Like all people who have nothing, I lived on dreams. With nothing but my longing for love, I burned my way through stone walls till I got to America. And what happened to me when I became an American is more than I can picture before my eyes, even in a dream.

I was a poor Melamid’s daughter in Savel, Poland. In my village, a girl without a dowry was a dead one. The only kind of a man that would give a look on a girl without money was a widower with a dozen children, or some one with a hump or on crutches.

There was the village water-carrier with red, teary eyes, and warts on his cracked lip. There was the janitor of the bath-house, with a squash nose, and long, black nails with all the dirt of the world under them. Maybe one of these uglinesses might yet take pity on me and do me the favor to marry me. I shivered and grew cold through all my bones at the thought of them.Like the hunger for bread was my hunger for love. My life was nothing to me. My heart was empty. Nothing I did was real without love. I used to spend nights crying on my pillow, praying to God: “I want love! I want love! I can’t live—I can’t breathe without love!”

And all day long I’d ask myself: “Why was I born? What is the use of dragging on day after day, wasting myself eating, sleeping, dressing? What is the meaning of anything without love?” And my heart was so hungry I couldn’t help feeling and dreaming that somehow, somewhere, there must be a lover waiting for me. But how and where could I find my lover was the one longing that burned in my heart by day and by night.

Then came the letter from Hanneh Hayyeh, Zlata’s daughter, that fired me up to go to America for my lover.

“America is a lover’s land,” said Hanneh Hayyeh’s letter. “In America millionaires fall in love with poorest girls. Matchmakers are out of style, and a girl can get herself married to a man without the worries for a dowry.”“God from the world!” began knocking my heart. “How grand to live where the kind of a man you get don’t depend on how much money your father can put down! If I could only go to America! There—there waits my lover for me.”

That letter made a holiday all over Savel. The butcher, the grocer, the shoemaker, everybody stopped his work and rushed to our house to hear my father read the news from the Golden Country.

“Stand out your ears to hear my great happiness,” began Hanneh Hayyeh’s letter. “I, Hanneh Hayyeh, will marry myself to Solomon Cohen, the boss from the shirtwaist factory, where all day I was working sewing on buttons. If you could only see how the man is melting away his heart for me! He kisses me after each step I walk. The only wish from his heart is to make me for a lady. Think only, he is buying me a piano! I should learn piano lessons as if I were from millionaires.”

Fire and lightning burst through the crowd. “Hanneh Hayyeh a lady!” They nudged and winked one to the other as they looked on the loose fatness of Zlata, her mother, and saw before their eyes Hanneh Hayyeh, with her thick, red lips, and her shape so fat like a puffed-out barrel of yeast.

“In America is a law called ‘ladies first,’” the letter went on. “In the cars the men must get up to give their seats to the women. The men hold the babies on their hands and carry the bundles for the women, and even help with the dishes. There are not enough women to go around in America. And the men run after the women, and not like in Poland, the women running after the men.”

Gewalt! What an excitement began to burn through the whole village when they heard of Hanneh Hayyeh’s luck!

The ticket agents from the ship companies seeing how Hanneh Hayyeh’s letter was working like yeast in the air for America, posted up big signs by all the market fairs: “Go to America, the New World. Fifty rubles a ticket.”

“Fifty rubles! Only fifty rubles! And there waits your lover!” cried my heart.

Oi weh! How I was hungering to go to America after that! By day and by night I was tearing and turning over the earth, how to get to my lover on the other side of the world.

“Nu, Zalmon?” said my mother, twisting my father around to what I wanted. “It’s not so far from sense what Sara Reisel is saying. In Savel, without a dowry, she had no chance to get a man, and if we got to wait much longer she will be too old to get one anywhere.”

“But from where can we get together the fifty rubles?” asked my father. “Why don’t it will itself in you to give your daughter the moon?”

I could no more think on how to get the money than they. But I was so dying to go, I felt I could draw the money out from the sky.

