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EHOVAH has staged many an exodus since that spectacular one across the Red Sea when he baited a far-away land with milk and honey to lure an imaginative race of brickmakers.

More recently he had taken Shmuel Goldberg, the little tailor, with his wife Sorah and their Izzy and Benny, out of the West Side ghetto, across the Mississippi, twelve miles away to Merriam Park, a Jewless Canaan, flowing with work and money.

Sorah's brother, black-bearded Yonkel, had moved the Goldbergs in his loose-wheeled serpentining wagon, the harness pieced with wire. He and Shmuel sat on the seat with cigarettes perilously pendent from their lips as they chatted and gesticulated with gusto. Behind were the few sticks of furniture, the shop fittings, the cradle, and the red feather-beds in which nestled Sorah and her excited, chattering brood. It was the adventure of the boys' lives, gypsying behind their uncle's horse among honking machines across the long shaking bridge.

Journeying so, Sorah forgot, in this fresh happiness of her family, the bitterness of parting with her ailing mother; forgot her dread of exile.

Shmuel was as eager as his boys. So long as business would be good exile didn't bother him.

He had made a bare living on St. Paul's West Side, where money was much tighter than the talk that passed over his counter; but he and Sorah wanted their Izzy and Benny to "have it better than they had had. Maybe, if God gave, Izzy would be a rabbi and Benny would learn doctor." Izzy at five had a "sharp head," and Benny -well Benchky was only four then. Baby Rachel came later.

The new shop was only a slit of a place; but, situated on the main street between the Twin Cities, it was a natural-born place for spots, wrinkles, and rips to come. The sign in the window drew trade with the hidden and visible pull of two languages. Over the old Yiddish sign, which would have been as undecipherable as a cuneiform tablet to the Occidental eyes of Merriam Park, Shmuel, with the help of Izzy's A B C's, had painted an English one that was a mighty stride ahead in phonetic orthography.

And the customers liked the Goldbergs with their dash of foreign color: pudgy Shmuel's twinkling eyes, his ingratiating gestures; Sorah's oldfashioned worried devotion; the Yiddish-English baby talk of the inquisitive boys, running out of the livingrooms at the back whenever the shop door slammed.

AND HONEY"

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BY JENNIE ROSENHOLTZ

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On a Friday morning in the early. summer Shmuel was at his ironingboard. His suspenderless pants clung in wrinkled desperation to his hips and double-cuffed and crumpled about his ankles. The Goldbergs had lived in the Park only a year, and already "business was going like it was greased.' Izzy would be a rabbi and Benny would "learn doctor" all right. Shmuel and Sorah had to work late into the night. The rack, near the door, was full of pressed and mended clothes. A cracked mirror reflected the easy-going perspiring proprietor. There was a sicky, sweetish smell of fish and soup, cooking in Sorah's kitchen and spreading its heavy odor of Sabbath sanctity over the shop mixture of gasoline, sweat, and steaming wool. And Shmuel was singing a snatch of folk-song to the spitting staccato accompaniment of his iron; it was something to sing over.

After a while Sorah came in and stood there, wiping her sallow face with her gingham apron and smiling in a timid way.

Shmuel chuckled teasingly as she came toward him, "Nu, it's almost time for Yonkel, not?"

She went out of the open door to the sidewalk, and he followed her with his flat-footed, rolling gait, and together they looked down the street expectantly. There was no Yonkel in sight; but he'd be there by dinner time.

He gave up a whole day's peddling each week to teach the boys Hebrew. It was a twenty-four-mile trip, and he had to hurry back for the Sabbath services at sundown.

So this was Sorah's busiest day; and she hastened back to the steaming kitchen. She took a grape-basket of potatoes from the table and, sitting on a box near the cradle, she began peeling them. As she worked she rocked the cradle with her foot and soothed the baby's sleepy, choking cry with a crooning minor lullaby, "I-le-loo-le-loole-loo." Sitting there, in a black sateen wrapper, her coarse brown wig combed tight back from her faded face, she looked much older than she She couldn't throw off worries like Shmuel; they ate into her. At such times a wave of homesickness would overwhelm her, carrying her back to the West Side ghetto across the river. There a dozen times a day neighbors would run in to borrow something-a chair, some dishes, or perhaps a little goose-grease for a croupy child. There'd be a bit of talk, a snatch of laughter. On a Thursday her mother would mind the children while she hurried to the Schochet with

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a squawking chicken under her arm, to have it killed. Ay, how wonderful were the Mozultoffs for the new-born babies; the houses lighted up with the beaming faces of friends, sipping wine and eating egg cookies! Would she ever forget that time when Izzy was burning with fever, how the charm woman came and sprinkled salt in the four corners of the room while she chanted an incantation against the evil spirits and made him well again!

