A world in which menschs, as if the season of spring lived within them, sprouted willowy sidelocks, and affixed knobby knotted strands to the fringes of their garments and covered their heads to assert modesty between their thoughts and the heavens that judge; their womenfolk went modestly garbed in dark raiment at the lengths of the ankle and elbow, and they, too, covered their heads and hair but in kerchiefs and wigs, which would tempt without revealing, which would promise without the flirt that fulfills. And maybe — a few scholars argue — this modesty’s to be attributed to the cut of the cold, yet another mode of insulation, remove, as the snow’d begun falling everywhere from Siberia where the snow had always fallen to the unprepared shorelines of what was then the Sodom of Florida, all along the Atlantic littoral from Newport’s Touro to Tampa piling up to the knee, to the waist then the neck depending on which blessing or prayer, whether one was bowing or kneeling, and even in parts known up to the seat of the head, which was covered in hats over yarmulkes above caftans below that would gust like dark ghosts in the wind. Eastern Parkway arose out of the skyline of Brooklyn as a ray of lighted ice, and everywhere had become if not the Pale of Settlement then only a slowbeaten fare away on the subway, which had gone out of service.
