Besides being Reader, Greenberg blew the horn and killed cattle and circumcised male infants and educated children and discharged the functions of beadle and collector.  He spent a great deal of his time in avoiding being drawn into the contending factions of the congregation and in steering equally between Belcovitch and the Shalotten Shammos.  The Sons only gave him fifty a year for all his trouble, but they eked it out by allowing him to be on the Committee, where on the question of a rise in the Reader’s salary he was always an ineffective minority of one.  His other grievance was that for the High Festivals the Sons temporarily engaged a finer voiced Reader and advertised him at raised prices to repay themselves out of the surplus congregation.  Not only had Greenberg to play second fiddle on these grand occasions, but he had to iterate “Pom” as a sort of musical accompaniment in the pauses of his rival’s vocalization.

“You can’t compare yourself with the Maggid” the Shalotten Shammos reminded him consolingly.  “There are hundreds of you in the market.  There are several morceaux of the service which you do not sing half so well as your predecessor; your horn-blowing cannot compete with Freedman’s of the Fashion Street Chevrah, nor can you read the Law as quickly and accurately as Prochintski.  I have told you over and over again you confound the air of the Passover Yigdal with the New Year ditto.  And then your preliminary flourish to the Confession of Sin—­it goes ‘Ei, Ei, Ei, Ei, Ei, Ei, Ei’” (he mimicked Greenberg’s melody) “whereas it should be ‘Oi, Oi, Oi, Oi, Oi, Oi.’”

“Oh no,” interrupted Belcovitch.  “All the Chazanim I’ve ever heard do it ‘Ei, Ei, Ei.’”

“You are not entitled to speak on this subject, Belcovitch,” said the Shalotten Shammos warmly.  “You are a Man-of-the-Earth.  I have heard every great Chazan in Europe.”

“What was good enough for my father is good enough for me,” retorted Belcovitch.  “The Shool he took me to at home had a beautiful Chazan, and he always sang it ‘Ei, Ei, Ei.’”

“I don’t care what you heard at home.  In England every Chazan sings ‘Oi, Oi, Oi.’”

“We can’t take our tune from England,” said Karlkammer reprovingly.  “England is a polluted country by reason of the Reformers whom we were compelled to excommunicate.”

“Do you mean to say that my father was an Epicurean?” asked Belcovitch indignantly.  “The tune was as Greenberg sings it.  That there are impious Jews who pray bareheaded and sit in the synagogue side by side with the women has nothing to do with it.”

The Reformers did neither of these things, but the Ghetto to a man believed they did, and it would have been countenancing their blasphemies to pay a visit to their synagogues and see.  It was an extraordinary example of a myth flourishing in the teeth of the facts, and as such should be useful to historians sifting “the evidence of contemporary writers.”