Papa managed a little better, but at home we only spoke Yiddish. Actually she understood a lot but she wouldn’t talk. She would have been as pretty as the drawings in the magazines, but she was so shy that she winced when people talked to her, especially the men Mameh pushed at her.Ĭelia didn’t like to go out of our house she said it was because her English was so bad. My sister was thin and had high cheekbones like my father, blue eyes, and fine brown hair like him, too. I didn’t mind because she didn’t yell so much if one of them was in the house, but they made Celia nervous.Ĭelia was “delicate.” That’s what Mameh called her. Sometimes Mameh took in a boarder, usually a man right off the boat who needed a place to flop for a few nights. Mostly I remember eating potatoes and cabbage, and I still can’t stand the smell of cabbage. Together, they made enough money for rent and food. When my mother wasn’t cooking or cleaning, she was mending sheets for the laundry across the street.

I don’t think we called it a sweatshop back then, but that’s what it was. Papa worked in a belt factory as a cutter and Celia was a finisher at a little shirtwaist factory upstairs over an Italian butcher shop. I didn’t understand why it bothered her but I kept my mouth shut so I wouldn’t get a smack. “It makes you look like you have nothing better to do.” “What if someone saw you there?” she’d say. Mameh didn’t like it when I looked out the window. The only good thing about our place was that we had a window that looked out on the street so there was a little light a lot of the apartments faced the air shaft, where it was always the middle of the night. Celia and I shared a bed in a kind of narrow hallway that didn’t go anywhere the landlords chopped up those apartments to squeeze in more people so they could get more rent. We had a stove, a table, a few chairs, and a saggy couch that Mameh and Papa slept on at night. In 1915, there were four of us living in one room. One lady broke a leg on those steps and she never walked right again afterward. At night, you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face and it was slippery from all the dirt and grease. Those were disgusting, believe me, but the stairways were what really scared me. In my building to go to the bathroom, we had to walk down three flights from our apartment to the outhouses in back. The neighborhood smelled of garbage and worse.

Where I lived in the North End when I was a little girl wasn’t so quaint.

The Boston Girl by Anita Diamant