United States or Afghanistan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
To insure secrecy I was to give him his lessons in my attic room "I don't want my kids to know their pa is learning like a little boy, don't you know," he explained. "American kids have not much respect for their fathers, anyhow." As a preliminary to his initial lesson Nodelman offered to show me what he could do.
It was quite a laborious proceeding, and his first attempt was a fizzle, for he reached the end of the paper before he finished the "in" in Nodelman. He tried again, and this time he was successful, but it was three minutes before the task was completed. It left him panting and wiping his ink-stained fingers on his hair
"I see," Huntington said, with a queer stare at me "Besides, our people content themselves with small profits," I pursued. "We are modest." Here I plagiarized an epigram I had heard from Meyer Nodelman: "Our German co-religionists will spend their money before they have made it, while we try to make it first." I expected Huntington to smile, but he did not.
My friend desisted, sheepishly "He does seem to be afraid of his American household," I said to myself After the meal, when we were all in the parlor again, Nodelman said to his wife, winking at me: "Poor fellow, his patience has all given out. He wants to know about the girl you've got for him. He has no strength any longer. Can't you see it, Bella? Look at him! Look at him!
There is something I want to ask you." "What is it, Mr. Nodelman?" "How about your studying to be a doctor-philosopher?" he asked, archly "Oh, well, one can attend to business and find time for books, too," I answered I came away in a new transport of expectations and in a new agony of despair at once. On the whole, however, my spirits were greatly buoyed up.
The prospect of facing a girl who offered herself as a candidate for becoming my wife put me all in a flutter. It took me a long time to dress and I made my appearance at the Nodelmans' rather late in the evening. Mrs. Nodelman, who met me in the hall, offered me a tempestuous welcome "Here he is! Better late than never," she shrieked, hoarsely, as I entered the hall at the head of the high stoop.
She had a hoarse voice, and altogether she might have given me the impression of being drunk had there not been something pleasing in her hoarseness as well as in that droll face of hers. That she was American-born was clear from the way she spoke her unpolished English. Was Nodelman the henpecked husband that his mother advertised him to be?
It came to be tacitly understood that the library was to be left to the former, while the dining-room, in the basement, was used as Tevkin's office. Being "a friend of the family," I had the freedom of both "You're making a big mistake, Levinsky," Nodelman once said to me, with a gesture of deep concern. "What is biting you? Aren't you making money fast enough?
The scene was largely a stereotyped copy of the one I had witnessed upon my first call at the Margolises' Sidney scowled "Come on, Sidney, be a good boy," Nodelman urged, taking him by the sleeve "Let me alone," Sidney snarled, breaking away and striking the air a fierce backward blow with his elbow "What do you want of him?" Mrs. Nodelman said to her husband, frigidly
"Unreal estate," I would call it. My friend Nodelman was of the same opinion. "It's a poker game traveling under a false passport," was his way of putting it. Once, as I sat in a Brooklyn street-car, I was accosted by a bewigged woman who occupied the next seat and whom I had never seen before "You speak Yiddish, don't you?" she began, after scrutinizing me quite unceremoniously "I do. Why?"
Word Of The Day