“Neither of the young men,” the rabbi went on, with his eyes still upon the fish, “knew anything about the Talmud, but Joseph, who was well versed in Hebrew, began at once to study it, wherein he had the advantage over Ezra, who knew not a word of Hebrew.”
“But Ezra was a shrewd young man, and, without wasting any time upon studying, he went straight to Sarai’s father and said to him: ‘Rabbi, you are the greatest scholar of the world to-day. Can you tell me the real meaning of the Talmud?’”
“‘My son,’ said Rabbi ben Achad, ‘all the wisdom of the human race since the days of Moses has not been able to answer that question!’”
The rabbi had taken up the big fish and the small one, and was carefully balancing them.
“Eight, you say. I know a place where I can get them——”
“All right. Six cents. But finish the story. What did Joseph do?”
“Joseph studied many years and came to the same conclusion. I’ll take the small one.”
“The story does not say. You’re sure it is fresh?”
There is no set rule for the turning of the worm; most worms, however, turn unexpectedly. It was so with Shadrach Cohen.
He had two sons. One was named Abel and the other Gottlieb. They had left Russia five years before their father, had opened a store on Hester Street with the money he had given them. For reasons that only business men would understand they conducted the store in their father’s name—and, when the business began to prosper and they saw an opportunity of investing further capital in it to good advantage, they wrote to their dear father to come to this country.
“We have a nice home for you here,” they wrote. “We will live happily together.”
Shadrach came. With him he brought Marta, the serving-woman who had nursed his wife until she died, and whom, for his wife’s sake, he had taken into the household. When the ship landed he was met by two dapper-looking young men, each of whom wore a flaring necktie with a diamond in it. It took him some time to realise that these were his two sons. Abel and Gottlieb promptly threw their arms around his neck and welcomed him to the new land. Behind his head they looked at each other in dismay. In the course of five years they had forgotten that their father wore a gaberdine—the loose, baglike garment of the Russian Ghetto—and had a long, straggling grey beard and ringlets that came down over his ears—that, in short, he was a perfect type of the immigrant whose appearance they had so frequently ridiculed. Abel and Gottlieb were proud of the fact that they had become Americanised. And they frowned at Marta.