An American in the Making: The Life Story of an Immigrant

chapter x

chapter x Purifications No doubt this was proper pride, but in the month and a half that followed I often had good reason to feel that the price I was made to pay for it was a trifle extortionate. I had come to New York in search of riches and adventure. Well, now, here at least was adventure a-plenty, even if the riches were a bit scarce. To be sure, the adventures I had most craved were of quite another sort. But, having neglected to specify in advance, it was not my place to complain against Destiny when she chose to put the broad interpretation on my order and supplied me with an ample stock of all the varieties in her shop. All the same, I could not for the life of me see any fun in the thing, not, at any rate, while it lasted. Think of me as devoid of imagination all you please, the fact remains that, with the best intentions in the world, I never succeeded in tapping the romance of my experiences. Going without meals two-thirds of the time was just as dull as it could be; tramping through the slushy, wind-swept streets while the rest of the world snuggled and snored under its warm covers was monstrously nasty; and the callousness, the indifference, the smugness of employers and acquaintances alike were both dull and nasty, and soul-destroying to boot. No, I got precious little poetry out of my adventures. Wisdom, perhaps—of the toughening kind.By the time my trials were over I had ceased to be a boy. I had become a man, with the disillusionment, the wiliness, and, I fear, the cynicism of a man. I had thought that that first week preceding my peddling ventures had exhausted all America’s possibilities of hardship and disheartening failure. But that was because I was a greenhorn, unversed in the ways of Columbus’s land. It was only now that I was to get my American baptism —that cleansing of the spirit by suffering which everyone of us immigrants must pass through to prove himself worthy of his adoption . The population of Little Rumania was made up of two classes, the greens and the yellows. They were not stationary castes; every yellow had once been a green, and every green was striving and hoping to 78 become a yellow some day. But in order to effect this coveted change of color and class there was but one thing for the new-comer to do—he must be purified. Purification—that was what, with telling aptness, the East Side called the period of struggle, starvation, and disappointment in America, which was the lot of the green. If a fellow-townsman of mine chanced to ask my cousin and former landlady whether she had seen me and how I was getting on, she answered apathetically and as if it were only what one might expect,“Oh, he is bleaching out—getting purified, you know.”People who had known my family in Vaslui would now and then pass me in the street or run into me in a tea-house, and the dialogue that then ensued was after this fashion: “Working?” “No, not yet.” “Um, getting properly purified. Oh, well, wait until you are a yellow. You’ll be all right in America yet.” And my friend would suddenly discover that he had important business in hand and bid me a breathless good-by. Happily I was not alone in my misery. A large percentage of those who had come to America on foot were, in a twofold sense, in the same shoes as I was, in spite of all the efforts of the newly formed Rumanian American Society to provide for the comfort and self-support of their compatriots. The dingy hotels on the Bowery were filled with them, and the communal kitchen on Broome Street saw scores of such of them as were willing to submit to charity, [to] stand in line every day for their meal tickets. The” labor agencies” did a thriving business by finding jobs for them somewhere in “the South,” which, however, turned out exceedingly short-lived, as those who managed to get back reported. With the help of some of my fellow-sufferers I picked up a variety of scraps of industrial information; but my extreme youth and my unconquerable timidity prevented me from making any use of them. There was Ascher Gold, for instance...