"A pound a week is luxury for a single man." The Sons of the Covenant did not know that the poor consumptive _Maggid_ sent half his salary to his sisters in Poland to enable them to buy back their husbands from military service; also they had vague unexpressed ideas that he was not mortal, that Heaven would look after his larder, that if the worst came to the worst he could fall back on Cabalah and engage himself with the mysteries of food-creation.
"I have a wife and family to keep on a pound a week," grumbled Greenberg the _Chazan_.
Besides being Reader, Greenberg blew the horn and killed cattle and circumcised male infants and educated children and discharged the functions of beadle and collector.

He spent a great deal of his time in avoiding being drawn into the contending factions of the congregation and in steering equally between Belcovitch and the Shalotten _Shammos_.
The Sons only gave him fifty a year for all his trouble, but they eked it out by allowing him to be on the Committee, where on the question of a rise in the Reader's salary he was always an ineffective minority of one.

His other grievance was that for the High Festivals the Sons temporarily engaged a finer voiced Reader and advertised him at raised prices to repay themselves out of the surplus congregation.

Not only had Greenberg to play second fiddle on these grand occasions, but he had to iterate "Pom" as a sort of musical accompaniment in the pauses of his rival's vocalization.
"You can't compare yourself with the _Maggid_" the Shalotten _Shammos_ reminded him consolingly.

"There are hundreds of you in the market.
There are several _morceaux_ of the service which you do not sing half so well as your predecessor; your horn-blowing cannot compete with Freedman's of the Fashion Street _Chevrah_, nor can you read the Law as quickly and accurately as Prochintski.