Daily Search for Job Yields Not 1 Nibble : Unemployed: Clerk was laid off after 12 years with the same firm. ‘When you cannot find work, you feel like nobody wants you.’

Ludomira Halabi is not asking the impossible. All she wants, she says, is to be a clerk. But she is getting desperate.

“I cannot live without a job,” she says. “I will be out of my house.”

Halabi, a native of Poland, was laid off April 26 after working more than 12 years as a clerk for Belkeith Jewelry Corp., which sells jewelry through The Broadway department-store chain.

Halabi says she was never told why she was laid off. But she suspects it had something to do with the financial troubles of The Broadway and its corporate parent, Carter Hawley Hale Stores, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February.

Halabi has been looking for work almost nonstop ever since. She scours the want ads and begins making calls from the small Hollywood apartment she shares with her teen-age son at 8 a.m., hoping to get the jump on the competition. She has even signed with a few employment agencies.

So far, not a nibble.

A well-dressed, middle-aged woman with steely gray eyes, she speaks of her job quest with careful deliberateness. Sometimes, though, weariness and exasperation slip into her thickly accented speech.

“It’s so hard, so complicated,” she says. “I am tired, and under stress. I will take any job, as soon as possible.”

In Poland, Halabi had experience in business administration and finance. But she understands she is fighting a language barrier here, and says she’ll settle for a secure job that pays $7 an hour--as long it’s on a bus route, since she can’t afford a car.

She doesn’t even mind long commutes. It took her an hour a day to get to her job at Belkeith Jewelry’s office in Toluca Lake if she hit all three bus connections just right.

But blue-collar jobs seem impossible to find on the Westside in the current recession, Halabi says.

Employers all want experience in computers, which she doesn’t have, even for clerking jobs. And she’s so afraid no one will hire her because of her age that Halabi refuses to say how old she is.

Out of pride, she refuses to go on welfare. She is getting by this month on her income tax refund and some help from friends. But she has become so worried about losing her apartment that she has grudgingly signed up for unemployment. She’ll get $129 a week, she says, but she has to wait a few weeks for the paperwork to go through.

But no matter how hard it is making calls, sending letters and boarding buses to go on interviews, Halabi doesn’t mind. For her, looking for work helps her maintain some semblance of dignity, and some interaction with the world outside her quiet apartment.

“When you cannot find work, you feel like nobody wants you,” she says. “You are rejected. It is as though you are dead.”