And, nearer to us, Galsworthy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Thomas Hardy. I’m amazed, he is triumphant. With every volume he places in my hands, he has a kind of smile of false modesty, like a host proud of the vintage wine he has served you, without announcing its quality, precisely in order to test you. However often I exclaim in surprise at a new discovery, he buries himself deeper between two covers, with an attempt at indifference which only half-hides his pleasure. And, when his triumph is decisive (a Jewish edition of Dante, printed magnificently on parchment, with tiny letters, as if engraved in wood), he can take it no longer and explodes almost furiously, struggling with I know not whom.

‘Beautiful? Beautiful you say? Beautiful like a puppy? Beautiful like a tie? No, sir, it’s not beautiful: it’s earth-shaking.’

His eyes burn – frowning for the first time. Roza, a little frightened, unsure what is happening, says nothing. Me, I feel embarrassed somehow. (I don’t like you, Abraham Sulitzer; I thought you were a serious sceptic, not an amateur, subject to tantrums.)

But he calms down quickly and becomes tolerant again. Now, with a little courage, perhaps my life may not even be in danger if I said – to test him – that I didn’t like a particular edition which inflames him with feeling. I don’t think he’d kill me; he’d settle for throwing me out.

The truth is that I am not in the mood for joking either and the revelations of his library open for me a world I never guessed existed. A culture in dialect? European culture in dialect. Why? For whom?

I ask Abraham Sulitzer and his reply this time is no longer excited or furious. It is sad.

‘I thought you’d ask. I’m surprised it took you so long. When it gets down to it, you’re no wiser than some street kid who runs after Jews with caftans, when one wanders along, shouting “Oy vey” and “Achychy azoy”. Dialect! Broken German! A ghetto language: that’s what Yiddish is to you. If I told you it was a language, neither a beautiful or ugly one, but a living one, through which people have suffered and sung for hundreds of years, if I told you that it’s a language containing everything in the world which has been pondered, you’d look at me, well, just as you’re doing now. Dialect indeed! It’s a living language, with nerves and blood, with its own troubles, its own beauty. With its own homeland, which is the ghetto – the whole world, in other words. It makes me laugh when I hear those Zionists talking Hebrew picked up from books. Is that what we need? Hebrew? With dictionaries, grammar and philology, or whatever they call it? God help them … Turning their backs on a healthy language to go searching in a tomb for a defunct one. God forgive me, I speak Hebrew myself after a fashion, having picked it up in my old age, but – what can I say? – to me it’s cold, harsh and empty somehow, like wandering through a long, long deserted stone hallway, without a single person or plant or window. How do you say “It hurts”, “I’m burning up” or “I miss you” in this language? And if you say it, does it do any good? Say “It hurts” in Yiddish – and you sense the pain. There’s blood there, it’s warm, it’s alive …’

‘I don’t know either of them well,’ I replied. ‘I wonder, though, to what degree you’re right, but – and I hope you don’t mind me saying this – I don’t think you’re entirely right. Yiddish is still a dialect – and that’s a serious problem. It’s a deformed language, derived from the corruption of another. Isn’t that a humiliating origin? I find it hard to believe that from the degeneration of one language you can create another.’

‘But that’s where your Zionists get it wrong. It’s not a case of a language that’s degenerated. It’s a case of another language altogether.

‘Yiddish is only ridiculous in the mouths of rich Jews with a Fräulein to take care of the kids who think that by speaking bad Yiddish they’re speaking good German. But real Yiddish, the straight Yiddish of a Jew without a Fräulein, is a living, breathing language. Millions of Jews speak it, millions live through it.