"It flattered my ambition that Herr Joseph Boehm, one of the chief wholesale dealers in Silesia, should offer his daughter to me himself, to me, who only three years before had entered his business as a poor, unknown clerk. Simon Eichelkatz, who was Simon Eichelkatz? Born in Tarnow, of poor, decent folk, I came to Reissnitz and made my fortune there. Just think! The son-in-law of Joseph Boehm! Such a thing had never been! But to become a son-in-law you must have a wife; and I took Friederike Boehm, who was aristocratically brought up, and could speak French." To-day it particularly struck me what it was that so peculiarly characterized his manner of narrating. As soon as he spoke about personal matters or told stories of the Khille, he fell into the jargon and the intonation of the Jews of former times.[*] But when he dealt with generalities and gave expression to ideas and speculations, his speech acquired a swing, his expressions became almost choice, and the form scarcely ever detracted from the matter. He grew, as it were, beyond his own bounds; and I thought I saw before me not a simple old Jew, but a sage. [*] The translator has found it impossible to convey this subtle distinction in English. It shows itself in the German by slightly mispronouncing words, for instance, _Leit_ instead of _Leute_; using _ae_ instead of the article _ein_ (an), and very slightly changing the correct order of the words. "What did they know at that time of such notions? They harnessed two human beings together and said, Now see how you get along with each other." A shadow flitted over his countenance, usually so mild. "And yet," I interposed, "Jewish marriages as a whole were seldom unfortunate." "That was because husband and wife were confined to their own homes, their children, and at most to their Mishpocheh. Nothing strange, from the outside, came to disturb them. Life passed in the closest relation of two human beings. Nowadays it's different. But if it happened to be different in my time, it was a calamity--and it was a calamity that Frau Friederike Eichelkatz, _nee_ Boehm, had learned to speak French. During the first year things went pretty well. To be sure, even then she spoke scornfully of having married an uneducated man, who knew nothing but whether cloths were bad or good, who could tell at the first glance whether a piece of cloth came from Cottbus or from Bruenn, whether it was manufactured in Germany or in England, whether the woof was wool or thread, and whether the wool was pure or mixed. All this was of value in business, but not in marriage. Marriage requires other knowledge to create happiness. And when my wife would ask me so mockingly: 'Do you suppose anyone in Tarnow knows French?' I had enough for a whole week.