When a rich Jew chooses to die in the middle of the summer with the rabbi away on vacation, when this final discourtesy crowns a whole career of estrangement from the Jewish community, and when the local church, to which the dead man had vaguely assimilated himself, suggests delicately that his bones might rest more easily in the Jewish cemetery—then you’ve got problems. This is the third of S. T. Hecht’s explorations of the manners and mores of the Jews of “Reedville”; his earlier pieces were: “Seven Men in Search of a Rabbi” (June 1952) and “Mr. Big Moves to Greener Pastures” (September 1952).

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When Jake Hammer died he sure made us trouble. Naturally, you’ll ask how could Jake make trouble if he was dead? That’s precisely the point.

Among our Jewish people, it appears, you shouldn’t die in the summer, not if you don’t want to make trouble. I was talking to Morris Teitelbaum from Newark, where they have shuls by the dozen and some even with two rabbis; but over there too, it seems, they’ve got the same sort of tsores. Of course when a poor man dies in the summer, the assistant rabbi takes over. But if one of the bigwigs, a Barney Rossman, heaven forbid, passes on and the senior rabbi, naturally, is away on vacation, God knows where—then you’ll hear about it, I promise you. And so will the rabbi—on his return.

“How am I to know?” he will try to defend himself.

“For fifteen thousand a year,” the cheeky one on the Board will tell him, “you are supposed to know!”

Compute the risks then of dying during the summer in a little burg with only one rabbi, then multiply by two for a shtetl like Reedville, N. J., where the best we can afford is a part-time rabbi. Plainly, in the summer is altogether a bad time for Jews to be dying. But there is something even worse, hazard unimaginable, so to speak, and that is to pass away during a summer weekend. In Reedville it’s like dropping dead in a desert.

Just exactly when is a good time for Jews or anyone else to die, you can’t ever be really sure. It’s one of those things you put off as long as possible, like paying your shul dues and pledges. As for which day of the week is best, some say Friday night; some say Saturday. Those in the know maintain that during Yom Kippur is the ne plus ultra of all occasions, especially after Kol Nidre. Not only is this the high dramatic moment in the whole Jewish religious calendar—it’ll prove, besides, that at heart you were truly a saint, the slander and backbiting of your fellow committee members to the contrary notwithstanding.

Somebody told me a story—while I’m on this subject of dying—and of course I can’t be held for its authenticity, but I’ll tell it to prove why der Ribono Shel Olom never lets us have advance notification, like the old-time landlord, that we must move; or why He even as much as doesn’t ask us if we’re ready to make the great leap. Quietly, deceitfully, comes the Malechhamoves—the Angel of Death. Forefinger in slow motion, he whispers, “Come along, brother!” and that’s that! Which reminds me of my grandmother who was raised in Poland in a small village where all sorts of old wives’ tales went the rounds from generation to generation. She had been given a full description of the Angel of Death so she might know him when he came, as if that mattered. What matters is, that disguise yourself as you please, he somehow or other always knows you.

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My Grandma, Chaye Sarah, was prepared, as all pious Jews should be, with the full meaning of her Hebrew names so she’d be all set to answer when they asked her about them as she lay in her grave. If you couldn’t—brother, you just lie there, neshome and all, body and soul, hearing the wind, the rain trickling through, hearing the joy of released souls who knew the meaning of their names, while ay, ay, ay! Oyf alle reshoim gezogt. Let all sinners molder thus! One night, still a girl, my grandma was startled from her sleep. Seeing a dark figure in motion across the room, she screamed “Shema Yisroel!”—but it was only her father crossing the earthen floor toward the pan that reposed smack in the middle of the sleeping room.

The story I meant to tell you—not about Jake Hammer yet—concerns a man in Glogov, where my people come from, and, oyf alle Yiden gezogt—may we all be equally blessed—who attained to the unbelievable age of one hundred and fifty. One couldn’t say that he never had been ill. He suffered all the frailties and diseases common to mankind, but somehow he always recovered. Even the doctors from the big city were perplexed. “How is it possible?” they marveled. But the old man refused to enlighten them. However, the Glogover rabbi, one Saturday afternoon with his Hasidim in the Besmedrash, revealed to them the secret in just above a whisper. The Angel of Death, says he, was never known to snuff out the light in a Jewish soul while at prayer. “If you feel yourself slipping,” confided this saintly character, “just keep on reciting the Psalms.” Unfortunately it’s not the fashion any longer among our Jews to repeat the Psalms, but it may serve to explain why in my father’s kleysel on Ridge Street you always saw the oldsters doing nothing else. Day and night, in their yarmelkes, right hands supporting their furrowed brows, their beards in steady rhythm, heads gently in motion, they sat by the hour, and over and over in the holy tongue, I can still hear them reciting Tillim.

