It means, I have come to know, that she has dropped the husk and retained the kernel of Judaism; but years were required for this process of instinctive selection.
My father, in his ambition to make Americans of us, was rather headlong and strenuous in his methods.

To my mother, on the eve of departure for the New World, he wrote boldly that progressive Jews in America did not spend their days in praying; and he urged her to leave her wig in Polotzk, as a first step of progress.

My mother, like the majority of women in the Pale, had all her life taken her religion on authority; so she was only fulfilling her duty to her husband when she took his hint, and set out upon her journey in her own hair.

Not that it was done without reluctance; the Jewish faith in her was deeply rooted, as in the best of Jews it always is.

The law of the Fathers was binding to her, and the outward symbols of obedience inseparable from the spirit.