Alpha Book

In business with Trendellsohn, the father, there
was Anton, his son; and Anton Trendellsohn was the Jew whom Nina
Balatka loved. Now it had so happened that Josef Balatka, Nina's
father, had drifted out of a partnership with Karil Zamenoy, a wealthy
Christian merchant of Prague, and had drifted into a partnership with
Trendellsohn. How this had come to pass needs not to be told here, as
it had all occurred in years when Nina was an infant. But in these
shiftings Balatka became a ruined man, and at the time of which I write
he and his daughter were almost penniless. The reader must know that
Karil Zamenoy and Josef Balatka had married sisters. Josef's wife,
Nina's mother, had long been dead, having died--so said Sophie Zamenoy,
her sister--of a broken heart; of a heart that had broken itself in
grief, because her husband had joined his fortunes with those of a Jew.
Whether the disgrace of the alliance or its disastrous result may have
broken the lady's heart, or whether she may have died of a pleurisy, as
the doctors said, we need not inquire here.


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