
Silently we followed my father back into the hut from which the Cossack had driven us a while before.
We children looked from mother to father and from father to mother.
“Gottuniu! The Czar himself is pushing us to America by this last ukaz.” My mother’s face lighted up the hut like a lamp.
“Meshugeneh Yidini!” admonished my father. “Always your head in the air. What—where—America? With what money? Can dead people lift themselves up to dance?”
“Dance?” The samovar and the brass pots rang and reëchoed with my mother’s laughter. “I could dance myself over the waves of the ocean to America.”
In amazed delight at my mother’s joy we children rippled and chuckled with her.
My father paced the room—his face dark with dread for the morrow.
“Empty hands—empty pockets—yet it dreams itself in you America.”