“Keep awake in the future,” he said as I was roughly bundled out of the court.
Keep awake! This is the worst advice he could have given me, for I was so happy asleep and dreaming that my brethren and sisters had reformed and had become real Jews for the sake of the race.
I now look upon my police court humiliation as the best thing that could have happened to me, for a kindly old Jewish scholar, who acted as court interpreter, was attracted by my appearance. His long contact with human misery and his great experience with foreigners stranded in a strange country enabled him to understand me.
That night he took me to his poverty-stricken little room behind a delicatessen shop in the Ghetto. After supper he went to the street door and called the neighbors from their stoops. He called them by their first names and I said kaddish for my father as they stood around among the pickle barrels.
Since then I have lived among Jews, real Jews. I have learned that beneath the ragged coat of a push-cart vender there may beat a heart of gold, and that a poor seller of collar buttons or suspenders may be a student of the Talmud with a mind that is a gift of the gods.
Leaving the seething, modern, fashionable life of upper Broadway to enter the religious atmosphere of the numerous schools of Jewish literature on the East Side entails a violent contrast in conditions.
To see the deeply furrowed, time-scarred faces of the grand old men pouring over their beloved Talmud is to get a glimpse of another world—a world of resignation, peace and love.