I found him a charming companion and soon in a cozy corner of the smoking room we became fast friends and I tried to win him over to think better of our people.
“I would like to hear your opinion of your fellow Jew after you have spent, say, twelve months in America,” he said.
Since then I have walked the length and breadth of the great cities of America, and my very soul has cried out to my fellow Jew: “Suppress Thyself!” The day I arrived in New York I learned that my dearest friend, my father, had passed away, and naturally my first thought was to say the kaddish, a prayer of the Jewish liturgy recited by orphans for the welfare of the souls of their deceased parents, somewhat after the fashion of the Catholic mass. Every male of Jewish blood at some time of his life recites this beautiful prayer. It does not matter how far one strays from the fold or how much one has denied the faith, there comes a time when the Jew in him asserts itself and he says the kaddish.
Public prayer among Jews can be recited only in the presence of ten males above the age of religious maturity, and this assembly is called minyan. Surely in this great city I would easily find a minyan, I thought; so I followed the line of least resistance, like any stranger in a strange land, and sought out the Jewish names best known to the public. I called at a business house uptown with the name of a great Hebrew over the door. He was the great man of whom I read with such pride in the little mining town at the other end of the world. Yes! The same Jewish face depicted in the huge photograph in the lobby I had seen in the magazine I had hugged so lovingly at home.
I made my way, full of hope, to his office and was asked by a doorkeeper my mission. I explained—the doorkeeper was a Hebrew—that I desired to say kaddish for my father and that I wanted to form a minyan. With a sly wink he passed me on to several Hebrew clerks and office boys, each