Yechiel wheeled a pushcart out of the Forsyth Street warehouse, his newly issued peddler’s license from the City of New York in his jacket pocket next to the passport and other papers he wouldn’t leave at home because he feared his roommates at the boarding house would steal them.
He was proud of how brightly the pots and pans on his pushcart shone in the summer sunlight that flashed in the spaces between tenement buildings. It was the gleam of silver, the shine of money. Borrowing money from his older brother Avraham to pay for them barely dimmed their luster; today he, too, would get his share of America’s gold.
Yechiel arrived at Orchard Street early, before it got too hot. Orchard Street! Yechiel had wandered through it one day and was amazed at how many shops, pushcarts and people could squeeze so tightly into such a narrow space. Wet laundry hung from windows and fire escapes. Small heaps of garbage piled up unattended in the gutter. Horsedrawn carriages, which were rare on the big avenues, vastly outnumbered motorcars. The rancid odor of horse dung, pickled herring and deep-fried knishes reminded him of the smell of seasickness in steerage class on the ship that had brought him here.
He saw a spot on the block between Rivington and Delancey, in front of Kirschner’s Hats & Caps, between one pushcart selling wigs for Orthodox women and another selling black and brown men’s shoes, and he slid his pushcart into the empty space. Behind him was a rack of girls’ dresses and pinafores. He congratulated himself on choosing well: women shopping for wigs and dresses for their daughters would also need pots and pans.
But just as he wheeled his cart in, the shoe salesman, who sported a derby and a bushy mustache, asked him in Yiddish, “What are you doing here?”
Yechiel was taken aback but answered, “Selling pots and pans. Why?”
“Landsman,” the man replied, his voice dripping with false familiarity as he used the term of kinship from the Old Country, “This is our territory. You can’t sell here.”
“But landsman,” Yechiel responded, emphasizing that word as an artificial smile spread across his lips, “doesn’t a man have a right to earn a living?”
“Yes, but not in our territory,” chimed in the man wearing a black yarmulke who operated the wig cart. “You’re taking the bread from our children’s mouths.”
“Am I selling wigs or shoes? Do you own this street?” Yechiel said as indignation, hot as the summer sun, rushed through him. Then, puffed up by the noble patriotic sentiments in the civics book he had gotten from his first English teacher, Mrs. Peterson, at P.S. 1, he declared:
“I’ll sell where I want to. This is America!”
Triumphant, he turned his back on both of them to display his merchandise in all its shining glory. As he lovingly straightened out saucepans, stock pots and cast-iron skillets, he practiced the brief pitch in English his new friend Yossel had taught him over dinner one night at a cafeteria on East Broadway. “Pots and pans!” he repeated over and over until it sounded natural. “Brand new! Good price!”
Then he felt a hard tap on his shoulder, and when he turned he was staring at a pink, thick neck sticking out of a dark blue collar.
“There’s a complaint you’re operating without a license,” said the impossibly tall policeman, who had paler skin and blonder hair than any Pole and a lilting accent that made his English words even harder to understand. So, Yechiel just raised his palms and shook his head.
“Do you have a license? Do you have a permit?” The officer spat out each word loudly, as though by sheer volume he could break down the language barrier.
“A license, landsman, do you have one,” the thin wig purveyor asked in Yiddish while
the mustachioed shoe salesman stood silently with his arms crossed.
“Ha! Hokay!” Yechiel said, then he reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out the brand-new peddler’s license and proudly presented it to the officer, certain it would settle everything.
Instead, the policeman slapped it out of Yechiel’s hand with his beefy paw and Yechiel scrambled to catch the paper as it fluttered to the ground like a dying moth.
“This isn’t good here. You can’t sell here,” the officer said as a crowd gathered and the other vendors looked away.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, Yechiel spotted Mr. Shapiro, his teacher from the Henry Street Settlement, stepping out of the crowd. In the sun’s glare, his wiry gray hair took on a metallic hue and his skin looked patchy and pale.
“What is the problem here, officer?” he asked in English.
The policeman’s eyes narrowed and he asked this interloper, “What business is this of yours?”
“Sorry, officer, I’m his English teacher. I can translate for him. He’s a dedicated student and a good family man.”
“Well, you can tell him in whatever gibberish he speaks that he doesn’t have the right permit to operate here. He is selling here illegally.”
The officer’s rage-fueled words were coming so fast Mr. Shapiro struggled to keep up as he translated for Yechiel.
“Tell him I’ll write him a summons and he’ll have to go to court. Tell him he’ll pay a ten-dollar fine.”
Yechiel got more and more upset. Go to court? Ten dollars? He couldn’t bear to think how humiliated he’d feel asking Avraham for that, on top of all the money he’d borrowed from his brother. And what if the judge sent him to jail or back to Poland? How would he face Marga and his children if he had to return in disgrace?
Yechiel shivered, even as the sun climbed and the temperature rose. Mr. Shapiro gripped his forearm and whispered something in his ear.
“All of it?” Yechiel asked. The teacher nodded and pointed to a quiet spot by the Hats & Caps storefront. The officer followed several steps behind. Yechiel took out of his pocket the four dollars he had left over from what Avraham had lent him and gave it to his teacher.
“Officer, this man wants to be a good American,” Mr. Shapiro said, as he slipped the rolled up bills into the policeman’s waiting hand. “He means no harm and apologizes for taking your time. He just wants to feed his family and bring them over for a better—”
“Bring them over?” the policeman exclaimed, his neck flaring from reddish pink to scarlet. “Bring them over? You should all go back where you came from, you sheeny bastards!”
Mr. Shapiro flinched but bowed his head and said nothing. With one hand the officer pocketed the last dollar bills Yechiel owned and with the other he pointed down the street with his night stick and cried out:
“Get moving—NOW!”
Yechiel thanked Mr. Shapiro, then he wheeled his pushcart down Orchard Street towards Delancey. The pots and pans rattled with each bump and glistened in the sunlight. His forehead was wet. Rivulets of perspiration trickled down his cheeks. He didn’t bother to reach for his handkerchief but soaked up the sweat with his sleeve.
He stopped and looked over his shoulder. The wig vendor, then the shoe salesman shook hands with the police officer, who put his closed fist in his pocket each time. Being a policeman in New York, Yechiel thought, was a very good job.
*this piece is excerpted from a larger novel-in-progress
Howard Gold grew up in the Bronx and attended New York City public schools and Swarthmore College, where he made four student films and started the college’s first film-studies classes. He was a business writer and editor for Forbes, Barron’s and MarketWatch and won a Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Economics Journalism. He lives with his family on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.