For hours and hours together I would sit at a gaunt reading-desk,
swaying to and fro over some huge volume, reading its ancient
text and interpreting it in Yiddish. All this I did aloud, in the
peculiar Talmud singsong, a trace of which still persists in my
intonation even when I talk cloaks and bank accounts and in
English
The Talmud was being read there, in a hundred variations of the
same singsong, literally every minute of the year, except the hours
of prayer.
There were plenty of men to do it during the day and the evening,
and at least ten men (a sacred number) to keep the holy word
echoing throughout the night. The majority of them were simply
scholarly business men who would drop in to read the sacred
books for an hour or two, but there was a considerable number of
such as made it the occupation of their life. These were supported
either by the congregation or by their own wives, who kept shops,
stalls, inns, or peddled, while their husbands spent sixteen hours a
day studying Talmud
One of these was a man named Reb (Rabbi) Sender, an
insignificant, ungainly little figure of a man, with a sad, child-like
little face flanked by a pair of thick, heavy, dark-brown side-locks
that seemed to weigh him down
His wife kept a trimming-store or something of the sort, and their
only child, a girl older than I, helped her attend to business as well
as to keep house in the single-room apartment which the family
occupied in the rear of the little shop.
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