Melting the Snow on Hester Street. Daisy Waugh

he seemed to travel entirely alone. He came to America – he said – ten years earlier, alone with his mother, who had died since, to be reunited with his father, who never appeared at the dock to claim him. It was a daily tragedy in New York back then, when so many thousands of immigrants were pouring in every day.

      And, to Matz, it was a mystery still. His father had sent the money home, enough for their passage to join him. It had taken him four years to collect enough together: four long, hungry years, saving, scrimping, living no better than a dog in the Lower East slums.

      But when wife and son disembarked at last, the Statue of Liberty behind them, and a free life in the New World in front, he wasn’t at the pier to greet them, and though they waited for three days, returned every morning and every afternoon for many more, he never did come. Matz and Matz’s mother never laid eyes on him again.

      So that was Matz.

      He couldn’t remember his father, anyway. Couldn’t remember his home country, not really. But he remembered this and that: a grandmother, plenty of cousins, and a great crowd – the whole shtetl, his mother said, turning out to wave them off on their journey. He remembered the ship, and the long days at sea: the cramped, stale air on the lower deck, the seasickness – and the lice inspectors at Ellis Island, who had dragged him off, yanked him, screaming, from his mother’s arms. He remembered the wild, overwhelming relief when he was allowed to fall back into her arms again. He would never forget that.

      And then … nothing much. The shock of the Lower East Side. The tenement flats, six storeys high, one after the other to the horizon end, blocking the sun, hiding the sky – and the teeming streets, the dirt, the smell of rotting garbage and horse manure, the roar of metal wheels on cobbled roads, the soot that rained from the elevated trains, the endless noise … And his mother finding work, and then working, and working, and never stopping … Someone used to bring vast bundles of materials to the apartment where they boarded, and then she – and the lady who took the rent, and her three daughters and an old man and someone else, and sometimes Matz, too – would sit in silence, too tired to talk, constructing silken flowers for ladies’ hats, by the hundreds, by the thousands, night after night … Someone took the bundles away when the work was completed, and brought back more bundles: a never-ending stream of bundles, squatting in the space, piled high, stealing the daylight …

      What he remembers most is that airless August, when she lay dying.

      They were boarding with a family on Essex Street, and the family was kind. There was tuberculosis rampant through the block that summer. With so many bodies existing so close together, when the sickness visited a building, as it did from time to time, it took with it whole families, it swept away whole floors of human life. But on this occasion, in Matz’s small apartment, only Matz’s mother fell prey – and the family they boarded with took pity. They let her stay on the only bed, they moved it to the room with the only window, and for those last few weeks, and even for a week or so afterwards, they wouldn’t take any rent from him, and they fed Matz free of charge.

      After that – after that – Matz had survived. That was the main thing. He stole food from the carts on Hester Street, collected coal fallen from the back of the coal carts and sold it, or exchanged it, piece by piece. He constructed silk flowers, carried bundles, took work where he could; did whatever he had to do. And in fact he did far better than simply survive. Somehow, between the struggle to earn enough to eat, the struggle to find a place to sleep, Matz achieved what his parents had brought him to the New World to achieve: there was a charitable night school on East Broadway, founded to help little immigrant boys just like him. Without it, who knows what might have happened?

      Matz learned English. He learned to read and write. Learned the piano. Discovered Karl Marx. Learned, above all, that life didn’t have to be this way; that it wasn’t this way for everyone.

      When he first came to live at Eleana’s tenement flat on Allen Street – his fifth move in a year – he was a member of the Socialist Party of America, and a vocal and active member of the Garment Workers’ Union. He worked ten hours a day as a cutter at the Triangle Waist Company, already one of the largest and most productive garment factories in the city – where, because his job required skill as well as masculine brawn, he earned $12 a week; three times what the young female machinists were paid, working the same hours. He kept only what he needed to survive, and divided the rest between the Party, the Union, and the little boys on the Lower East Side who roamed the streets just as he had, whose fathers never came to meet them at the dock, whose mothers died of consumption by a small window in a filthy street, in a crowded tenement a world away from home.

      That was Matz.

      By comparison, Eleana had enjoyed an easy life. Who hadn’t? She was born a few crowded streets away, on Orchard Street, five years after her parents arrived off the ship. By the time she was born, her parents were fully Americanized, and took care to speak to Eleana, almost always, in English. Her sister, two years her elder, died of tuberculosis when Eleana was one. Her father, Jethro, shared a lease on a six-by-four feet pickled food store, in the hallway of a neighbouring tenement block. He died of pneumonia, aged thirty-nine, in the winter of 1905, a year or so before she and Matz met. But Eleana often remembered her father: learned, affectionate and kind, always with the smell of pickled herring hanging over him, and – like everyone she knew – always working.

      After he died, life grew much tougher. The shop, such that it was, was quickly appropriated by the other lessee, leaving Jethro’s widow and daughter to fend for themselves: Eleana abandoned her education and set to work making up the family income. Easier than Matz’s life, perhaps. But never easy. Before Jethro died, their tiny apartment had been shared only with one uncle and two cousins. Afterwards, innumerable more were crammed in. The apartment, like so many of their neighbours’, became home and sweatshop both, and a flop house for an ever-changing roster of boarders and fellow workers. They sewed buttons onto feathers, or feathers onto ribbons or ribbons onto hats … Whatever piecework was going, they took it in, and sewed – too tired to talk – and sewed – too poorly paid to stop – and sewed, and only paused to sleep.

      It was how Matz first encountered her. Old for her years, and with the roster of boarders always passing through, no longer quite the untarnished maiden of good romantic fiction, a toughened daughter of the Lower East Side, but with a bloom that nothing and no one could dim.

      There was a heat between them from the moment they met. No doubt about it. She was fifteen. He was eighteen. Maybe. He came back from the Triangle factory that first night. He sat down at the small kitchen table, where the boarders had to eat in shifts. Her mother passed Eleana a plate of schmaltz – chicken fat – and cornbread, which Eleana set before him without a word. He looked up at her – she looked back at him. If it wasn’t love, it was desire at first sight: hot, thick, rich. They gazed at each other, and felt a rush of something wonderful flow through them. They gazed at each other, in no hurry to look away; allowed their eyes to roam each other’s faces as if they were quite alone in the room, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. After a minute, when the current between them seemed to stifle everything else – and there seemed to be no question where it would lead, Eleana’s mother leaned across from the stove and smacked her soup ladle against Matz’s bowl. That was all. She said nothing. Nobody said anything. And, for the instant at least, the spell was partially broken.

      There were eight bodies sleeping in that small and crumbling ‘old law’ Allen Street apartment then. Lower East Side was still filled with them – tenements with conditions so foul, with so little light and space, that they were no longer legal. Slowly, they were being replaced. But too slowly. In this small apartment, there lived five family members, loosely connected – not everyone could say quite how – and three boarders, connected only by the fact of the rent. At the end of each day, ten dog-tired bodies returned from their workplaces to be fed by their landlady: pickled herring and cornbread, pickled herring or cornbread, schmaltz, potatoes … mostly potatoes … Eleven bodies squeezed into the four small rooms: a parlour, a windowless kitchen, two windowless bedrooms. Directly outside ran the track for the Second Avenue elevated railroad, which meant a constant thunder and rumble of passing trains, and cinders from the engines floating through the only window,