It was several weeks before he regained his consciousness. An ugly scar stretched from above his left eye to his ear. Many of his friends held that he never quite recovered from that wound, for as long as he lived he sometimes spoke of his wife and his son Benjamin as though they were still alive. But such lapses of memory happened rarely; generally he remembered that they had been buried while he was in the hospital. He had only Yetta left. He would surely have gone mad if he had lived on among the memories of Kovna. So he had emigrated to join his sister in the Happy Valley of America. There was wonderful vitality to Benjamin's dreams. Even the tangible realities of Orchard Street could not obliterate them. Many hideous things which he saw he did not understand. Among such phenomena was his brother-in-law. In the social organization of the Kovna Ghetto, David Goldstein had found no place. The opportunities for viciousness were too limited for him; he had been only a shiftless misfit. But on the East Side of New York his distorted talents found a market. He had sold them to Tammany Hall. His wife's money had been wasted in a legitimate business enterprise for which he had no fitness. A defalcation had caused his arrest, the District Leader had saved him from jail, and David found the niche into which he fitted. He was nominal owner of The Sioux Hotel--a saloon of the worst repute. The profits of vice are large, but those "higher up" always claim the lion's share. And as David had taken to drink--a rare vice among the Jews--his wife and her three children were having a very miserable time of it. Perhaps it was the wound across his forehead which made it difficult for Benjamin to see clearly. About all he seemed to realize was that his sister could not afford to live comfortably. He had brought with him a few thousand dollars, the wreck of his father's fortune, and, by offering to pay liberally for a room and board, he enabled his sister to move into a better flat and so dulled the edge of her poverty. Some instinctive wisdom made him resist David's impassioned appeals to invest his money in The Sioux Hotel. But he was no more of a business man than his brother-in-law, and before long, seduced by his passion for reading, he was persuaded to buy the second-hand book-store.