Part 27

Our belief in children, like our belief in many other good things, is mainly a word belief. What we need is a practical belief. We are still at the stage where we separate work and thought, action and theory, practice and ethics. If we would be saved, we must follow the child’s way of life. His way is the direct way. He learns from contact with the forces about him. He feels them, he sees them, he knows what they do to him. He thinks and does and discovers all in one continuous flow of energy.

The child says: “I am of things as they are. I am the fighter for the things that ought to be. I was the beginning of human progress, and I am the progress of the world. I drive the world on. I invent, I achieve, I reform. About me is always the glory of mounting. I have no fear of falling, of slipping down, down. I have no fear of being lost. I am truth. I am reality, and always I question chaos.”

When the child begins to question the wisdom of the group, its religion, its literature, its dress, its tastes, its method of government, its standard of judgment, that moment the group should begin to take heed. It should take the child’s questioning seriously. When the group fails to do this, it gives up its existence, it ceases to grow because it looks back, it worships tradition, it makes history in terms of the past rather than in terms of the future.

Belief in evolution is a belief in the child.

What the race needs is a principle of growth, spiritual growth, that can never be denied. Such a principle it will find in the child, because the spirit of the child is the one factor of the group existence that in itself keeps changing, growing. The child is nature’s newest experiment in her search for a better type, and the race will be strong as it determines that the experiment shall be successful.

We develop national characteristics in accord with our adherence to a common ideal. We must therefore surrender ourselves for the common good, and the common good to which we should surrender is epitomized in the child idea.

I feel that the attitude towards the school and the child is the ultimate attitude by which America is to be judged. Indeed, the distinctive contribution America is to make to the world’s progress is not political, economical, religious, but educational, the child our national strength, the school as the medium through which the adult is to be remade.

What an ideal for the American people!

When my father came to America, he thought of America only as a temporary home. He learned little or no English. As the years went by he would say, “It is enough; my children know English.” Then more years rolled by. One day he came to me and asked me to help him get his citizenship papers. He and I began reading history together. Month after month we worked, laboring, translating, questioning, until the very day of his examination.

That day I hurried home from college to find a smiling, happy father. “Did you get them?” I asked.

“Yes, and the judge wanted to know how I knew the answers so well, and I told him my son who goes to college taught me, and the judge complimented me.”

I have been a part of many movements to Americanize the foreigner, but I see that the child is the only one who can carry the message of democracy if the message is to be carried at all. If the child fails to make the connection between the ideals of the school and the fundamental beliefs of the people, there is none other to do it. The children are the chain that must bind people together.

I have told about parents growing because they sought growth for their children. I saw them grow through the initiative of the school. These were tenement dwellers. Would this thing hold where the parents are well to do, and the streets are clean and music is of the best, and home ideals are of the highest and the social life of the neighborhood is intimate? Is it still necessary for the school to gather the parents about itself? Is it still necessary for the school to go out into the community and get the parents to consciously work as a group for the children’s interest, to consciously shape their philosophy of life in conformity with the dynamic philosophy that childhood represents?

More necessary! If not to save the children, it should be done to save the parents.

No matter who the people are, they need the school as a humanizing force, so that they may feel the common interest, revive their visions, see the fulfillment of their dreams in terms of their children, so that they may be made young once more. Americanize the foreigner, nay, through the child let us fulfill our destiny and Americanize America.

ANZIA YEZIERSKA

Anzia Yezierska was born in a Polish province of Russia in the year 1886, and migrated, when nine years old, to New York City, where she was sent to work in an East Side sweatshop at a dollar and a half a week. Her life in America has been a heroic struggle for self-expression both in a literary and spiritual sense.

Since upon every hand one hears the cry that more should be required of the immigrants in the way of preparation for citizenship, in loyalty and in service, it is very fitting that this book of selections should close with that touching passage of her story, “How I Found America,” which sets forth the immigrants’ yearning for fellowship with native Americans and their passionate desire to serve. Will not here be found the two master keys--fellowship and service--to the successful accomplishment of the work of Americanization; in fact, without which all attempts at Americanization will prove futile?

The writings of the immigrants have hitherto been largely historical and sociological in character. Miss Yezierska’s work suggests the unlimited artistic possibilities of the newer elements in our national life,--gifts on which we should not lay violent hands, but which we should carefully conserve as a part of the heritage of America to the future. It is interesting to note that one of her stories was selected by Edward J. O’Brien as the best piece of imaginative writing in short form produced during the year 1919.

That part of the story that follows is taken from the issue of The Century for November, 1920. The same story in longer and somewhat different form is found in a volume of her collected writings recently published by Houghton Mifflin under the title, “Hungry Hearts.”

HOW I FOUND AMERICA

Times changed. The sweat-shop conditions that I had lived through had become a relic of the past. Wages had doubled, tripled, and went up higher and higher, and the working day became shorter and shorter. I began to earn enough to move my family uptown into a sunny, airy flat with electricity and telephone service. I even saved up enough to buy a phonograph and a piano.

My knotted nerves relaxed. At last I had become free from the worry for bread and rent, but I was not happy. A more restless discontent than ever before ate out my heart. Freedom from stomach needs only intensified the needs of my soul.

I ached and clamored for America. Higher wages and shorter hours of work, mere physical comfort, were not yet America. I had dreamed that America was a place where the heart could grow big with living. Though outwardly I had become prosperous, life still forced me into an existence of mere getting and getting.

Ach! how I longed for a friend, a real American friend, some one to whom I could express the thoughts and feelings that choked me! In the Bronx, the uptown ghetto, I felt myself farther away from the spirit of America than ever before. In the East Side the people had yet alive in their eyes the old, old dreams of America, the America that would release the age-old hunger to give; but in the prosperous Bronx good eating and good sleeping replaced the spiritual need for giving. The chase for dollars and diamonds deadened the dreams that had once brought them to America.

More and more the all-consuming need for a friend possessed me. In the street, in the cars, in the subways, I was always seeking, ceaselessly seeking for eyes, a face, the flash of a smile that would be light in my darkness.

I felt sometimes that I was only burning out my heart for a shadow, an echo, a wild dream, but I couldn’t help it. Nothing was real to me but my hope of finding a friend. America was not America to me unless I could find an American that would make America real.

The hunger of my heart drove me to the night-school. Again my dream flamed. Again America beckoned. In the school there would be education, air, life for my cramped-in spirit. I would learn to think, to form the thoughts that surged formless in me. I would find the teacher that would make me articulate.