I guess that was the trouble with Jake Hammer. He didn’t know the Psalms.

To be sure, it wasn’t only the Psalms Jake Hammer was ignorant of. There were lots of other things about our Jewish religion and our way of life that he didn’t know. He was altogether mixed up. Don’t please say nebach! I implore you not to waste your sympathies on the guy. I’ve been told that one time he joined the Presbyterian Church in Reedville—right here mind you, in our own town! Jake Hammer was a fool and doesn’t merit under any circumstances the honest, innocent sympathies of a Jewish heart. Just why he joined and a few years later “unjoined” them, I’ve not found out. But I can guess. Honig hot er dort nit gelekt! Honey on his wafers they surely didn’t serve him. Even Greenspan, to whom I owe much of this tale, had none other than the usual explanation: hot gevolt antloyfen—he wanted to make his getaway. But where to?

“Mit Jake Hammer,” said Greenspan, “was very funny.”

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Jake died in a hot July, and almost instantly our community was set by the ears trying to decide if he was fit to be given a Jewish burial.

When he heard the news, Mr. Benny Itzkowitz—if you don’t remember him I can tell you that Mrs. Greenspan once confidentially told me he was a “pillow from the synagogue”—Itzkowitz at once declared outright: “Hammer ain’t no Jew!”

Now unless one adheres to the dictum that “Once an Englishman always an Englishman,” Jake Hammer really had a hard time qualifying as a Jew. Naturally, those who had eased up on their own observances championed Jake’s cause. But the Orthodox wanted none of him! And that’s where, as I said, Jake Hammer made us the trouble.

It was summer and our part-time rabbi, poor fellow, always had to take a job in one Jewish camp or another where, believe me, some kids get all the Jewishness they’ll ever have. Reedville in the summer, to all intents and purposes, returns to its early Christian purity, what with the Jews at the beaches or the mountains. The storekeepers, nebach, they remain behind and sweat it out. A minyan for Friday night the rabbi never gets even during winter, but during summer, if you’re unfortunate enough to have to say Kaddish, you’ll either go around collecting ten men by hand so to speak, or you’ve got to rise with the rooster and make the pilgrimage to Passaic where in a little basement,-my friend, you will find collected the aged worthies—sleep they can’t anyway—in tallis un tefilin, and if you’ve got an eye and just a fraction of a memory it’ll all come back to you.

“Ay, ay, ay,” you’ll be saying to yourself. “What am I doin’ here?” and the distance you’ve still got to travel back to your Judaism—you who have been believing you’re already returned—will become painfully plain. “Is this it?” you’ll ask yourself, like coming on a wife you deserted some twenty years ago; and the whole problem of Orthodoxy vs. Reform vs. nothing will smack you in the face while your body, out of habit, like in swimming, will assume the old rhythm. Your lips will speak the prayers. If you knew how to daven, it’ll come back to you. The sight of the Hebrew will singe you.

One man I knew—at just such a point as this—took flight. At his nephew’s Bar Mitzvah they were going to call him up to the Torah, and the thought of getting up there, taking the corner of the tallis, and touching the parchment, so ancient, so yellow, and bringing the tallis to his lips, revolted him. “Not me!” he cried and bolted out the door. But if you’re something like me, alack, you’ll say, “Kodesh, kodesh, kodesh—holy, holy, holy,” and rise three times to your toes, and you’ll back up a few steps toward the close of the Shmoyne Esrey and you’ll be wondering at yourself, at the pliability of the human soul as it is ricocheted against the close walls of the little kleysel in Passaic here, so early in the morning with Jews whom you never saw before. How wise of our rabbis to have instituted the saying of Kaddish for the dead for twelve months, and Yizkor four times a year.

