 Chapter 6 The Tree of Knowledge History shows that in all countries where Jews have equal rights with the rest of the people, they lose their fear of secular science, and learn how to take their ancient religion with them from century to awakening century, dropping nothing by the way but what their growing spirit has outgrown. In countries where progress is to be bought only at the price of apostasy, they shut themselves up in their synagogues, and raise the wall of extreme separateness between themselves and their gentile neighbors. There is never a Jewish community without its scholars. But where Jews may not be both intellectuals and Jews, they prefer to remain Jews. The survival in Russia of medieval injustice to Jews was responsible for narrowness of educational standards in the Polotsk of my time. Jewish scholarship, as we have seen, was confined to a knowledge of the Hebrew language and literature, and even these limited stores of learning were not equally divided between men and women. In the medieval position of the woman of Polotsk, education really had no place. A girl was finished when she could read her prayers in Hebrew, following the meaning by the aid of the Yiddish translation especially prepared for women. If she could sign her name in Russian, do a little figuring, and write a letter in Yiddish to the parents of her betrothed. She was called Wuljela Rent, well-educated. Fortunately for me, my parents' ideals soared beyond all this. My mother, although she had not stirred out of Polotsk, readily adopted the notion of a liberal education imported by my father from cities beyond the pale. She heartily supported him in all his plans for us girls. Fetka and I were to learn to translate as well as pronounce Hebrew, the same as our brother. We were to study Russian and German and arithmetic. We were to go to the best pension and receive a thorough secular education. My father's ambition, after several years sojourn and in latent circles, reached even beyond the pension. But that was flying farther than Polotsk could follow him with the naked eye. I do not remember our first teacher. When our second teacher came, we were already able to read continuous passages. Reb Leba was no great scholar. Great scholars would not waste their learning on mere girls. Reb Leba knew enough to teach girls Hebrew. Tall and lean was the Reba, with a lean pointed face and a thin pointed beard. The beard became pointed from much stroking and pulling downwards. The hands of Reb Leba were large, and his beard was not half a handful. The fingers of the Reba were long, and the nails, I am afraid, were not very clean. The coat of Reb Leba was rusty, and so was his skullcap. Remember, Reb Leba was only a girl's teacher, and nobody would pay much for teaching girls. But lean and rusty as he was, the Reba's pupils regarded him with entire respect, and followed his pointer with earnest eyes across the limp page of the alphabet, or the thumbed page of the prayer-book. For a short time my sister and I went for our lessons to Reb Leba's header in the bare room off the woman's gallery, up one flight of stairs in a synagogue. The place was as noisy as a reckless expenditure of lung power could make it. The pupils on the bench shouted their way from a left to tov, cheered and prompted by the growl of the Reba, while the children in the corridor waiting their turn played puss in the corner and other noisy games. Fetka and I, however, soon began to have our lessons in private at our own home. We sat one on each side of the Reba, reading the Hebrew sentences turn and turn about. When we left off reading by rote and Reb Leba began to reveal the mysteries to us, I was so eager to know all that was in my book that the lesson was always too short. I continued reading by the hour, after the Reba was gone, though I understood about one word and ten. My favorite Hebrew reading was the Psalms. Verse after verse I chanted to the monotonous tune taught by Reb Leba, rocking to the rhythm of the chant, just like the Reba. And so ran the song of David, and so ran the hours by, while I sat by the low window, the world erased from my consciousness. What I thought I do not remember. I only know that I loved the sound of the words, the full, dense, solid sound of them, to the meditative chant of Reb Leba. I pronounced Hebrew very well, and I caught some mechanical trick of accent and emphasis, which was sufficiently like Reb Leba's, to make my reading sound intelligent. I had a clue to the general mood of the subject from the few Psalms I had actually translated, and drawing on my imagination for details, I was able to read with so much spirit that ignorant listeners were carried away by my performance. My mother tells me, indeed, that people used to stop outside my window to hear me read. Of this I have not the slightest recollection, so I suppose I was an unconscious imposter. When I am, that I thought no ignoble thoughts as I chanted the sacred words, and who can say that my visions were not as inspiring as David's. He was a shepherd before he became a king. I was an ignorant child in the ghetto, but I was admitted at last to the society of the best. I was given the freedom of all America. Perhaps the stuff that dreams are made of is the same for all dreamers. When we came to read Genesis, I had the great advantage of a complete translation in Yiddish. I faithfully studied the portion assigned in Hebrew, but I need no longer wait for the next lesson to know how the story ends. I could read while daylight lasted, if I chose, in the Yiddish. Well I remember that Pentateuch, a middling thick act of ovalium, in a crumbly sort of leather cover, and how the book opened of itself at certain places, where there were pictures. My father tells me that when I was just learning to translate single words, he found me one evening pouring over the humash, and made fun of me for pretending to read, whereupon I gave him an eager account, he says, of the stories of Jacob, Benjamin, Moses, and others, which I had puzzled out from the pictures, by the help of a word here and there that I was able to translate. It was inevitable, as we came to Genesis, that I should ask questions. Reba, translating, In the beginning God created the earth. Pupil repeating, In the beginning, Reba, when was the beginning? Reba losing the place in amazement. Saga hurta kasa, ever hear such a question. The beginning was the beginning. The beginning was in the beginning, of course. New, new, go on. Pupil resuming, In the beginning God made the earth. Reba, what did he make it out of? Reba dropping his pointer in astonishment. What did? What sort of a girl is this, that asks questions? Go on, go on. The lesson continues to the end. The book is closed, the pointer put away. The Reba exchanges his skullcap for his streetcap, is about to go. Pupil, timidly but determinedly, detaining him. Reba, who made God? The Reba regards the pupil in amazement, mixed with anxiety. His emotion is beyond speech. He turns and leaves the room. In his perturbation, he even forgets to kiss the mazuza on the doorpost. The pupil feels reproved, and yet somehow in the right. Who did make God? But if the Reba will not tell, will not tell? Or perhaps he does not know. The Reba? It was some time after this conflict between my curiosity and his obtuseness that I saw my teacher act a ridiculous part in a trifling comedy, and then I remember no more of him. That Reba lingered one day after the lesson. A guest who was about to depart, wishing to fortify himself for his journey, took a roll of hard sausage from his satchel and laid it, with his clasped knife on the table. He caught himself a slice, and ate it standing. And then, noticing the thin, lean Reba, he invited him by a gesture to help himself to the sausage. The Reba put his hands behind his coat-tails, declining the traveler's hospitality. The traveler forgot the other, and walked up and down, ready in his fur coat and cap, till his carriage should arrive. The sausage remained on the table, thick and spicy and brown. No such sausage was known in Polotsk. Reba looked at it. Reba continued to look. The stranger stopped to cut another slice, and repeated his gesture of invitation. Reba moved a step towards the table, but his hands stuck behind his coat-tails. The traveler resumed his walk. Reba moved another step. The stranger was not looking. The Reba's courage rose. He advanced toward the table. He stretched out his hand for the knife. At that instant the door opened, the carriage was announced. The eager traveler, without noticing Reba swept up sausage and knife, just at the moment when the timid Reba was about to cut himself a delicious slice. I saw his disconfiture from my corner, and I am obliged to confess that I enjoyed it. His face always looked foolish to me after that. But fortunately for us both, we did not study together much longer. Two little girls dressed in their best, shining from their curls to their shoes. One little girl has rosy cheeks. The other has staring eyes. Rosy cheeks carries a carpet bag. Big eyes carries a new slate. Hand in hand they go into the summer morning, so happy and pretty a pair that it is no wonder people look after them from window and door, and the other little girls, not dressed in their best, and carrying no carpet bags. Stand in the street, gaping after them. Let the folks stare. No harm can come to the little sisters. Did not grandmother tie pepper and salt into the corners of their pockets, to ward off the evil eye? The little maid see nothing but the road ahead, so eager are they upon their errand. Carpet bag and slate proclaim that errand. Rosy cheeks and big eyes are going to school. I have no words to describe the pride with which my sister and I crossed the threshold of Isaiah the scribe. Hither, too, we had been to Header, to Ereba. Now we were to study with a lever, a secular teacher. There was all the difference in the world between the two. The one taught you Hebrew only, which every girl learned. The other could teach Yiddish and Russian, and some said even German, and how to write a letter, and how to do sums without a counting frame, just on a piece of paper. Accomplishments which were extremely rare among girls in Polotsk, but nothing was too high for the grandchildren of Raphael the Russian. They had good heads, everybody knew, so we were sent to Rebbe Isaiah. My first school, where I was so proud to be received, was a hovel on the edge of a swamp. The school room was gray within and without. The door was so low that Rebbe Isaiah had to stoop in passing. The little windows were murky, the walls were bare, but the low ceiling was decorated with bundles of goosequills stuck in under the rafters. A rough table stood in the middle of the room with a long bench on either side. That was the school room complete. In my eyes, on that first morning, it shone with a wonderful light, a strange glory that penetrated every corner, and made the stained logs fair as tinted marble, and the windows were not too small to afford me a view of a large new world. Room was made for the new pupils on the bench beside the teacher. We found our inkwells, which were simply hollows scooped out in the thick tabletop. Rebbe Isaiah made us very serviceable pens by tying the pen points securely to little twigs, though some of the pupils used quills. The teacher also ruled our paper for us into little squares, like a surveyor's notebook. Then he set us a copy, and we copied one letter in each square all the way down the page. All the little girls and the middle-sized girls and the pretty big girls copied letters in little squares just so. There were so few of us that Rebbe Isaiah could see everybody's page by just leaning over. And if some of our cramped fingers were clumsy and did not form the loops and curves accurately, all he had to do was to stretch out his hand and wrap with his ruler on our respective knuckles. It was all very cozy, with the inkwells that could not be upset, and the pens that grew in the woods, or strutted in the door-yard, and the teacher in the closest touch with his pupils, as I have just told. And as he labored with us, and the hours drew themselves out, he was comforted by the smell of his dinner cooking in some little hole adjoining the school room, and by the sound of his good Leah, or Rachel, or Deborah—I don't remember her name—keeping order among his little ones. She kept very good order, too, so that most of the time you could hear the scratching of the laborious pens accompanied by the croaking of the frogs in the swamp. Although my sister and I began our studies at the same time and progressed together, my parents did not want me to take up new subjects as fast as Fetka did. They thought my health too delicate for much study. So when Fetka had her Russian lesson, I was told to go and play. I am sorry to say that I was disobedient on these occasions, as on many others. I did not go and play. I looked on. I listened when Fetka rehearsed her lesson at home. And one evening I stole the Russian primer and repaired to a secret place I knew of. It was a storeroom for broken chairs, and rusty utensils, and dried apples. Nobody would look for me in that dusty hole. Nobody did look there, but they looked everywhere else, in the house and in the yard and in the barn and down the street and at our neighbors. And while everybody was searching and calling for me, and telling each other when I was last seen and what I was then doing, I, Mashka, was bent over the stolen book, rehearsing A-B-C, by the names my sister had given them. And before anybody hit upon my retreat, I could spell B-O-G, B-O-G, God, and K-A-Z-A, Kaza, Goat. I did not mind in the least being caught, for I had my new accomplishment to show off. I remembered the littered place and the high chest that served as my table, and the blue glass lamp that lighted my secret efforts. I remember being brought from there into the firelit room where the family was assembled, and confusing them all by my recital of the simple words, B-O-G, Bag, and K-A-Z-A, Kaza. I was not reproached for going into hiding at bedtime, and the next day I was allowed to take part in the Russian lesson. Alas, there were not many lessons more. Long before we had exhausted Reba Isaiah's learning, my sister and I had to give up our teacher, because the family fortunes began to decline, and luxuries, such as schooling, had to be cut off. Isaiah the scribe taught