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Women Making Cigarettes
Jamie Wendt Engaged and newly married women left home for the workshop just after sunrise, the sky pinkish-golden. A pocket of rubles, a growing fortune, jiggled in their tobacco-stained fingers, like a luck charm. The young, shaven, socialist man–the owner who spoke Russian instead of Yiddish– angered over the local learned men who studied rather than work. The women listened as he spoke. Not yet mothers, their bodies said. Their wrists at the long, cold table’s edge, stiff and poised. They wore long chain necklaces, hair pinned back. Their forced smiles slid into their smooth, pale cheeks. They spent sunlit hours toiling, measuring, spreading tobacco into papers, rolling them tight, stacking them in a pyramid in the center of the worktable. They would still punch dough late in the dull evenings, though, their tainted fingers playing the role of kitchen wife as a sleepy sister took note from a stepstool. Out the window, they observed skinny boys leaning on hay bales, cigarettes tucked behind their ears, and wondered what it would be like to have sons. Men walking home parted their lips for the sharp inhale, the little flame escaping rolled paper, ash flicked to the ground, the cigarette turning into a woman’s finger. |
Photo from Austrian National Library
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