Sarah Kessner knew brassieres. Since she was fourteen years old she had sat at a sewing machine stitching together the cups that shaped the bosoms of other women, women she sometimes pictured in her mind.
The factory occupied a converted apartment house on Livonia Avenue under the IRT elevated New Lots line, but Sarah rarely heard the trains passing overhead because the train noise was drowned out by the sixty-eight sewing machines on the second floor of Nu Yu Foundations. The girls in the cutting room on the third floor listened to the radio between trains, but in the sewing room that was impossible. So for nine hours a day, with thirty minutes for lunch and two ten minute breaks, Sarah occupied her head with her own variations on the stories she read in the Yiddish newspaper riding the same IRT train home.
One of the stories that fascinated her was of a girl her age, eighteen, nineteen, who left home without telling anyone where she was going. One day she simply got on a bus and never came back. Her mother cried her eyes out and her father went from synagogue to synagogue showing her picture to the men who came to evening prayers, describing her in detail, asking them to pass the information along to their wives and daughters. He promised a hundred dollar reward, though he had no idea where the money would come from, he being a stock clerk in a men’s clothing store on Third Avenue in Manhattan.
After a month the...
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