New York Stories by Bob Blaisdell

Author:Bob Blaisdell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications, Inc
Published: 2016-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

WINGS (1920)

Anzia Yezierska

Sentimental but thoroughly touching, “Wings” recounts the hard luck of a 22-year-old Jewish immigrant. Working as a janitor for her uncle on the Lower East Side, Shenah Pessah dreams of improving her lot and is inspired by love to strive for education. Anzia Yezierska (c. 1885–1970) was probably less naïve and certainly not an orphan, as is her plucky heroine. Yezierska and her parents arrived in America in the 1890s (her precise birth and arrival dates are unknown). Her father devoted himself to the study of the Torah and did not encourage Anzia’s career ambitions; nevertheless, she enrolled at Columbia University’s Teachers College. She graduated and was a grammar school teacher before becoming a celebrated writer of fiction. “Wings” is the first story in her Hungry Hearts collection (1920). Her most famous work, the novel Bread Givers, was published in 1925. Yezierska spent much of her long life advocating for Lower East Side immigrant groups, including those from Puerto Rico.

“My heart chokes in me like in a prison! I’m dying for a little love and I got nobody—nobody!” wailed Shenah Pessah, as she looked out of the dismal basement window.

It was a bright Sunday afternoon in May, and into the gray, cheerless, janitor’s basement a timid ray of sunlight announced the dawn of spring.

“Oi weh! Light!” breathed Shenah Pessah, excitedly, throwing open the sash. “A little light in the room for the first time!” And she stretched out her hands hungrily for the warming bit of sun.

The happy laughter of the shopgirls standing on the stoop with their beaux and the sight of the young mothers with their husbands and babies fanned anew the consuming fire in her breast.

“I’m not jealous!” she gasped, chokingly. “My heart hurts too deep to want to tear from them their luck to happiness. But why should they live and enjoy life and why must I only look on how they are happy?”

She clutched at her throat like one stifled for want of air. “What is the matter with you? Are you going out of your head? For what is your crying? Who will listen to you? Who gives a care what’s going to become from you?”

Crushed by her loneliness, she sank into a chair. For a long time she sat motionless, finding drear fascination in the mocking faces traced in the patches of the torn plaster. Gradually, she became aware of a tingling warmth playing upon her cheeks. And with a revived breath, she drank in the miracle of the sunlit wall.

“Ach!” she sighed. “Once a year the sun comes to light up even this dark cellar, so why shouldn’t the High One send on me too a little brightness?”

This new wave of hope swept aside the fact that she was the “greenhorn” janitress, that she was twenty-two and dowryless, and, according to the traditions of her people, condemned to be shelved aside as an unmated thing—a creature of pity and ridicule.

“I can’t help it how old I am or how poor I am!” she burst out to the deaf and dumb air.

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