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Updated: May 7, 2025
In six months the frightened girl had changed her boarding-place four times, hoping that the men would not be able to follow her. She was also obliged constantly to look for a cheaper place, because the dull season in the cloak-making trade came early that year.
People who were born to speak English were superior beings. Even among fallen women I would seek those who were real Americans I WAS reading Pendennis. The prospect of returning to work was a hideous vision. The high wages in store for me had lost their magnetism. I often wondered whether I might not be able to secure some pupils in English or Hebrew, and drop cloak-making at once.
Finally, when my cash was all gone, I borrowed some money of Joe, my "rabbi" at the art of cloak-making. Breaking the round sum total of my savings-bank account was out of the question. Joe advanced me money more than cheerfully. He was glad to have me in his debt as a pledge of my continuing to work for him.
Others of our workmen had achieved the same evolution by employing their days of enforced idleness in taking lessons in cloak-designing, and then setting up a small shop of their own Newfangled manufacturers of this kind were now springing up like mushrooms. Joe, my old-time instructor in cloak-making, was one of the latest additions to their number.
He is so highly educated he could read any kind of book, and I don't believe there is a book in the world that he has not read. He is saving up money to go to college." On parting he became fully respectful again. "Do as I tell you, Mr. Levinsky," he said. "Take up cloak-making." He made me write down his address. He expected that I would do it in Yiddish.
The image of that cloak-operator reading books and laying by money for a college education haunted me. Why could I not do the same? I pictured myself working and studying and saving money for the kind of education which Matilda had dinned into my ears I accepted Gitelson's offer. Cloak-making or the cloak business as a career never entered my dreams at that time.
Cloak-making was now nothing but a temporary round of dreary toil, an unavoidable stepping-stone to loftier occupations Another year and I should be a fully developed mechanic, working on my own hook that is, as the immediate employee of some manufacturer or contractor. "I shall soon be earning forty or fifty dollars a week," I would muse.
When he saw me write his name and the name of the street in English he said, reverently: "Writing English already! There is a mind for you! If I could write like that I could become a designer. Well, don't lose the address. Call on me, and if you make up your mind to take up cloak-making just say the word and I'll fix you up. When Gitelson says he will, he will."
In cloak-making the lowest wage is $3, and the highest $7.50; and in shirt-making the lowest is $2.50, and the highest $6. General clothing and underwear range from $4.50 to $6, and other trades average a trifle higher wage than in New England.
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