There are no feelings, no thoughts, no reason; the bitter bloody work kills the noblest, the most beautiful and best, the richest, the deepest, the highest, which life possesses. The seconds, minutes and hours fly; the nights like the days pass as swiftly as sails; I drive the machine just as if I wished to catch them; I chase without avail, I chase without end.
The clock in the workshop does not rest; it keeps on pointing and ticking and waking in succession. A man once told me the meaning of its pointing and waking—that there was a reason in it; as if through a dream I remember it all; the clock awakens life and sense in me, and something else—I forget what; ask me not, I know not, I know not, I am a machine!
And at times, when I hear the clock, I understand quite differently its pointing, its language; it seems to me as if the unrest[[7]] egged me on so that I should work more, more, much more. In its sound I hear only the angry words of the boss; in the two hands I see his gloomy look. The clock, I shudder—it seems to me it drives me and calls me machine, and cries out to me “sew”!
Only when the wild tumult subsides, and the master is away for the midday hour, day begins to dawn in my head, and a pain passes through my heart; I feel my wound, and bitter tears and boiling tears wet my meager meal, my bread; it chokes me, I can eat no more, I cannot! O, horrible toil! O, bitter necessity.
The shop at the midday hour appears to me like a bloody battlefield where all are at rest; about me I see lying the dead, and the blood that has been spilled cries from the earth. A minute later—the tocsin is sounded, the dead arise, the battle is renewed. The corpses fight for strangers, for strangers, and they battle and fall and disappear into night.
I look at the battlefield in bitter anger, in terror, with a feeling of revenge, with a hellish pain. The clock now I hear it aright. It is calling: “An end to slavery, an end shall it be”! It vivifies my reason, my feelings and shows how the hours fly; miserable I shall be as long as I am silent, lost, as long as I remain what I am.
The man that sleeps in me begins to waken—the slave that wakens in me is put to sleep. Now the right hour has come, an end to misery, an end let it be! But suddenly—the whistle, the boss, an alarm! I lose my reason, forget where I am; there is a tumult, the battle. Oh, my ego is lost! I know not, I care not, I am a machine!
The prose translation reproduces the thought alone; the Yiddish original reproduces also the loud insistent stitching of the machines, and the persistent nagging of the hateful clock. The machine beats out these lines:
Ich arbeit, un’ arbeit, un’ arbeit ohn’ Cheschben.
Es schafft sich, un schafft sich, un schafft sich ohn’ Zahl.[[8]]