The Imported Bridegroom | Page 8

addressed him in a voice trembling and funereal with old age. "Obey
me, my son, ascend the platform, and offer the congregation a public
apology. The Holy One--blessed be He will help you."
The rabbi's appeal moved Asriel to tears, and tingling with devout
humility he was presently on the platform, speaking in his blunt, gruff
way.
"Do not take it hard, my rabbis! I meant no offense to any one, though
there was a trick--as big as a fat bull. Still, I donate two hundred rubles,
and let the cantor recite 'God full of Mercy' for the souls of my father
and mother--peace upon them."
It was quite a novel way of announcing one's contribution, and the
manner of his apology, too, had at once an amusing and a scandalizing
effect upon the worshipers, but the sum took their breath away and
silenced all hostile sentiment.
The reading over, and the scrolls restored, amid a tumultuous acclaim,
to the Holy Ark, the cantor resumed his place at the Omud, chanting a
hurried Half-Kaddish. "And say ye Amen!" he concluded abruptly, as if
startled, together with his listeners, into sudden silence.
Nodding or shaking their heads, or swaying their forms to and fro,
some, perhaps mechanically, others with composed reverence, still
others in a convulsion of religious fervor, the two or three hundred men
were joined in whispering chorus, offering the solemn prayer of
Mussaff. Here and there a sigh made itself heard amid the monotony of
speechless, gesticulating ardor; a pair of fingers snapped in an outburst
of ecstasy, a sob broke from some corner, or a lugubrious murmur from
the women s room. The prodigy, his eyes shut, and his countenance
stern with unfeigned rapture, was violently working his lips as if to
make up for the sounds of the words which they dared not utter. Asriel
was shaking and tossing about. His face was distorted with the piteous,
reproachful mien of a neglected child about to burst into tears, his twin
imperials dancing plaintively to his whispered intonations. He knew not
what his lips said, but he did know that his soul was pouring itself forth

before Heaven, and that his heart might break unless he gave way to his
restrained sobs.
At last the silent devotions were at an end. One after another the
worshipers retreated, each three paces from his post. Only three men
were still absorbed in the sanctity of the great prayer: the rabbi, for
whom the cantor was respectfully waiting with the next chant, Reb
Lippe, who would not "retreat" sooner than the rabbi, and Asriel, who,
in his frenzy of zeal, was repeating the same benediction for the fifth
time.
When Asriel issued forth from the synagogue he found Pravly
completely changed. It was as if, while he was praying and battling, the
little town had undergone a trivializing process. All the poetry of
thirty-five years' separation had fled from it, leaving a heap of beggarly
squalor. He felt as though he had never been away from the place, and
were tired to death of it, and at the same time his heart was contracted
with homesickness for America. The only interest the town now had for
him was that of a medium to be filled with the rays of his financial
triumph. "I'll show them who they are and who Asriel is," he comforted
himself.
The afternoon service was preceded by a sermon. The "town preacher"
took his text, as usual, from the passage in the "Five Books" which had
been read in the morning. But he contrived to make it the basis of an
allusion to the all-absorbing topic of gossip. Citing the Talmud and the
commentaries with ostentatious profuseness, he laid particular stress on
the good deed of procuring a scholar of sacred lore for one's
son-in-law.
"It is a well-known saying in tractate Psohim," he said, "that one should
be ready to sell his all in order to marry his daughter to a scholar.' On
the other hand, 'to give your daughter in marriage to a boor is like
giving her to a lion.' Again, in tractate Berochath we learn that 'to give
shelter to a scholar bent upon sacred studies, and to sustain him from
your estates, is like offering sacrifices to God'; and 'to give wine to such
a student is, according to a passage in tractate Sota, 'tantamount to
pouring it out on an altar.'"

Glances converged on Reb Lippe and the prodigy by his side.
Proceeding with his argument, the learned preacher, by an ingenious
chain of quotations and arithmetical operations upon the numerical
value of letters, arrived at the inference that compliance with the above
teachings was one of the necessary conditions of securing a place in the
Garden of Eden.
All of which