Yossi's Goal (3 page)

And with a bitter sigh, he realized that Papa was right—the family needed every single penny. If Papa lost his job, it would be a disaster.

But to be shamed so! And not to be able to fight back!

“It's not fair, Papa,” Yossi said angrily.

“I know, Yossele,” Papa said.

Suddenly Yossi understood what Daniel had meant the night Mrs. Belnick came, when he'd said he didn't want to take handouts from the rich owners. Especially when the owners treated them like this. And they were their own people, fellow Jews! That made it even worse.

Furiously, Yossi unfastened the toggles, threw the coat on the ground and started walking away.

“Yossi, no!” Papa cried.

“I won't wear it, Papa.”

Coughing, Papa stooped to pick up the coat. “Yossi, please, it's cold.”

“I don't care,” Yossi said. “I'd rather freeze.” Daniel's words. The other night he'd tried them out. Now he meant them.

Yossi stormed ahead, fuming. Maybe he couldn't get back at Max Steiner right now, but someday, somehow, he'd bring that Uptowner down a notch.

Papa's hand nudging his shoulder woke Yossi up. Fighting the sleepiness that he longed to give in to, he rose from his thin cotton mattress on the floor, grabbed his clothes and tiptoed into the kitchen, trying not to wake Miriam. It was still black outside. By the light of a candle, Yossi dressed quickly in the chilly room. A moment later, Daniel joined him and dressed silently.

Mama lit a fire in the coal stove and put the kettle on. Yossi shrugged on his old winter coat, trying vainly to pull the sleeves down to cover his wrists, then tugged on his woolen cap. He counted out
eight pennies from a cup on the mantel and put them in his pocket, along with a hunk of rye bread. As he headed for the door, Mama whispered, “Yossi, wait. Have a cup of tea first.”

Before she could say anything more, he was out the door. The first newsboy to hit the street sold his papers the quickest, Yossi knew. Tea could wait.

Although the sun had not yet risen when Yossi stepped outside, the milk-man's horse clip-clopped down the street, a freight car clanged from the railyard several blocks away and a tugboat hooted on the Saint Lawrence. Montreal was waking up.

Minutes later, Yossi turned in at an office door marked
Die Zeit
. He placed the eight pennies on the counter, and a man slid a dozen Yiddish newspapers toward him. “The early bird catches the worm, eh, Mendelsohn?”

“Yes.”

Yossi tucked the papers under his arm and left. Ducking his head against the
wind blowing north off the river, he headed south and west, toward his corner at The Main and Des Pins. This, he was convinced, was the best corner in Montreal for selling newspapers. It was at the center of where three garment factories were located, and men streamed past from all directions on their way to work. Even the poorest could afford a penny for a paper.

Men started walking by, first a trickle, then a few more, then a flood. “Paper! Get your paper!” Yossi hollered. One by one, he sold his newspapers, pocketing twelve pennies. Four cents profit. The coins jingled satisfyingly in his pocket.

By now the sun was a faint brightening in the eastern sky. Munching on the hunk of rye bread, Yossi walked up to Rue Marie-Anne, Abie's corner.

Abie still had a couple of papers left, so Yossi kept him company until he sold them. Then the two of them set off for Steiner's Garment Works, where Abie was also a bundle carrier. His papa, Herman, worked there too.

As they walked, Abie told him about how he and Louie had been playing down at the docks the day before, and he'd found a nickel wedged between two planks.

“A whole nickel!” Yossi tried to imagine finding such riches all at once. “What'd you do with it? Go on a spending spree?”

“I gave it to Mama,” Abie said. “Naomi's got a fever and she needs medicine.”

Naomi was Abie's two-year-old sister. Yossi thought of her lying sick in bed and shook his head. And even if Naomi hadn't been sick, Yossi knew that Abie would have given the nickel to his mama anyway. Abie's family was even poorer than Yossi's. There were three little ones at home, and the family took in boarders to help pay the rent. They needed every penny that Abie made.

Yossi was luckier. Papa let him keep two cents of every four-cent profit he earned. Yossi had a small collection of pennies rolled up in an old sock, maybe twenty in all. He didn't know what he was saving for.

The boys turned south and a blast of wind off the river hit them. They both shivered.

“Too bad about that coat, eh?” Abie said.

Yossi shrugged, though he would have been glad of its warmth right now. “You want it?”

Abie gave him a black look. “I'm desperate, but I ain't that desperate!”

Yossi frowned. “How'm I going to get that Max Steiner back? It's got to be good. But he can't know it's me, so I don't get Papa in trouble.”

Abie scratched his head. “We'll think of something, don't worry.”

They turned a corner. There stood a massive brick building, four stories high, with the words STEINER'S GARMENT WORKS spelled out in yellow bricks amid the red. The two boys went to a side entrance and walked down a hallway to the packing room. There, workers were bundling pieces of cut-out cloth into piles two feet square, wrapping them in burlap and tying them with twine.

The supervisor ticked off Yossi's and Abie's
names on a list and told them where to take their deliveries. Yossi could barely hear him over the whine of the sewing machines and the rumble of the wooden tables shaking with the vibrations of many machines. Out on the floor, where Papa and Daniel worked, the noise was deafening. Sometimes Papa's ears rang all evening.