One night I could not fall asleep. I lay in the darkness and stillness, my wild, beating heart on fire with dreams of my lover. I put out my hungry hands and prayed to my lover through the darkness: “Oh, love, love! How can I get the fifty rubles to come to you?”

In the morning I got up like one choking for air. We were sitting down to eat breakfast, but I couldn’t taste nothing. I felt my head drop into my hands from weakness.

“Why don’t you try to eat something?” begged my mother, going over to me.

“Eat?” I cried, jumping up like one mad. “How can I eat? How can I sleep? How can I breathe in this deadness? I want to go to America. I must go, and I will go!”

My mother began wringing her hands. “Oi weh! Mine heart! The knife is on our neck. The landlord is hollering for the unpaid rent, and it wills itself in you America?”

“Are you out of your head?” cried my father.

“What are you dreaming of golden hills on the sky? How can we get together the fifty rubles for a ticket?”

I stole a look at Yosef, my younger brother. Nothing that was sensible ever laid in his head to do; but if there was anything wild, up in the air that willed itself in him, he could break through stone walls to get it. Yosef gave a look around the house. Everything was old and poor, and not a thing to get money on—nothing except father’s Saifer Torah—the Holy Scrolls—and mother’s silver candlesticks, her wedding present from our grandmother.

“Why not sell the Saifer Torah and the candlesticks?” said Yosef.

Nobody but my brother would have dared to breathe such a thing.

“What? A Jew sell the Saifer Torah or the Sabbath candlesticks?” My father fixed on us his burning eyes like flaming wells. His hands tightened over his heart. He couldn’t speak. He just looked on the Saifer Torah, and then on us with a look that burned like live coals on our naked bodies. “What?” he gasped. “Should I sell my life, my soul from generation and generation? Sell my Saifer Torah? Not if the world goes under!”

There was a stillness of thunder about to break. Everybody heard everybody’s heart beating.

“Did I live to see this black day?” moaned my father, choking from quick breathing. “Mine own son, mine Kadish—mine Kadish tells me to sell the Holy Book that our forefathers shed rivers of blood to hand down to us.”

“What are you taking it so terrible?” said my brother. “Doesn’t it stand in the Talmud that to help marry his daughter a man may sell the holiest thing—even the Holy Book?”

“Are there miracles in America? Can she yet get there a man at her age and without a dowry?”

“If Hanneh Hayyeh, who is older than Sara Reisel and not half as good-looking,” said my brother, “could get a boss from a factory, then whom cannot Sara Reisel pick out? And with her luck all of us will be lifted over to America.”

My father did not answer. I waited, but still he did not answer.

At last I burst out with all the tears choking in me for years: “Is your old Saifer Torah that hangs on the wall dearer to you than that I should marry? The Talmud tells you to sell the holiest thing to help marry your daughter, but you—you love yourself more than your own child!”Then I turned to my mother. I hit my hands on the table and cried in a voice that made her tremble and grow frightened: “Maybe you love your silver candlesticks more than your daughter’s happiness? To whom can I marry myself here, I ask you, only—to the bath janitor, to the water-carrier? I tell you I’ll kill myself if you don’t help me get away! I can’t stand no more this deadness here. I must get away. And you must give up everything to help me get away. All I need is a chance. I can do a million times better than Hanneh Hayyeh. I got a head. I got brains. I feel I can marry myself to the greatest man in America.”

My mother stopped crying, took up the candlesticks from the mantelpiece and passed her hands over them. “It’s like a piece from my flesh,” she said. “We grew up with this, you children and I, and my mother and my mother’s mother. This and the Saifer Torah are the only things that shine up the house for the Sabbath.”

She couldn’t go on, her words choked in her so. I am seeing yet how she looked, holding the candlesticks in her hands, and her eyes that she turned on us. But then I didn’t see anything but to go to America.