The

The hiss of soup boiling over brought her back; but here, in Merriam Park, did a woman's foot ever step into her kitchen? Sorah lifted the pot-cover. She went to the sink and grated some horse-radish and reddened it with beet juice. gefültte fish she set to cool in the pantry. Her movements were abrupt, jerky with eagerness. She was thinking of Yonkel and her boys. The brass samovar and the mortar and candlesticks that were her pride she rubbed briskly with ashes and newspaper. How they gleamed forth the fullness of Sorah's devotion to her little family! Their sharp appetite for her cabbage soup and potato pudding was pay enough for her dragging legs, her breaking back. She hurried into the dark bedroom, where hung the marriage and birth certificates in huge black Hebrew. She shook up the feather-bed. In the doorway she stopped a second and reverently touched the Mazuzzah, the tiny shrine with the holy unutterable name of Jehovah in the wicket, to bless their home and keep evil spirits away. Back to the kitchen she went. Baby was still sleeping. She pulled aside the coarse lace curtain and glanced out the window. The whistles were blowing; it was time for the boys to be coming from school.

There they were now. She could hear them racing along the walk, always on the run, her golden boys! They burst into the kitchen, howling.

At the sight of them Sorah wildly clutched her head.

"Oi, sorrow upon me!" she cried.

Izzy was sobbing; angry, heartbreaking tears spurted from his eyes. In Russian blouse, with tossing blond hair, his broad Lithuanian nose quivering, he was a raging young Tolstoy. He stamped his foot at his mother.

"For vy you don't make me vaists vit strings, ha?" He tore at his clothes and flung out his arms at his mother accusingly.

"Oi!" she cried helplessly, overcome by the suddenness of the attack. "Look, she makes me pants vat heng

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But Izzy, heedless of her pain, went on. "You ain't no good mame." And he pushed her away with loathing.

Each word burned into her like a brand.

"Oi, I no good mame," she echoed, weakly, shrinking against the wall. God the Highest, whom could she go to for help? How she had tried to make her boys' clothes like other children's! But from all the mothers rolling by in their parlor-cars, was there one to come in and show her how to make "Americanishe" pants for her boys? Her aching homesickness she benumbed with a frenzy of work; but her boys' tears were heart pains that could not be boiled or scrubbed away.

The telephone ringing in the shop broke in upon her despondent mood. At once the boys stopped crying-no heartbreak now-another thought. They clattered out to hear what was up.

The noise had awakened Rachel. Sorah took her up and began walking. Agitated as she was, there came to her the recollection of Izzy's first day at school. She had said to the teacher: "Comes a man from New York, vat says if ve send our Izzy to kindergarten, it vould make a man from him." And for a while Izzy had been happy. Then the children began calling him names; they mimicked his sing-song accent. One day he came home, crying, bitterly, "Ma, dey hitted me." And she had grabbed her shawl in desperation, running breathless to school. "Dey punch Izzy; dey hit him; he's like a rotten apple, spots all over him," she had cried, brokenly. When she told Shmuel, he had laughed it off with a shrug, saying they were babies yet; she shouldn't "bother" her head. But, God the Highest, was she made of iron?

She heard them coming back. They came clumping in, Shmuel with them, some sewing in his hand. The boys were boisterously singing.

"Uncle ain't coming! uncle ain't coming!" They clapped their hands and jumped around. "His horse is died; his horse is died! Ve don't hev to learn Aleph Beth no more, no more!"

Shmuel's eyes puckered with fun, but when he saw how Sorah took it he became stern.

"Sha!" he commanded, going after

the boys with a threatening gesture that Sorah stopped with her arm.