How else would you remember them? It’s like singing Swanee River or Santa Lucia, the songs you heard and learned as a child in school. So with our prayers. . . . Take me back . . . and on your way back to Reedville, still early, on the train . . . take me back . . . take me back . . . you’ll be wondering maybe you’ve gone soft on all this old religious stuff, and then again, maybe you’ve not. . . . What else have you got that’s genuinely you? A Christian service? The Gregorian chants? Look it up! They swiped every bit of it, the goyim, kit and kaboodle. Like me, maybe you’ll go soft too, and you’ll even forgive your Reedville merchants for not wanting to get up six in the morning or to gather round you late at night after a day in the store, hot and steamy, after the cash is counted, the doors locked, the safe with an electric light burning for the night, and the burglar alarm ready to scream. After such a day why should they want to come and say Kaddish with you?

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Mrs. Hammer, I’ve been told, first called up the Presbyterian minister, but he quickly disabused her of her notions, not rudely if you please, but tactfully you understand, so she was able to put two and two together and realize for the first time in her namby-pamby neither-Jewish-nor-Christian existence, that not being baptized, her Jake wasn’t exactly kosher merchandise for a church burial. “It would be much more appropriate, Mrs. Hammer, if Mr. Hammer were interred as a Jew.” My mother would have said, “Noch’n toyt iz er goveren a Yid.” After his demise Jake became a Jew.

First indications were that nobody would take Jake—truly, A Man Without a Cemetery. We, officially Orthodox, not only lacked a rabbi to do the honors. There were those among us—plenty—who didn’t feel that Jake would exactly constitute an ornament to our Bes Oylem. His monument, to be sure, would be big enough. It would jut out in our modest cemetery, rise and declare itself like the Obelisk in Central Park. But during his life, I have been given to understand, he in no way identified himself with our people. I’ve also been told that he was ashamed of our Reedville Jews.

“Tell me!” Itzkowitz clamored. “Tell me from at least two mitzvahs what he done, and I’ll say is all right he shall lay in our cemetery.”

Behold zealotry forgetful of the goodness of God! Our father Abraham, pleading for the city of Sodom, might have saved it had he been able to produce one good man. Itzkowitz wanted two mitzvahs. Never had Hammer given a cent to Jewish charities, not until our veterans in the UJA Year of Destiny campaign flushed him from the thicket and somehow extracted twenty-five bucks from his hide. As “Colonel” Abe Klein remarked at the time: “A hor fun a chazer is oych gut.” Even a bristle from a pig is something gained.

Jake Hammer lived alone with his wife in a very nice white house in a very exclusive part of Reedville. His lawn was long and wide, and the house itself sat well back behind a wall of tall rhododendron. What he did with his wife alone there, none of us could figure out. A sort of mysterious character, whom the old-timers among our Jews in Reedville had long ago given up. He was reputed to have had some sort of business in New York, just what, nobody knows. By the time I arrived on the Reedville scene he was already retired, white-haired, quite dignified, walking once as I saw him when he was pointed out to me, with his large head, stooped shoulders, all alone on the lawn toward evening before the mosquitoes begin their nightly blood collection for their own boys in the service. Charlie Parker, one of my goyishe buddies, pointing him out, said, “Waxy, there goes one of your lost brethren,” and he gave me a fill-in on Jake Hammer. “You should try to bring him back to the tabernacle. Do him good!”

In His cellar Jake had a valuable collection of shaving mugs and tonsorial bottles which he kept in a showcase built for the purpose, with doors that locked to make it easy shipping to exhibitions. He also prided himself on his library of Americana over which he made a great to-do but never read. His ambition, as I have learned from sources other than Greenspan, was to make himself acceptable to the goyim. He gave to the Boy Scouts of America, to Father Flanagan’s Boys’ Town, to the Red Cross, and during his brief marriage to the Presbyterian Church he made more than tolerable contributions to the church itself, to their missions, and toward a fund for a new parish house they were hoping to erect. He must have once thought to buy his wav in.

After Jake Hammer’s death our Reedville library held quite an exhibition of his books. The Reedville Republican Sentinel reported the event in proper spirit, but never a word about his former flirtations with Presbyterianism. So he lived, quietly, mysteriously, a lonesome figure of a man who, as he aged, perhaps had felt he had made some blunders and that the best way out was to keep behind his trees and bushes. His one son, Michael, married a shiksa, of course, changed his name to Hammond, and through his wife succeeded where his father failed and was safely brought to Jesus. I’m not in the least interested in trying to make this a horrendous tale of a Jew and the “price he paid.” In a manner of speaking I feel very sorry for the poor devil, but what I cannot forgive him is the way he spent his money. Not that I’m especially indignant that he gave charity only to non-Jewish causes. Worse, I’m told that he would spend three hundred dollars for a lousy shaving mug, and you couldn’t even drink tea from it!

