I recall, as a boy, a man who lived on one of the most thickly settled streets on the East Side of New York City. We children coming and going from school would often times see him. He was a little old man with a gray, straggly beard, who dealt in coal and ice. He had his place of business in a dark basement underneath a huge tenement. In winter he sold coal and in the summer he sold ice. He would sell coal by the bucket-load and would carry these buckets up three and four flights of stairs. In the summer, he would buy large cakes of ice, cut them into smaller cakes, and carry them up five, six flights of stairs to his customers. He was always bent under a load. We called him “Humpback,” though he was really not humpbacked. This little man with the gray, straggly beard, “Jacob the Humpback,” died quietly like all humble folks, as he had lived.
A few years ago I learned that one of his sons, because of the labors of “Jacob the Humpback,” had become a professor of mathematics in a large university, and another had become a surgeon. I suddenly asked myself, “Little man, how big were you?”
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Abba Hillel Silver in James W. Cox, The Minister’s Manual 1994 , San Francisco: Harper, 1993, p. 46.