She walked over to my father, who sat with his head in his hands, stoned with sadness. “Zalmon!” she sobbed. “The blood from under my nails I’ll give away, only my child should have a chance to marry herself well. I’ll give away my candlesticks—”

Even my brother Yosef’s eyes filled with tears, so he quick jumped up and began to whistle and move around. “You don’t have to sell them,” he cried, trying to make it light in the air. “You can pawn them by Moisheh Itzek, the usurer, and as soon as Sara Reisel will get herself married, she’ll send us the money to get them out again, and we’ll yet live to take them over with us to America.”

I never saw my father look so sad. He looked like a man from whom the life is bleeding away. “I’ll not stand myself against your happiness,” he said, in a still voice. “I only hope this will be to your luck and that you’ll get married quick, so we could take out the Saifer Torah from the pawn.”In less than a week the Saifer Torah and the candlesticks were pawned and the ticket bought. The whole village was ringing with the news that I am going to America. When I walked in the street people pointed on me with their fingers as if I were no more the same Sara Reisel.

Everybody asked me different questions.

“Tell me how it feels to go to America? Can you yet sleep nights like other people?”

“When you’ll marry yourself in America, will you yet remember us?”

God from the world! That last Friday night before I went to America! Maybe it is the last time we are together was in everybody’s eyes. Everything that happened seemed so different from all other times. I felt I was getting ready to tear my life out from my body.

Without the Saifer Torah the house was dark and empty. The sun, the sky, the whole heaven shined from that Holy Book on the wall, and when it was taken out it left an aching emptiness on the heart, as if something beautiful passed out of our lives.

I yet see before me my father in the Rabbi’s cap, with eyes that look far away into things; the way he sang the prayer over the wine when he passed around the glass for every one to give a sip. The tears rolled out from my little sister’s eyes down her cheeks and fell into the wine. On that my mother, who was all the time wiping her tears, burst out crying. “Shah! Shah!” commanded my father, rising up from his chair and beginning to walk around the room. “It’s Sabbath night, when every Jew should be happy. Is this the way you give honor to God on His one day that He set aside for you?”

On the next day, that was Sabbath, father as if held us up in his hands, and everybody behaved himself. A stranger coming in couldn’t see anything that was going on, except that we walked so still and each one by himself, as if somebody dying was in the air over us.

On the going-away morning, everybody was around our house waiting to take me to the station. Everybody wanted to give a help with the bundles. The moving along to the station was like a funeral. Nobody could hold in their feelings any longer. Everybody fell on my neck to kiss me, as if it was my last day on earth.

“Remember you come from Jews. Remember to pray every day,” said my father, putting his hands over my head, like in blessing on the day of Atonement.

“Only try that we should be together soon again,” were the last words from my mother as she wiped her eyes with the corner of her shawl.

“Only don’t forget that I want to study, and send for me as quick as you marry yourself,” said Yosef, smiling good-bye with tears in his eyes.

As I saw the train coming, what wouldn’t I have given to stay back with the people in Savel forever! I wanted to cry out: “Take only away my ticket! I don’t want any more America! I don’t want any more my lover!”

But as soon as I got into the train, although my eyes were still looking back to the left-behind faces, and my ears were yet hearing the good-byes and the partings, the thoughts of America began stealing into my heart. I was thinking how soon I’d have my lover and be rich like Hanneh Hayyeh. And with my luck, everybody was going to be happy in Savel. The dead people will stop dying and all the sorrows and troubles of the world will be wiped away with my happiness.

I didn’t see the day. I didn’t see the night. I didn’t see the ocean. I didn’t see the sky. I only saw my lover in America, coming nearer and nearer to me, till I could feel his eyes bending on me so near that I got frightened and began to tremble. My heart ached so with the joy of his nearness that I quick drew back and turned away, and began to talk to the people that were pushing and crowding themselves on the deck.

Nu, I got to America.

Ten hours I pushed a machine in a shirt-waist factory, when I was yet lucky to get work. And always my head was drying up with saving and pinching and worrying to send home a little from the little I earned. All that my face saw all day long was girls and machines—and nothing else. And even when I came already home from work, I could only talk to the girls in the working-girls’ boarding-house, or shut myself up in my dark, lonesome bedroom. No family, no friends, nobody to get me acquainted with nobody! The only men I saw were what passed me by in the street and in cars.

