It's not a race, he says, it's not even a...
It's not a race, he says, it's not even a religion any more, maybe it will never be a nationDimly, he knows he has lost the child already, but he continues talking, musing aloud
What is it, then? Yehudah Halevy said Israel is the heart of all nationsWhat attacks the body attacks the heartAnd the heart is also the conscience, which suffers for the sins of the nationsHe shrugs once more, does not differentiate between saying aloud what he thinks or merely moving his lipsIt's an interesting problem, but personally I think a Jew is a Jew because he suffers
Why?
So we will deserve the Messiah? The old man no longer knowsIt makes us better and worse than the goyim, he thinks
But the child must always be given an answerHe rouses himself, concentrates and says without certainty, It is so we will lastHe speaks again, wholly lucid for a momentWe are a harried people, beset by oppressorsWe must always journey balenciaga dix motorcycle from disaster to disaster, and it makes us stronger and weaker than other men, makes us love and hate the other Juden more than other menWe have suffered so much that we know how to endureWe will always endure
The boy understands almost nothing of this, but he has heard the words and they engrave a memory which perhaps he will exhume laterHe looks at his grandfather, at the wrinkled corded hands and the anger, the febrile intelligence, in his pale old-man's eyesIt is the only word Joey Goldstein absorbsAlready he has forgotten most of the shame and fear of his beatingHe fingers the plaster on his temple, wonders if he can go out to play

The poor are the great voyagersThere are always new businesses, new jobs, new places to live, new expectations evolving into old familiar failures
There is the candy store in the East Side, which fails, and another which fails, and still anotherThere are movements: to chanel jumbo flap bag the Bronx, back to Manhattan, to candy stores in BrooklynThe grandfather dies, and the mother is alone with Joey, settles at last in a candy store in Brownsville with the same front window that slides open painfully, the same dust on the candy
By the time he is eight and nine and ten, Joey is up at five in the morning, sells the papers, the cigarettes, to the men going to work, leaves at seven-thirty himself for school, and is back in the candy store again until it is almost time for bedAnd his mother is in the store almost all day long
The years pass slowly in the work-vacuum, the lonely lifeHe is an odd boy, so adult, the relatives tell his motherAnd he is eager to please, a fine salesman on the honest side, but there are no potentialities for the big operator, the con manIt is all work, and the peculiar intimate union between his mother and himself of people who work together for many yearsDuring chanel top the time he is in high school there are impossible dreams about college, of being an engineer or a scientistIn his little spare time he reads technical books, dreams of leaving the candy storeBut of course when he does it is to work in a warehouse as a shipping clerk while his mother employs a kid to do the work he has done formerly
And there are no contactsHis speech is different, quite different from that of the men with whom he works, the few boys he knows on the blockThere is virtually nothing of the hoarse rough compassionate accent of BrooklynIt is like his mother's speech, slightly formal, almost with an accent, a loving use of bigger words than are really necessaryAnd when at night he sits on one of the stoops and talks to the youths with whom he grew up, whom he has watched play stick ball and touch football on the streets for many years, there is a difference between them and him
Look at the chanel watch women knockers on her, Murray says
Joey smiles uncomfortably, sits among the dozen other youths on the stoop, watches the foliage of the Brooklyn trees rustle in contented bourgeois rhythms over his head
She got a rich father, Riesel says
And two steps farther down, they are arguing about batting averagesWhadeya mean? I know, ya wanta bet on it? Listen, that was the day I woulda made sixteen bucks if Brooklyn wonI had Hack Wilson picked for two for five to bring him up to 81 and Brooklyn to win, and he did three for four only they dropped it to the Cubs 7-2 and I lostWhadeya handing me ya want to bet on it?
Goldstein's cheek muscles are tired from the stupid outsider grinHow come you didn't go with us to the Giant doubleheader?
Oh, I don't know, somehow I never can concern myself properly with baseball
Another girl wiggles by in the Brooklyn gloaming, and Riesel, the card, stalks after her, moving like an logo dolce & gabbana a