us, in all, perhaps two terms, in which time we learned Yiddish and Russian, and a little arithmetic. But little good we had from our ability to read, for there were no books in our house except prayer books and other religious writings, mostly in Hebrew. For our skill in writing we had as little use, as letter writing was not an everyday exercise, and idle writing was not thought of. Our good teacher, however, who had taken pride in our progress, would not let us lose all that we had learned from him. Books he could not lend us, because he had none himself. But he could, and he did, rate us out a beautiful copy of peace, which we could repeat over and over, from time to time, and so keep our hands in. I wondered that I have forgotten the graceful sentences of my copy, for I wrote them out just about countless times. It was in the form of a letter, written on lovely pink paper. My sister's was blue, the lines taking the shape of semi-circles across the page, and that without any guideline showing. The script, of course, was perfect, in the best manner of Isaiah the scribe, and the sentiments there and expressed were entirely noble. I was supposed to be a high school pupil away in my vacation, and I was writing to my respected parents to assure them of my welfare, and to tell them how, in the midst of my pleasures I still longed for my friends, and looked forward with eagerness to the renewal of my studies. All this in phrases half Yiddish, half German, and all together foreign to the ears of Polotsk. At least I never heard such talk in the market, when I went to buy a Kopeck's birth of sunflower seeds. This was all the schooling I had in Russia. My father's plans fell to the ground, on account of the protracted illness of both my parents. All his hopes of leading his children beyond the intellectual limits of Polotsk were trampled down by the monster poverty, who showed his evil visage just as my sister and I were fairly started on a broader path. One chance we had, and that was quickly snatched away, of continuing our education in spite of family difficulties. Laza the Rav, hearing from various sources that Pinchas, son-in-law of Raphael the Russian, had two bright little girls, whose talents were going to waste for want of training, became much interested, and sent for the children, to see for himself what the gossip was worth. By a strange trick of memory I recall nothing of this important interview, nor indeed of the whole matter, although a thousand trifles of that period recurred to me on the instant, so I report this anecdote on the authority of my parents. They tell me how the Rav lifted me up on a table in front of him, and asked me many questions, and encouraged me to ask questions in my turn. Rip Laza came to the conclusion, as a result of this interview, that I ought by all means to be put to school. There was no public school for girls as we know, but a few pupils were maintained in a certain private school by irregular contributions from city funds. Rip Laza enlisted in my cause the influence of his son, who by virtue of some municipal office which he held, had a vote in fixing this appropriation. But although he pleaded eloquently for my admission as a city pupil, the Rav son failed to win the consent of his colleagues, and my one little crack of opportunity was tightly stopped. My father does not remember on what technicality my application was dismissed. My mother is under the impression that it was plainly refused on account of my religion, the authorities being unwilling to appropriate money for the tuition of a Jewish child. But little it matters now what the reason was. The result is what affected me. I was left without teacher or book just when my mind was most active. I was left without food just when the hunger of growth was creeping up. I was left to think and think without direction, without the means of grappling with the contents of my own thought. In a community which was isolated from the mass of the people on account of its religion, which was governed by special civil laws in recognition of that fact, in whose calendar there were two score days of religious observation, whose going and coming, giving and taking, living and dying, to the minutest details of social conduct, to the most intimate particulars of private life were regulated by sacred laws, there could be no question of personal convictions in religion. One was a Jew leading a righteous life, or one was a Gentile, existing to harass the Jews while making a living off Jewish enterprise. In the vocabulary of the more intelligent part of Polotsk, it is true, there were such words as free thinker and apostate, but these were the names of men who had forsaken the law in distant times, or in distant parts, and whose evil fame had reached Polotsk by the circuitous route of tradition. Nobody looked for such monsters in this neighborhood. Polotsk was safely divided into Jews and Gentiles. If anyone in Polotsk had been idle and curious enough to inquire into the state of mind of a little child, I wonder if his findings would not have disturbed this simple classification. There used to be a little girl in Polotsk who recited the long Hebrew prayers, morning and evening, before and after meals, and never skipped a word, who kissed the Mazusa when going or coming, who abstained from food and drink on fast days when she was no bigger than a sacrificial hen, who spent Sabbath mornings over the lengthy ritual for the day, and read the Psalms till daylight faded. This pious child could give as good an account of the creation as any boy of her age. She knew how God made the world. Undeterred by the fate of Eve, she wanted to know more. She asked her wise Reba how God came to be in his place, and where he found the stuff to make the world of, and what was doing in the universe before God undertook his task. Finding from his unsatisfying replies that the Reba was but a barren branch on the tree of knowledge, the good little girl never betrayed to the world by look or word, her discovery of his limitations, but continued to accord him outwardly all the courtesy due to his calling. Her teacher, having failed her, the young student, with admirable persistence, carried her questions from one to another of her acquaintances, putting their answers to the test whenever it was possible. She established by this means two facts, first, that she knew as much as any of those who undertook to instruct her. Second, that her oracles sometimes gave false answers. Did the little inquisitor charge her betrayers with a lie? An examinous creature, she kept their falseness a secret, and ceased to probe their shallow depths. What you would know, find out for yourself, this became our student's motto, and she passed from the question to the experiment. Her grandmother told her that if she handled blind flowers, she would be stricken blind. She found by test that the pretty flowers were harmless. She tested everything that could be tested, till she hid at last on an impious plan to put God himself to the proof. The pious little girl arose one sabbath afternoon from her religious meditations, when all the house was taking its after-dinner nap, and went out in the yard, and stopped at the gate. She took out her pocket hankerchief, she looked at it. Yes, that would do for the experiment. She put it back into her pocket. She did not have to rehearse mentally the sacred admonition not to carry anything beyond the house limits on the sabbath day. She knew it as she knew that she was alive. And with her hankerchief in her pocket the audacious child stepped into the street. She stood a moment, her heart beating so that it pained. Nothing happened. She walked quite across the street. The sabbath peace still lay on everything. She felt again the burden in her pocket. Yes, she certainly was committing a sin. With an excess of impious boldness the sinner walked. She ran as far as the corner, and stood still, fearfully expectant. What form would the punishment take? She stood breathing painfully for an eternity. How still everything was! How close and still the air! Would it be a storm? Would a sudden bolt strike her? She stood and waited. She could not bring her hand to her pocket again. But she felt that it bulged monstrously. She stood with no thought of moving again. Where were the thunders of Jehovah? No sacred word of all her long prayers came to her tongue. Not even, hero Israel! She felt that she was in direct communication with God, awful thought, and he would read her mind and would send his answer. An age passed and blank expectancy. Nothing happened. Where was the wrath of God? Where was God? When she turned to go home the little philosopher had her handkerchief tied around her wrist in the proper way. The experiment was over, though the result was not clear. God had not punished her, but nothing was proved by his indifference. Either the act was no sin and her preceptors were all deceivers, or it was indeed a sin in the eyes of God, but he refrained from stern justice for high reasons of his own. It was not a searching experiment she had made. She was bitterly disappointed, and perhaps that was meant as her punishment. God had refused to give her a reply. She intended no sin for the sake of sin, so, being still in doubt, she tied her handkerchief around her wrist. Her eyes stared more than ever. This was the child with the staring eyes, but that was the only sign she gave of a consciousness suddenly expanded, of a self-consciousness intensified. When she went back into the house, she gazed with a new curiosity at her mother, at her grandmother dozing in their chairs. They looked different. When they awoke and stretched themselves and adjusted wig and cap, they looked very strange. As she went to get her grandmother her Bible, and dropped it accidentally, she kissed it by way of atonement just as a proper child should. How, I wonder, would this psalm-singing child have been enlabeled by the investigator of her mind? Would he have called her a Jew? She was too young to be called an apostate. Perhaps she would have been dismissed as a little fraud. And I should be content with that classification, if slightly modified. I should say that the child was a piteously puzzled little fraud. To return to the honest first person, I was something of a fraud. The days when I believed everything I was told did not run much beyond my teething time. I soon began to question if fire was really hot, if the cat would really scratch. Presently, as we have seen, I questioned God. And in those days my religion depended on my mood. I could believe anything I wanted to believe. I did believe, in all my moods, that there was a God who had made the world, in some fashion unexplained, and who knew about me and my doings. For there was the world all about me, and somebody must have made it. And it was conceivable that a being powerful enough to do such work could be aware of my actions at all times, and yet continue to me invisible. The question remained. What did he think of my conduct? Was he really angry when I broke the Sabbath? Or pleased when I fasted on the day of atonement? My belief as to these matters wavered. When I swung the sacrifice around my head on Atonement Eve, repeating, Be thou my sacrifice, etc., I certainly believed that I was bargaining with the Almighty for pardon, and that he was interested in the matter. But next day, when the fast was over, and I enjoyed all of my chicken that I could eat, I believed as certainly that God could not be party to such a foolish transaction, in which he got nothing but words, while I got both the feast and the pardon. The sacrifice of money, to be spent for the poor, seemed to me a more reliable insurance against damnation. The well-to-do pious offered up both living sacrifice and money for the poor-box, but it was a sign of poverty to offer only money. Even a lean rooster, to be killed, roasted, and garnished for the devotee's own table at the breaking of the fast, seemed to be considered a more respectable sacrifice than a grotion to increase the charity fund. All this was so illogical that I unsettled my faith in minor points of doctrine. And on these points I was quite happy to believe today one thing, tomorrow another. As I unwaveringly believed that we Jews had a God who was powerful and wise, I believed that the God of my Christian neighbors was impotent, cruel, and foolish, I understood that the God of the Gentiles was no better than a toy, to be dressed up in gaudy stuffs and carried in processions. I saw it often enough, and turned away in contempt. While the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, my God, enjoined on me honesty and kindness, the God of Vanca bade him beat me and spit on me whenever he caught me alone. And what foolish God was that, who taught the stupid Gentiles that we drank the blood of a murdered child at our Passover feast. Why I, who was only a child, knew better, and so I hated and feared and avoided the great white church in the plots, and hated every sign and symbol of that monstrous God who has cupped there and hated my own person, when, in her play of a Christian funeral, I imagined my body to be the corpse, over which was carried the hideous cross. Perhaps I have established that I was more Jew than Gentile, though I can still prove that I was nonetheless a fraud. For instance, I remember how once, on the eve of the Ninth of Ab, the anniversary of the fall of the temple, I was looking on at the lamentations of the woman. A large circle had gathered around my mother, who was the only good reader among them, to listen to the story of the cruel destruction. Sitting on humble stools, in stocking feet, shabby clothes, and disheveled hair, weeping in chorus, and wringing their hands, as if it was but yesterday that the sacred edifice fell, and they were in the very dust and ashes of the rune. The woman looked to me enviously wretched and pious. I joined the circle in the candle-light. I wrung my hands. I moaned. But I was always slow of tears. I could not weep. But I wanted to look like the others. So I straighted my cheeks with the only moisture at hand. I'll last for my pious ambition. I'll last for the noble lament of the woman. Somebody looked up and caught me in the act of manufacturing tears. I grinned, and she giggled. Another woman looked up. I grinned, and they giggled. Demoralization swept around the circle. Honest laughter snuffed out artificial