“Is this ‘lovers’ land’?” was calling in my heart. “Where are my dreams that were so real to me in the old country?”

Often in the middle of the work I felt like stopping all the machines and crying out to the world the heaviness that pressed on my heart. Sometimes when I walked in the street I felt like going over to the first man I met and cry out to him: “Oh, I’m so lonely! I’m so lonely!”

One day I read in the Jewish “Tageblatt” the advertisement from Zaretzky, the matchmaker. “What harm is it if I try my luck?” I said to myself. “I can’t die away an old maid. Too much love burns in my heart to stand back like a stone and only see how other people are happy. I want to tear myself out from my deadness. I’m in a living grave. I’ve got to lift myself up. I have nobody to try for me, and maybe the matchmaker will help.”

As I walked up Delancey Street to Mr. Zaretzky, the street was turning with me. I didn’t see the crowds. I didn’t see the pushcart peddlers with their bargains. I didn’t hear the noises or anything. My eyes were on the sky, praying: “Gottuniu! Send me only the little bit of luck!”

“Nu? Nu? What need you?” asked Mr. Zaretzky when I entered.

I got red with shame in the face the way he looked at me. I turned up my head. I was too proud to tell him for what I came. Before I walked in I thought to tell him everything. But when I looked on his face and saw his hard eyes, I couldn’t say a word. I stood like a yok unable to move my tongue. I went to the matchmaker with my heart, and I saw before me a stone. The stone was talking to me—but—but—he was a stone!

“Are you looking for a shidduch?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, proud, but crushed.

“You know I charge five dollars for the stepping in,” he bargained.

It got cold by my heart. It wasn’t only to give him the five dollars, nearly a whole week’s wages, but his thick-skinness for being only after the money. But I couldn’t help myself—I was like in his fists hypnotized. And I gave him the five dollars.

I let myself go to the door, but he called me back.

“Wait, wait. Come in and sit down. I didn’t question you yet.”

“About what?”

“I got to know how much money you got saved before I can introduce you to anybody.”

“Oh—h—h! Is it only depending on the money?”

“Certainly. No move in this world without money,” he said, taking a pinch of snuff in his black, hairy fingers and sniffing it up in his nose.

I glanced on his thick neck and greasy, red face. “And to him people come looking for love,” I said to myself, shuddering. Oh, how it burned in my heart, but still I went on, “Can’t I get a man in America without money?”

He gave a look on me with his sharp eyes. Gottuniu! What a look! I thought I was sinking into the floor.“There are plenty of young girls with money that are begging themselves the men to take them. So what can you expect? Not young, not lively, and without money, too? But, anyhow, I’ll see what I can do for you.”

He took out a little book from his vest-pocket and looked through the names.

“What trade do you go on your hands?” he asked, turning to me. “Sometimes a dressmaker or a hairdresser that can help make a living for a man, maybe—”

I couldn’t hear any more. It got black before my eyes, my voice stopped inside of me.

“If you want to listen to sense from a friend, so I have a good match for you,” he said, following me to the door. “I have on my list a widower with not more than five or six children. He has a grand business, a herring-stand on Hester Street. He don’t ask for no money, and he don’t make an objection if the girl is in years, so long as she knows how to cook well for him.”

How I got myself back to my room I don’t know. But for two days and for two nights I lay still on my bed, unable to move. I looked around on my empty walls, thinking, thinking, “Where am I? Is this the world? Is this America?”

Suddenly I sprang up from bed. “What can come from pitying yourself?” I cried. “If the world kicks you down and makes nothing of you, you bounce yourself up and make something of yourself.” A fire blazed up in me to rise over the world because I was downed by the world.

