At last I burst out with all the tears choking in me for years: “Is your old Saifer Torah that hangs on the wall dearer to you than that I should marry? The Talmud tells you to sell the holiest thing to help marry your daughter, but you—you love yourself more than your own child!”
Then I turned to my mother. I hit my hands on the table and cried in a voice that made her tremble and grow frightened: “Maybe you love your silver candlesticks more than your daughter’s happiness? To whom can I marry myself here, I ask you, only—to the bath janitor, to the water-carrier? I tell you I’ll kill myself if you don’t help me get away! I can’t stand no more this deadness here. I must get away. And you must give up everything to help me get away. All I need is a chance. I can do a million times better than Hanneh Hayyeh. I got a head. I got brains. I feel I can marry myself to the greatest man in America.”
My mother stopped crying, took up the candlesticks from the mantelpiece and passed her hands over them. “It’s like a piece from my flesh,” she said. “We grew up with this, you children and I, and my mother and my mother’s mother. This and the Saifer Torah are the only things that shine up the house for the Sabbath.”
She couldn’t go on, her words choked in her so. I am seeing yet how she looked, holding the candlesticks in her hands, and her eyes that she turned on us. But then I didn’t see anything but to go to America.
She walked over to my father, who sat with his head in his hands, stoned with sadness. “Zalmon!” she sobbed. “The blood from under my nails I’ll give away, only my child should have a chance to marry herself well. I’ll give away my candlesticks—”
Even my brother Yosef’s eyes filled with tears, so he quick jumped up and began to whistle and move around. “You don’t have to sell them,” he cried, trying to make it light in the air. “You can pawn them by Moisheh Itzek, the usurer, and as soon as Sara Reisel will get herself married, she’ll send us the money to get them out again, and we’ll yet live to take them over with us to America.”
I never saw my father look so sad. He looked like a man from whom the life is bleeding away. “I’ll not stand myself against your happiness,” he said, in a still voice. “I only hope this will be to your luck and that you’ll get married quick, so we could take out the Saifer Torah from the pawn.”
In less than a week the Saifer Torah and the candlesticks were pawned and the ticket bought. The whole village was ringing with the news that I am going to America. When I walked in the street people pointed on me with their fingers as if I were no more the same Sara Reisel.
Everybody asked me different questions.
“Tell me how it feels to go to America? Can you yet sleep nights like other people?”