grief. My mother at last looked up, with red and astonished eyes, and I was banished from the Feast of Tears. I returned promptly to my playmates in the street, who were amusing themselves, according to the custom on that sad anniversary, by pelting each other with burrs. Here I was distinguished, more than I had been among my elders. My hair being curly, it caught a generous number of burrs, so that I fairly bristled with these emblems of mortification and woe. Not long after that sinful experiment with a handkerchief, I discovered by accident that I was not the only doubter in Polotsk. One Friday night I lay wakeful in my little bed, staring from the dark into the lighted room adjoining mine. I saw the Sabbath candles sputter and go out, one by one. It was late, but the lamp hanging from the ceiling still burned high. Everybody had gone to bed. The lamp would go out before morning if there was little oil, or else it would burn till Natasha, the Gentile chorewoman, came in the morning to put it out, and remove the candlesticks from the table, and unseal the oven, and do the dozen little tasks which no Jew could perform on the Sabbath. The simple prohibition to labor on the Sabbath day had been construed by zealous commentators to mean much more. One must not even touch any instrument of labor or commerce, as an ax or a coin. It was forbidden to light a fire, or to touch anything that contained a fire, or had contained fire, were only a cold candlestick or a burnt match. Therefore, the lamp at which I was staring must burn till the Gentile woman came to put it out. The light did not annoy me in the least. I was not thinking about it. But apparently it troubled somebody else. I saw my father come from his room, which also had joined the living room. What was he going to do? What was this he was doing? Could I believe my eyes? My father touched the lighted lamp. Yes, he shook it, as if to see how much oil there was left. I was petrified in my place. I could neither move nor make a sound. It seemed to me he must feel my eyes bulging at him out of the dark. But he did not know that I was looking. He thought everybody was asleep. He turned down the light, a very little, and waited. I did not take my eyes from him. He lowered the flame a little more, and waited again. I watched. By the slightest degrees he turned the light down. I understood. In case any one were awake, it would appear as if the lamp was going out of itself. I was the only one who lay so as to be able to see him, and I had gone to bed so early that he could not suppose I was awake. The light annoyed him. He wanted to put it out, but he would not risk having it known. I heard my father find his bed in the dark before I dared to draw a full breath. The thing he had done was a monstrous sin. If his mother had seen him do it, it would have broken her heart, his mother who fasted half the days of the year when he was a boy, to save his teacher's fee, his mother who walked almost bare foot in the cruel snow to carry him on her shoulders to school when she had no shoes for him, his mother who made it her pious pride to raise up a learned son, that most precious offering in the eyes of the great God from the hand of a poor struggling woman. If my mother had seen it, it would have grieved her no less, my mother who was given to him, with her youth and good name and her dowry, in exchange for his learning and piety, my mother who was taken from her play to bear him children and feed them and keep them, while he sat on the benches of the scholars and repaid her labours with the fame of his learning. I did not put it to myself just so, but I understood that learning and piety were the things most valued in our family, that my father was a scholar, and that piety, of course, was the fruit of sacred learning, and yet my father had deliberately violated the Sabbath. His act was not to be compared with my carrying the handkerchief. The two sins were of the same kind, but the sinners and thermotives were different. I was a child, a girl at that, not yet of the age of moral responsibility. He was a man full grown, passing for one of God's elect, and accepting the reverence of the world as due tribute of his scholarly merits. I had by no means satisfied myself, by my secret experiment, that it was not sinful to carry a burden on the Sabbath day. If God did not punish me on the spot, perhaps it was because of my youth, or perhaps it was because of my motive. According to my elders, my father, by turning out the lamp, committed the sin of Sabbath-breaking. What did my father intend? I could not suppose that his purpose was similar to mine. Surely he, who had lived so long and studied so deeply, had by this time resolved all his doubts. Surely God had instructed him. I could not believe that he did wrong knowingly, so I came to the conclusion that he did not hold a sin to touch a lighted lamp on Sabbath. Then why was he so secret in his action? That too became clear to me. I myself had instinctively adopted secret methods in all my little investigations, and had kept the results to myself. The way in which my questions were received had taught me much. I had a dim and articulate understanding of the horror and indignation which my father would excite if he, supposedly a man of piety, should publish the heretical opinion that it was not wrong to handle fire on the Sabbath. To see what remorse my mother suffered, or my father's mother, if by some accident she failed in any point of religious observance, was to know that she could never be brought to doubt the sacred importance of the Thousand Manuta of ancient Jewish practice. That which had been taught them as the truth by their fathers and mothers, was the whole truth to my good friends and neighbors. That and nothing else. If there were any people in Pilots who had strange private opinions, such as I concluded my father must hold, it was possible that he had a secret acquaintance with them. But it would never do, it was plain to me, to make public confession of his convictions. Such an act would not only break the hearts of his family, but it would also take the bread from the mouths of his children, and ruin them forever. My sister and my brother and I would come to be called the children of Israel the Apostate, just as Gutka, my playmate, was called the granddaughter of Yonkel, the informer. The most innocent of us would be cursed and shunned for the sin of our father. All this I came to understand, not all at once, but by degrees, as I put this and that together, and brought my childish thoughts to order. I was by no means absorbed in this problem. I played and danced with the other children as heartily as ever. I brooded in my window-corner when there was nothing else to do. I had not the slightest impulse to go to my father, charge him with his unorthodox conduct, and demand an explanation of him. I was quite satisfied that I understood him, and I had not the habit of confidences. I was still in the days when I was content to find out things, and did not long to communicate my discoveries. Moreover, I was used to living in two worlds, a real world and a make-believe one, without ever knowing which was which. In one world I had much company, father and mother and sister and friends, and did as others did, and took everything for granted. In the other world I was all alone, and I had to discover ways for myself, and I was so uncertain that I did not attempt to bring a companion along. And did I find my own father treading in the unknown ways? Then perhaps some day he would come across me, and take me farther than I had yet been. But I would not be the first to whisper that I was there. It seems strange enough to me now, that I should ever have been so uncommunicative, but I remind myself that I have been thoroughly made over, at least once, since those early days. I recall with sorrow that I was sometimes as weak in morals as I was in religion. I remember stealing a piece of sugar. It was long ago. Almost as long ago is anything that I remember. We were still living in my grandfather's house, when this dreadful thing happened, and I was only four or five years old when we moved from there. Before my mother figured this out for me I scarcely had the courage to confess my sin. And it was thus, in a corner of a front room, by a window, stood a high chest of drawers. On top of the chest stood a tin box, decorated with figures of queer people with queer flat parasols, a Chinese tea-box and a word. The box had a lid, the lid was shut tight, but I knew what was in that gorgeous box and I coveted it. I was very little. I never could reach anything. There stood a chair suggestively near the chest. I pushed the chair a little and mounted it. By standing on tiptoe I could now reach the box. I opened it and took out an irregular bump of sparkling sugar. I stood on the chair admiring it. I stood too long. My grandmother came in, or was it could the housemaid, and found me with a stolen morsel. I saw that I was fairly caught. How could I hope to escape my captor when I was obliged to turn on my stomach in order to descend safely, thus presenting my jailer with the most tempting opportunity for immediate chest tisement? I took in the situation before my grandmother had found her voice for horror. Did I rub my eyes with my knuckles and whimper? I wish I could report that I was thus instantly struck with a sense of my guilt. I was impressed only with the absolute certainty of my impending doom, and I promptly seized on a measure of compensation. While my captor, I really think it was a grandmother, rehearsed her entire vocabulary of reproach from a distance sufficient to enable her to hurl her voice at me with the best effect, I stuffed the lump of sugar into my mouth and munched it as fast as I could, and I had eaten it all and had licked my sticky lips before the avenging rod came down. I remember no similar lapses from righteousness, but I sinned in lesser ways more times than there are years in my life. I sinned, and more than once I escaped punishment by some trick or sly speech. I do not mean that I lied outright, though that also I did sometimes, but I would twist my naughty speech, if forced to repeat it, in such an artful manner, or give such ludicrous explanation of my naughty act, that justice was overcome by laughter and threw me, as often is not, a handful of raisins instead of a knotted strap. If by such successes I was encouraged to cultivate my natural slinus and duplicity, I throw the blame on my unwise preceptors, and am glad to be rid of the burden for once. I have said that I used to lie. I recall no particular occasion when a lie was the cause of my disgrace, but I know that it was always my habit, when I had some trifling adventure to report, to garnish it up with so much detail and circumstance that nobody who had witnessed my small affair could have recognized it as the same, had I not insisted on my version, with such fervid conviction. The truth is that everything that happened to me really loomed great and shone splendid in my eyes, and I could not, except by conscious effort, reduce my visions to their actual shapes and colors. If I saw a pair of geese leading about a lazy goose girl, they went through all sorts of antics before my eyes, that fat geese are not known to indulge in. If I met poor blind Mugna, with a frown on his face, I thought that a cloud of wrath overspread his countenance, and I ran home to relate, panting, how narrowly I had escaped his fury. I will not pretend that I was absolutely unconscious of my exaggerations, but if you insist, I will say that things as I reported them might have been so, and would have been much more interesting had they been so. The noble reader, who has never told a lie, or never confessed one, will be shocked at these revelations of my childish depravity. But proof has he, he will cry, that I am not lying on every page of this chronicle, if by my own confession my childhood was spent in a maze of lies and dreams. I shall say to the saint, when I am challenged, that the proof of my conversion to veracity is engraven in his own soul. Do you not remember, you spotless one, how you used to steal and lie and cheat and rob? Oh, not with your own hand, of course. It was your remote ancestor, who lived by plunder, and was honored for the blood upon his hairy hands. By and by he discovered that cunning was more effective than violence, and thus troublesome. Still later he became convinced that the greatest cunning was virtue, and made him a moral code, and subdued the world. Then when you came along, stumbling through the wilderness of cast off errors, your wise ancestor gave you a thrust that landed you in the clearing of modernity, at the same time bellowing in your ear. Now be good, it pays. This is the whole history of your saintliness. But all people do not take up life at the same point of human development. Some are backward at birth, and have to make up, in the brief space of their individual history, the stages they missed on their way out of the black past. With me, for example, it actually comes to this, that I have to recapitulate, in my own experience, all the slow steps of the progress of the race. I seem to learn nothing except by the prick of life on my own skin. I am saved from living in ignorance and dying in darkness only by the sensitiveness of my skin. Some men learn through borrowed experience, shut them up in a glass tower with an unobstructed view of the world, and they will go through every adventure of life by proxy, and be able to furnish you with a complete philosophy of life, and you may safely bring up your children by it. But I am not of that godlike organization. I am a thinking animal. Things are as important to me as ideas. I imbibe wisdom through every pore of my body. There are times, indeed, when the doctor in his study is less intelligible to me than a cricket far off in the field. The earth was my mother. The earth is my teacher. I am a dutiful pupil. I listen ever with my ear close to her lips. It seems to me that I do not know a single thing that I did not learn, more or less directly, through the corporal senses. As long as I have my body, I need not despair of salvation. End of chapter 6. Chapter 7 of the Promised Land. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain, recording by Bridget Gage, The Promised Land, by Mary Anton, chapter 7, The Boundaries Stretch. The long chapter of troubles which led to my father's emigration to America began with his own illness. The doctors sent him to Corland to consult expensive specialists, who prescribed tedious courses of treatment. He was far from cured when my mother also fell ill, and my father had to return to Polotsk to look after the business. Trouble begets trouble, after my mother took to her bed everything continued to go wrong. The business gradually declined, as too much money was withdrawn to pay the doctors and apothecaries bills. And my father, himself in poor health, and worried about my mother, was not successful in coping with the growing difficulties. At home the servants were dismissed, for the sake of economy, and all the housework and nursing fell on my grandmother and my sister. Fetka, as a result, was overworked, and fell ill of a fever. The baby, suffering from unavoidable neglect, developed the fractious temper of semi-illness. And by way of a climax the old cow took it into her head to kick my grandmother, who was laid up for a week with a bruised leg. Neighbors and cousins pulled us through till Grandma got up, and after her Fetka. But my mother remained on her bed. Weeks, months, a year she lay there, and half of another year. All the doctors in Polotsk attended her in turn, and one doctor came all the way from Vitebsk. Every country practitioner for miles around was consulted. Every quack, every old wife who knew a charm. The apothecaries ransacked their shops for drugs, the name of which they had forgotten, and kind neighbors brought in their favorite remedies. There were midnight prayers in the synagogue for my mother, and petitions at the graves of her parents. And one awful night, when she was near death, three pious mothers, who had never lost a child, came to my mother's bedside, and bought her, for a few copex for their own, so that she might gain the protection of their luck, and so be saved. Still my poor mother lay on her bed, suffering and wasting. The house assumed a look of desolation. Everybody went un-tiptoe. We walked in whispers. For weeks at a time there was no laughter in our home. The ominous nightlamp was never extinguished. We slept in our clothes, night after night, so as to wake them more easily, in case of sudden need. We watched, we waited, but we scarcely hoped. Once in a while I was allowed to take a short turn in the sick-room. It was awful to sit beside my mother's bed in the still night, and see her helplessness. She had been so strong, so active. She used to lift sacks and barrels that were heavy for a man, and now she could not raise a spoon to her mouth. Sometimes she did not know me when I gave her the medicine, and when she knew me she did not care. Would she ever care any more? She looked strange and small in the shadows of the bed. Her hair had been cut off after the first few months. Her short curls were almost covered by the ice-bag. Her cheeks were red, red, but her hands were so white as they had never been before. In the still night I wondered if she cared to live. The nightlamp burned on, my father grew old. He was always figuring on a piece of paper. We children knew the till was empty when the silver candlesticks were taken away to be pond. Next superfluous feather-beds were sold for what they would bring, and then there came a day when grandma, with eyes blinded by tears, groped in the big wardrobe for my mother's satin dress and velvet mantle, and after that it did not matter any more what was taken out of the house. Then everything took a sudden turn. My mother began to improve, and at the same time my father was offered a good position as superintendent of a grist mill. As soon as my mother could be moved he took us all out to the mill, about three verses out of town, on the Pilata. We had a pleasant cottage there, with the miller's red-headed freckled family for our only neighbors. If our rooms were bareer than they used to be, the sun shone in at all the windows, and as the leaves on the tree grew denser and darker my mother grew stronger on her feet and laughter returned to our house as the songbird to the grove. We children had a very happy summer. We had never lived in the country before, and we liked the change. It was endless fun to explore the mill, to squeeze into forbidden places, and to be pulled out by the angry miller, to tyrannize over the mill hands, and to be worshipped by them in return, to go boating on the river, and discover unvisited nooks, and search the woods and fields for kitchen herbs, and get lost, and be found a hundred times a week. And what an adventure it was to walk the three bursts into town, leaving a trail of perfume from the wildflower posies we carried to our city friends. But these things did not last. The mill changed hands, and the new owner put a protege of his own in my father's place. So after a short breathing spell, we were driven back into the swamp of growing poverty and trouble. The next year or so my father spent in a restless and fruitless search for a permanent position. My mother had another serious illness, and his own health remained precarious. What he earned did not more than half pay the bills in the end, though we were living very humbly now. Polotsk seemed to reject him, and no other place invited him. Just at this time occurred one of the periodic anti-Semitic movements whereby government officials were wont to clear the forbidden cities of Jews, whom, in the intervals of slack administration of the law, they allowed to maintain an illegal residence in places outside the pale, on payment of enormous bribes, and at the cost of nameless risks and indignities. It was a little before Passover that the cry of the hunted thrilled the Jewish world with a familiar fear. The wholesale expulsion of Jews from Moscow and its surrounding district, at cruelly short notice, was the name of this latest disaster. Where would the doom strike next? The Jews who lived illegally without the pale turned their possessions into cash, and slept in their clothes, ready for immediate flight. Those who lived in the comparative security of the pale trembled for their brothers and sisters without, and open wide their doors to afford the fugitives' refuge. And hundreds of fugitives, preceded by a wail of distress, flocked into the open district, bringing their trouble where trouble was never absent, mingling their tears with the tears that never dried. The open cities becoming thus suddenly crowded, every man's chance of making a living was diminished in proportion to the number of additional competitors. Hardship, acute distress, ruined for many. Thus spread the disaster, ring beyond ring, from the stone thrown by a despotic official into the ever-full river of Jewish persecution. Passover was celebrated in tears that year. In the story of the Exodus we would have read a chapter of current history. Only for us there was no deliverer and no promised land. But what said some of us at the end of the long service? Not may we be next year in Jerusalem, but next year in America. So there was our promised land, and many faces returned towards the west. And if the waters of the Atlantic did not part for them, the wanderers rode its bitter flood by a miracle as great as any the rod of Moses ever wrought. My father was carried away by the westward movement, glad of his own deliverance, but so were of heart for us whom he left behind. It was the last chance for all of us. We were so far reduced in circumstances that he had to travel with borrowed money to a German port whence he was forwarded to Boston with a host of others at the expense of an emigrant aid society. I was about ten years old when my father emigrated. I was used to his going away from home, and America did not mean much more to me than Kirsten, or Odessa, or any other names of distant places. I understood vaguely from the gravity with which his plans were discussed, and from references to ships, societies, and other unfamiliar things, that this enterprise was different from previous ones, but my excitement and emotion on the morning of my father's departure were mainly vicarious. I know the day when America, as a world entirely unlike Polotsk, lodged in my brain, to become the center of all my dreams and speculations. Well I know the day. I was in bed, sharing the measles with some of the other children. America brought us a thick letter from father, written just before boarding the ship. The letter was full of excitement. There was something in it besides the description of travel, something besides the pictures of crowds of people, of foreign cities, of a ship ready to be put out to sea. My father was traveling at the expense of a charitable organization, without means of his own, without plans, to a strange world where he had no friends, and yet he wrote with the confidence of a well-equipped soldier going into battle. The rhetoric is mine. Father simply wrote that the emigration committee was taking good care of everybody, that the weather was fine, and the ship comfortable. But I heard something, as we read the letter together in the darkened drum, that was more than the words seemed to say. There was annihilation, a hint of triumph, such as had never been in my father's letters before. I cannot tell how I knew it. I felt a stirring, a straining in my father's letter. It was there, even though my mother stumbled over strange words, even though she cried, as women will when somebody's going away. My father was inspired by a vision. He saw something, he promised us something. It was this America. And America became my dream. While it was nothing new for my father to go far from home in search of his fortune, the circumstances in which he left us were unlike anything we had experienced before. We had absolutely no reliable source of income, no settled home, no immediate prospects. We hardly knew where we belonged in the simple scheme of our society. My mother as a breadwinner had nothing like her former success. Her health was permanently impaired. Her place in the business world had long been filled by others, and there was no capital to start her anew. Her brothers did what they could for her. They were well to do, but they all had large families, with marriageable daughters, and sons to be bought out of military service. Once they made her was generous compared to their means. Affection and duty could do no more, but there were four of us growing children, and my mother was obliged to make every effort within her power to peace out her income. How quickly we came down from a large establishment with servants and retainers, and a place among the best in Polotsk, to a single room hired by the weak, and the humblest associations, and the averted heads of former friends. But oftenest it was my mother who turned away her head. She took to using the side streets to avoid the pitiful eyes of the kind, and the scornful eyes of the haughty. Both were turned on her as she trudged from store to store, and from house to house, peddling tea or otherware, and both were hard to bear. Many a winter morning she arose in the dark, to tramp three or four miles in the gripping cold, through the dragging snow, with a pound of tea for a distant customer, and her profit was perhaps twenty copex. Many a time she fell on the ice, as she climbed the steep bank on the far side of the Divina, a heavy basket on each arm. More than once she fainted at the doors of her customers, ashamed to knock as suppliant, where she had used to be received as an honored guest. I hope the angels did not have to count the tears that fell on her frost-bitten, aching hands, as she counted her bitter earnings at night. And who took care of us children while my mother tramped the streets with her basket? Why, who but Fetka? Who but the little housewife of twelve? Sure of our safety was my mother, with Fetka, to watch. Sure of our comfort, with Fetka, to cook the soup, and divide the scrap of meat, and remember the next meal. Joseph was in header all day. The baby was a quiet little thing. Moshka was no worse than usual. But still there was plenty to do, with order to keep in a crowded room, and the washing and the mending. And Fetka did it all. She went to the river with the woman to wash the clothes, and tucked up her dress and stood bare-legged in the water, like the rest of them, and beat and rubbed with all her might, till our miserable rags gleamed white again. And I, I usually had a cold, or a cough, or something to disable me, and I never had any talent for housework. If I swept and sanded the floor, polished the samovar, and ran errands, I was doing much. I minded the baby, who did not need much minding. I was willing enough, I suppose, but the hard things were done without my help. Not that I mean to belittle the part that I played in our reduced domestic economy. Indeed, I am very particular to get all the credit to me. I always remind my sister Debra, who was the baby of those humble days, that it was I who pierced her ears. Earrings were a requisite part of a girl's toilet. Even a beggar girl must have earrings, were the only loops of thread with glass beads. I heard my mother bemoan the baby, because she had not time to pierce her ears. Promptly I armed myself with a coarse needle, and a spool of thread, and towed Debra out into the woodshed. The operation was entirely successful, though the baby was entirely ungrateful, and I am proud to this day of the unflinching manner in which I did what I conceived to be my duty. If Debra chooses to go with ungarnished ears, it is her affair. My conscience is free of all reproach. I had a direct way in everything. I rushed right in. I spoke right out. My mother sent me sometimes to deliver a package of tea, and I was proud to help in business. One day I went across the Divina, and far up the other side. It was a good-sized expedition for me to make alone, and I was not a little pleased with myself when I delivered my package, safe and intact, into the hands of my customer. But the storekeeper was not pleased at all. She sniffed and sniffed. She pinched the tea. She shook it all out on the counter. Nah, take it back, she said and discussed. This is not the tea I always buy. It's a poorer quality. I knew the woman was mistaken. I was acquainted with my mother several grades of tea, so I spoke up manfully. Oh, no, I said. This is the tea my mother always sends you. There is no worse tea. Nothing in my life ever hurt me more than that woman's answer to my