“Make a person of yourself,” I said. “Begin to learn English. Make yourself for an American if you want to live in America. American girls don’t go to matchmakers. American girls don’t run after a man: if they don’t get a husband they don’t think the world is over; they turn their mind to something else.

“Wake up!” I said to myself. “You want love to come to you? Why don’t you give it out to other people? Love the women and children, everybody in the street and the shop. Love the rag-picker and the drunkard, the bad and the ugly. All those whom the world kicks down you pick up and press to your heart with love.”As I said this I felt wells of love that choked in me all my life flowing out of me and over me. A strange, wonderful light like a lover’s smile melted over me, and the sweetness of lover’s arms stole around me.

The first night I went to school I felt like falling on everybody’s neck and kissing them. I felt like kissing the books and the benches. It was such great happiness to learn to read and write the English words.

Because I started a few weeks after the beginning of the term, my teacher said I might stay after the class to help me catch up with my back lessons. The minute I looked on him I felt that grand feeling: “Here is a person! Here is America!” His face just shined with high thoughts. There was such a beautiful light in his eyes that it warmed my heart to steal a look on him.

At first, when it came my turn to say something in the class, I got so excited the words stuck and twisted in my mouth and I couldn’t give out my thoughts. But the teacher didn’t see my nervousness. He only saw that I had something to say, and he helped me say it. How or what he did I don’t know. I only felt his look of understanding flowing into me like draughts of air to one who is choking.

Long after I already felt free and easy to talk to him alone after the class, I looked at all the books on his desk. “Oi weh!” I said to him, “if I only knew half of what is in your books, I couldn’t any more sit still in the chair like you. I’d fly in the air with the joy of so much knowledge.”

“Why are you so eager for learning?” he asked me.

“Because I want to make a person of myself,” I answered. “Since I got to work for low wages and I can’t be young any more, I’m burning to get among people where it’s not against a girl if she is in years and without money.”

His hand went out to me. “I’ll help you,” he said. “But you must first learn to get hold of yourself.”

Such a beautiful kindness went out of his heart to me with his words! His voice, and the goodness that shone from his eyes, made me want to burst out crying, but I choked back my tears till I got home. And all night long I wept on my pillow: “Fool! What is the matter with you? Why are you crying?” But I said, “I can’t help it. He is so beautiful!”

My teacher was so much above me that he wasn’t a man to me at all. He was a God. His face lighted up the shop for me, and his voice sang itself in me everywhere I went. It was like healing medicine to the flaming fever within me to listen to his voice. And then I’d repeat to myself his words and live in them as if they were religion.

Often as I sat at the machine sewing the waists I’d forget what I was doing. I’d find myself dreaming in the air. “Ach!” I asked myself, “what was that beautifulness in his eyes that made the lowest nobody feel like a somebody? What was that about him that when his smile fell on me I felt lifted up to the sky away from all the coldness and the ugliness of the world? Gottunui!” I prayed, “if I could only always hold on to the light of high thoughts that shined from him. If I could only always hear in my heart the sound of his voice I would need nothing more in life. I would be happier than a bird in the air.

“Friend,” I said to him once, “if you could but teach me how to get cold in the heart and clear in the head like you are!”

He only smiled at me and looked far away. His calmness was like the sureness of money in the bank. Then he turned and looked on me, and said: “I am not so cold in the heart and clear in the head as I make-believe. I am bound. I am a prisoner of convention.”

“You make-believe—you bound?” I burst out. “You who do not have foreladies or bosses—you who do not have to sell yourself for wages—you who only work for love and truth—you a prisoner?”

“True, I do not have bosses just as you do,” he said. “But still I am not free. I am bound by formal education and conventional traditions. Though you work in a shop, you are really freer than I. You are not repressed as I am by the fear and shame of feeling. You could teach me more than I could teach you. You could teach me how to be natural.”“I’m not so natural like you think,” I said. “I’m afraid.”

He smiled at me out of his eyes. “What are you afraid of?”

