“Alla right!” Jake bethought himself. “Charge him ten shent for each spoonful. Mr. Bernstein, you shall be kind enough to be the bookkeeper. But if you don’t pay, Chollie, I’ll get out a tzommesh [summons] from court.”
Whereat the little kitchen rang with laughter, in which all participated except Bernstein. Even Joey, or Yosselé, joined in the general outburst of merriment. Otherwise he was busily engaged cramming borshtch into his mouth, and, in passing, also into his nose, with both his plump hands for a pair of spoons. From time to time he would interrupt operations to make a wry face and, blinking his eyes, to lisp out rapturously, “Sour!”
“Look—may you live long—do look; he is laughing, too!” Gitl called attention to Yosselé’s bespattered face. “To think of such a crumb having as much sense as that!” She was positive that he appreciated his father’s witticism, although she herself understood it but vaguely.
“May he know evil no better than he knows what he is laughing at,” Jake objected, with a fatherly mien. “What makes you laugh, Joey?” The boy had no time to spare for an answer, being too busy licking his emptied plate. “Look at the soldier’s appetite he has, de feller! Joey, hoy you like de borshtch? Alla right?” Jake asked in English.
“Awrr-ra rr-right!” Joey pealed out his sturdy rustic r’s, which he had mastered shortly before taking leave of his doting grandmother.
“See how well he speaks English?” Jake said, facetiously. “A —— shight better than his mamma, anyvay.”
Gitl, who was in the meantime serving the meat, coloured, but took the remark in good part.
“I tell ye he is growing to be Presdent ’Nited States,” Charlie interposed.
“Greenhorn that you are! A President must be American born,” Jake explained, self-consciously. “Ain’t it, Mr. Bernstein?”
“It’s a pity, then, that he was not born in this country,” Bernstein replied, his eye envyingly fixed now on Gitl, now at the child, on whose plate she was at this moment carving a piece of meat into tiny morsels. “Vell, if he cannot be a President of the United States, he may be one of a synagogue, so he is a president.”