"I am not joking," Kaplan persisted. "One has got to be a Jew. Excuse me, David, for speaking like that, but you re going to be as good as a son of mine and I have a right to talk to you in this way."
"Why, of course, you have!" I answered, with filial docility
His lecture bored me, but it did me good, too. It was sweet to hear myself called "as good as a son" by this man of Talmudic education who was at the same time a man of substance and of excellent family
The chicken was served. My intended wife ate voraciously, biting lustily and chewing with gusto. The sight of it jarred on me somewhat, but I overruled myself. "It's all right," I thought. "She's a healthy girl. She'll make me a strong mate, and she'll bear me healthy children."
I had a temptation to take her in my arms and kiss her. "I am not in love with her, and yet I am so happy," I thought. "Oh, love isn't essential to happiness. Not at all. Our old generation is right."
Fanny's reading, which was only an occasional performance, was confined to the cheapest stories published. Even the popular novels of the day, the "best sellers," seemed to be beyond her depth. Her intellectual range was not much wider than that of her old-fashioned mother, whose literary attainments were restricted to the reading of the Yiddish Commentary on the Pentateuch. She often interrupted me or her mother; everybody except her father. But all this seemed to be quite natural and fitting. "She is expected to be a wife, a mother, and a housekeeper," I reflected, "and that she will know how to be. Everything else is nonsense. I don't want to discuss Spencer with her, do I?"
Kaplan quoted the opening words of a passage in the Talmud bearing upon piety as the bulwark of happiness. I took it up, finishing the passage for him
"See?" he said to his wife. "I have told you he remembers his
Talmud pretty well, haven't I?"
"When a man has a good head he has a good head," she returned, radiantly
Rubie went to a public school, but he spent three or four hours every afternoon at an old-fashioned Talmudic academy, or "yeshivah." 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