Mrs. Hammer was, I guess, the villain in the piece. She was devilishly eager to become a member of the Reedville Women’s Club, and as it’s said about a camel and the eye of a needle, that’s how much chance there ever has been for a Jewess to elbow herself into that outfit. My own home isn’t far from their club and I’ll have to allow it’s a darned nice-looking piece of real estate, but the dames I see rolling up to its doors, for my money you can put ’em in one barrel and make pickled snobs from the whole lot of ’em. Mrs. Adelaide Waller, who belongs to that choice group and whom my wife and I got to know by buying through Reedville’s Co-op, swears that the women are the stupidest lot of stuffed brassieres you ever saw in a mirror or elsewhere.

Mrs. Hammer, according to her, was under the delusion that Gentile social doors would fly open once she and Jake joined the fanciest church in town. “You know the pay-off,” Mrs. Waller said to us a year after Jake died. “The Women’s Club wanted to make some money. They read in the Sentinel about Jake’s having those shaving mugs and pretty bottles, so they wrote to Mrs. Hammer asking would she please lend them to be exhibited at the club for a charitable purpose. And the damn fool did it!” It must have been quite a come-down for her to discover that joining the church didn’t automatically bestow membership in the Women’s Club. Poor Mrs. Hammer!

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That July day Jake died—he said he was tired, went to lie down on a sofa, and poof! oys Jake. He was gone! Mrs. Hammer called Reverend Sutton whose hand she had shaken on Sundays as he stood in the shadowed and venerable entrance to our Presbyterian Church, and he, as I’ve said, had to let her down gently. Miserable critter! She thought she was through with us. Go tell her that hard as it is to be a Jew, it is even harder to quit being one. When you’re alive, brother, you can ramble as you darn please, but after you’re a goner, my boy, that’s when you come home again—like it or not.

“What am I to do?” she quavered. The doctor, of course, wrote the necessary certification, but that’s only the beginning. If you’ve been lucky enough thus far never to have to go through the agony of “arranging things,” let me advise you right off—join whatever is necessary, even our little Ahavath Israel, superior as you may feel to it. It pays.

Speaks now Mr. Greenspan in his own particular way: “Rings the telephone one morning when is very hot the weather, and says a voice from which I never before heard and is asking, ‘Is this Mr. Greenspan?’ I say yes, and is a voman’s voice which I still don’t recognize and is saying, ‘Mr. Greenspan, this is Mrs. Hammer.’ ‘What can I do, mam?’ I say, and she says, ‘Is dead Mr. Hammer.’ In a minute I remember, and I say how sorry I am from the sad news. Sad I wasn’t, but glad I wasn’t neither. After all, is a human being, why should I be glad he dies? True, he didn’t do us no good, but harm he didn’t do us neither. ‘I’m needing help,’ she says, and is crying the voman. Is a funny thing mit people, Mr. Waxman. For years they lives in a community and never pays a cent to a shul or church, but comes time when they needing it, they expecting shall be there. Is coming to them! Right now is in town lots of young Jews mit children which don’t pay nothing to the shul. Comes Yom Kippur they expecting seats which ain’t members and they don’t belonging to nothing. When grows up the boy needs to be Bar Mitzvah—step right in! But if we ain’t having everything nice and ready for them, they is getting mad, turning up the nose and saying ‘Such a dump!’ We needing to keep up a cemetery for them, mit a shul, mit a rabbi, mit a cantor for the Holidays, un alles oyf trombe—all for peanuts!”

Our Reedville Ahavath Israel cemetery committee consisted of one man, whom Greenspan called up at once.

“Is Jake Hammer dead,” he said to Leo Lifshitz.

“So what?” says Leo. “Is none of our business.”

“Mrs. Hammer wants we shall bury him.”

“Let her ask the priest from the Presbyterian Church.”

“Listen, Leo. Is not I’m saying you wrong. But the voman is needing help. She wants a Jewish burial.”

“Nu!” cried Leo. “Dí malachim tanzen in hitnel—the angels rejoice on high. For twenty years he never give a penny to nothing and now we should bury him. The chutzfah of the rich! He didn’t even buy no plot from us!”

