A Book of Great Worth Read Online Free Page A

where his family lived, leaving at thirteen, when his English was good enough, to work. Since then, he’d had a succession of minor jobs, delivering newspapers, selling papers on street corners, running errands at his father’s office, helping a milkman on his early morning delivery rounds, wielding a shovel on a crew repairing city streets, planting and tending trees in Central Park as part of an other city crew. For the last year or more he’d been em ployed as an apprentice silversmith for the famous Tiffany company but was feeling restless, wanting to better himself. As he told this, his cheeks suddenly reddened, for it occurred to him that Pearlman, a jeweller, might take offence, but if he had he didn’t betray it.
    My father didn’t say why he worked: so that Sam and his brother Henry, one year younger than him, could attend university, so that Ida could study to be a midwife, so that his brother Izzy, who was still in high school, could also go to college when his time came. Somehow, it had fallen to my father and his brother Nathan, one year older, to help provide for their siblings. Over this apparent injustice, he felt no bitterness. His own time, he was certain, would come.
    “And when you are not working?” Pearlman inquired. “In the evenings? You have friends, I suppose?”
    Friends, yes, my father said, and he also took night classes at the Arbiter Ring – the Workman’s Circle – and read everything he could get his hands on. And, he admitted, his cheeks suddenly reddening again, he often, on his own time, wrote stories and poems.
    Pearlman listened intently, and when my father came to an embarrassed halt, the jeweller made only this comment: “Your English is excellent.” Then he asked him to repeat what he’d said, as best he could, in Yiddish.
    This my father did, with no difficulty, since he was equally fluent in both languages. He also mentioned, though he wasn’t asked this, that he could speak Polish passably and had a smattering of German.
    “Ah,” Pearlman said with satisfaction. “And Hebrew?”
    Here my father had to admit he had knowledge of only a few words.
    “You were not bar mitzvah?” Pearlman asked with some surprise, perhaps because he knew my father had a brother who was a rabbi.
    “No,” my father said, with a mixture of self-consciousness and defiance.
    “So you won’t object to working on the Sabbath?”
    “Certainly not.”
    “This is very satisfactory,” Pearlman said.
    As my father was rising to go, Pearlman noticed the headline on the folded paper my father had placed on the chair beside him. He picked up the paper and quickly read the first few paragraphs.
    “This is terrible news,” he said gravely, “terrible. I’ve been afraid something like this might happen.” He looked at my father knowingly, but my father had only the vaguest understanding of the implications of the news.
    “Thank God, this will all seem very far away from Mohegan Lake,” Pearlman concluded, shaking my fa ther’s hand.
    Within a few days, my father was on a train upstate to Peekskill, where he was met at the station by Mrs. Pearlman, a tall, graceful woman in a brocaded dress, with the scent of lilacs clinging to her, and was driven in a magnificent four-door Dodge touring sedan to the Pearlman country home, at Mohegan Lake, a further distance of some fifteen miles. My father had ridden in streetcars, of course, but he’d never been in either a train or an automobile, let alone one driven by a woman, let alone a woman as enthralling as Mrs. Pearlman, and his head was spinning by the time they arrived at the estate, where a barking black and white sheepdog raced out to greet them. He was ushered through the front door of a large house sheltered by a ring of imposing oak trees.
    There he was introduced to Betty, a local woman who cooked and cleaned at the house, and the two children, Benjamin, who was seven, and Esther, who was five. They eagerly clambered around him, the boy