Leah's Journey by Gloria Goldreich Page B

I am on guard duty. We have tried mightily to befriend the neighboring Arabs but they return our overtures with attacks. I am sorry to tell you that Mottel Abramowitz who studied with us in Odessa lost an eye in such a raid. But we comfort ourselves with the knowledge that this is not Russia. Here, Jews are allowed to defend themselves. I wish we could persuade the rest of the family to leave the old country and join us here. Write to us soon. Our hearts are with you.”
    Leah refolded the sheets of paper and put them back in the envelope. She peeled the English stamp off the envelope and gave it to Joshua Ellenberg, who had announced that he was now collecting stamps for a hobby. Aaron knew that Joshua saved the stamps he begged from other people’s letters and sold them to the old man who kept a coin and stamp stall on Canal Street. He wondered why his friend didn’t tell the truth and turned back to the fairy tales which were less puzzling to him than the people around him.
    “Your brother sounds like a marvelous man,” Masha said.
    She was wearing a new dress and as she talked to Leah her eyes laughed across the room to Shimon Hartstein. The dress was of a rustling brocade and when she reached over to pick up the weekend edition of the Yiddish Morning Journal, her skirt brushed against Shimon’s knees. He blushed slightly and pressed the richly waxed curves of his handlebar moustache with nervous fingers. Twice last week Leah had heard soft voices behind Shimon’s closed door and on the second occasion, late in the evening, she had recognized Masha’s softly lisping voice. She had noticed too that whenever Masha emerged from her room to announce that she was going to the roof to collect her drying laundry, Shimon felt the urgent need for a breath of air.
    “My sister is also a marvelous woman,” Leah said. “I wonder if Moshe’s Yaakov can be as cute as Yankele and little Chana?”
    Shimon coughed nervously and looked away from Leah.
    “Did you bring home the sewing machine?” he asked David, swiftly changing the subject.
    “It’s over there.” David pointed to the machine which he had set down on a bench. “What do you want it for over a Sabbath?”
    “My business secret,” his brother-in-law replied, but leaned forward conspiratorially. “I bought a pattern for a new kind of shirt front. A dickey, they call it. They’re like the shirtwaists the girls wear to go to business but without sleeves or a back. Just for show underneath the jacket and very cheap to make. I got a good buy on the fabric and I figure I can cut and sew myself and sell direct. I listen when the boss talks to the buyers and salesmen and all the names I got in my head.”
    “And I can deliver for you,” Joshua Ellenberg volunteered. “I just put new wheels on my wagon. I can go all over the city.”
    “Wonderful,” David murmured. “Everyone here in this apartment is a Henry Ford, at least.”
    “So what’s wrong with a little ambition?” Masha asked, looking up from her paper. “It’s better to have some ambition than to give up and put your head in the oven like that poor young woman on Monroe Street. Every week something like that in the paper, and then I think of poor Mrs. Moskowitz next door left with all those children. Ach, it makes me not want to read any more.” But she licked her lips expectantly as she bent over yet another headline offering a reward for information about men who had deserted their wives.
    “You had a good day, David?” Leah asked. She wanted to change the subject quickly, to steer the conversation into calmer waters, away from the shoals of suicide and desertion and the desperate race against poverty.
    “A day like all days,” he answered.
    “You must have had something on your mind though,” Morris Morgenstern said. “When I saw you at the bathhouse you looked right through me. Thinking about your books, maybe.” He glanced with reverent eyes at the small mountain of David’s texts