“I’m afraid of my heart,” I said, trying to hold back the blood rushing to my face. “I’m burning to get calm and sensible like the born Americans. But how can I help it? My heart flies away from me like a wild bird. How can I learn to keep myself down on earth like the born Americans?”

“But I don’t want you to get down on earth like the Americans. That is just the beauty and the wonder of you. We Americans are too much on earth; we need more of your power to fly. If you would only know how much you can teach us Americans. You are the promise of the centuries to come. You are the heart, the creative pulse of America to be.”

I walked home on wings. My teacher said that I could help him; that I had something to give to Americans. “But how could I teach him?” I wondered; “I who had never had a chance to learn anything except what he taught me. And what had I to give to the Americans, I who am nothing but dreams and longings and hunger for love?”

When school closed down for vacation, it seemed to me all life stopped in the world. I had no more class to look forward to, no more chance of seeing my teacher. As I faced the emptiness of my long vacation, all the light went out of my eyes, and all the strength out of my arms and fingers.

For nearly a week I was like without air. There was no school. One night I came home from the shop and threw myself down on the bed. I wanted to cry, to let out the heavy weight that pressed on my heart, but I couldn’t cry. My tears felt like hot, burning sand in my eyes.

“Oi-i-i! I can’t stand it no more, this emptiness,” I groaned. “Why don’t I kill myself? Why don’t something happen to me? No consumption, no fever, no plague or death ever comes to save me from this terrible world. I have to go on suffering and choking inside myself till I grow mad.”I jumped up from the bed, threw open the window, and began fighting with the deaf-and-dumb air in the air-shaft.

“What is the matter with you?” I cried. “You are going out of your head. You are sinking back into the old ways from which you dragged yourself out with your studies. Studies! What did I get from all my studies? Nothing. Nothing. I am still in the same shop with the same shirt-waists. A lot my teacher cares for me once the class is over.”

A fire burned up in me that he was already forgetting me. And I shot out a letter to him:

“You call yourself a teacher? A friend? How can you go off in the country and drop me out of your heart and out of your head like a read-over book you left on the shelf of your shut-down classroom? How can you enjoy your vacation in the country while I’m in the sweatshop? You learned me nothing. You only broke my heart. What good are all the books you ever gave me? They don’t tell me how to be happy in a factory. They don’t tell me how to keep alive in emptiness, or how to find something beautiful in the dirt and ugliness in which I got to waste away. I want life. I want people. I can’t live inside my head as you do.”

I sent the letter off in the madness in which I wrote it, without stopping to think; but the minute after I dropped it in the mail-box my reason came again to my head. I went back tearing my hair. “What have I done? Meshugeneh!”

Walking up the stairs I saw my door open. I went in. The sky is falling to the earth! Am I dreaming? There was my teacher sitting on my trunk! My teacher come to see me? Me, in my dingy room? For a minute it got blind before my eyes, and I didn’t know where I was any more.

“I had to come,” he said, the light of heaven shining on me out of his eyes. “I was so desolate without you. I tried to say something to you before I left for my vacation, but the words wouldn’t come. Since I have been away I have written you many letters, but I did not mail them, for they were like my old self from which I want to break away.”He put his cool, strong hand into mine. “You can save me,” he said. “You can free me from the bondage of age-long repressions. You can lift me out of the dead grooves of sterile intellectuality. Without you I am the dry dust of hopes unrealized. You are fire and sunshine and desire. You make life changeable and beautiful and full of daily wonder.”

I couldn’t speak. I was so on fire with his words. Then, like whirlwinds in my brain, rushed out the burning words of the matchmaker: “Not young, not lively, and without money, too!”

“You are younger than youth,” he said, kissing my hands. “Every day of your unlived youth shall be relived with love, but such a love as youth could never know.”

And then how it happened I don’t know; but his arms were around me. “Sara Reisel, tell me, do you love me,” he said, kissing me on my hair and on my eyes and on my lips.

I could only weep and tremble with joy at his touch. “The miracle!” cried my heart; “the miracle of America come true!”