“Rather a stone for a pillow in my own home,” said one woman on whom life had pressed hard. “Would you go back?” she was asked. “Oh, no, no, no!” emphasizing the words by a swaying of the body and a shaking of the head. “It is not poverty we fear. It is not money we are seeking here. We do not expect things for ourselves. It is the chance for the children, education and freedom for them.”
The passion of the Russian Jews for intellectual attainment recalls the spirit of the early New England families and their willingness to forego every comfort that a son might be set apart for the ministry. Here we are often witnesses of long-continued deprivation on the part of every member of the family, a willingness to deny themselves everything but the barest necessities of life, that there may be a doctor, a lawyer, or a teacher among them. Submission to bad housing, excessive hours, and poor working conditions is defended as of “no matter because the children will have better and can go to school—maybe college.” Said a baker who showed the ill-effects of basement and night work and whose three rooms housed a family of ten: “My boy is already in the high school. If I can’t keep on, the Herr Gott will take it up where I leave off.”
A painful instance was that of a woman who came to the settlement one evening. Her son was studying music under one of the most famous masters in Vienna, and she had exiled herself to New York in order to earn more money for him than she could possibly earn at home. Literally, as I afterwards discovered, she spent nothing upon herself. A tenement family gave her lodging (a bed on chairs) and food, in return for scrubbing done after her day’s work in the necktie factory. The Viennese master, not knowing his pupil’s circumstances, or, it is possible, not caring, had written that the young man needed to give a concert, an additional demand which it was utterly impossible for her to meet. She had already given up her home, she had relinquished her wardrobe, and she had sold her grave for him.
One young lad stands out among the many who came to talk over their desire to go through college. He dreamed of being great and, this period of hardship over, of placing his family in comfort. I felt it right to emphasize his obligation to the family; the father was dead, the mother burdened with anxiety for the numerous children. How reluctant I was to do this he could not realize; only fourteen, he had impressed us with his fine courage and intelligence, and it was hard to resist the young pleader and to analyze with him the common-place sordid facts. He had planned to work all summer, to work at night, and he was hardly going to eat at all. But his young mind grasped, almost before I had finished, the ethical importance of meeting his nearest duties. He has met the family claims with generosity, and has realized all our expectations for him by acquiring through his own efforts education and culture; and he evinces an unusual sense of civic responsibility.
Those who have had for many years continuous acquaintance with the neighborhood have countless occasions to rejoice at the good use made of the education so ardently desired, and achieved in spite of what have seemed overwhelming odds. New York City is richer for the contributions made to its civic and educational life by the young people who grew up in and with the settlements, and who are not infrequently ready crusaders in social causes. A country gentleman one day lamented to me that he had failed to keep in touch with what he was pleased to call our humanitarian zeal, and recalled his own early attempt to take an East Side boy to his estate and employ him. “He could not even learn to harness a horse!” he said, with implied contempt of such unfathomable inefficiency. Something he said of the lad’s characteristics made it possible for me to identify him, and I was able to add to that unsatisfactory first chapter another, which told of the boy’s continuance in school, of his success as a teacher in one of the higher institutions of learning, and of his remarkable intelligence in certain vexed industrial problems.
Such achievements are the more remarkable because the restricted tenement home, where the family life goes on in two or three rooms, affords little opportunity for reading or study. A vivid picture of its limitations was presented by the boy who sought a quiet corner in a busy settlement. “I can never study at home,” he said, “because sister is always using the table to wash the dishes.”
Study-rooms were opened in the settlement in 1907, where the boys and girls find, not only a quiet, restful place in which to do their work, but also the needed “coaching.” The school work is supplemented by illuminating bulletins on current topics, and the young student is provided with the aid which in other conditions is given by parents or older brothers and sisters. Such study-rooms are now maintained by the Board of Education in numerous schools of the city,—“Thanks to the example set by the settlement,” the superintendent of the New York school system reported.