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Joe Flom is an outlier. But he's not an outlier for the reasons you might think.
喬·弗洛姆是一個卓爾不群的人，但他也許不是你想象當中的那種卓越者。
By the end of the chapter, in fact, we'll see that it is possible to take the lessons of Joe Flom,
在本章的后面部分，喬·弗洛姆的人生故事或許能給我們上幾堂頗有教益的課，
apply them to the legal world of New York City, and predict the family background, age,
我們將從這些故事里面了解紐約城的法律世界，從而可以在不知道任何額外的單一的信息下，
and origins of the city's most powerful attorneys, without knowing a single additional fact about them.
推想這座城市最具實力律師的境況，他們的家庭背景、年齡和出身。
But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
我們的進度會越來快。
Lesson Number One: The Importance of Being Jewish
成為猶太人的意義
One of Joe Flom's classmates at Harvard Law school was a man named Alexander Bickel.
亞歷山大·比克爾（AlexanderBickel）是喬·弗洛姆在哈佛法學院讀書時候的同班同學。
Like Flom, Bickel was a son of eastern European Jewish immigrants from Brooklyn.
像弗洛姆一樣，比克爾是一位住在布魯克林的來自東歐的猶太移民的兒子；
Like Flom, Bickel had gone to public school in New York City and then City College.
像弗洛姆一樣，比克爾先是進了紐約的一所公立學校，隨后在城市學院讀書；
Like Flom, Bickel was a star in his law school class.
像弗洛姆一樣，在法學院讀書的比克爾，是班里的“名角”，
In fact, before his career was cut short by cancer,
事實上，如果不是因為癌癥縮短了他的職業生涯，
Bickel would become perhaps the finest constitutional scholar of his generation.
他很可能成為那一代人當中最好的憲法學學者。
And like Flom and the rest of their law school classmates, Bickel went to Manhattan during "hiring season" over Christmas of 1947 to find himself a job.
像弗洛姆和其他同班同學一樣，比克爾也在1947年圣誕節期間的“應聘季節”來到曼哈頓，希望謀到一份工作。
His first stop was at Mudge Rose, down on Wall Street, as traditional and stuffy as any firm from that era.
工作的第一站是默基·羅斯律師事務所（MudgeRose），和當時那些事務所相似，
Mudge Rose was founded in 1869.
這是一家創辦于1869年，位于華爾街的傳統而又乏味的律師事務所。
It was where Richard Nixon practiced in the years before he won the presidency in 1968.
在理查德·尼克松1968年贏得總統大選之前，這里曾是他工作的地方。
"We're like the lady who only wants her name on the newspaper twice when she's born and when she dies," one of the senior partners famously said.
“我們就像一些女士一樣，希望自己的名字在報紙上只出現兩次出生的時候和死去的時候，”事務所一位高級合伙人曾用這樣一句話極其恰當地說到自己。
Bickel was taken around the firm and interviewed by one partner after another,
比克爾被帶著到事務所轉來轉去，見了一個又一個事務所的合伙人，
until he was let in the library to meet with the firm's senior partner.
最后他被帶到一間藏書室去會見事務所的高級合伙人。
You can imagine the scene: a dark paled room, an artfully frayed Persian carpet,
你能夠想象當時的情景：一間擺放著暗色書架的房子，地上鋪著邊沿已經磨損的波斯地毯，
rows upon rows of leather-bound legal volumes, oil paintings of Mr. Mudge and Mr. Rose on the wall.
書架上一排一排全是皮革包起來的法律書籍、文件，墻上掛著默基先生和羅斯先生的油畫。
"After they put me through the whole interview and everything," Bickel would say, many years later,
“當他們讓我完成了所有的面試和其它程序之后，”比克爾在很多年之后說到，
"I was brought to the senior partner, who took it upon himself to tell me that for a boy of my antecedents" and you can imagine how Bickel must have been paused before giving that euphemism for his immigrant background.
“我就被帶到了那里（去見高級合伙人），他竟然自己先開口談到我的”你可以想象，當比克爾聽到別人委婉地說到自己的移民身份時，他是怎樣的驚訝。
