They hung their heads despondently, and kept silent, too. Then
father asked me once more:
"Married a Gentile? Has children?" I still kept silent. My old
mother wept silently. My heart melted within me, but I braced
myself up and kept silent. I felt as if a lump in my throat was
choking me, but I swallowed it. I heard mother talking to herself:
"O Master of the Universe, Father who art in Heaven, Thou Merciful
and Righteous!" . . . . As she said it, she shook her head, as if
accepting God's verdict and complaining at the same time.
The old man stood up, his beard a-quiver. His hand shook nervously,
and he said in a tone of dry, cold despair:
"Ett. . . . Blessed be the righteous Judge!" as though I had told
him the news of his son's death. With that he took out a pocket
knife, and wanted to make the "mourning cut." At that moment my ear
caught the sound of the heartrending singsong of the Psalms. The
voice was old and tremulous. It was an old man, evidently a lodger,
who was reading his Psalter in an adjoining room:
"For the Lord knoweth the path of the righteous. . . ."
The memories of the long past overtook me, and I told my parents who
I was. . . . .
And yet--continued Samuel after some thought--and yet they were not
at peace, fearing I had deceived them. And they never rested till
they got me married to my Rebekah, "according to the laws of Moses
and Israel."
Well, two years passed after my wedding, and troubles began; I got a
toothache, may you be spared the pain! That is the way of the Jew:
no sooner does he wed a woman and beget children, than all kinds of
ills come upon him.
Some one told me, there was a nurse at the city hospital who knew
how to treat aching teeth and all kinds of ills better than a
full-fledged doctor.