Greenspan called Mrs. Hammer, explained that our rabbi was away on vacation—only a slight exaggeration—and incidentally informed her that we had no record of their ever having purchased a grave from us.

Her son, Michael, who had arrived by then, took over the telephone at this point and he asked Greenspan if there would be any objections to having his father removed to Finnegan’s Funeral Home.

“You do mit him as you like,” said Greenspan.

“Will a rabbi go there?”

Greenspan gave him the bitter truth. From a goyish funeral parlor no rabbi which has self-respect would walk in.

“Mine advice is you shall leave him where he is.”

“Will you get us a rabbi to take care of everything?”

Greenspan, good soul, said he would try.

“But a plot on the cemetery you must first buy from us!”

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News travels fast in Reedville. Within the hour our Jewish merchants on Main Street were either pro-Hammer or anti-Hammer. But there was one detail on which they all saw eye to eye: the price of the plot was to cover some twenty years’ dues to the synagogue, plus a rabbi’s fee of a hundred, plus incidentals such as the cost of a coffin, a gratuity to the Chevre Kedishe—the Holy Brotherhood, usually consisting of some poor old Jews—for who else wants to wash a dead body, pare the nails, and otherwise set up the deceased for a proper audience with the King of Kings? For a nice round sum of a thousand dollars, it was agreed we would bury Jake Hammer and take care of all the arrangements.

“That’s a holdup!” cried Michael Hammond to our Leo Lifshitz, who conveyed the message over the telephone.

“So don’t buy from us!” Leo replied. Michael got the drift.

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Finding a rabbi wasn’t easy.

Look high, look low. It’s summer. Greenspan wanted a Reform rabbi, believing that would be most appropriate, but these gentlemen, as if in a body, had gone on vacation. Who knows? Maybe there was a conference in Cincinnati.

Itzkowitz, standing by and seeing how hard it was to find a man, bleated, “Meyer, you gotta find somebody!”

What a thousand dollars can do is nobody’s business!

Speaking again Mr. Greenspan: “Mr. Waxman, I’m tellin’ you was a terrible hot day, and already was late. At last I’m finding an Orthodox rabbi from way over in Dover, a place I never seen but which, thank God, has Jews mít a shul, and this rabbi is saying over the telephone that from such kind Jews like I’m describing to him, he ain’t too happy to bury. So I say, ‘Look, rabbi. B’ris mile hot ex. He’s circumcised. A Jewish voman for a wife, he’s also got it.’ But right there I gotta stop. I should tell him yet that Jake and Yosele Pandre were pan bradt—that Jake and the Church had embraced each other? That, mine friend, Greenspan wouldn’t do for no money in the world. So I say, ‘Rabbi, you got right, and is right too on such things you should take care. In shul he never went. From kashrut he didn’t know. But he gave money to the UJA.’ Wasn’t a lie, was it, Mr. Waxman?”

Ah, that Mr. Greenspan, I’m sure he would have lied just the same for you, whoever you are, to get you a Jewish burial.

“Hollers the rabbi over the phone, ‘And from this you calling a Jew?’ So I plead, ‘Rabbi, we already digged the grave, and is a coffin in the house from pine and not a nail in it. The Chevre Kedishe, is right now there. Please, you must come!’

“At last,” continued Greenspan, while the store fan stirred the page of his Jewish Forward and we both sat, also on a warm day, quietly in the shadow of his lowered store awning and not a soul of a customer to disturb us. “At last he is saying yes. He is coming. Only must be done two things. Mr. Hammer is gotta be in tachrichim—a shroud—and must wear a tallis kot’n—a small praying shawl. A full-size tallis he wouldn’t have around such a Jew. Of course I’m thinking might be better we shall wrap Jake in an extra large tallis so maybe the Devil will not see him and so will pass straight into heaven and fool God.”

I interrupted to ask if that were possible.

“Got opnaren hen men takeh nit—God will not be deceived,” he replied. “But menshen—people—yes. If some of them Elks seen Jake in a full-size tallis, maybe would laugh, maybe would faint!”

“What Elks?”

“Don’t rush me,” says he, for he was a man to take his time with a story. “The minute I hang up the telephone from the rabbi, I hurry up and call Gittleson, which is already in Mrs. Hammer’s house and over there is already an argument between Mrs. Hammer—and who you think? Gittleson, of course!”

“In a full-dress suit,” argued our worthy shammes, “is umpossible we shall do it.”

