Yossi's Goal Read Free Page B

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    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.
    â€œA whole nickel!” Yossi tried to imagine finding such riches all at once. “What’d you do with it? Go on a spending spree?”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œToo 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’snames 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.
    â€œSee you at school,” Yossi called. Each day, after selling his papers and carrying his bundles, he and his pals went to theRebbe’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