The Imported Bridegroom | Page 3

two bakeries, and some real estate, he had been too busy to
live, much less to think of death. He had never been seen at the
synagogue on weekdays; and on the Sabbath, when, enveloped in his
praying-shawl, he occupied a seat at the East Wall, he would pass the
time drowsing serenely and nodding unconscious approval of the
cantor's florid improvisations, or struggling to keep flour out of his
mind, where it clung as pertinaciously as it did to his long Sabbath
coat.
The first sermon that failed to lull him to sleep was delivered by a
newly landed preacher, just after Asriel had found it more profitable to

convert his entire property into real estate. The newcomer dwelt,
among other things, upon the fate of the wicked after death and upon
their forfeited share in the World to Come. As Asriel listened to the
fiery exhortation it suddenly burst upon him that he was very old and
very wicked. "I am as full of sins as a watermelon is of seeds," he said
to himself, on coming out of the synagogue. "You may receive notice
to move at any time, Asriel. And where is your baggage? Got anything
to take along to the other world, as the preacher said, hey?"
Alas! he had been so taken up with earthly title deeds that he had given
but little thought to such deeds as would entitle him to a "share in the
World-to-Come"; and while his valuable papers lay secure between the
fireproof walls of his iron safe, his soul was left utterly exposed to the
flames of Sheol.
Then it was that he grew a pair of bushy sidelocks, ceased trimming his
twin goatees, and, with his heart divided between yearning after the
business he had sold and worrying over his sins, spent a considerable
part of his unlimited leisure reading psalms.
What a delight it was to wind off chapter after chapter! And how
smoothly it now came off, in his father's (peace upon him!) singsong,
of which he had not even thought for more than thirty years, but which
suddenly came pouring out of his throat, together with the first verse he
chanted! Not that Asriel Stroon could have told you the meaning of
what he was so zestfully intoning, for in his boyhood he had scarcely
gone through the Pentateuch when he was set to work by his father's
side, at flax heckling. But then the very sounds of the words and the
hereditary intonation, added to the consciousness that it was psalms he
was reciting, "made every line melt like sugar in his mouth," as he once
described it to the devout housekeeper.
He grew more pious and exalted every day, and by degrees fell prey to
a feeling to which he had been a stranger for more than three decades.
Asriel Stroon grew homesick.
It was thirty-five years since he had left his birthplace; thirty years or

more since, in the whirl of his American successes, he had lost all
interest in it. Yet now, in the fifty-eighth year of his life, he suddenly
began to yearn and pine for it.
Was it the fervor of his religious awakening which resoldered the
long-broken link? At all events, numerous as were the examples of
piety within the range of his American acquaintance, his notion of
genuine Judaism was somehow inseparably associated with Pravly.
During all the years of his life in New York he had retained a vague but
deep-rooted feeling that American piety was as tasteless an article as
American cucumbers and American fish--the only things in which his
ecstasy over the adopted country admitted its hopeless inferiority to his
native town.

III
On a serene afternoon in May, Asriel drove up to Pravly in a peasant's
wagon. He sat listlessly gazing at the unbroken line of wattle-fences
and running an imaginary stick along the endless zigzag of their tops.
The activity of his senses seemed suspended.
Presently a whiff of May aroma awakened his eye to a many-colored
waving expanse, and his ear to the languorous whisper of birds. He
recognized the plushy clover knobs in the vast array of placid
magnificence, and the dandelions and the golden buttercups, although
his poor mother tongue could not afford a special name for each flower,
and he now addressed them collectively as tzatzkes--a word he had not
used for thirty-five years. He looked at the tzatzkes, as they were
swaying thoughtfully hither and thither, and it somehow seemed to him
that it was not the birds but the clover blossoms which did the chirping.
The whole scene appealed to his soul as a nodding, murmuring
congregation engrossed in the solemnity of worship. He felt as though
there were no such flowers in America, and that he