“We can’t stand it!” I cried. “Even as it is we’re hungry. Fifty cents a dozen would starve us. Can you, a Jew, tear the bread from another Jew’s mouth?”
“You, fresh mouth, you! Who are you to learn me my business?”
“Weren’t you yourself once a machine slave—your life in the hands of your boss?”
“You—loaferin—money for nothing you want! The minute they begin to talk English they get flies in their nose…. A black year on you—trouble-maker! I’ll have no smart heads in my shop! Such freshness! Out you get … out from my shop!”
Stunned and hopeless, the wings of my courage broken, I groped my way back to them—back to the eager, waiting faces—back to the crushed hearts aching with mine.
As I opened the door they read our defeat in my face.
“Girls!” I held out my hands. “He’s fired me.”
My voice died in the silence. Not a girl stirred. Their heads only bent closer over their machines.
“Here, you! Get yourself out of here!” The boss thundered at me. “Bessie Sopolsky and you, Balah Rifkin, take out her machine into the hall…. I want no big-mouthed Americanerins in my shop.”
Bessie Sopolsky and Balah Rifkin, their eyes black with tragedy, carried out my machine.