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Portrait of the Kaiser. In the final fourth of his book, Author Singer bitingly recounts the collapse of Poland's 800-year-old Jewish community before the brisk and bitter winds of change in the years of World War I. One day in 1916, a group of rabbis was peremptorily summoned to Warsaw's city hall for a meeting with occupying German officials. The rabbis were terrified. Father Singer carefully bathed, prayed, donned his Sabbath best, and resignedly marched off to the meeting. Instead of catastrophe, he met only courtesy. Beneath a portrait of the Kaiser, an epauleted military doctor displayed a big picture of a louse, explained that it caused typhus, and reminded the rabbis that cleanliness accorded well with their religion. It is probably the last time in history that a German enjoined a Jew to better Judaism.