argument. She laughed. She simply laughed. But I understood, even before she controlled herself sufficiently to make verbal remarks, that I had spoken like a fool, had lost my mother a customer. I had only spoken the truth, but I had not expressed it diplomatically. That was no way to make business. I felt very sore to be returning home with the tea still in my hand, but I forgot my trouble in watching a summer storm gather up the river. The few passengers who took the boat with me looked scared as the sky darkened, and the boatman grasped his oars very soberly. It took my breath away to see the signs, but I liked it, and I was much disappointed to get home dry. When my mother heard of my misadventure, she laughed, too. But that was different, and I was able to laugh with her. This is the way I helped in the housekeeping and in business. I hope it does not appear as if I did not take our situation to heart, for I did, in my own fashion. It was plain, even to an idle dreamer like me, that we were living on the charity of our friends, and barely living at that. It was plain, from my father's letters, that he was scarcely able to support himself in America, and that there was no immediate prospect of our joining him. I realized it all, but I considered it temporary, and I found plenty of comfort in writing long letters to my father, real original letters this time, not copies of Rebe Isiah's model, letters which my father treasured for years. As an instance of what I mean by my own fashion of taking trouble to heart, I recall the day when our household effects were attached for a debt. We had plenty of debts, but the stern creditor who set the law on us this time was none of ours. The claim was against a family to whom my mother sublet, two of our three rums, furnished with her own things. The police officers, who swooped down upon us without warning, as was their habit, asked no questions, and paid no heed to explanations. They affixed a seal to every lame chair and cracked pitcher in the place, I, to every faded petticoat found hanging in the wardrobe. These goods, comprising all our possessions and all our tenants, would presently be removed to be sold at auction for the benefit of the creditor. Lame chairs and faded petticoats, when they are the last one has, have a vital value in the owner's eyes. My mother moved about, weeping distractedly, all the while the officers were in the house. The frightened children cried, our neighbors gathered to bemoan our misfortune, and over everything was the peculiar dread which only Jews in Russia feel when agents of the government invade their homes. The fear of the moment was in my heart, as in every other heart there. It was a horrid, oppressive fear. I retired to a quiet corner to grapple with it. I was not given to weeping, but I must think things out in words. I repeated to myself that the trouble was all about money. Somebody wanted money from our tenant, who had none to give. Our furniture was going to be sold to make this money. It was a mistake, but then the officers would not believe my mother. Still, it was only about money. Nobody was dead. Nobody was ill. It was all about money. Why, there was plenty of money in Polatsk. My own uncle had many times as much as the creditor claimed. He could buy all our things back, or somebody else could. What did it matter? It was only money, and money was got by working, and we were all willing to work. There was nothing gone, nothing lost, as when somebody died. This furniture could be moved from place to place. And so if money could be moved, and nothing was lost out of the world by the transfer, that was all, if anybody. Why, what do I see at the window? Breen Melka, our next door neighbor, is—yes, she is smuggling something out of the window. If she is caught—oh, I must help. Breen Melka beckons. She wants me to do something. I see, I understand. I must stand in the doorway, to obstruct the view of the others, who are all engaged in the next room just now. I move readily to my post, but I cannot resist my curiosity. I must look over my shoulder a last time, to see what it is Breen Melka wants to smuggle out. I can scarcely stifle my laughter. Of all our earthly goods our neighbor has chosen for salvation a dented bandbox containing a moth-y in bonnet from my mother's happier days. And I laugh not only from amusement, but also from lightness of heart. Here I have succeeded in reducing our catastrophe to its simplest terms, and I find that it is only a trifle and no matter of life and death. I could not help it. That was the way it looked to me. I am sure I made as serious efforts as anybody to prepare myself for life in America on the lines indicated in my father's letters. In America, he wrote, it was no disgrace to work at a trade. Workmen and capitalists were equal. The employer addressed the employee as you, not familiarly, as thou. The cobbler and the teacher had the same title, Mr., and all the children, boys and girls, Jews and Gentiles, went to school. Education would be ours for the asking, and economic independence also, as soon as we were prepared. He wanted Fetka and me to be taught some trade, so my sister was a apprentice to a dressmaker, and I to a milliner. Fetka, of course, was successful, and I, of course, was not. My sister managed to learn her trade, although most of the time at the dressmakers she had to spend in sweeping, running errands, and mining the babies, the usual occupations of the apprentice in any trade. But I had to be taken away from the milliners after a couple of months. I did try, honestly. With all my eyes I watched my mistress build up a chimney pot of straw and things. I ripped up old bonnets with enthusiasm. I picked up everybody's spools and thimbles and other far rolling objects. I did just as I was told, for I was determined to become a famous milliner, since America honored the workmen so. But most of the time I was sent away on errands, to the market to buy soup-greens, to the corner store to get change, and all over town with band-boxes half as round again as I. It was winter, and I was not very well-dressed. I froze. I coughed. My mistress said I was not of much use to her. So my mother kept me at home, and my career as a milliner was blighted. This was during our last year in Russia, when I was between twelve and thirteen years of age. I was old enough to be ashamed of my failures, but I did not have much time to think about them, because my uncle Solomon took me with him to Vitebsk. It was not my first visit to that city. A few years before I had spent some days there, in the care of my father's cousin Rachel, who journeyed periodically to the capital of the province to replenish her stock of spools and combs and like small wares, by the sale of which she was slowly earning her dowry. On that first occasion, cousin Rachel, who had developed in business that dual conscience, one for her Jewish neighbors and one for the Gentiles, decided to carry me without a ticket. I was so small, though of an age to pay half fair, that it was not difficult. I remember her simple stratagem from beginning to end. When we approached the ticket office, she whispered to me to stoop a little, and I stooped. The ticket agent passed me. In the car she bade me curl up in the seat, and I curled up. She threw a shawl over me, and bade me pretend to sleep, and I pretended to sleep. I heard the conductor collect the tickets. I knew when he was looking at me. I heard him ask my age, and I heard cousin Rachel lie about it. I was allowed to sit up when the conductor was gone, and I sat up and looked out of the window and saw everything, and was perfectly, perfectly happy. I was fond of my cousin, and I smiled at her in perfect understanding and admiration of her cleverness in beating the railroad company. I knew then, as I know now, beyond a doubt, that my uncle David's daughter was an honorable woman. With the righteous she dealt squarely, with the unjust as best she could. She was in duty bound to make all the money she could, for money was her only protection in the midst of the enemy. Every co-pec she earned or saved was a scale in her code of armor. We learned this code early in life in Polotsk, so I was pleased with the success of our ruse on this occasion, though I should have been horrified if I had seen cousin Rachel cheat a Jew. We made our headquarters in that part of Vitebsk where my father's numerous cousins and aunts lived, in more or less poverty, or at most in the humblest comfort. But I was taken to my uncle Solomon's to spend the Sabbath. I remember a long walk through magnificent avenues and past splendid shops and houses and gardens. Vitebsk was a metropolis beside Provincial Polotsk, and I was very small, even without stooping. Uncle Solomon lived in the better part of the city, and I found his place very attractive. Still, after a night's sleep, I was ready for further travel and adventures, and I set out, without a word to anybody, to retrace my steps clear across the city. The way was twice as long as on the preceding day, perhaps because such small feet set the pace, perhaps because I lingered as long as I pleased at the shop windows. At some corners, too, I had to stop and study my route. I do not think I was frightened at all, though I imagine my back was very straight and my head very high all the way, for I was well aware that I was out on an adventure. I did not speak to anyone till I reached my aunt Lia's, and then I hardly had a chance to speak. I was so much hugged and laughed over and cried over, and questioned and crossed questioned, without anybody waiting to hear my answers. I had meant to surprise cousin Rachel, and I had frightened her. When she had come to Uncle Solomon's to take me back, she found the house in an uproar, everybody frightened at my disappearance. The neighborhood was searched, and at last messengers were sent to aunt Lia's. The messengers in their haste quite overlooked me. It was their fault if they took a shortcut unknown to me. I was all the time faithfully steering by the sign of the tobacco shop, and the shop with the jumping jack in the window, and the garden with the iron fence, and the sentry-box opposite a drug store, and all the rest of my landmarks, as carefully entered on my mental chart the day before. All this I told my scared relatives as soon as they let me, till they were convinced that I was not lost, nor stolen by the gypsies, nor otherwise done away with. Cousin Rachel was so glad that she would not have to return to Pilotsk empty-handed that she would not let anybody scold me. She made me tell over and over what I had seen on the way, till they all laughed and praised my acuteness for seeing so much more than what they had supposed there was to see. Indeed, I was made a heroine, which was just what I intended to be when I set out on my adventure, and thus ended most of my unlawful escapades. I was more petted than scolded for my insubordination. My second journey to Vitebsk, in the company of Uncle Salomon, I remember as well as the first. I had been up all night, dancing at a wedding, and had gone home only to pick up my small bundle and to be picked up, in turn, by my uncle. I was a little taller now, and had my own ticket, like a real traveller. It was still early in the morning when the train pulled out of the station, or else it was a misty day. I know the fields looked soft and grey when we got out into the country, and the trees were blurred. I did not want to sleep. A new day had begun. A new adventure. I would not miss any of it. But the last day, so unnaturally prolonged, was entangled in the skirts of the new. When did yesterday end? Why was not this new day the same day continued? I looked up at my uncle, but he was smiling at me in the amused way of his. He always seemed to be amused at me, and he would make me talk, and then laugh at me, so I did not ask my question. Indeed, I could not formulate it, so I kept staring out on the dim country, and thinking, and thinking, and all the while the engine throbbed and lurched, and the wheels ground along, and I was astonished to hear that they were keeping perfectly the time of the last waltz I had danced at the wedding. I sang it through in my head. Yes, that was the rhythm. The engine knew it, the whole machine repeated it, and sent vibrations through my body that were just like the movements of the waltz. I was so much interested in this discovery that I forgot the problem of the continuity of time, and from that day to this, whenever I have heard that waltz, one of the sweet Danube waltzes, I have lived through that entire experience, the festive night, the misty morning, the abnormal consciousness of time, as if I had existed forever without a break, the journey, the dim landscape, and the tune singing itself in my head. Never can I hear that waltz without the accompaniment of engine wheels grinding rhythmically along speeding tracks. I remained in Vitebsk about six months. I do not believe I was ever homesick during all that time. I was too happy to be homesick. The life suited me extremely well. My life in Polotsk had grown meaner in dollar as the family fortunes declined. For years there had been no lessons, no pleasant excursions, no jolly gatherings with uncles and aunts. Poverty, shadowed by pride, trampled down our simple ambitions and simpler joys. I cannot honestly say that I was very sensitive to our losses. I do not remember suffering, because there was no jam on my bread and no new dress for the holidays. I do not know whether I was hurt when some of our playmates abandoned us. I remember myself oftener in the attitude of an onlooker, as on the occasion of the attachment of our furniture, when I went off into a corner to think about it. Perhaps I was not able to cling to the negations. The possession of the bread was a more absorbing fact than the loss of the jam. If I were to read my character backwards, I ought to believe that I did miss what I lacked in our days of privation, for I know to my shame that in more recent years I have cried for jam. But I am not trying to reason, only to remember, and from many scattered and shadowy memories that glimmer and fade away so fast that I cannot fix them on this page. I form an idea, almost a conviction, that it was with me as I say. How indifferent I may have been to what I had not, I was fully alive to what I had. So when I came to Vitebsk I eagerly seized on the many new things that I