Without a Place by Yente Serdatsky

Translated by Cady Vishnaic

Translator’s Note

It’s easy to interpret this story of family abandonment as a thinly veiled account of Yente Serdatsky’s own abandonment (and later reconciliation) with her husband and children. What a reader might miss is that it’s also about the effect of modernity on Eastern European Jews, or Ashkenazim. The protagonist is frustrated by family life in part because of the breakdown of industrialization’s impact on the economic systems that once supported the Ashkenazim—her husband earns very little and they have several children, likely with more to come. She is also frustrated because she’s been exposed to new leftist politics popular among educated Jews of her time, only to have many benefits of modernity denied to her as a woman. She struggles with familial love; she is conscious that her position in the family is unfair.

In this story we understand that internal struggle that so many Jewish women felt, the pull between family as a source of comfort and family as a burden imposed by her class, culture, and time, made more of a burden by destitution.

Everything turned out as Mirl wanted. She’s been in the great, busy city of V—— for some months. She had to fight a whole war in order to attain this; finally, she emerged the victor.

Eight years back Mirl got married. At the time she was eighteen years old. She didn’t have any real concept of marriage; she only sensed that some unfamiliar feelings were forming in her, that it was somewhat too crowded in her parents’ house, and that she must begin a new life … or so she thought. That after the wedding she would pass a boundary to some sort of new, bright life—no other path had she imagined at the time. And she hadn’t fooled herself: their small room on the third floor, which she and her Shmuel moved into after the wedding, was always full of people, and these people brought with them a world of new ideas. In her little apartment rang out young, energetic voices, which valiantly constructed this new world, a free world.

Mirl began to mature: many things that had earlier lain hidden deep in her soul, expressed only as an inconceivable longing, became clear to her. So passed three years, and on the day when Mirl’s path became clear to her, she was already fenced in with four children; children don’t want to know their mother’s plans, and require their own. Her Shmuel didn’t earn much, and she had to look after the home, cook, sew, and do the washing.

The day would pass in constant busywork. One day went after the other, one week after the other, and Mirl had lost her patience. She would then think, “Will my whole youth pass this way?”

At this thought she would tremble with fear. She would try to stop thinking of herself. She would try to get used to it—to see her happiness, her future, only in the children.

That’s when the war began for her, a hard, bitter war. She was twenty-one years old, full of strength and life. In her soul coursed desire and ambition, immensely drawn into the great world. She had to start a new life, a life that was meaningful to her, and her only thought was to tear herself from home, from her children and husband. For six years she’d wanted this. She’d lost so many forces in the war. Both her body and soul suffered for it; she perceived this all too well, but she nevertheless tore herself away.

Now she’s lived several months in the tumultuous city. She’s registered for and begun to attend courses. She’s prepared herself to lead the new life of which she dreamed for so long. In the meantime, she still can’t settle on a room.

The first room she rents from an old woman, a widow. Right away on the very first night, when Mirl sits herself down by the little old woman on the balcony, the old woman suddenly begins to speak of him, may he rest in peace, what a kind-hearted person he was, and of her beautiful, gifted children, who are spread across the whole world. Mirl sits the whole time as if nailed to the spot and listens deeply: she sees how the little old woman’s dull eyes, speaking of her children, flare up, and her wrinkled face becomes almost smooth.

Suddenly, Mirl’s mind is confused by strange thoughts. “This woman has lived three generations,” thinks Mirl, “and yet is still sustained by her family life, just as she was when she was young.”

The whole time, Mirl takes to leafing through her own marriage. She can’t remember one good thing, nothing at all similar to what she hears from the old woman. The first three years, Mirl lived in a tumult, and the last five, it seemed, she hated both her Shmuel and the children. She saw in them only the fence that stood between her and life, and this was enough to make her hate them. They, it seemed to her, had paid her back in kind—it couldn’t, of course, be otherwise. And she sees herself in the future, an old woman, stooped exactly like her current landlady, but without the warm family memories. A lonesome woman, despondent.

She puts her hand over her forehead and gets up from her place—stupid thoughts—and tries to drive away her melancholy.

