Public prayer among Jews can be recited only in the presence of ten males above the age of religious maturity, and this assembly is called minyan. Surely in this great city I would easily find a minyan, I thought; so I followed the line of least resistance, like any stranger in a strange land, and sought out the Jewish names best known to the public. I called at a business house uptown with the name of a great Hebrew over the door. He was the great man of whom I read with such pride in the little mining town at the other end of the world. Yes! The same Jewish face depicted in the huge photograph in the lobby I had seen in the magazine I had hugged so lovingly at home. I made my way, full of hope, to his office and was asked by a doorkeeper my mission. I explained—the doorkeeper was a Hebrew—that I desired to say kaddish for my father and that I wanted to form a minyan. With a sly wink he passed me on to several Hebrew clerks and office boys, each of whom smiled, sneered, and made his little joke about “greenhorns.” Then I was ushered with many grimaces into the presence of the big man. Just a minute’s conversation convinced me that he was a Jew in appearance only, and that he had never known anything of the traditions, the romance, the art or the literature of our race. He didn’t exactly know what minyan was, or pretended he didn’t, but recommended me to “one of our people,” as he put it, who ran a very popular chophouse close by. I began to realize that I was a stranger among my own people and that night I walked the streets of great New York with an aching heart. Everywhere in the hurrying crowds I saw the faces of my brethren and sisters, thousands, hundreds of thousands of them, hurrying, pushing, shoving brethren they were, with all the tenderness, the friendship and the Semitic look gone from their eyes. “Oh, God!” I thought, “are these the children of Israel? Is this the persecuted race—that people who had been scattered to the four corners of the earth?” Hungry and weary, I made my way as if in a dream to the café of a great hotel. Everything in the huge room was glaringly false—marble pillars, oak beams, flowers, were all imitation: a big orchestra sat in a balcony with an artificial moon and a painted sky as a background; everywhere were lights, lights and more lights. From table to table I went but I was roughly reminded that “this” was reserved and “that” was reserved. Presently glaringly gowned, bediamonded Jewish women, accompanied by equally vulgar Jewish men, filed in and occupied every seat, and between mouthfuls of food and drink their bodies would sway to the voices of other Jews who sang only of “Mississippi” and “Georgia.” How these people did laugh when they caught sight of my foreign clothes and my pale, poetic face, and how they would have screamed with laughter had I shown them my Arba Kanfoth, that beautiful little token which my poor father fondly imagined would have made me understood in the New World.