found around me, and these new impressions and experiences affected me so much that I count that visit as an epoch in my Russian life. I was very much at home in my uncle's household. I was a little afraid of my aunt, who had a quick temper, but on the whole I liked her. She was fair and thin, and had a pretty smile in the wake of her tempers. Uncle Solomon was an old friend. I was fond of him, and he made much of me. His fine brown eyes were full of smiles, and there always was a pleasant smile for me, or a teasing one. Uncle Solomon was comparatively prosperous, so I soon forgot whatever I had known at home of sordid cares. I do not remember that I was ever haunted by the thought of my mother, who slaved to keep us in bread, or of my sister, so little older than myself, who bent her little back to a woman's work. I took up the life around me, as if there were no other life. I did not play all the time, but I enjoyed whatever work I found because I was so happy. I helped my cousin Dinka help her mother with the housework. I put it this way because I think my aunt never set me any tasks, but Dinka was glad to have me help wash dishes, and sweep, and make beds. My cousin was a gentle, sweet girl, blue-eyed and fair, and altogether attractive. She talked to me about grown-up things, and I liked it. When her friends came to visit her, she did not mind having me about, although my skirts were so short. My helping hand was extended also to my smaller cousins, Mendela and Perilla. I played Lada with Mendela and let him beat me. I found him when he was lost, and I helped him play tricks on our elders. Perilla, the baby, was at times my special charge, and I think she did not suffer in my hands. I was a good nurse, though my methods were somewhat original. Uncle Solomon was often away on business, and in his absence, cousin Herschel was my hero. Herschel was only a little older than I, but he was a pupil in the high school and wore the student's uniform, and knew nearly as much as my uncle, I thought. When he buckled on his satchel of books in the morning and strode away straight as a soldier, no header boy ever walked like that, I stood in the doorway and worshipped his retreating steps. I met him on his return in the late afternoon, and hung over him when he laid out his books for his lessons. Sometimes he had longed Russian pieces to commit to memory. He would walk up and down, repeating the lines out loud, and I learned as fast as he. He would let me hold the book while he recited, and a proud girl was I if I could correct him. My interest in his lessons amused him. He did not take me seriously. He looked much like his father, and twinkled his eyes at me in the same way, and made fun of me, too. But sometimes he condescended to set me a lesson in spelling or arithmetic, in reading I was as good as he, and if I did well, he praised me and went and told the family about it. But lest I grow too proud of my achievements, he would sit down and do mysterious sums. I now believe it was algebra, to which I had no clue whatever, and which truly impressed me with a sense of my ignorance. There were other books in the house than school books. The Hebrew books, of course, were there as in other Jewish homes, but I was no longer devoted to the Psalms. There were a few books about in Russian and in Yiddish that were neither works of devotion nor of instruction. These were story books and poems. They were a great surprise to me and a greater delight. I read them hungrily, all there were, a mere handful, but to me an overwhelming treasure. Of all those books I remember by name only, Robinson Crusoe. I think I preferred the stories to the poems, though poetry was good to recite, walking up and down, like Cousin Herschel. That was my introduction to secular literature, but I did not understand it at the time. When I had exhausted the books, I began on the old volumes of a Russian periodical which I found on a shelf in my room. There was a high stack of these paper volumes, and I was so hungry for books that I went at them greedily, fearing that I might not get through before I had to return to Polotsk. I read every spare minute of the day and most of the night. I scarcely ever stopped at night until my lamp burned out. Then I would creep into bed beside Dinka, but often my head burned from so much excitement that I did not sleep at once. And no wonder the violent romances which rushed through the pages of that periodical were fit to inflame an older, more sophisticated brain than mine. I must believe that it was a thoroughly respectable magazine because I found it in my uncle Solomon's house, but the novels it printed were certainly sensational if I dare judge from my lured recollections. These romances indeed may have had their literary qualities, which I was too untrained to appreciate. I remember nothing but startling adventures of strange heroes and heroines, violent catastrophes in every chapter, beautiful maidens abducted by cruel Cossacks, inhuman mothers who poison their daughters for jealousy of their lovers, and all these unheard of things happening in a strange world, the very language of which was unnatural to me. I was quick enough to fix meetings to new words, however, so keen was my interest in what I read. Indeed when I recall the zest with which I devoured those fearful pages, the thrill with which I followed the heartless mother or the abused maiden in her adventures, my heart beating in my throat when my little lamp began to flicker, and then myself big-eyed and shivery in the dark, stealing to bed like a guilty ghost. When I remember all this I have an unpleasant feeling, as of one hearing of another's debauch, and I would be glad to shake the little bony culprit that I was then. My uncle was away so much of the time that I doubt if he knew how I spent my nights. My aunt, poor, hard-worked housewife, knew too little of books to direct my reading. My cousins were not enough older than myself to play mentors to me. Besides all this I think it was tacitly agreed, at my uncle's as at home, that Moshko is best let alone in such matters. So I burnt my midnight lamp, and filled my mind with a conglomeration of images entirely unsuited to my mental digestion, and no one can say what they would have bred in me, besides headache and nervousness, had they not been so soon dispelled and superseded by a host of strong new impressions. For these readings ended with my visit, which was closely followed by the preparations for our emigration. On the whole then I do not feel that I was seriously harmed by my wild reading. We have not been told that my taste was corrupted, and my morals, I believe, have also escaped serious stricture. I would even say that I have never been hurt by any revelation, however distorted or untimely, that I found in books, good or poor, that I have never read an idle book that was entirely useless, and that I have never quite lost whatever was significant to my spirit in any book, good or bad, even though my conscious memory can give no account of it. One lived at Uncle Solomon's, not only one's own life, but the life of all around. My uncle, when he returned after a short absence, had stories to tell and adventures to describe, and I learned that one might travel considerably and see things unknown, even in the tepsk, without going as far as America. My cousins sometimes went to the theatre, and I listened with rapture to their account of what they had seen, and I learned the songs they had heard. Once Cousin Herschel went to see a giant, who exhibited himself for three co-pecs, and came home with such marvelous accounts of his astonishing proportions, and his amazing feats of strength, that little Mendeley cried for envy, and I had to play lotto with him, and let him beat me, oh, so easily, till he felt himself a man again. And sometimes I had adventures of my own. I explored the city to some extent by myself, or else my cousins took me with them on their errands. There were so many fine people to see, such wonderful shops, such great distances to go. Once they took me to a bookstore. I saw shelves and shelves of books and people buying them, and taking them away to keep. I was told that some people had in their houses more books than were in the store. Was that not wonderful? It was a great city, Vitebsk. I never could exhaust its delights. Although I did not often think of my people at home struggling desperately to live while I reveled in abundance and pleasure and excitement, I did do my little to help the family by giving lessons in lace-making. As this was the only time in my life that I earned money by the work of my hands, I take care not to forget it, and I like to give account of it. I was always, as I have elsewhere admitted, very clumsy with my hands, counting five thumbs to the hand, knitting and embroidery at which my sister was so clever, I could never do with any degree of skill. The blue peacock with the red tail that I achieved in cross-stitch was not a performance of any grace. Neither was I very much downcast at my failures in this field. I was not an ambitious needle-woman. But when the fad for Russian lace was introduced into Pilotsk by a family of sisters who had been expelled from St. Petersburg, and all feminine Pilotsk on both sides of the divina dropped knitting and crochet needles and embroidery frames to take up pillow and bobbins I, too, was carried away by the novelty, and applied myself heartily to learn the intricate art with the result that I did master it. The Russian sisters charged enormous fees for lessons, and made a fortune out of the sale of patterns while they held the monopoly. Their pupils passed on the art at reduced fees, and their pupils' pupils charged still less, until even the humblest cottage rang with a pretty click of the bobbins, and my cousin Rachel sold steel pins by the ounce instead of by the dozen, and the women exchanged cardboard patterns from one end of town to the other. My teacher, who taught me without fee, being a friend of our prosperous days, lived on the other side. It was winter, and many a time I crossed the frozen river, carrying a lace pillow as big as myself, till my hands were numb with cold. But I persisted, afraid as I was of cold, and when I came to Vitebsk I was glad of my one accomplishment, for Vitebsk had not yet seen Russian lace, and I was an acceptable teacher of the new art, though I was such a mite, because there was no other. I taught my cousin Dinka, of course, and I had a number of paying pupils. I gave lessons at my pupils' homes, and was very proud, going thus about town, and being received as a person of importance. If my feet did not reach the floor when I sat in a chair, my hands knew their business for once, and I was such a conscientious and enthusiastic teacher that I had the satisfaction of seeing all my pupils execute difficult pieces before I left Vitebsk. I have never seen money that was half so bright to look at, half so pretty to clink, as the money I earned by these lessons. And it was easy to decide what to do with my wealth. I bought presents for everybody I knew. I remembered to this day the pattern of the shawl I bought for my mother. When I came home and unpacked my treasures, I was the proudest girl in Polotsk. The proudest, but not the happiest, I found my family in such a pitiful state that all my joy was stifled by care, if only for a while. Unwilling to spoil my holiday, my mother had not written me how things had gone from bad to worse during my absence, and I was not prepared. Vitebsk met me at the station, and conducted me to a more wretched whole than I had ever called home before. I went to the room alone, having been greeted outside by my mother and brother. It was evening, and the shabbiness of the apartment was all the gloomier for the light of a small kerosene lamp standing on the bare-deal table. At one end of the table, is this Deborah, my little sister, dressed in an ugly gray jacket, sent motionless in the lamp-light, her fair head drooping, her little hands folded on the edge of the table. At sight of her, I grew suddenly old. It was merely that she was a shy little girl, unbecomingly dressed, and perhaps a little pale from underfeeding. But to me, at that moment, she was the personification of dejection, the living symbol of the fallen family state. Of course my sober mood did not last long. Even fallen family state could be interpreted in terms of money. Absent money, and that, as once established, was a trifling matter. Hadn't I earned money myself, heaps of it. Only look at this, and this, and this that I brought from Vitebsk, bought with my own money. No, I did not remain old. For many years more, I was a very childish child. Perhaps I had spent my time in Vitebsk to better advantage than at the milleners, from any point of view. When I returned to my native town, I saw things. I saw the narrowness, the stifling narrowness of life in Vitebsk. My books, my walks, my visits as a teacher to many homes, had been so many doors opening on a wider world, so many horizons, one beyond the other. The boundaries of life had stretched, and I had filled my lungs with a thrilling air from a great beyond. Child though I was, Vitebsk, when I came back, was too small for me. And even Vitebsk, for all its people's into a beyond, began to shrink in my imagination, as America loomed near. My father's letters warned us to prepare for the summons. And we lived in a quiver of expectation. Not that my father had grown suddenly rich. He was so far from rich that he was going to borrow every cent of the money for our third-class passage. But he had a business in view which he could carry on all the better for having the family with him. And besides, we were borrowing bright and left anyway, and to no definite purpose. To the children, he argued, every year in Russia was a year lost. They should be spending the precious years in school and learning English and becoming Americans. United in America, there were ten chances of our getting to our feet again, to one chance in our scattered, aimless state. So at last I was going to America, really, really going at last. The boundaries burst, the arch of heaven soared, a million suns shone out for every star. The winds rushed in from outer space, roaring in my ears, America, America. CHAPTER VIII. THE EXITUS On the day when our steamer ticket arrived, my mother did not go out with her basket. My brother stayed out of header, and