Fifty rubles! A ship-ticket to America! That so much good luck should fall on one head! A savage envy bit us. Gloomy darts from narrowed eyes stabbed Masheh Mindel. Why should not we, too, have a chance to get away from this dark land! Has not every heart the same hunger for America, the same longing to live and laugh and breathe like a free human being? America is for all. Why should only Masheh Mindel and her children have a chance to the New World?
Murmuring and gesticulating, the crowd dispersed. Every one knew every one else's thought—how to get to America. What could they pawn? From where could they borrow for a ship-ticket?
Silently, we followed my father back into the hut from which the Cossack had driven us a while before. We children looked from mother to father and from father to mother.
“Gottunieu! the czar himself is pushing us to America by this last ukase.” My mother's face lighted up the hut like a lamp.
“Meshugeneh Yideneh!” admonished my father. “Always your head in the air. What—where—America? With what money? Can dead people lift themselves up to dance?”
“Dance?” The samovar and the brass pots reëchoed my mother's laughter. “I could dance myself over the waves of the ocean to America.”
In amazed delight at my mother's joy, we children rippled and chuckled with her. My father paced the room, his face dark with dread for the morrow.
“Empty hands, empty pockets; yet it dreams itself in you—America,” he said.
“Who is poor who has hopes on America?” flaunted my mother.
“Sell my red-quilted petticoat that grandmother left for my dowry,” I urged in excitement.