Left alone, Miriam was about to throw the cake away, but had not the heart to do so. She sat eyeing it for some minutes and then, making fun of herself, she bit off a morsel. She acted like the Jewess of the anecdote, who, to be on the safe side, would kiss the cross and the Hebrew prayer book at once.
An hour later Yossl was flaunting his son’s Paris letter and cursing him to a new crowd in front of the Good Jew’s headquarters.
“The ghost take him!” he said. “Indeed, the ghost is a well-travelled fellow. He can get to Paris just as readily as he does to Zorki.”
CHAPTER XXI.
MAKAR’S FATHER.
ON Saturday morning Weinstein’s salon was crowded with worshippers, all married men in their praying shawls and skull-caps. A Good Jew is exempt from praying with the congregation, his transports of religious fervour being too sacred a proceeding for common mortals to intrude upon. Accordingly, the Man of Righteousness was making his devotions in the seclusion of the adjoining parlour.
To a stranger unfamiliar with Pietist prayer meetings the crowd here gathered would have looked for all the world like the inmates of the violent ward in an insane asylum. Most of the worshippers were snapping their fingers; the others were clapping their hands, clenching their fists with all their might or otherwise gesticulating savagely. They were running or jumping about, shrieking, sighing or intoning merrily, while here and there a man seemed to be straining every bit of his strength to shut his eyes as tightly as possible or to distort his face into some painful or grotesque expression. The Gentiles of the province called the Pietists Jumping Jacks.