United States or Belgium ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"Hush, hush, my little Benjamin, don't cry," said Benjamin, and began to sing in his mothers jargon: "Sleep, little father, sleep, Thy father shall be a Rav, Thy mother shall bring little apples, Blessings on thy little head," Moses saw his dead Gittel lulling his boy to sleep. Blinded by his tears, he did not see that they were falling thick upon the little white face.
This Lent-keeping demoiselle the little Polish Jewess who had munched Passover cake at his table in the far-off happy days! This gilded idol the impecunious Gittel he had caressed! 'You ever seen this Yvonne Rupert? he inquired of his neighbour, a pock-marked, spectacled young woman, who, as record-breaker of the establishment, had refused to join the strike of the mere hundred-and-fifty a day.
Goldwater, Pinchas added zestfully. 'They say she has a Yiddish accent, Elkan ventured again. The table roared louder. 'I have heard of Yiddish-Deutsch, cried Pinchas, 'never of Yiddish-Français! Elkan Mandle was frozen. By his disappointment he knew that he had been hoping to meet Gittel again that his resentment was dead. But the hope would not die.
Misery had made him childish. Goldwater had, indeed, blossomed out since the days of his hired hall in Spitalfields, but his fame remained exclusively Yiddish and East-side. But Gittel! How could that obscure rush-light of the London Ghetto Theatre have blazed into the Star of Paris and New York?
Why not to Paris that her theatric gifts might receive training? This chic, this witchery, with which reputation credited her had not Gittel possessed it all? Had not her heroines enchanted the Ghetto? Oh, but this was a wild day-dream, insubstantial as the smoke-wreaths of the Yvonne Rupert cigar! But the obsession persisted.
In his miserable attic off Hester Street that recalled the attic he had found her in, though it was many stories nearer the sky he warmed himself with Gittel's image, smiling, light-darting, voluptuous. Night and sleep surrendered him to grotesque combinations Gittel Goldstein smoking cigarettes in a bath-room, Yvonne Rupert playing Yiddish heroines in a little chapel.
And despite all this glitter of imposing images a subconscious thought was forcing itself more and more clearly to the surface of his mind. That aureole of golden hair, those piquant dark eyes! The Yvonne the cheap illustrated papers had made him familiar with had lacked this revelation of colour! But no, the idea was insane! This scintillating celebrity his lost Gittel! Bah!
It was only when, at the age of sixteen, Gittel Goldstein left the whirring machine-room for the more lucrative and laurelled position of heroine of Goldwater's London Yiddish Theatre that he had discovered how this whimsical, coquettish creature had insinuated herself into his very being.
It means a commandment and a good deed, the two conceptions being regarded as interchangeable. "Nay, thou errest there," answered Moses. "'Gittel was not a phoenix which alone ate not of the Tree of Knowledge and lives for ever.
He was drenched to the skin with accumulated drippings ere a smart brougham drove up, a smart groom opened an umbrella, and a smart an unimaginably smart Gittel Goldstein alighted. Yes, the incredible was true! Beneath that coquettish veil, under the aureole of hair, gleamed the piquant eyes he had kissed so often. He remained petrified an instant, dazed and staring.
Word Of The Day