Life takes a long time to pass. But without changing our
bitter, brutal faces we bow this afternoon, madam, to the memory of you.
We paid four bits to see you. Our Lady of Jokes, and in this cold, sunless
street we grin, we smirk, we leer a salutation to your photograph and the
phrase beneath it that laughs mockingly back at us--Oh, Dancing Venus!
MISHKIN'S MINYON
We were discussing vacations and Sammy, who is eleven years old going on
twelve, listened nervously to his father. Finally Sammy spoke up:
"I won't go," he bristled. "No, I won't if I gotta tell the conductor I'm
under five. I ain't going."
Sammy's father coughed with some embarrassment.
"Sha!" said Feodor Mishkin, removing his attention from the bowl of fruit,
"I see it takes more than naturalization papers to change a
_landsmann_ from Kremetchuk." And he fastened a humorous eye upon
Sammy's father.
"It's like this," continued the Falstaffian one from Roosevelt Road: "In
Russia where my friend here, Hershela comes from, that is in Russia of the
good old days where there were pogroms and ghettos and _provocateurs_--ah,
I grow homesick for that old Russia sometimes--the Jews were not always so
honest as they might be.
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