Inventing Memory Read Online Free PDF Page A

rented me a slab of a bed in the cellar by the coal vault, which I shared with three other boarders. Chaya was a "sweater"—she ran a sweatshop in which newly arrived girls from Russia sewed knee pants for a few pennies a pair.
    "Sleep faster, we need the pillows," goes one of Mama's favorite sayings ( Shlof gicher, me darf di kishen! ), and "Aunt" Chaya took it literally, rotating the girls who worked on different shifts in that very coal cellar and letting three beds serve for six boarders. The bedclothes always reeked of someone else's underarms or monthly blood. Bedbugs—bursting with the blood of immigrant girls—were constant companions. There were also fleas and roaches. And rats as big as lapdogs. Remembering, I shudder. I was resolved to get out of there as soon as possible.
    Whose relative was Chaya anyway? I had only a scrap of paper with her name, but even then I wondered whether Mama could have been mistaken, for Chaya didn't treat me like a relative at all.
    Do you want to hear about the other jobs she found for us? Turning worn collars over and resewing them: poor clothes for poor people. Sewing buttons, sewing buttonholes, washing, pressing, the steam flying up in our burning faces. And always hanging over me the thought of the money my journey had cost—the equivalent of twenty-five dollars for the steamship ticket (the precious shifskarte ) and kopecks for the bribes of the border guards—and more kopecks for the packed train to Hamburg.
    How would I repay my family by bringing them one by one across the sea? Turning collars would not do it, nor would making caps in a locked factory with twenty other girls, nor even draping pretty springcolored evening dresses on a mannequin, whom I talked to as if she were Mama, wetting the chiffon with my tears. My perfect little stitches would not bring them all across the water. I had to find another way.

    And then it was a Sunday in spring and my day off, and I was walking down Rivington Street in a swelling tide of people. They pushed and shoved, argued in a mélange of languages. Boys stole apples and pears from pushcarts. Girls danced frantically around the hurdy-gurdy man. Drunks guzzled beer. Babies howled from tenement windows. Corpulent, red-faced mothers leaned out to watch the pageant of the streets—their only entertainment, distraction, pleasure. The fire escapes were hung with worn featherbeds, torn sheets, tattered blankets. The roofs were alive with flapping laundry, pigeons, adolescent boys at their dangerous play. And suddenly my eyes were drawn to an open window on the street level, and I wandered over as if in a trance.
    A naked girl—pink, plump, large-breasted—was arranged among folds of fabric on a low wooden platform at the room's center, and a variety of men were sketching her. One man had a gold stopwatch, protuberant eyes, and a bushy black beard. His eyebrows were like black caterpillars. They jumped up and down on his forehead as if possessed by their own will. Instead of the usual skullcap, he wore a sort of embroidered beret. Every five minutes or so, he clapped his hands, and the girl changed her pose.
    The other men, those who were sketching, were young, old, thin, fat. Some could draw like demons, some were awkward and slow. One of the laggards complained, "Levitsky—not so fast!"
    "Out!" shouted the man with the stopwatch and the funny eyebrows, and he sent the nebbish of an artist packing. The girl changed poses again, and seeing the door was open, I walked in.
    "May I watch?" I asked politely with my heavy accent.
    Levitsky immediately replied in Yiddish: "A pretty face is half a dowry." It was a proverb my mama always used. Then he added in English: "How can I say no to such a beauty?" His accent, strong too, was redolent of Russia: beautzy.
    I stood and watched through various cycles of poses. The odalisque was now on her back, now on her stomach, now standing, now sitting cross-legged among the drapes of fabric. I was