Inventing Memory Read Online Free PDF

fascinated with the folds of her fat and couldn't stop staring.
    Levitsky came over to me and put his arm around my shoulder—I almost jumped.
    "Are you an artist too?" he asked.
    "A retoucher," I said. "But I can draw as well as this lot."
    He looked cynical—as if he didn't believe a girl could draw. Then he handed me a board with paper pinned to it and a piece of charcoal.
    "Draw!" he commanded. And draw I did. I had never sketched a nude before, but I was born knowing how to draw. How could a nude be different from the other things I'd drawn—houses, animals, portraits? Levitsky sucked in his breath as he watched me draw the sprawling nude. Then she changed poses, and he gave me another sheet of paper. I drew the next pose as well.
    "I'll be damned," said Levitsky, in English. "You're better than my other slaves."
    "Slaves?" I asked.
    "Slaves who can draw fast!" Levitsky barked. "Heads, hands, legs, feet, shoes, hats. To mine opinion, if you work quick enough and specialized enough, you can make quite a lot from the catalogs, but you have to hustle. These schmegegges "—he gestured at the drawing fools—"would love to be my slaves, but they ain't good enough. I got the commissions—more than I can handle—but I need the hands to draw 'em. If it were only me drawing, I couldn't make enough to buy a pot to piss in, let alone what I have in mind…."
    "And what do you have in mind?" I asked.
    "I ain't telling a girl I just met," he said rather roughly.
    "Begging your pardon," I said, "but with a hardworking woman with
    a business head on her shoulders to help you, you could be, eppis , a millionaire."
    What gave me such chutzpah I do not know, but Levitsky was piqued by my brazenness—as brazen people often are.
    "So nu? " I said.
    And that was how I came to leave the coal cellar and work for Lev Levitsky.

    The first night I spent in his studio, we drank tea with damson jam, ate walnuts (which we cracked with our teeth), and talked in Yiddish like two prisoners who had been in solitary confinement. Such talk, talk, talk! It warmed my heart. Levitsky was the greatest talker I had ever met—and I had met some great ones.
    Then he showed me his drawings. He was a cornucopia of ideas, and his drawings brought back the old country to me and made me homesick for Mama. (In those days, everything made me homesick for Mama. I used to read the Yiddish poets in the Forverts and weep.) Not only Levitsky's work but his way of speaking made me homesick. And his smell . He smelled like my dead papa. His drawings depicted towering tenements, trains that ran on single rails through the air, strange flying machines that could be harnessed to the backs of humans. At the root of it all was a sad wooden village, with skinny goats and hollow-eyed children and tumbled houses arranged around mud ponds. It could have been Sukovoly.
    His masterpiece was the huge oil painting he was doing of heaven and hell. All of heaven was made of rosy, creamy clouds encircled by the arms of a rosy-cheeked, white-bearded God, whose body also seemed to be composed of fluffy clouds. His eyes followed you wherever you moved in the room. And below his realm, hell began: demons climbing tenement buildings, hanging from the teeming summer roofs, from fire escapes, from careening streetcars, leaping on people who walked in the streets, dragging them down through manholes into a darker realm—a realm of sewage pools and flesh-denuded humans who crawled on what was left of their knees and howled for mercy. It was the Lower East Side, transformed into a vision of hell!
    "A Michelangelo I could be," he said, not without bitterness. "But that's no way to get rich in America. To get rich you have to skim the fat of other people's bones, multiply your hands, and lose your heart. To mine opinion, you have to be a boss . And a boss can't be an artist. When the Messiah comes to America, he should come in a private railroad car like Mr. Frick or Mr. Rockefeller! Who would