" There were two such "yeshivahs" on the East Side,
and they were attended by boys of the most orthodox families in
the Ghetto. I had never met such boys before. That an American
school-boy should read Talmud seemed a joke to me. I could not
take Rubie's holy studies seriously. As we now sat at the table I
banteringly asked him about the last page he had read. He
answered my question, and at his father's command he ran
up-stairs, into the back parlor, where stood two huge bookcases
filled with glittering folios of the Talmud and other volumes of
holy lore, and came back with one containing the page he had
named
"Find it and let David see what you can do," his father said
Rubie complied, reading the text and interpreting it in Yiddish
precisely as I should have done when I was eleven years old. He
even gesticulated and swayed backward and forward as I used to
do. To complete the picture, his mother, watching him, beamed as
my mother used to do when she watched me reading at the
Preacher's Synagogue or at home in our wretched basement.
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