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The guests had retired to their homes. The children had been blessed and sent to bed. The parents throughout the quarter, having discussed the one topic of the day, Mendel's bar-mitzvah, had extinguished their candles and sought their pillows, preparatory to again venturing forth into a cold and inhospitable world in search of their meagre subsistence.
Only in the centre of the table towered in awful intact majesty the great Bar-mitzvah cake, like some mighty sphinx of stone surveying the ruins of empires, and the least reverent shrank before its austere gaze. But at last the Shalotten Shammos shook off his awe and stretched out his hand leisurely towards the cake, as became the master of ceremonies.
Mendel having attained his thirteenth year and acquired due proficiency in the difficult studies of the Jewish law, would become bar-mitzvah; in other words, he would take upon himself the responsibility of a man before God and the world, and acknowledge his readiness to act and suffer for the maintenance of the belief in Adonai Echod the only God.
The second school-room was for the more advanced pupils, who had for the most part passed their bar-mitzvah and now revelled in the mystic lore of the Talmud. On rough wooden desks, whose surfaces had been engraved by unskilled hands, huge folios lay open. At the upper end of the room sat the Rabbi, on whose head the frosts of sixty winters had left their traces.
"One of them Gideon, M.P., the stockbroker, engaged me to teach his son for his Bar-mitzvah, But the boy is so stupid! So stupid! Just like his father. I have no doubt he will grow up to be a Rabbi. I teach him his Portion I sing the words to him with a most beautiful voice, but he has as much ear as soul.
Still, at any cost, he had determined not to miss so important an event as his nephew's bar-mitzvah. The bread having been broken, the supper was proceeded with. The fish was succulent and the cake delicious. A lofty and religious Sabbath sentiment enhanced the charm of the whole meal.
"Jacob, my brother," he cried again; "do you not remember me, Mendel? Do you not remember our home in Togarog? Do you not recollect how we were both stolen away from home on the night of my bar-mitzvah; how we were taken to Kharkov by the soldiers, and how we escaped and fled into the country?
Moses turned again to his eldest born, feeling that he was secondary in importance only to the Maggid, and proud at heart of his genteel English appearance. "Well, you'll soon be Bar-mitzvah, Benjamin." he said, with clumsy geniality blent with respect, as he patted his boy's cheeks with his discolored fingers. Benjamin caught the last two words and nodded his head.
The Maggid felt so grateful he was almost ashamed to ask whether he could eat kosher there, but the Shalotten Shammos, who had the air of a tall encyclopaedia, set his soul at rest on all points. The day of Ebenezer Sugarman's Bar-mitzvah duly arrived. All his sins would henceforth be on his own head and everybody rejoiced.
It was long since there had been a bar-mitzvah in Togarog, and Israelites came from all the villages in the vicinity to witness the happy event. Happy appeared the mothers in the reflection that their sons, too, would some day be admitted to the holy rite. Like a finished scholar did Mendel recite his sidrah, that portion of the Torah or Law which was appropriate to the day.
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