The House That Shadows Built (1928)

THE SOD HOUSE 55 emigrant train, and landed in Chicago with less than ten dollars between them. One Beifeld, a Hungarian, had founded years before a pioneer cloak factory. The establishment remained as Hungarian as Szamarodni wine. There the Kohn boys got a job and set about learning the trade. They had left in Hungary their elder sister Esther, married to a vineyard owner named Herman Kaufmann. He, also, had lost his modest all in the phyloxera epidemic. “All for one and one for all” was the family motto. The brothers lived small and sent their savings back to Hungary. A year later, the Kaufmann family, including their young children, came to Chicago. Morris Kohn, always the active and enterprising intelligence of the family, had a job waiting for Herman Kaufmann. He became a suit-presser at Beifeld’s. Still peasant by instinct, the Kohns had the peasant hunger for land. The American custom of giving away virgin tracts to all comers burst upon them with the dazzle of a fairy tale. Just then Dakota — still a territory and still undivided — had entered the initial stages of American progress. It was enjoying a temporary boom, stimulated by the railroads. A few years afterward the boom collapsed, and the Dakotas built on the wreckage their permanent and sober prosperity. That is the American way. The Kohn boys had entered night school and begun to acquire English. Strolling one night in the downtown district, Morris Kohn puzzled out a