ht, scarcely half clad in the hot summer weather, does for the
girls what the street completes in the boy. But for the patriarchal family
life of the Jew that is his strongest virtue, their ruin would long since
have been complete. It is that which pilots him safely through shoals upon
which the Gentile would have been inevitably wrecked. It is that which
keeps the almshouse from casting its shadow over Ludlow Street to add to
its gloom. It is the one quality which redeems, and on the Sabbath eve
when he gathers his household about his board, scant though the fare be,
dignifies the darkest slum of Jewtown.

How strong is this attachment to home and kindred that makes the Jew cling
to the humblest hearth and gather his children and his children's children
about it, though grinding poverty leave them only a bare crust to share, I
saw in the case of little Jette Brodsky, who strayed away from her own
door, looking for her papa. They were strangers and ignorant and poor, so
that weeks went by before they could make their loss known and get a
hearing, and meanwhile Jette, who had been picked up and taken to Police
Headquarters, had been hidden away in an asylum, given another name when
nobody came to claim her, and had been quite forgotten. But in the two
years that passed before she was found at last, her empty chair stood ever
by her father's, at the family board, and no Sabbath eve but heard his
prayer for the restoration of their lost one. It happened once that I
came in on a Friday evening at the breaking of bread, just as the four
candles upon the table had been lit with the Sabbath blessing upon the
home and all it sheltered. Their light fell on little else than empty
plates and anxious faces; but in the patriarchal host who arose and bade
the guest welcome with a dignity a king might have envied I recognized
with difficulty the humble pedlar I had known only from the street and
from the police office, where he hardly ventured beyond the door.

But the tenement that has power to turn purest gold to dross digs a pit
for the Jew even through this virtue that has been his shield against its
power for evil. In its atmosphere it turns too often to a curse by helping
to crowd his lodgings, already overflowing, beyond the point of official
forbearance. Then follow orders to "reduce" the number of tenants that
mean increased rent, which the family cannot pay, or the breaking up of
the home. An appeal to avert such a calamity c