“Ain’t you going to give a taste the eating?”
No answer.
“I fried the lotkes special for you——”
“I can’t stand your fried, greasy stuff.”
“Ain’t even my cooking good no more neither?” Her gnarled, hard-worked hands clutched at her breast. “God from the world, for what do I need yet any more my life? Nothing I do for my child is no use no more.”
Her head sank; her whole body seemed to shrivel and grow old with the sense of her own futility.
“How I was hurrying to run by the butcher before everybody else, so as to pick out the grandest, fattest piece of brust!” she wailed, tears streaming down her face. “And I put my hand away from my heart and put a whole fresh egg into the lotkes, and I stuffed the stove full of coal like a millionaire so as to get the lotkes fried so nice and brown; and now you give a kick on everything I done——”
“Fool woman,” shouted her husband, “stop laying yourself on the ground for your daughter to step on you! What more can you expect from a child raised up in America? What more can you expect but that she should spit in your face and make dirt from you?” His eyes, hot and dry under their lids, flashed from his wife to his daughter. “The old Jewish eating is poison to her; she must have treifah ham—only forbidden food.”
Bitter laughter shook him.
“Woman, how you patted yourself with pride before all the neighbours, boasting of our great American daughter coming home from college! This is our daughter, our pride, our hope, our pillow for our old age that we were dreaming about. This is our American teacherin! A Jew-hater, an anti-Semite we brought into the world, a betrayer of our race who hates her own father and mother like the Russian Tsar once hated a Jew. She makes herself so refined, she can’t stand it when we use the knife or fork the wrong way; but her heart is that of a brutal Cossack, and she spills her own father’s and mother’s blood like water.”