Neighbors: Life Stories of the Other Half

Publisher Marketing: "You get the money, or out you go! I ain't in the business for me health," and the bang of the door and the angry clatter of the landlord's boots on the stairs, as he went down, bore witness that he meant what he said. Judah Kapelowitz and his wife sat and looked silently at the little dark room when the last note of his voice had died away in the hall. They knew it well enough-it was their last day of grace. They were two months behind with the rent, and where it was to come from neither of them knew. Six years of struggling in the Promised Land, and this was what it had brought them. A hungry little cry roused the woman from her apathy. She went over and took the baby and put it mechanically to her poor breast. Holding it so, she sat by the window and looked out upon the gray November day. Her husband had not stirred. Each avoided the question in the other's eyes, for neither had an answer. They were young people as men reckon age in happy days, Judah scarce past thirty; but it is not always the years that count in Ludlow Street. Behind that and the tenement stretched the endless days of suffering in their Galician home, where the Jew was hated and despised as the one thrifty trader of the country, tortured alike by drunken peasant and cruel noble when they were not plotting murder against one another. With all their little savings they had paid Judah's passage to the land where men were free to labor, free to worship as their fathers did-a twice-blessed country, surely-and he had gone, leaving Sarah, his wife, and their child to wait for word that Judah was rich and expected them.