Free Inventing Memory by Erica Jong Page A

to agree with her. But madness lay that way. The only thing that has preserved our people for six thousand years is hope. When we lose hope, we doom ourselves as Jews. Hope is our bread, hope is our honey, hope is our means of survival.)
    There were flophouses with hammocks where the refuse of the city could sleep for a few cents a day—but even worse were the streets, where many lived, if you could call it living, including children whose lives were mercifully short. They either perished of exposure as infants, died due to the neglect of orphanages, or expired in the streets at eight or ten, having helped to enrich some boss.
    I sent my sketches to the Forverts under the name "Sol," and I signed them with a sun. It was presumed the artist was a man—for what woman would dare impersonate the sun? Besides, they were paired with writings by "Sim."
    After a while, my sketches were much talked about, and so were his writings. Some people complained that Sim and Sol were slandering New York, and others said that we were honestly depicting the need for reform.
    But "Sol," the sketcher of the ghetto, lived a separate life from Sarah Solomon, the fashionable portrait painter.
    Levitsky hated these excursions to the ghetto, but he felt powerless to forbid them because Sim had launched my other career.
    Sketching as "Sol," I felt utterly liberated. It was the freedom of the mask, the fact that I need not sign my own name to these drawings and so could depict the cruelty of the city as I saw it—the orphans, the shopgirls, the street Arabs, the newsies, the consumptive waifs, the rumsoaked beggars, the porkpie-hatted gang leaders, the urchins who slept on the sawdust floors of bars.
    Tell me the story of a foundling dropped on the doorstep of a wealthy house and saved. I will tell you of another foundling, dead and buried in a pine box. The rich are not so tender of the children of the poor. They may lecture them, preach to them of the joys of labor while they give them their dust to sweep, but do they ever bestow charity without a plaque to commemorate their goodness? What became of anonymous charity? Is charity true charity when it embellishes a rich name? I bless the man who gives without a plaque to commemorate his giving. In those days, all charity was private, and bodies of babies found floating in the river testify to its efficacy.
    America was supposed to be the place where challah was served on weekdays, where the workers walked from factory to bank laden with bags of gold, where greenhorn girls wore feathered hats like duchesses. When I began doing these sketches and sent some of them home with the money I was making, my mama was outraged. She did not want to hear that America was not a perfect country, and she reproached me with my ingratitude to the new land. I unburdened my heart to Sim about this.
    "You are taking away her dreams," he said. "People can forgive anything but that. I know, because you are taking away my dreams."
    "Sim!" I exploded. "Do you want to be an outcast for all your days? Marry me and lose the world."
    "Gladly I would," he said. "Otherwise I creep into my coffin early, with only Lucretia to row across the river Styx."
    Even if Levitsky did not like my rovings with Sim, he tolerated them. No doubt he thought Sim would open more doors for him. I wanted to keep Levitsky happy. He was essential to my business. Also, he was landsleit . We shared a way of speaking, a way of thinking, a way of looking at the world.
    Levitsky (as I always called him), a big man with a grizzled black beard, big dark eyes, those distinctive larval brows, and a paunch, looked older than his years—he was only a few years my senior. His greatest assets were his ready, easy way with strangers, his joke-telling, his fluent talk. He was a born salesman who could ensnare the unsuspecting with clever words and separate them from their thrifty intentions before they knew what was happening.
    "Any fool can paint a picture," he used