“Only a hundred rubles for them all!” pleaded my mother, “only enough to lift us to America! Only one hundred little rubles!”
“A hundred rubles! Pfui!” sniffed the pawnbroker. “Forty is overpaid. Not even thirty is it worth.”
But, coaxing and cajoling, my mother got a hundred rubles out of him.
Steerage, dirty bundles, foul odors, seasick humanity; but I saw and heard nothing of the foulness and ugliness about me. I floated in showers of sunshine; visions upon visions of the New World opened before me. From lip to lip flowed the golden legend of the golden country:
“In America you can say what you feel, you can voice your thoughts in the open streets without fear of a Cossack.”
“In America is a home for everybody. The land is your land, not, as in Russia, where you feel yourself a stranger in the village where you were born and reared, the village in which your father and grandfather lie buried.”
“Everybody is with everybody alike in America. Christians and Jews are brothers together.”
“An end to the worry for bread, an end to the fear of the bosses over you. Everybody can do what he wants with his life in America.”
“There are no high or low in America. Even the President holds hands with Gedalyah Mindel.”