This is what it had all come to: the epic of emancipation reduced to a tatterdemalion starveling, desperate for a little rachmones from Jews whose habitual lives were untouched by the lofty rhetoric of philosophers. What was left of Gabriel Schrameck, tailor, soldier of the empire, citizen-Jew, fully vested in his rights, had, in a way even he did not fully comprehend, somehow come home to a pot of piping-hot cholent, the Sabbath stew he had wolfed down as a child, the morsel of pity which in his distress of body and soul, he could not keep down.
