“My friends of the Mosaic fraternity. It’s a pity we have to intrude on your evening. On your innocent pleasures. It just can’t be helped. But at least I am not a stranger. No, no! I was brought up here, in the same streets as you. I am not ashamed to say that I played boyish games and swam in the blue Dolna with members of your community. Those were happy days! In later years my business has often drawn me away. Coffee! Coffee! But no matter where I travel, even in far-off Brazil, I always long to return to our beloved city. So it is your neighbor, Wohltat, speaking to you.”

Upon those assembled in the Astoria Café, these words—spoken so softly, so mildly—made an agreeable impression. Our beloved city! Your neighbor! And above all, My friends! Those who knew Wohltat only by reputation began, a little, to relax. They had thought he would be tall, fierce, and—perhaps because he was a coffee roaster—somehow darker. But there he was—short, plump, white-skinned, like a popped kernel of corn. He turned his hat brim in his hands.

“With your permission we want to make a brief announcement, and then we shall be gone. The message is for the proprietor of this fine café. Would he step forward? Would someone perhaps point him out to me?”

No reply. Everyone in the crowd looked away from the owner—Putermilch, a huge, albinoish man, who went on drying glasses in back of the bar.

It was the lipless gray-suiter’s turn to speak. “Three minutes! Three minutes only! If in that time the man we ask for is not before us, each Jew here must bear the consequences.”

Immediately Wohltat’s face broke into dripping perspiration. His brown eyes bulged a bit. The crowd was sweating, too. A whole minute went by. And then another. Putermilch, in his shirt sleeves, went round and round the rim of a glass. What awful tension!

“Heavens!” cried a woman. “Why won’t he step forward?”

The next instant Schotter was speaking. “Horowitz, you know who he is, the Big Man, wanted a suit of clothes. So he orders three different tailors to make him one out of the material he furnished. Said the first tailor, ‘There’s only enough material here for a vest.’ The second tailor said, ‘From this I might be able to make a pair of pants.’ But the Jewish tailor laughed, saying he could easily make three suits, with something left over: ‘To them he’s a giant, but to us he’s only a pygmy!’”

You can imagine the horror that greeted this joke. Franz Xavier Wohltat put on his hat. Margolies, a waiter, choked on something. And both the Totenkopfers took out their guns.

Then Putermilch, round-shouldered, head hanging, came around the end of the bar. He stood in front of the gray-suited man.

“You are the owner of this club?”

Putermilch nodded. With his white, soft skin, and the way the electric lights caught the little hairs on his neck and his arms, he looked like a root that had been dug from the ground. A tuber. A yam.