“Why not sell the Saifer Torah and the candlesticks?” said Yosef. Nobody but my brother would have dared to breathe such a thing. “What? A Jew sell the Saifer Torah or the Sabbath candlesticks?” My father fixed on us his burning eyes like flaming wells. His hands tightened over his heart. He couldn’t speak. He just looked on the Saifer Torah, and then on us with a look that burned like live coals on our naked bodies. “What?” he gasped. “Should I sell my life, my soul from generation and generation? Sell my Saifer Torah? Not if the world goes under!” There was a stillness of thunder about to break. Everybody heard everybody’s heart beating. “Did I live to see this black day?” moaned my father, choking from quick breathing. “Mine own son, mine Kadish--mine Kadish tells me to sell the Holy Book that our forefathers shed rivers of blood to hand down to us.” “What are you taking it so terrible?” said my brother. “Doesn’t it stand in the Talmud that to help marry his daughter a man may sell the holiest thing--even the Holy Book?” “_Are there miracles in America?_ Can she yet get there a man at her age and without a dowry?” “If Hanneh Hayyeh, who is older than Sara Reisel and not half as good-looking,” said my brother, “could get a boss from a factory, then whom cannot Sara Reisel pick out? And with her luck all of us will be lifted over to America.” My father did not answer. I waited, but still he did not answer. At last I burst out with all the tears choking in me for years: “Is your old Saifer Torah that hangs on the wall dearer to you than that I should marry? The Talmud tells you to sell the holiest thing to help marry your daughter, but you--you love yourself more than your own child!” Then I turned to my mother. I hit my hands on the table and cried in a voice that made her tremble and grow frightened: “Maybe you love your silver candlesticks more than your daughter’s happiness? To whom can I marry myself here, I ask you, only--to the bath janitor, to the water-carrier? I tell you I’ll kill myself if you don’t help me get away! I can’t stand no more this deadness here. I must get away. And you must give up everything to help me get away. All I need is a chance. I can do a million times better than Hanneh Hayyeh. I got a head. I got brains. I feel I can marry myself to the greatest man in America.” My mother stopped crying, took up the candlesticks from the mantelpiece and passed her hands over them. “It’s like a piece from my flesh,” she said. “We grew up with this, you children and I, and my mother and my mother’s mother. This and the Saifer Torah are the only things that shine up the house for the Sabbath.” She couldn’t go on, her words choked in her so. I am seeing yet how she looked, holding the candlesticks in her hands, and her eyes that she turned on us. But then I didn’t see anything but to go to America.