PART TWO (First Published in DAVNOB in March 1959) PART ONE PART THREE
For Annie Salit the new life she had entered, after so much anxiety and difficulty, yet with so much hope, presented itself as a picture of which the main outlines were cheerlessly familiar - poverty and insecurity.
These were indeed the conditions which her first sixteen years of life had introduced, and now, amongst so many things in England which were so different, these two she was immediately to recognise as being still her closest and most loyal companions.
Had she been of a reflective turn of mind it would no doubt have occurred to her that there is nothing so consistently similar in its implications and reactions as the similarity to be found in the cramped lives of all that great international brotherhood, the poor and underprivileged.
Uncle Malech was a tailor and had two fundamental aims as a philosophy upon which his life was to be fashioned - the first was to be a pious, honest and upright Jew, and very close second, to be respected as a good tailor and a sincere craftsman. Somewhere, a fairly long way behind, was a third aim - somehow or other to make a living. If one is to record history, one must be jealously careful of fact, and this history shows that his whole life was a reflection of his success in the achievement of the first two aims, but in the matter of earning a 11ving, one can only find a depressing record of failure.
For many years of his life - almost the whole of it - he lived hand in hand with all the restraints on pleasure that poverty enforces, and yet with it all there seemed to shine from his handsome, bearded face a benign inner tranquillity that seemed to rise above, and even to ignore the shortcomings of his material conditions.
He was not only liked, but sincerely respected by all who knew him.
Five years before my mother had arrived, he himself had left Vilna and reached England, almost penniless - an immigrant seeking a relative in Hull, a Mr. Marmer, also a tailor, who had already achieved a precarious foothold in the town. Uncle Malech had followed the usua1 pattern amongst the immigrants from "Der Heim". He had left his wife and daughter Rachel, until he could, by scraping a black-bread-and-herring livelihood, save enough to send them the fare money. It took two years before he was reunited with his family.
A small house - if one can dignify such a brokendown collection of bricks and mortar with the name of a house - in a slum street, known as North Street, had, by almost superhuman efforts, become the home of the Salits, in this great Mecca of freedom, to which the eyes of so many Jews in Russland were turned.
The slum areas are with us today, but the great tides of progress that have swept across our land, have almost obliterated from human memory the unmentionable obscenity of the slums of the years 1900 to 1913, and North Street, if one is to really appreciate its standing as a slum amongst slums, requires a far more descriptive pen than mine. I remember it always only in association with the word "squalor" . The word "landlords" in the minds of poor people who pay rent, has always had a most unenviable connotation, and the mental picture has always been of a sort of rich pot-bellied oppressor, who lived on the sufferings and the blood, sweat and tears of the poor.
The landlords of North Street would be unjustly described by such a picture. From the bottom of my heart I pity them! For "rent" to the citizens of North Street was merely a sort of abstract economic formula slightly understood, very much disliked, and consequently, held very much in abeyance.
Some refrained from paying on the twin grounds of Principle and Inability; others purely because they had no money. But as far as the landlords were concerned, on any grounds, they just didn't get any!
Here Uncle Malech lived, and here, in the next four years, were born to him three other daughters.
In the early Spring and late Autumn he was busy - he had a few coats to make. But in the ever-lengthening intervals between, how he lived in the absence of work is just one of those miracles, that like all other miracles, have no comprehensible explanation.
It was into this unwholesome little world of day-to-day anxiety, insecurity and hardship, that the young girl who was to be our mother, was introduced.