“You witch you!” he cried in a hoarse voice tense with rage. “Move by yourself! We lived without you while you was away in college, and we can get on without you further. God ain’t going to turn his nose on us because we ain’t got table manners from America. A hell she made from this house since she got home.”
“Shah! Yankev leben,” pleaded the mother, “the neighbours are opening the windows to listen to our hollering. Let us have a little quiet for a while till the eating is over.”
But the accumulated hurts and insults that the old man had borne in the one week since his daughter’s return from college had reached the breaking-point. His face was convulsed, his eyes flashed, and his lips were flecked with froth as he burst out in a volley of scorn:
“You think you can put our necks in a chain and learn us new tricks? You think you can make us over for Americans? We got through till fifty years of our lives eating in our own old way——”
“Woe is me, Yankev leben!” entreated his wife. “Why can’t we choke ourselves with our troubles? Why must the whole world know how we are tearing ourselves by the heads? In all Essex Street, in all New York, there ain’t such fights like by us.”
Her pleadings were in vain. There was no stopping Yankev Ravinsky once his wrath was roused. His daughter’s insistence upon the use of a knife and fork spelled apostasy, anti-Semitism, and the aping of the gentiles.
Like a prophet of old condemning unrighteousness, he ran the gamut of denunciation, rising to heights of fury that were sublime and godlike, and sinking from sheer exhaustion to abusive bitterness.
“Pfui on all your American colleges! Pfui on the morals of America! No respect for old age. No fear for God. Stepping with your feet on all the laws of the holy Torah. A fire should burn out the whole new generation. They should sink into the earth, like Korah.”
“Look at him cursing and burning! Just because I insist on their changing their terrible table manners. One would think I was killing them.”
“Do you got to use a gun to kill?” cried the old man, little red threads darting out of the whites of his eyes.