[Children of the Ghetto by I. Zangwill]@TWC D-Link book
Children of the Ghetto

CHAPTER XII
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Joy came to bear to it the offering of its thanksgiving and to vow sixpenny bits to the Lord, prosperity came in a high hat to chaffer for the holy privileges, and grief came with rent garments to lament the beloved dead and glorify the name of the Eternal.
The poorest life is to itself the universe and all that therein is, and these humble products of a great and terrible past, strange fruits of a motley-flowering secular tree whose roots are in Canaan and whose boughs overshadow the earth, were all the happier for not knowing that the fulness of life was not theirs.
And the years went rolling on, and the children grew up and here and there a parent.
* * * * * The elders of the synagogue were met in council.
"He is greater than a Prince," said the Shalotten _Shammos_.
"If all the Princes of the Earth were put in one scale," said Mr.
Belcovitch, "and our _Maggid_, Moses, in the other, he would outweigh them all.

He is worth a hundred of the Chief Rabbi of England, who has been seen bareheaded." "From Moses to Moses there has been none like Moses," said old Mendel Hyams, interrupting the Yiddish with a Hebrew quotation.
"Oh no," said the Shalotten _Shammos_, who was a great stickler for precision, being, as his nickname implied, a master of ceremonies.

"I can't admit that.

Look at my brother Nachmann." There was a general laugh at the Shalotten _Shammos's_ bull; the proverb dealing only with Moseses.
"He has the true gift," observed _Froom_ Karlkammer, shaking the flames of his hair pensively.

"For the letters of his name have the same numerical value as those of the great Moses da Leon." _Froom_ Karlkammer was listened to with respect, for he was an honorary member of the committee, who paid for two seats in a larger congregation and only worshipped with the Sons of the Covenant on special occasions.
The Shalotten _Shammos_, however, was of contradictory temperament--a born dissentient, upheld by a steady consciousness of highly superior English, the drop of bitter in Belcovitch's presidential cup.


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