He was a man of
thirty-two or more, tall, wiry, nervous, with large, protruding, dark
eyes. He was "a dentist by profession and a Russian social
democrat by religion," as his father introduced him to me
"Karl Marx is his god and Pleenanoff, the Russian socialist leader,
is his Moses," the old man added
Moissey's wife looked strikingly Semitic. She seemed to have just
stepped out of the Old Testament. She had been only about a year
in the country, and the only language she could speak was
Russian, which she enunciated without a trace of a Jewish accent
or intonation. She scarcely understood Yiddish.
All this was uncannily at variance with her Biblical face. It seemed
incredable that her speech and outward appearance should belong
to the same person. To add to the discrepancy, she was smoking
cigarette after cigarette, a performance certainly not in keeping
with one's notion of a Jewish woman of the old type
The oldest two sons, Moissey and Sasha, spoke English with a
Russian accent from which the English of all the other children
was absolutely free.
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