THE SHOEMAKERPROLOGUE.
THE SHOEMAKER
In one of the small side streets that end in the Bowery, on the East Side, is a row of small and dilapidated buildings, which once, in the early days of New York, were the dwellings of fashionable people, but which are now occupied by poor but industrious people. The majority of these houses have some small business carried on in the basement cellars.
The people who occupy the houses above the cellar stores or workshops are mostly of the poor but industrious Hebrews who toil early and late to build up a little business in this land of freedom, a business which is really and truly their own, to have and to hold without persecution or robbery.
The house where Morris Goldberg had found a shelter and a chance to show of what stuff hewas made was, if possible, a little more disreputable in appearance than the others in that row, but to him, who had gone through the horrors of the Kishineff massacre, robbed of his all, save his wife and little daughter, it seemed a peaceful haven of delight.
The little destitute family had been assisted to start, in this humble location, by the noble and practical Benevolent Society of the Hebrews in New York, and, though a cellar whose only light came through grated windows or the opened cellar-doors, this seemed to him a palace. Was he not free from persecution? His good wife and little daughter and he were free, free. One must have been a Jew in Russia to know what freedom means.
Morris Goldberg was a shoemaker and plied his humble calling with such patient industry, and such thrift, that after a year of struggle he had proudly paid back the money loaned him, and then he moved his wife and daughter to the back room on the floor above, while he pegged and sewed and smoked and sang at his work.
The daughter grew into a beautiful womanhood, with all the rich coloring of her race, with snowy teeth, thick waving black hair, and beautiful large dark eyes.
She was the loveliest girl in all the neighborhood,with a dainty, graceful figure and a gay, merry soul. Words could not tell how she loved her father; for, after a few years of peace and joy in this land, the mother, who had never recovered from the horrors through which she had passed, died. Her last hours were so sweetly peaceful that the loss to those left behind was more of a chastened sorrow than a poignant grief.
Dora was now sixteen, and matured like the maidens of her race.
The father loved Dora with a brooding tenderness almost womanlike in its intensity, and her little hands held his very heart in their grasp. Nothing she did seemed wrong to him, and everything she wanted, that was in his power to give, she had.
Above all, he was proud of her education, for that had been his first desire. Dora was kept in school when other girls of her age had worked in factories. She kept house for him in the room above the shop, and she was a good, sweet, obedient daughter. What more could a man ask? A business that kept them from want, and something left over every month. No wonder the honest shoemaker sang as he worked in his little shop as he listened to the steps of his daughter above.
Morris Goldberg, the Shoemaker.