“I don’t know what is with me the matter. I’m so choked…. Sundays and holidays when the other girls go out to enjoy themselves, I walk around by myself—thinking—thinking…. My thoughts tear in me and I can’t tell them to no one! I want to do something with my life and I don’t know what.”
“I’m glad you came,” she said. And after a pause, “You can help me.”
“Help you?” I cried. It was the first time that an American suggested that I could help her.
“Yes, indeed! I have always wanted to know more of that mysterious vibrant life—the immigrant. You can help me know my girls.”
The repression of centuries seemed to rush out of my heart. I told her everything—of the mud hut in Sukovoly where I was born, of the Czar’s pogroms, of the constant fear of the Cossack, of Gedalyeh Mindel’s letter and of our hopes in coming to America.
After I had talked myself out, I felt suddenly ashamed for having exposed so much, and I cried out to her: “Do you think like the others that I’m all wrapped up in self?”
For some minutes she studied me, and her serenity seemed to project itself into me. And then she said, as if she too were groping, “No—no—but too intense.”
“I hate to be so all the time intense. But how can I help it? Everything always drives me back in myself. How can I get myself out into the free air?”
“Don’t fight yourself.” Her calm, gray eyes penetrated to the very soul in me. “You are burning up too much vitality….
“You know some of us,” she went on—“not many, unfortunately—have a sort of divine fire which if it does not find expression turns into smoke. This egoism and self-centeredness which troubles you is only the smoke of repression.”