It is 1890 and my family has sent me to America. I am only 17 years old and am both afraid and excited to travel to this new country and start a new life. I am from a small town in Germany and life was not easy before I left. My family and I have endured such hardships, and have sacrificed many things to save up to send me across the ocean. We all worked around the clock and took whatever jobs we could to save up money. They are sending me first because I am a young woman, and people like me are needed in New York City to work in the factories. I learned from my mother how to sew when I was a very little girl in my parents shop. My mother can make beautiful suits and I first learned how to sew on the buttons, but I quickly caught on and became my mothers ‘little helper’. I saw how much she loved to make people happy by dressing them in fine fabrics that were tailored to fit perfectly, and I felt the same joy in creating beautiful clothes for others. Life became very difficult in Germany for my family, and we were forced to move along with other Jews in Germany. My family quickly lost everything they had worked for and had to build them back up again. This is when the dreams of America gave hope to our family like many others. We heard from others who had already taken the plunge and left Germany that there is a great demand for skilled tailors in New York City because this is where all of the factories were located. Soon after we heard these stories I remember the night perfectly when my parents told me that they were going to send me to America to make a new life for myself and for them. I did not want to leave without my family, especially my mother, but I knew that we would have to save every penny we could to afford to send one person let alone all of us. I promised them that I would work all that I could and save tirelessly until I saw all of my family members with me again in America.
This is how I ended up in the bottom of a large ship, traveling across the ocean. It was dirty, crowded, and I tired to ignore all of this to keep up my hopes for America. I hoped that this would be the last hardship that I would endure, but I was quickly proven wrong. Upon my arrival in America, an old friend met me to help me find work in this new place. It was not very hard because of the boom in the tailor industry here in New York City. There were many factories that wanted to hire a young skilled woman like me to work for them. I quickly accepted an offer in a men’s shirt factory to start saving up to bring my parents along. In the beginning they gave me a quota of 15 shirts a day, and this was difficult but achievable because I have been making these things for many years. So for weeks I went into the crowded workshop filled with many other women like myself and made shirt after shirt to collect my paycheck at the end of the week. I saved whatever I could but I had to pay for my housing and food and it was expensive living in New York. After about a month my quota was moved up to 20 shirts a day and I was forced to work at such a fast pace that I could not even take breaks during my workday anymore. I was getting through it, but barely and I was tired and got sick often because there were so many people crammed into the workroom. One day, the factory manager called a meeting before work for that day started and asked everyone to gather round. He announced that we would be switching to a system of manufacturing that many other companies had changed to in order to increase efficiency and make our workdays ‘easier’. I was assigned to sewing on buttons to the shirts. Everyone was assigned different little parts to making the whole shirt; I had a friend whose sole job was to iron the collars on the shirts. Now day in and day out I had returned to the job I was given as a child of sewing buttons. At first this was not that bad, but soon the manager started asking us to come in early and stay later, all for the same pay. It was hard to keep up with my own expenses, let alone save enough money to get the rest of my family to America. Many of the women around me starting calling the factory a ‘sweatshop’ and I did not really understand the meaning of this. I knew that they meant that our long workdays was grueling and we were not getting properly paid for this, but I was not willing to lose my job and lose all hope to see my family again. So I kept on coming in earlier and earlier every morning to the factory to sew buttons onto shirts. I sewed on so many buttons that I had totally forgotten even how to make anything else on the shirt. Memories of sewing the sleeve onto the main part started to fade and I became saddened by the loss of my love for creating. I remembered my mother joy when she completed a suit, and how it made me feel accomplished when I had made something start to finish, and it made me realize that what I was doing now gave me no satisfaction. I realized that my skill no longer mattered to the factory, that they only needed me to sew on buttons like I did when I was five. What made me angry was not my pay, nor my long hours, it was that I had lost so much upon arrival in America that I forgot what I loved to do, and quickly learned to just collect a small paycheck.
I came into the factory the next day emotionless and beaten down. I realized the night before that I had been working so hard all these longs months for no gain. I knew that I would probably never see my mothers face again. But I came to work day in and day out and worked hard to sew on buttons faster and faster everyday to please the manager of the factory. Although I had lost my hope and my passion, I still dreamt that I would one day see my mother and father again in America and that our life would return to how it was as a child and I could leave the factory to pursue my passions once again.