That was like Shmuel, too easygoing, then suddenly losing his temper; that's why she kept things to herself.

And now God alone knew when Yonkel would come. Where could he get money for another horse?

"Oi, it shouldn't happen her worst enemy."

There'd be no Yonkel sitting between her boys while they followed his sonorous Hebrew with their fresh, piping voices, as she sat near, nursing baby, and Shmuel, tilted back in his chair, nibbled sugar and drank glasses of tea from the samovar. Her desire to see her brother, to hear home news, was nothing to her fear that the children would lose their Jewishness.

"Shmuel," she begged, "we must get some one else to learn with the boys." But Shmuel only patted her on the shoulder.

"Nu, don't eat your heart out," he said. "Plenty time for Izzy to be a rabbi." And, with a philosophical shrug, he went back to work.

So the months went by-June, July, August. No Hebrew lessons, the children running wild with the Gentiles, learning from Jimmie McGuire, and nobody to talk with to ease the weight of trouble that pressed upon her heart. From early morning until late at night the shop door slammed-husband and wife "working with their sides"-money piling up for the children. So their life went on.

September came, and the first day of school. Sorah was with the children, getting breakfast. Izzy on his roller-coaster and Benny straddling a stick were laughing and shouting as they rode through the clutter of clothes and toys. Baby Rachel wanted to creep right under the wheels. Sorah's head buzzed with the racket; she was weak, scolding, coaxing them. to dress, begging them to eat their bread and coffee.

It was time for school.

Izzy was watching his mother narrowly as she put on a white apron and reached behind the door for her shawl.

"You ain't going to school vit me." He stamped his foot.

"For vy?" Her hands dropped weakly.

"For vy you don't vear shiny shoes and a hat full from red flowers like Jimmie's ma?" His scathing look raked her from her wigged head to tired feet in their worn carpet slippers.

"Oi, you are 'shamed from your

mame?"

"Sure!" from Izzy, bone of her bone.

"Sure!" from Benchky. Benumbed, she took off her shawl and hung it behind the door.

The school-bell clanged, startling

the boys. They tumbled over each other and spilled themselves through the door in a stumbling scramble to get away-away from her. Shmuel did not know how they hurt her; how they threw her love back in her face. They jerked away offensively when she buttoned a blouse or tucked them in bed. She worked herself to the bone; but they heaped ashes on her head. A tightness strained her throat. She was stripped, scorched with humiliation; despair looked her in the face.

Baby, not understanding but sensing something wrong, tugged at her mother's skirts. And Sorah, with a hungry cry, pulled Rachel to her. Baby at least was still hers. Would she too in time. Bitter tears scorched her eyes; then hearing Shmuel coming, she quickly leaned over the baby to hide her face.

"What have they done?" he demanded, looking around suspiciously. "Nothing, nothing," she huskily replied.

She

He couldn't get it out of her. insisted it was nothing, and finally he went back to his work, scratching his head in a puzzled way, new to him.

A few weeks later, on a Sunday, Shmuel was sitting cross-legged on a table, sewing, when Izzy came in. He gave his father a hard, contemptuous look as he walked toward the window. Then he reached over and in a fearless, determined way he pulled down the shade.

"De Goyem are going to church; I don't vant dey should see you vorking on Sunday."

Shmuel straightened up with surprise. "Pull up."

"Jimmie says" Izzy insolently broke in.

"Pull up de shade." Shmuel got off the table and, pushing Izzy aside, jerked up the shade with a loud snap. Then impatiently taking his first-born by the shoulders, he pushed him out of the shop. "By me Jimmie ain't no boss," he said as he slammed the door.

The little tailor took up his work again; but he was restless, thoughtful-shaking out a coat, stopping blankly, his needle poised in the air. He seemed unconscious of passing time. After a bit he slid off the table and shuffled aimlessly about the room, looking for something-he didn't seem to know what. He drifted into the kitchen. Sorah was nursing baby. Her rough fingers caught in the fine hair as she passed them through Rachel's golden curls, damp from sleep. Shmuel looked at Sorah more sharply than usual; as though then for the first time he saw how drooping, how troubled she looked. Impulsively he drew near and patted her shoulder. uttering broken, husky sounds of pity.

On the following Saturday Sorah

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