The other evenings pass the same. The old lady comes to further confide in her, and Mirl deserts the room and looks for a new landlady.

In the new apartment, however, lives a family with two children, and Mirl often imagines that the children are strangely similar to her own. Here, it seems to her, is her little Chaim, with his blond, curly hair, with his deep blue, thoughtful eyes, and with rosy little cheeks; and there, the younger has exactly the same dark grey eyes as her little Laybl. Even the voice is like Laybl’s. Not intentionally, Mirl takes to looking at the mother. She sees how happy the mother is, like she’s delighted by each word from the children. It seems that with each look at the children, the mother is rejuvenated.

More than anything, Mirl suffers in the morning, when they dress their children. The mother looks and beams at, beams and kisses the dressed-up little children, and the children scramble all the while, one with little arms around the mother’s neck, covering it with kisses.

Mirl is reminded that each time she dressed her children, they used to become nervous and upset. “Nonsense,” she would think with anger. When would she be done with this “nonsense”!

And she would comb their hair with anger, dress them with anger, and go away from them with anger. The children used to stand the whole time with lowered heads, like sinners, and used to breathe a sigh of relief as soon as she left.

Mirl feels a twinge of remorse; something seethes in her heart. Now she wants to dress her children with love, like the young mother, and to take them in her arms and kiss them. How good that would be—weakness, softness. She frets, and without staving off further weakness, she rents another room.

Now she has, it seems, truly arrived. Middle-aged people, grown children, all good. Time to go study. She tells herself, “This behind on my studies, who knows whether I will catch up?”

And she’s tried to take to the books. Only, right across from her lives a young couple in love. Whole days, one after another, they kiss each other. The textbook falls from Mirl’s hand, for suddenly, before her eyes, her Shmuel appears. She sees his high white forehead with its beautiful widow’s peak, with its soft, blue, gentle eyes, which used to always look at her with such love—before she left she saw such pleading in his eyes—and now it seems to her she senses his warm breath, and she recalls with what hate she used to ward him off. She doesn’t know why she hated him so much, only that he stood in her path, and that was enough that she drove him away.

Mirl feels an urgent longing to have her Shmuel near her. Now, she’d take his head in both hands and look him long, long in his blue, gentle eyes. He would, it seems to her, die of joy. And she?

Only enough! Enough. To Mirl, the thought is simply shameful.

She has to get away from this apartment.

She has rented a room from an old maid. “Here, finally nothing will be in my way,” she thinks, and begins to set out her things.

Only. Only soon, she senses the apartment is ruled over by a deep, sad stillness, a stillness like in a cemetery. She can’t bear the old maid’s look; she feels such melancholy, sorrow, and longing in the look that it tugs at her heart. The old maid’s eyes speak to her of a long history, of an eternally lonesome life, of unhappiness and eternal longing. Mirl feels crowded there. She can’t breathe the air there, and she’s suffocating … and looks for a new apartment.

Her books lie unopened.

And she can’t keep any fixed address.

Yente Serdatsky was born in 1877 in a shtetl near Kovne, Lithuania, and died May 1, 1962, in New York. She began writing in 1905, when she abandoned her husband and three children and moved to Warsaw; however, the family reunited by the time they moved to Chicago in 1907. She was known during her lifetime as a rabble-rouser who repeatedly lost her income by feuding with other writers and editors. Many of her stories focused on the frustrations of countless Jewish women during the turn of the century, a time of pogroms and economic depression in the Pale, mass Jewish immigration to the U.S., a breakdown in traditional family structures, and so-called liberatory leftist politics heralded by men who remained committed sexists. Eventually, in 1922, a feud with Abe Cahan, the editor of the famed Forverts, left her without a venue for her fiction. She did not write again until 1949, when she began to compose short stories, along with comedic epistolary and accounts of her life—writing that today might be labelled creative nonfiction.

Cady Vishniac has published her fiction in several literary magazines, including New England Review and Glimmer Train. She is a Translation Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center and an Endelman/Gitelman Fellow at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor.