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Enough that I know four European languages, German, French, English, and Italian, not to mention Polish, Ukrainian and Yiddish. But shall I show you some more experiments, Mr. Chairman?" The chairman looked at his watch. "Unfortunately the time is too short," he said. "Wouldn't it be better to pass on to the substance of your business?
I faithfully studied the portion assigned in Hebrew, but I need no longer wait for the next lesson to know how the story ends. I could read while daylight lasted, if I chose, in the Yiddish. Well I remember that Pentateuch, a middling thick octavo volume, in a crumbly sort of leather cover; and how the book opened of itself at certain places, where there were pictures.
She could write and speak fluently French, Italian, Arabic, and Portuguese. German she knew also, though not so well, and she had more than a smattering of Yiddish. She was a brilliant talker, full of wit and charm in her conversation, and there was nothing she liked better than to relate, in her inimitable way, some of her many adventures in the past.
Joe, the plump, dark fellow who was teaching me the trade, was one of the several men in the shop who were addicted to salacious banter. One of his favorite pranks was to burlesque some synagogue chant from the solemn service of the Days of Awe, with disgustingly coarse Yiddish in place of the Hebrew of the prayer. But he was not a bad fellow, by any means.
Is there an unholy spirit that cannot be found there? Z-z-z- a sudden sizzling whisper reached my ear, and I began to cry. "Why don't you sleep?" asked the shepherd boy in his broken Yiddish. "I am afraid!" "What are you afraid of?" "Of of the woods . . . ." "Ha ha ha I have good dogs with the flock!"
Rubie complied, reading the text and interpreting it in Yiddish precisely as I should have done when I was eleven years old. He even gesticulated and swayed backward and forward as I used to do. To complete the picture, his mother, watching him, beamed as my mother used to do when she watched me reading at the Preacher's Synagogue or at home in our wretched basement. I was deeply affected
She laughed heartily over her onomatopoetic addition to the Yiddish vocabulary, screwing up her nose to give it due effect. She was a small sickly-looking woman, with black eyes, and shrivelled skin, and the wig without which no virtuous wife is complete. For a married woman must sacrifice her tresses on the altar of home, lest she snare other men with such sensuous baits.
Chajim, the father, "Chajim" is the Yiddish of "Herman," was long at the shop. To Abe was committed the care of his two young brothers, Isaac and Jacob. Abraham was nine, and past time for fooling. Play is "fooling" in the sweaters' tenements, and the muddling of ideas makes trouble, later on, to which the police returns have the index.
He held out the two cards to the stranger, who took them from him, and looked at them with scowling curiosity. "This one is Yiddish," said he, raising his right hand, "and this other is Russian, not Greek." He held out the two cards to Thorndyke, who took them from him, holding them carefully by the edges as before.
The child had not been at school many weeks when she began to show signs of estrangement from her mother-tongue. Her Yiddish was rapidly becoming clogged with queer-sounding "r's" and with quaintly twisted idioms. Yiddish words came less and less readily to her tongue, and the tendency to replace them with their English equivalents grew in persistence.
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