Aug***
ca*xdia* j*wYsk review
Genendel the Pious
All ideas are relative, not alone in the world at large but "also in the Gass. But in the Gass, one is more definite. Oae does not say of a man vaguely: "He is rich," and leave you distractedly guessing how much1 it is that he has got.
No, one says "a solider Bal-bos"; thea you may know that his income is about three hundred gulden. When one says "a ganger Rothschild," it is perhaps six hundred. But when one throws out or>e's hands, purses trp one's Hps, and rolling one's eyes heavenward, cries: "Pm, a Chotzeri!" vou mav know that he has at least a thousand a year.
plateau
DR. MARCUS STAR
SURGEON-DENTIST
35S1 Park Ar�na�, Montreal
coa. rxiwcE asthu* st.
^wd ntnuo, l.j. fl, b.cl, phone:
mjcw c/eeDbktt. bjl, aCX. uac***ru07
NEUMANN & 6REENBLATT
ADVOCATES
St ]uat� bid* 277 St. cadmrm Street West
Ladies Classic Shop
Protect your boJth by wearbf abdominal wpportl Come to see u�I Do not deUyl
call for appointment
Mde. A. COURVAL
b�ulr 7824 4233 st. l*wrenc� bird.
dr. a. d. tessier
city audoiman
surgeon doctor
ihaiuzm m tmm� mutum
o-ECTmC trsatkckti 1b17 rosemount avc calumet 2045
Dr. Fern and Jatras, ldjs.
dental surgeon x-hay
1SI7 Ro^Mt BM. . Nw
1 'nuiti qj47
sol WEBER, BJL, LLM.
ADVOCATE
10 St. j/uassr.
And as to his material, so as to his spiritual estate, they leave you riot in doubt. When a person is reasonably pious, one says of him, he is a Zaddik. When he persistently refuses to take from a Gentile a cup of coffee�even without milk�one says a Chas-sid. But when his piety reaches its utmost bounds, leaps over and runs wild, one says "a whole Genendel"; for Genendel had become a proverb in the Gass.
She was so pious that even frumm Loebele said:
"Would that mine were but a little piece of Genendel's portion of Gan Eden (Paradise)."
There was not a fast nor a feast, not a holiday nor half-holiday, not a law nor an ordinance nor an inspected law or ordinance that Genendel did not keep, but Synagogue-going was her strongest point..
There might have been women in the Gass w'ho approached her in this, but to equal her there was none.
So firmly established was her synagogue-going, that when she suddenly left it off, the Gass for a while quite lost its equilibrium, and before it regained its balance Yainkele, Eisak Schulklopfer's, had got a terrible dose of Makkes; but how this happened shall be narrated later. First of Genendel this: spiritually she represented the very essence of beauty, but the visible part of her was just a dried-up little mother with a wizened face, stoop-shoulders and a scheitel. Further, a bundle� large, bulky and squarish�which contained her old prayer-book, carefully screened from profane eyes and sheltered from the weather by the white cloth into which it was devotedly knotted. The rest, a long thread-bare shawl and a headkerchief which had once glowed grandly with a border of pink and purple acorns, but whose frayed edges had been so often trimmed and hemmed again, that it now was but a black wisp, whose short ends fluttered limply in the wind, and let all the cruel snowflakes sting Genendel's neck.
Genendel was very poor. Even the Gass admitted this; and when one is poor in the Gass, one is most woefully poor. Also she was proud; at any rate so the Gass thought, for she kept to herself and let no one pry into her affairs, and when in her bitterest days one asked sympathetically "How goes it, Genendel?" she did not wail, "Wai, mir," but set her lips, and answered curtly, "Nu, it goes," which, translated into clear language, means, "Mind thine own tffeirf,"
CLEANERS *ad DYERS
IT PAYS IN THE LONG RUN TO PHONE THE TOCLET. YOU GET THE UTMOST IN SATISFACTORY RESULTS.
TOILET LAUNDRIES
LIMITED
She lived in a single smalt room, and she lived quite alone, for her only son�the last of six�had gone to America, and there, in the wicked New World, he had forgotten his old mother. But Genendel never complained. At least, no one ever heard her. It may be that she complained to God, for she went to shool twice every day. This, as everyone knows, is not even proper^ for a woman; but still Genendel did it. And there in a corner of the women's gallery she prayed out of her old black Siddur; and sometimes, when the cold had been most cruelly bitter and her soup most pitifully thin, slow tears would drop upon the yellow pages of the book.
And now comes the tale of how Eisak Schulklopfer's Yainkele got his dose of Makkes�for once in
his Life quite unjustly. It happened in this wise.
One Sunday morning Yainkele lay even later than usual abed, and though his mother had twice called: "Out with thee lazybones�thou'lt be late for school!" he did not budge.
"'Tis not time yet," said Yainkele, at length.
"How dost know?"
"Genendel has not gone to shool yet;" for Genendel was Yainkele's clock, and he had his eyes on the synagogue door. So when Yainkele arrived at the Cheder a full hour late, Reb Itzig Melamed began to beat him soundly, nor did he desist when Yainkele roared:
"Can I help it? Genendel did not go to shool to-day."
"What?" cried Reb Itzig. "Art dreaming?�art still asleep?