And what a foolish god was that who taught the stupid Gentiles that we drank the blood of a murdered child at our Passover feast! Why, I, who was only a child, knew better.

And so I hated and feared and avoided the great white church in the Platz, and hated every sign and symbol of that monstrous god who was kept there and hated my own person, when, in our play of a Christian funeral, I imagined my body to be the corpse, over which was carried the hideous cross.
Perhaps I have established that I was more Jew than Gentile, though I can still prove that I was none the less a fraud.

For instance, I remember how once, on the eve of the Ninth of Ab--the anniversary of the fall of the Temple--I was looking on at the lamentations of the women.

A large circle had gathered around my mother, who was the only good reader among them, to listen to the story of the cruel destruction.

Sitting on humble stools, in stocking feet, shabby clothes, and dishevelled hair, weeping in chorus, and wringing their hands, as if it was but yesterday that the sacred edifice fell and they were in the very dust and ashes of the ruin, the women looked to me enviously wretched and pious.