“But, mister,” weeps the bereaved creature, still dreaming of glory among the goyim. “My husband’s brothers, the Elks, are coming.”

“So let come the Elks! Is no Jew in a fulldress suit going to our Bes Oylem.”

Michael Hammond stood apart from all this show of barbarity and superstition.

“Mother,” he whispers, “why can’t he be cremated?”

“No, no, Michael,” she whispers back.

“Bah!” declared Michael, and then and there reaffirmed his resolution for an unbarbaric burial. After all, in his own home did he not have the finest advanced objets d’art, a piece of black African sculpture, for example, and enlargements of Mayan temples?

“So is yes or no?” Gittleson shot his ultimatum. He didn’t fancy that whispering in his presence. Could be they was saying something about the Jews!

The rest of the Chevre Kedishe, afraid of their shadows in this rich man’s home, stood shy and timid, admiring our courageous but somewhat brazen shammes. If Barney Rossman couldn’t bulldoze him, what chance had an elegant goy like Michael Hammond?

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The Elks arrived. Gittleson and his two assistants retired into another room, and Jake, who had been quickly readied by one of Finnegan’s men, was exhibited to his brethren in proper attire. But the moment they left, in went Gittleson and renewed his arguments. The upshot was that Jake was taken out again, prepared according to Jewish ritual, and as a compromise, the boys laid him out once more in his full-dress suit, but on top of that they had slipped on his tachrichim and over that a tallis Gittleson had brought along. The old guy knew his business!

“Reminds me,” said Greenspan, “of a story from Chelm. Was a man in Chelm and even he was rich, still he was a fool. He was so much wanting to show off, he is even wearing gold shoes. When was nice the weather, was all right, but in bad weather, in a small town which the streets isn’t paved, is a blotte—mud, when it rains, and the rich man he don’t like should be dirty the shoes. Still, he is wanting everybody shall see his gold shoes, even when is mud in town. So the shoemaker, which is just such a wise man like the other, makes a pair of shoes from wood so shall fit over the gold ones and is everything satisfactory. Now the gold shoes isn’t getting dirty, not even in the blotte. Is only mit one trouble. Is nobody can see his gold shoes when it rains. So he goes back to the shoemaker, and what you think he done? He tells the man he shall drill holes in the wooden shoes so shall be seen the gold through the holes, and is happy now because he solves a big problem. Same with Jake Hammer. Underneath was the full-dress suit. If Mrs. Hammer was a smart woman she would put moths in the coffin they shall make holes in the tachrichim and the tallis.”

I asked Mr. Greenspan if he attended the funeral.

“Was nothing to do anyway, and maybe by the cemetery which is open fields, I was thinking might be cooler, and is also a mitzvah. But this Orthodox rabbi—maybe you hear from him, a Mr. Wexler, he is a shrayer—a hollerer—and comes to make the prayers, he forgets where he is and who he is burying, and he hollers. And he shakes himself and screams the prayers so Mrs. Hammer is feeling ashamed, and I seen the look on the son’s face, and I see he was thinking is like something from the tribal days. But Greenspan, he was thinking how was nice and cool on the cemetery, a high place and the heaven blue, so was possible to see New York.

“To tell you the truth, Mr. Waxman, I don’t like snrayers myself and I don’t go to Washington Cemetery in Brooklyn where is my mother, may she rest in peace, all on account from them el mole rachemniks—(cemetery weepers) who before the Holy Days, for a gratuity, will wail you a prayer enough to rouse the dead. Is true, Jewish funerals ain’t nothing fancy like by the goyim mit flowers and dressing up the body so shall looking just like was alive and ot, ot, is getting up in three days. Not by the Jews, Mr. Waxman. We know that dead is dead. I’m not saying flowers ain’t nice; but from what I seen already by the goyim, is better by us. By us we know the show is over, and is better not fool yourself.”

“Who said Kaddish?”

“Who you think?” he asked, smiling.

“You?’

“That’s right,” said he. “And was well worth it, and also a mitzvah. Don’t forget, Mr. Waxman, is a net nine hundred dollars mit change in the shul treasury from this little transaction, and for such money I’ll say Kaddish every day.”

We both broke into a loud laugh, bringing Mrs. Greenspan out of her retreat.

“From what you laughing?” asked she.

“Mir lachen fun toyt,” said he. “Death tickles our fancy.”

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