continued his story:--



Well, we of our little community threw off the yoke of the old
Torah, yet refused to accept the yoke of the new Torah.
Nevertheless our lives were far from being barren. Our longing for
the things we were forbidden to practise prompted us to invent a
good many new usages. For instance, long before we had the freedom
of Anna's house, we managed to meet every Saturday to exchange a few
words in Yiddish; two or three words were sufficient to satisfy our
sense of duty. Those meetings were among the things for the sake of
which we were ready to run any risk of discovery. Of course, we
dared not recite our Modeh-Ani: our patrons might have overheard us,
and that meant a sure flogging. But we practised repeating the
prayer mentally, and we always managed to do it with our faces
turned in the direction from which we thought we had come, and where
our native towns were situated. Jacob had a little piece of cloth,
a remnant of an Arba-Kanfos. The Tzitzis had long been torn away,
to prevent discovery and avoid punishment; but what was left of it
we kept secretly, and we used to kiss it at opportune moments, as if
it were a scroll of the Torah.

Then we made a point of abstaining from work at least one hour every
Saturday and on the days that were the Jewish holidays according to
Jacob's calendar. On the other hand, work was considered obligatory
on Sundays and on Christian holidays. Tearing up some papers or
starting a fire was thought sufficient.

These and many other usages we invented, slowly, one after another.