my sister salted the soup three times. I do not know what I did to celebrate the occasion. Very likely I played tricks on Deborah, and wrote a long letter to my father. Before sunset, the news was all over Polotsk that Hannah Haye had received a steamer ticket for America. Then they began to come, friends and foes, distant relatives, and new acquaintances, young and old, wise and foolish, debtors and creditors, and mere neighbors, from every quarter of the city, from both sides of the Divina, from all over the Pilata, from nowhere, a steady stream of them poured into our street, both day and night, till the hour of our departure. And my mother gave audience, her faded kerchief halfway off her head, her black ringlet straying, her apron often at her eyes. She received her guests in a rainbow of smiles and tears. She was the heroine of Polotsk, and she conducted herself appropriately. She gave her heart's thanks for the congratulations and blessings that poured in on her, ready tears for condolences, patient answers to monotonous questions, and handshakes and kisses and hugs she gave gratis. What did they not ask the eager, foolish, friendly people? They wanted to handle the ticket, and mother must read them what is written on it. How much did it cost? Was it all paid for? Were we going to have a foreign passport, or did we intend to steal across the border? Were we not all going to have new dresses to travel in? Was it sure that we could get kosher food on the ship? And with the questions poured in suggestions, and solid chunks of advice were rammed in by nimble prophecies. Mother ought to make a pilgrimage to a good Jew, say, the reba of Lubavitch, to get his blessing on her journey. She must be sure and pack her prayer-books in Bible, and twenty pounds of zwaibak at the least. If they did serve trefa on the ship, she and the four children would have to starve, unless she carried provisions from home. Oh, she must take all the feather-beds. Feather-beds are scarce in America. In America they sleep on hard mattresses, even in winter. Hava Mirel, Yakna the dressmaker's daughter, who emigrated to New York two years ago, wrote her mother that she got up from child's bed with sore sides, because she had no feather-bed. Mother mustn't carry her money in a pocket-book. She must sew it into the lining of her jacket. The policemen and castle-garden take all their money from the passengers as they land, unless the travellers deny having any. And so on, and so on, till my poor mother was completely bewildered. And as the day set for her departure approached, the people came oftener and stayed longer, and rehearsed my mother in long messages for their friends in America, praying that she delivered them promptly on her arrival, and without fail, and might God bless her for her kindness, and she must be sure to write them how she found their friends. Haya Davoshi, the wake-maker, for the eleventh time repeating herself to my mother, still patiently attentive, thus, Promise me I beg you I don't sleep nights for thinking of him. I emigrated to America eighteen months ago, fresh and well and strong, with twenty-five ruble in his pocket, besides his steamer ticket, with new phylacteries, and a silk skull-cap, and a suit as good as new, made it only three years before. Being respectable, there could be nothing better. Sent one letter, how he arrived in Castlegarden, how well he was received by his uncle Son-in-law, how he was conducted to the baths, how they bought him an American suit. Everything good, fine, pleasant, wrote how his relative promised him a position in his business. A clothing merchant is he. Makes gold, and since then not a postal card, not a word, just as if he had vanished, as if the earth had swallowed him. Oy vey, what haven't I imagined? What haven't I dreamed? What haven't I lamented? Already three letters have I sent. The last one you know, you wrote yourself for me, Hanna hayadir, and no answer, lost, as if in the sea. And after the application of a corner of her shawl to eyes and nose, Hayadavoshi continuing. So you will go into the newspaper, and ask them what has become of my mausoleum, and if he isn't in Castlegarden, maybe he went up to Baltimore, it's in the neighborhood, you know, and you can tell them, for a mark, that he has a silk handkerchief with his monogram in Russian, that his betrothed embroidered for him before the engagement was broken. And may God grant you an easy journey, and may you arrive in a propitious hour, and may you find your husband well, and strong, and rich, and may you both live to lead your children to the wedding canopy, and may America shower gold on you. Amen. The week skipped, the days took wing, and hour was a flash of thought, so brimful of events was the interval before our departure, and no one was more alive than I to the multiple significance of the daily drama. My mother, full of grief at the parting from home and family, and all things dear, anxious about the journey, uncertain about the future, but ready, as ever, to take up what new burdens awaited her. My sister, one with our mother in every hope and apprehension. My brother, rejoicing in his sudden release from header, and the little sister, vaguely excited by mysteries afoot, the uncles and aunts and devoted neighbors, sad and solemn over their coming loss, and my father away over in Boston, eager and anxious about us in Polotsk, an American citizen impatient to start his children on American careers. I knew the minds of every one of these, and I lived their days and nights with them after an apish fashion of my own. But at bottom I was aloof from them all. What made me silent in big-eyed was the sense of being in the midst of a tremendous adventure. From morning till night I was all the tension. I must credit myself with some pang of parting. I certainly felt the thrill of expectation, but keener than these was my delight in the progress of the great adventure. It was delightful just to be myself. I rejoiced with the younger children during the weeks of packing and preparation, and the relaxation of discipline, and the general demoralization of our daily life. It was pleasant to be petted and spoiled by favorite cousins, and stuffed with belated sweets by unfavorite ones. It was distinctly interesting to catch my mother weeping in corner cupboards over precious rubbish that could by no means be carried to America. It was agreeable to have my Uncle Moses stroke my hair and regard me with affection at eyes, while he told me that I would soon forget him, and asked me, so coaxingly, to write him an account of our journey. It was delicious to be notorious through the length and breadth of Pilotsk, to be stopped and questioned at every shop door when I ran out to buy two copex worth of butter, to be treated with respect by my former playmates, if ever I found time to mingle with them, to be pointed at by my enemies, as I passed them importantly on the street. And all my delay in pride and interest were steeped in a super feeling, the sense that it was I, Moshka, I myself that was moving and acting in the midst of unusual events. Now that I was sure of America, I was in no hurry to depart, and not impatient to arrive. I was willing to linger over every detail of our progress, and so cherished the flavor of the adventure. The last night in Pilotsk we slept at my Uncle's house, having disposed of all our belongings, to the last three-legged stool, except such as we were taking with us. I could go straight to the room where I slept with my Aunt that night, if I were suddenly set down in Pilotsk. But I did not really sleep. Excitement kept me awake, and my Aunt snored hideously. In the morning I was going away from Pilotsk, for ever and ever. I was going on a wonderful journey. I was going to America. How could I sleep? My Uncle gave out a false bulletin, with the last batch that the Gossips carried away in the evening. He told them that we were not going to start till the second day. Because he did in the hope of smuggling us quietly out, and so saving us the wear and tear of a public farewell. But his ruse failed of success. Half of Pilotsk was at my Uncle's gate in the morning, to conduct us to the railway station, and the other half was already there before we arrived. The procession resembled both a funeral and a triumph. The woman wept over us, reminding us eloquently of the perils of the sea, of the bewilderment of a foreign land, of the torments of homesickness that awaited us. They bewailed my mother's lot, who had to tear herself away from blood relations to go among strangers, who had to face zoned arms, ticket agents, and sailors, unprotected by a masculine escort, who had to care for four young children in the confusion of travel, and very likely feed them trefa, or see them starve on the way. Or they praised her for a brave pilgrim, and expressed confidence in her ability to cope with the zoned arms, and ticket agents, and blessed her with every other word, and all but carried her in their arms. At the station the procession disbanded, and became a mob. My Uncle and my tall cousins did their best to protect us, but we wanderers were almost torn to pieces. They did get us into a car at last, but the rye on the station platform continued unquelled. When the warning bell rang out, it was drowned in a confounding babble of voices, fragments of the oft-repeated messages, admonitions, lamentations, blessings, farewells. Don't forget, take care of, keep your tickets. Masha'la, newspapers, garlic is best, happy journey, God help you. Goodbye, goodbye, remember, the last I saw of Polotsk was an agitated mass of people, waving colored handkerchiefs and other frantic bits of calico, madly gesticulating, falling on each other's necks, gone wild altogether. When the station became invisible, and the shining tracks spun out from sky to sky, I was in the middle of the great, great world, and the longest road was mine. Memory may take a rest while I copy from a contemporaneous document the story of the great voyage. In accordance with my promise to my Uncle, I wrote, during my first months in America, a detailed account of our adventures between Polotsk and Boston. Those cheap, and the epistle, in Yiddish, occupied me for many hot summer hours. It was a great disaster, therefore, to have a lamp upset on my writing-table, when I was near the end, soaking the thick pile of letter sheets in kerosene. I was obliged to make a fair copy for my Uncle, and my father kept the oily, smelly original. After a couple of years teasing, he induced me to translate the letter into English, for the benefit of a friend who did not know Yiddish. For the benefit of the present narrative, which was not thought of thirteen years ago, I can hardly refrain from moralizing as I turn to the leaves of my childish manuscript, grateful at last for the calamity of the overturned lamp. Our route lay over the German border, with Hamburg for our port. On the way to the frontier we stopped for a farewell visit in Vilna, where my mother had a brother. Vilna is slighted in my description. I find special mention of only two things, the horse-cars and the bookstores. On a gray, wet morning in April, we set out for the frontier. This was the real beginning of our journey, and all my faculties of observation were alert. I took note of everything, the weather, the trains, the bustle of railroad stations, our fellow passengers, and the family mood at every stage of our progress. The bags and bundles which composed our traveling outfit were much more bulky than valuable. A trifling sum of money, the steamer ticket, and the foreign passport were the magic agents by means of which we hoped to span the 5,000 miles of earth and water between us and my father. The passport was supposed to pass us over the frontier without any trouble. But on account of the prevalence of cholera in some parts of the country, the poorer sort of travelers, such as immigrants, were subjected, at this time, to more than ordinary supervision and regulation. At Verspalova, the last station on the Russian side, we met the first of our troubles. A German physician and several zoned arms boarded the train and put us through a searching examination, as to our health, destination, and financial resources. As a result of the inquisition, we were informed that we would not be allowed to cross the frontier unless we exchanged our third-class steamer tickets for second class, which would require 200 rubles more than we possessed. Our passport was taken from us, and we were to be turned back on our journey. My letter describes the situation. We were homeless, houseless, and friendless in a strange place. We had hardly money enough to last us through the voyage, for which we had hoped and waited for three long years. We had suffered much that the reunion we longed for might come about. We had prepared ourselves to suffer more in order to bring it about, and had parted with those we loved, with places that were dear to us in spite of what we passed through in them, never again to see them, as we were convinced, all for the same dear end. With strong hopes and high spirits that hid the sad parting, we had started on our long journey. And now we were checked so unexpectedly but surely, the blow coming from where we little expected it, being, as we believed, safe in that quarter. When my mother had recovered enough to speak, she began to argue with the Zhendarm, telling him our story, and begging him to be kind. The children were frightened, and all but I cried. I was only wondering what would happen. Moved by our distress, the German officers gave us the best advice they could. We were to get out at the station of Khabart on the Russian side, and apply to one Air Skidorsi, who might help us on our way. The letter goes on. We are in Khabart at the depot, the least important particular even of that place I noticed and remembered. How the porter, he was an ugly grinning man, carried in our things and put them away in the southern corner of the big room, on the floor, how we sat down on a sati near them, a yellow sati, how the glass roof let in so much late that we had to shade our eyes because the car had been dark and we had been crying, how there were only a few people besides ourselves there, and how I began to count them, and stopped when I noticed a sign over the head of the fifth person, a little woman with a red nose and a pimple on it, and tried to read the