Now the street seems a bit colder because it was warmer in the theater. Where do we go from here? Up and down, up and down the old street. A very pleasant afternoon. Spent in laughter and applause. Once there was booze for a nickel and a dime. But it was found necessary to improve the morals of the nation. No booze today.
That is quite a brave photograph of you outside the theater, madam. The Dancing Venus. If we had tears we would shed them. The Dancing Venus, indeed! We smile as you smiled yourself when you saw it for the first time. But—good-by. Master Francois Villon sang it all long ago. Yesterdays, yesterdays, here is a street of yesterdays.
And we, the tired ones, the brutal-faced, bitter-eyed ones, the beaten ones—we walk up and down the cold street, peering at the cheerless buildings. Life takes a long time to pass. But without changing our bitter, brutal faces we bow this afternoon, madam, to the memory of you.
We paid four bits to see you. Our Lady of Jokes, and in this cold, sunless street we grin, we smirk, we leer a salutation to your photograph and the phrase beneath it that laughs mockingly back at us—Oh, Dancing Venus!
MISHKIN'S MINYON
We were discussing vacations and Sammy, who is eleven years old going on twelve, listened nervously to his father. Finally Sammy spoke up:
"I won't go," he bristled. "No, I won't if I gotta tell the conductor I'm under five. I ain't going."
Sammy's father coughed with some embarrassment.
"Sha!" said Feodor Mishkin, removing his attention from the bowl of fruit,
"I see it takes more than naturalization papers to change a
landsmann from Kremetchuk." And he fastened a humorous eye upon
Sammy's father.
"It's like this," continued the Falstaffian one from Roosevelt Road: "In Russia where my friend here, Hershela comes from, that is in Russia of the good old days where there were pogroms and ghettos and provocateurs—ah, I grow homesick for that old Russia sometimes—the Jews were not always so honest as they might be. Don't interrupt me, Hershela. My friend here I want to tell a story to is a journalist and he will understand I am no 'antishemite' if I explain how it is that you want your son Sammy to tell the conductor he is under five."