As a girl in a Jewish family she was denied a formal textual religious education, and as a Jew she was denied entry into the only public school in Gorodok. Her parents banned the speaking of Russian in the house in protest. Lemlich befriended non-Jewish peasant children who taught her Russian folk songs, and then taught the folk songs to older Jewish girls in exchange for them teaching her how to read Russian and lending her volumes of Tolstoy, Gorky, and Turgenev. When she had exhausted that library she started sewing buttonholes on shirts and writing letters in Yiddish for illiterate mothers to send to their children in America in order to buy books. She hid these under a meat pan in the kitchen and when her father discovered her library and burned it she simply started her collection over. She was 16 when the Kishinev pogrom prompted her family to move from the Ukraine to the Lower East Side.

Never underestimate the radical potency of the teenage girl. It was at 16, after all, that Joan of Arc set out to lead the French army in expelling the British from France.

Joan of Arc would claim at her trial that, “when it comes to spinning and weaving, I fear no woman.” Likewise, Clara Lemlich combined radicalism with the more traditional female task of making clothing: she feared no woman of the Lower East Side who ran an industrial sewing machine. Like Pauline Newman, Rose Schneiderman, and the rest of the hustler scholars who arrived in the Lower East Side from Russia in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, Lemlich arrived hoping to find in the American public school system what had been denied her in Russia: a formal education. She was bitterly disappointed when her family’s circumstances required that she go to work in a sweatshop. All of these teenagers were already on fire with Marxism, which they had picked up in the old country where “Behind every other volume of Talmud, in those years, there was a volume of Marx.”