German, with the aid of the Russian translation below. I noticed all this, and remembered it, as if there were nothing else in the world for me to think of. The letter dwells gratefully on the kindness of Air Skidorsi, who became the agent of our salvation. He procured my mother a pass to Edcunion, the German frontier station, where his older brother, as chairman of a well-known emigrant aid association, arranged for our admission into Germany. During the negotiations, which took several days, the good man of Khabart entertained us in his own house, shabby emigrants though we were. The Shidorsky brothers were Jews, but it is not on that account that their name has been lovingly remembered for fifteen years in my family. On the German side, our course joined that of many other emigrant groups, on their way to Hamburg and other ports. We were a clumsy enough crowd, with wide, unsophisticated eyes, with awkward bundles hugged in our arms, and our hearts set on America. The letter to my uncle faithfully describes every stage of our bustling progress. Here is a sample scene of many that I recorded. There was a terrible confusion in the baggage-rum where we were directed to go. Boxes, baskets, bags, valices, and great shapeless things belonging to no particular class were thrown about by porters and other men, who sorted them and put tickets on all but those containing provisions, while others were opened and examined in taste. At last our turn came, and our things, along with those of all other American bound travelers, were taken away to be steamed and smoked, and other such processes gone through. We were told to wait till notice should be given us of something else to be done. The phrases, we were told to do this, and told to do that, occur again and again in my narrative, and the most effective handling of the facts, could give no more vivid picture of the proceedings. We emigrants were herded at the stations, packed in the cars, and driven from place to place, like cattle. At the expected hour we all tried to find room in a car indicated by the conductor. We tried, but could only find enough space on the floor for our baggage, on which we made believe sitting comfortably. For now we were obliged to exchange the comparative comforts of a third-class passenger train for the certain discomforts of a fourth-class one. There were only four narrow benches in the whole car, and about twice as many people were already seated on these as they were probably supposed to accommodate. All other space to the last inch was crowded by passengers or their luggage. It was very hot and close, and altogether uncomfortable. And still at every new station fresh passengers came crowding in, and actually made room, spare as it was for themselves. It became so terrible that all glared madly at the conductor, as he allowed more people to come into that prison, and trembled at the announcement of every station. I cannot see even now how the officers could allow such a thing. It was really dangerous. The following is my attempt to describe a flying glimpse of a metropolis. Towards evening we came into Berlin. I grow dizzy even now when I think of our whirling through that city. It seemed we were going faster and faster all the time, but it was only the whirl of trains passing in opposite directions and close to us that made it seem so. The sight of crowds of people, such as we had never seen before, hurrying to and fro, in and out of great depots that danced past us, helped to make it more so. Strange sights, splendid buildings, shops, people, and animals, all mingled in one great confused mass of a disposition to continually move in a great hurry, wildly, with no other aim but to make one's head go round and round, in following its dreadful motions. Round and round went my head. It was nothing but trains depots crowds. Crowds depots trains, again and again, with no beginning, no end, only a mad dance. Faster and faster we go, faster still, and the noise increases with the speed. Bells, whistles, hammers, locomotives streaking madly, men's voices, peddlers' cries, horses' hooves, dogs barking, all united in doing their best to drown every other sound but their own, and made such a deafening uproar in the attempt that nothing could keep it out. The plight of the bewildered immigrant on the way to foreign parts is always pitiful enough, but for us who came from plague-ridden Russia the terrors of the way were doubled. In a great lonely field opposite a solitary house within a large yard, our train pulled up at last, and a conductor commanded the passengers to make haste and get out. He need not have told us to hurry. We were glad enough to be free again after such a long imprisonment and the uncomfortable car. All rushed to the door. We breathed more freely in the open field, but the conductor did not wait for us to enjoy our freedom. He hurried us into the one large room which made up the house, and then into the yard. Here a great many men and women, dressed in white, received us, the women attending to the women and girls of the passengers, and the men to the others. This was another scene of bewildering confusion, parents losing their children and little ones crying, baggage being thrown together in one corner of the yard, heedless of contents, which suffered in consequence. Those white-clad Germans shouting commands, always accompanied with, quick, quick, the confused passengers obeying all orders like meek children, only questioning now and then what was going to be done with them. And no wonder, if in some mind stories arose of people being captured by robbers, murderers, and the like. Here we had been taken to a lonely place where only that house was to be seen. Our things were taken away, our friends separated from us. A man came to inspect us, as if to a certain our full value. Strange-looking people driving us about like dumb animals. Helpless and unresisting, children we could not see crying in a way that suggested terrible things. Ourselves driven into a little room where a great kettle was boiling on a little stove. Our clothes taken off, our bodies rubbed with a slippery substance that might be any bad thing. A shower of warm water let down on us without warning. Again driven to another little room where we sit, wrapped in woven blankets, till large coarse bags are brought in, their contents turned out, and we see only a cloud of steam, and hear the woman's orders to dress ourselves. Quick, quick, or else we'll miss, something we cannot hear. We are forced to pick out our clothes from among all the others, with a steam blinding us. We choke, cough, and treat the woman to give us time. They persist. Quick, quick, or you'll miss the train. Oh, so we really won't be murdered. They are only making us ready for the continuing of our journey, cleaning us of all suspicions of dangerous sickness. Thank God. In Polotsk, if the cholera broke out, as it did once or twice in every generation, we made no such fuss as did these Germans. Those who died of the sickness were buried, and those who lived ran to the synagogues to pray. We travelers felt her at the way the Germans treated us. My mother nearly died of cholera once, but she was given a new name, a lucky one, which saved her. And that was when she was a small girl. None of us were sick now, yet hear how we were treated. Those gendarmes and nurses always shouted their commands at us from a distance, as fearful of our touch as if we had been lepers. We arrived in Hamburg early one morning, after a long night in the crowded cars. We were marched up to a strange vehicle, long and narrow and high, drawn by two horses, and commanded by a mute driver. We were piled up on this wagon, our baggage was thrown after us, and we started on a sightseeing tour across the city of Hamburg. The sights I faithfully enumerate for the benefit of my uncle include little carts drawn by dogs and big cars that run of themselves, later identified as electric cars. The humorous side of our adventures did not escape me. Again and again I come across a laugh in the long pages of the historic epistle. The description of the ride through Hamburg ends with this. The sightseeing was not all on our side. I noticed many people stopping to look at us as if amused, though most passed by us as though used to seeing such sights. We did make a queer appearance, all in a long row, up above people's heads. In fact, we looked like a flock of giant fowls roosting, only wide awake. The smiles and shivers fairly crowded each other in some parts of our career. Suddenly, when everything interesting seemed at an end, we all recollected how long it was since we had started on our funny ride. Hours we thought, and still the horses ran. Now we rode through quieter streets, where there were fewer shops and more wooden houses. Still the horses seemed to have but just started. I looked over our perch again. Something made me think of a description I had read of criminals being carried on long journeys in uncomfortable things. Like this? Well it was strange, this long, long drive, the conveyance, no word of explanation, and all, though going different ways, being packed off together. We were strangers, the driver knew it. He might take us anywhere, how could we tell? I was frightened again, as in Berlin. The faces around me confessed the same. Yes, we are frightened, we are very still. Some Polish women over there have fallen asleep, and the rest of us look such a picture of woe, and yet so funny, it is a sight to see and remember. Our mysterious ride came to an end on the outskirts of the city, where we were once more lined up, cross-questioned, disinfected, labeled and pigeon-holed. This was one of the occasions when we suspected that we were the victims of a conspiracy to extort money from us. For here, as at every repetition of the purifying operations we had undergone, a fee was levied on us, so much per head. My mother indeed, seeing her tiny hoard melting away, had long since sold some articles from her baggage to a fellow passenger richer than she. But even so, she did not have enough money to pay the fee demanded of her in Hamburg. Her statement was not accepted. And we all suffered the lasting dignity of having our person searched. The last place of detention turned out to be a prison. Quarantine, they called it, and there was a great deal of it, two weeks of it. Two weeks within high brick walls, several hundred of us hurted in half a dozen compartments, numbered compartments, sleeping in rows, like sick people in a hospital, with roll-call morning and night, and short rations three times a day, with never a sign of the free world beyond our barred windows, with anxiety and longing and home sickness in our hearts, and in our ears the unfamiliar voice of the invisible ocean, which drew and repelled us at the same time. The fortnight in quarantine was not an episode. It was an epoch, divisible into eras, periods, events. The greatest event was the arrival of some ship to take some of the waiting passengers. When the gates were opened and the lucky one said goodbye, those left behind felt hopeless of ever seeing the gates open for them. It was both pleasant and painful, for the strangers grew to be fast friends in a day, and really rejoiced in each other's fortune. But the regretful envy could not be helped, either. Our turn came at last. We were conducted through the gate of departure, and after some hours of bewildering maneuvers, described in great detail in the report to my uncle, we found ourselves, we five frightened pilgrims from Pilatsk, on the deck of a great big steamship, a flow on the strange big waters of the ocean. For sixteen days the ship was our world. My letter dwells solemnly on the details of the life at sea, as if afraid to cheat my uncle of the smallest circumstance. It does not shrink from describing the torments of sea sickness. It notes every change in the weather. A rough night is described when the ship is pitched and rolled so that people were thrown from their births. These and nights, when we crawled through dense fogs, our foghorn drawing answering warnings from invisible ships. The perils of the sea were not minimized in the imaginations of us inexperienced voyagers. The captain and his officers ate their dinners, smoked their pipes, and slept soundly in their turns, while we frightened immigrants, turned our faces to the wall, and awaited our watery graves. All this while the sea sickness lasted, then came happy hours on deck, with fugitive sunshine, birds atop the crested waves, band music, and dancing and fun. I explored the ship, made friends with officers and crew, or pursued my thoughts in quiet nooks. It was my first experience of the ocean, and I was profound to the moved. Oh, what solemn thoughts I had, how deeply I felt the greatness, the power of the scene, the immeasurable distance from horizon to horizon, the huge billows forever changing their shapes. Now only a wavy and rolling plane, now a chain of great mountains, coming and going farther away, then a town in the distance, perhaps, with spires and towers, and buildings of gigantic dimensions, and mostly a vast mass of uncertain shapes, knocking against each other in fury, and seething and foaming in their anger, the gray sky, with its mountains of gloomy clouds, flying, moving with the waves as it seemed very near them, the absence of any object besides the one ship, and the deep, solemn groans of the sea, sounding as if all the voices of the world had been turned into sighs, and then gathered into that one mournful sound. So deeply did I feel the presence of these things, that the feeling became one of awe, both painful and sweet, and stirring and warming, and deep and calm and grand. I would imagine myself all alone on the ocean, and Robinson Crusoe was very real to me. I was alone sometimes. I was aware of no human presence. I was conscious only of sea and sky, and something I did not understand. And as I listened to its solemn voice, I felt as if I had found a friend, and knew that I loved the ocean, as seemed as if it were within, as well as without, part of myself, and I wondered how I had lived without it, and if I could ever part with it. And so, suffering, fearing, brooding, rejoicing, we crept nearer and nearer to the coveted shore. Until, on a glorious May morning, six weeks after our departure from Polotsk, our eyes beheld the promised land, and my father received us in his arms. End of chapter 8