As Yossi leaned close to hear the address, Daniel's friend Solly, one of the garment packers, caught his eye and waved. When Yossi waved back, the supervisor bellowed at Solly, “Get back to work, Bregman,” then cuffed Yossi's ear.

The supervisor roughly loaded the bundles onto the boys' backs. The carriers had fashioned straps that hooked over their shoulders to help carry the weight. Even so, Yossi and Abie were bent double and panting by the time they reached the end of the first block, where they parted ways.

“See you at school,” Yossi called. Each day, after selling his papers and carrying his bundles, he and his pals went to the
Rebbe's for lessons. Jews weren't allowed to attend public school, and the poorer families couldn't afford a private Jewish school, so they paid the Rebbe a small fee to teach their children Hebrew, mathematics, religion, reading and writing. Yossi didn't mind—he enjoyed learning— though it was much more fun to explore the city with his friends.

Like this French section he was delivering his bundle in today. He hadn't been here before, and at first everything looked strange. There was a church on every corner, black-frocked priests swished by, and all the signs were in French. But then he noticed tumbledown tenements and shabby storefronts, ragged children picking up stray lumps of coal from the street. That wasn't strange—it was just like in his neighborhood.

From nearby, Yossi heard boys' voices, calling back and forth in French. He didn't understand much of the language—a word here or there, picked up in the shops or on the street. “
Salut
”…
“
Combien coute ça?
”—How much does it cost? Or, the phrase he heard most often, “
Va-t'en!
”—Get lost!

But today there was another sound in addition to the French words, one that Yossi didn't recognize. Sort of a scraping, then a whooshing, then a scraping again. Curious, he followed the sounds around the corner.

Between the backs of two rows of tall windowless brick tenements was a lowlying lane, covered in a treacherous sheet of ice. A group of boys, five or six of them, was on the ice. They were on skates— Yossi had seen those before, though he'd never skated himself. They were flailing away at a lump of coal. Each boy had a wooden stick, flattened on either side, with a curved end. First one boy would tap the lump with his stick, then another boy would push away the first boy's stick with his own and send the coal in the opposite direction. Then another boy would capture the lump and skate away with it, pushing it forward with his stick. With each move, the boys shouted to one another, cheering and laughing.

Back and forth they skated, up and down the sheet of ice, zigzagging from side to side, darting around one another, always chasing the elusive lump of coal. As they stopped and turned, their skates made sharp rasping sounds and the blades sent up showers of ice flakes. Sometimes a boy fell, but he sprang to his feet, unhurt, and sped off again.

Yossi stood entranced. Heedless of the weight on his back, of the cold, he watched the beautiful game.

Then one of the players, a tall agile boy with blond hair sticking out below his blue knitted cap, gave a mighty thrust with his stick and sent the lump of coal soaring down the ice. It flew past a boy Yossi hadn't even noticed before, a burly fellow in a red stocking cap, who stood in front of a large barricade of snow. The red-capped boy flung up his stick to try to bat the lump away, but he was too late. The coal sailed past his shoulder and lodged in the snowbank.

Grinning, the blond boy threw both arms in the air, stick raised, and shouted, “
But!
” as the red-hatted fellow rapped his stick on the ice in disgust.

Without quite understanding what had happened, only knowing it was wonderful, Yossi grinned too.

As the blond boy turned, laughing, toward his teammates, he spotted Yossi. He stopped and stared. Not smiling. Not frowning. Just looking at Yossi, at the bundle on his back.

Yossi's grin faded. The boy didn't look friendly, and neither did his mates, who also stopped and stared, grouping themselves around the blond boy as if waiting for him to make a move.

Yossi stood still. After all, they were French. Which meant they were Catholic. Everyone knew that the Catholics hated the Jews because they believed that the Jews had killed Christ. It wasn't true, of course, but that didn't stop them from believing it.

But in spite of the French boys' unfriendly
looks, Yossi couldn't help himself. Sweeping his arm toward the ice, he called out, in Yiddish, “What is it?”

The blond boy waved his stick in the air. Thinking the boy meant to chase him away, Yossi turned and started trudging down the street. But a moment later, he heard a shout: “
Le hockey!
”

Yossi whipped around. The boy was still looking at him, stick raised. Yossi flashed him a smile. He couldn't be sure, but he thought the other boy smiled back. “Hockey,” Yossi whispered to himself as he hurried down the street to make his delivery.

Twenty minutes later, free of his bundle, Yossi raced up the stairs to the flat and burst in the door. Sadie was already at work at the sewing machine, and Miriam and Mama were hand-stitching by the window.

Mama leaped to her feet.

“Yossi, where were you?” she said. “You'll be late for your lessons. What will the Rebbe say?”

“Mama!” Yossi said excitedly. “I saw these boys. Frenchies. Playing a game. Hockey, it's called. And I'm going to learn how to play it, Mama.”

“And you haven't even had breakfast yet,” Mama fussed.

“Hockey,” Yossi repeated dreamily. He gulped a cup of tea and grabbed a roll and a hunk of cheese. Then he strapped on his book bag.

But before he left, he carefully counted ten pennies into the jar on the mantel and added two to his collection in the rolled-up sock.

Finally he knew what he was saving for.

A pair of skates.