"I have no money, and they must do their English lessons. Else, perhaps, their clothes will be stopped. Besides, I teach them myself every _Shabbos_ afternoon and Sunday. Solomon translates into Yiddish the whole Pentateuch with Rashi."
"Yes, he may know _Térah_" said Malka, not to be baffled. "But he'll never know _Gemorah_ or _Mishnayis_." Malka herself knew very little of these abstruse subjects beyond their names, and the fact that they were studied out of minutely-printed folios by men of extreme sanctity.
"He knows a little _Gemorah_, too," said Moses. "I can't teach him at home because I haven't got a _Gemorah_,--it's so expensive, as you know. But he went with me to the _Beth-Medrash_, when the _Maggid_ was studying it with a class free of charge, and we learnt the whole of the _Tractate Niddah_. Solomon understands very well all about the Divorce Laws, and he could adjudicate on the duties of women to their husbands."
"Ah, but he'll never know _Cabbulah_," said Malka, driven to her last citadel. "But then no one in England can study _Cabbulah_ since the days of Rabbi Falk (the memory of the righteous for a blessing) any more than a born Englishman can learn Talmud. There's something in the air that prevents it. In my town there was a Rabbi who could do _Cabbulah_; he could call Abraham our father from the grave. But in this pig-eating country no one can be holy enough for the Name, blessed be It, to grant him the privilege. I don't believe the _Shochetim_ kill the animals properly; the statutes are violated; even pious people eat _tripha_ cheese and butter. I don't say thou dost, Méshe, but thou lettest thy children."
"Well, your own butter is not _kosher_," said Moses, nettled.
"My butter? What does it matter about my butter? I never set up for a purist. I don't come of a family of Rabbonim. I'm only a business woman. It's the _froom_ people that I complain of; the people who ought to set an example, and are lowering the standard of _Froomkeit_. I caught a beadle's wife the other day washing her meat and butter plates in the same bowl of water. In time they will be frying steaks in butter, and they will end by eating _tripha_ meat out of butter plates, and the judgment of God will come. But what is become of thine apple? Thou hast not gorged it already?" Moses nervously pointed to his trousers pocket, bulged out by the mutilated globe. After his first ravenous bite Moses had bethought himself of his responsibilities.