"You are not entitled to speak on this subject, Belcovitch," said the Shalotten Shammos warmly. "You are a Man-of-the-Earth. I have heard every great Chazan in Europe."
"What was good enough for my father is good enough for me," retorted Belcovitch. "The Shool he took me to at home had a beautiful Chazan, and he always sang it 'Ei, Ei, Ei.'"
"I don't care what you heard at home. In England every Chazan sings
'Oi, Oi, Oi.'"
"We can't take our tune from England," said Karlkammer reprovingly. "England is a polluted country by reason of the Reformers whom we were compelled to excommunicate."
"Do you mean to say that my father was an Epicurean?" asked Belcovitch indignantly. "The tune was as Greenberg sings it. That there are impious Jews who pray bareheaded and sit in the synagogue side by side with the women has nothing to do with it."
The Reformers did neither of these things, but the Ghetto to a man believed they did, and it would have been countenancing their blasphemies to pay a visit to their synagogues and see. It was an extraordinary example of a myth flourishing in the teeth of the facts, and as such should be useful to historians sifting "the evidence of contemporary writers."
The dispute thickened; the synagogue hummed with "Eis" and "Ois" not in concord.
"Shah!" said the President at last. "Make an end, make an end!"
"You see he knows I'm right," murmured the Shalotten Shammos to his circle.
"And if you are!" burst forth the impeached Greenberg, who had by this time thought of a retort. "And if I do sing the Passover Yigdal instead of the New Year, have I not reason, seeing I have no bread in the house? With my salary I have Passover all the year round."