“America is a lover’s land,” said Hanneh Hayyeh’s letter. “In America millionaires fall in love with poorest girls. Matchmakers are out of style, and a girl can get herself married to a man without the worries for a dowry.”
“God from the world!” began knocking my heart. “How grand to live where the kind of a man you get don’t depend on how much money your father can put down! If I could only go to America! There—there waits my lover for me.”
That letter made a holiday all over Savel. The butcher, the grocer, the shoemaker, everybody stopped his work and rushed to our house to hear my father read the news from the Golden Country.
“Stand out your ears to hear my great happiness,” began Hanneh Hayyeh’s letter. “I, Hanneh Hayyeh, will marry myself to Solomon Cohen, the boss from the shirtwaist factory, where all day I was working sewing on buttons. If you could only see how the man is melting away his heart for me! He kisses me after each step I walk. The only wish from his heart is to make me for a lady. Think only, he is buying me a piano! I should learn piano lessons as if I were from millionaires.”
Fire and lightning burst through the crowd. “Hanneh Hayyeh a lady!” They nudged and winked one to the other as they looked on the loose fatness of Zlata, her mother, and saw before their eyes Hanneh Hayyeh, with her thick, red lips, and her shape so fat like a puffed-out barrel of yeast.
“In America is a law called ‘ladies first,’” the letter went on. “In the cars the men must get up to give their seats to the women. The men hold the babies on their hands and carry the bundles for the women, and even help with the dishes. There are not enough women to go around in America. And the men run after the women, and not like in Poland, the women running after the men.”
Gewalt! What an excitement began to burn through the whole village when they heard of Hanneh Hayyeh’s luck!
The ticket agents from the ship companies seeing how Hanneh Hayyeh’s letter was working like yeast in the air for America, posted up big signs by all the market fairs: “Go to America, the New World. Fifty rubles a ticket.”
“Fifty rubles! Only fifty rubles! And there waits your lover!” cried my heart.
Oi weh! How I was hungering to go to America after that! By day and by night I was tearing and turning over the earth, how to get to my lover on the other side of the world.