Elated with this opportunity to show off his superior knowledge, he went on: “I learned myself to sign my name in America. Stop only and I’ll read for you the sign from the lamp-post,” and he spelled aloud, “W-a-l-l—Wall.”
“And what street is this?” asked the doctor, as we came to another corner.
Moisheh coloured with confusion, and the eyes he raised to his brother were like the eyes of a trapped deer pleading to be spared. “L-i-b——” He stopped. “Oh, weh!” he groaned, “the word is too long for me.”
“Liberty,” scorned the doctor. “You are an Amerikaner already and you don’t know Liberty?”
His own humiliation forgot in pride of his brother’s knowledge, Moisheh nodded his head humbly.
“Yeh—yeh! You a greener and yet you know Liberty. And I, an Amerikaner, is stuck by the word.” He turned to me with a pride that brought tears to his eyes. “Didn’t I tell you my brothers were high educated? Never mind—they won’t shame me in America.”
A look of adoration drank in the wonder of his beloved family. Overcome with a sense of his own unworthiness, he exclaimed, “Look only on me—a nothing and a nobody.” He breathed in my ear, “And such brothers!” With a new, deeper tenderness, he pressed his mother’s slight form more closely to him.
“More Bolsheviki!” scoffed a passer-by.
“Trotzky’s ambassadors,” sneered another.
And the ridicule was taken up by a number of jeering voices.