At
first he could make nothing of it at all; everywhere chaos met his eyes.
But he found something formless, huge, that made to him a strong appeal.
The big building fairly hummed at night with numberless activities.
Fathers, mothers and children came pouring in together and went skurrying
off to their places. They learned to speak English, to read and write;
grown men and women scowled and toiled over their arithmetic. They worked
at trades in the various shops; they hammered and sawed and set up type;
they cooked and sewed and gossiped. "The Young Galician Socialist Girls"
debated on the question: "Resolved that woman suffrage has worked in
Colorado." "The Caruso Pleasure Club" gave a dance to "The Garibaldi
Whirlwinds." An orchestra rehearsed like mad. They searched their memories
for the songs and all the folk tales they had heard in peasant huts in
Italy, in hamlets along rocky coasts, in the dark old ghettos of crowded
towns in Poland and in Russia. And some of these songs were sung in school,
and some of these tales were dramatized here. Children and parents all took
part. And speakers emerged from the neighborhood. It was at times
appalling, the number of young Italians and Jews who had ideas to give
forth to their friends on socialism, poverty, marriage and religion, and
all the other questions that rose among these immigrants jammed into this
tenement hive. But when there were too many of these self-appointed guides,
the neighborhood shut down on them.
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