Chapter 3

Ten children are mentioned above and in the list below, so perhaps one more died as an infant.

In the summer of 1896 a great tragedy struck our family: my mother died in childbirth. She could not deliver the baby. It would have been my mother’s twelfth child.¹

The rabbi came to our house with a minyan of men, and they recited Psalms, standing around my mother. She was already lying on straw on the floor, with seven candles burning at her head. The rabbi and my father, wearing white kittels, stood with their prayer shawls over their heads and pleaded in tears: “Khane-Leye, you were always a modest and virtuous woman. In the name of God, blessed be He, we beg you, give up the child!”

After the doctor called in a second doctor, the dead child was delivered. The weeping of us children tore everyone’s heart. Father went to each child in turn and comforted them, saying we mustn’t cry, because this was God’s will.

The day of my mother’s funeral is engraved in my memory. The whole shtetl went to accompany my mother to her eternal rest. Even some Christians we knew, our neighbors, grieved deeply over my mother’s death.

The two older sisters, Malke and Feygl, and to some extent Sheve, a younger sister, looked after the other five children. Of the two older brothers, Khayim-Yoysef was then serving in the army, and Avrom was already married to Sarah.

A year passed, and my father brought home a stepmother, whose name was Perl. She was a widow from a wealthy family in Gomel. She had been left with five children, two girls and three boys, who stayed with their grandfather in Gomel. Father called in the older sisters, and me as well, and said to us: “God took your mother from you, and God has sent you a new mother. Do as she says, and she will be good to you.”

I took a look at my stepmother. She was a good-looking woman, nicely dressed, with a string of pearls around her neck and rings on her fingers. She wore her own hair. She wasn’t tall, was a little plump, and had a smile on her face.

She said to Father, “Tell me the names of all the children.” So Father sat down and began to list them, the sons first. “Khayim-Yoysef, the eldest, is in the army. Avrom, a teacher, has married Sarah. Moyshe” (that’s me) “is to become bar mitzvah in a month. Then Getsl, Nokhem and Shloyme. Now for the daughters. Malke, the eldest, is a precious soul. She looks after everyone and is very capable, but she’s gone and fallen for a zagotovshchik [a maker of shoe uppers], a decent young man who has his heart set on becoming Ben-Zion’s son-in-law. Feygl does everything in the house and is obedient. Sheve and Sorke are little ones who need more looking after, as does little Shloymke.” You could see from my stepmother’s face that she wasn’t very happy. Father noticed and said, “It won’t be long before we’re down to just two or three of the younger children.”

Father soon set off on his travels again. The Mume [aunt], which is what we children called our stepmother, began ordering the children around like a noblewoman. She would sit in Father’s chair and hand out orders to all the children.

One day I came home from cheder and found Malke crying. I asked her why she was crying, but she wouldn’t tell me. Feygl told me that the Mume had twisted her ear. Then, when the Mume went over to Feygl and was about to slap her, I stepped in and stopped her. She was afraid to tangle with me, but when my father came home from his travels she told on me. Father gave me a scolding and threatened to hand me over to Yosl the carpenter as an apprentice after my bar mitzvah.

When I became bar mitzvah, my father took me to the Rebbe’s shul. I was called up to the Torah, and after the prayers I gave a lesson from the Gemara tractate Gittin. The Rebbe blessed me and told me not to be a sheygets [an irrelegious boy]. Then Father took me to Yosl the carpenter and arranged for me to work for him for a year without pay, just for my meals.

The carpentry shop made fine furniture. Eight men worked there, plus two apprentices: me and the other boy, whose name was Osher. At mealtimes we apprentices had to serve everyone, but we ourselves were always hungry.

I told my friend Grisha and his father, the pharmacist, about my troubles. They told me they were getting ready to leave Loyev. They had bought a pharmacy in Mozyr, another town in Minsk province, and in a couple of months I could come to them there and work in the pharmacy helping the provisor [the pharmacist in charge]. I liked the idea, and I thanked them warmly for their kindness to me.

When my father came home, my sister Feygl heard him tell the Mume that he had been in Petrikov. The town shochet there, a relative of my father’s, was willing to give me four days’ meals [yeshiva students ate each day of the week with a different household], and I should go and study at the Petrikov yeshiva. “And what about the other three days?” the Mume asked. Father answered, “Leave that to Moyshe, he’ll find a way.” They agreed to take me out of the carpentry shop and send me to the yeshiva. My sister came running to tell me right away, and I hurried home to see Father. When Father saw me, he hugged me and gave me a kiss. I started to cry. My father asks me why I’m crying. I tell him that I’m miserable at Yosl’s carpentry shop, they torment me, I have to wait on everyone, and I don’t want to be there anymore. The Mume speaks up: “Come back home, we’ll send you to study at the Petrikov yeshiva.” I gave the Mume a kiss for that.

My father hired Leyzer the wagon driver, who was considered one of the better drivers; he had a team of horses and a large covered wagon. When the day came for me to leave, I ran around saying goodbye to all my friends and relatives. When Leyzer pulled up at our house, I kissed my brothers and sisters goodbye. We hardly spoke, but some of us cried. Leyzer gave a shout: “Well, little passenger, climb into the wagon!” My older sisters walked behind the wagon until Leyzer flicked the horses with his whip, shouted “Giddyap!”, and the horses set off at a gallop. There were three other passengers in the wagon. One was also going to Petrikov, and two women were going somewhere else.

I sat close to Leyzer, because I wanted to see the fields and forests and villages we passed. After all, it was the first time I had gone out into the wider world. Toward evening we came to an inn. Leyzer told us we would sleep there for a few hours. It wouldn’t cost much; you just had to buy something, a schnapps for some, a roll and a cup of chicory for others. We slept in a big room where a large palatke [sleeping platform] had been built, covered with straw. Everyone lay down on the same platform in their clothes.

At the crack of dawn Leyzer called out in his bass voice: “Passengers, enough snoozing, get up and get back on the road!” The innkeeper’s wife, who seemed like a very friendly woman, said to Leyzer, “Wait a bit, let me make a hot cup of chicory and a piece of bread.” We ate quickly and climbed into the wagon. Toward evening we rested again at another inn. In the evening, as the sun began to set, we saw houses, closer and closer together, until Leyzer called out: “My little horsies [susimlekh, a playful word from the Hebrew for horse] have brought you to Petrikov, thank God!” Then Leyzer took me to the inn of Reb Elye the shochet.

About a 200km journey west from Loyev, Petrikov is on the Pripyat river, in present-day Belarus. Map

Thus I arrived safely in Petrikov². Reb Elye the shochet, my mother’s relative, was a very fine-looking man. Besides his work as a shochet, he also kept a small inn. He had three grown daughters.

They received me very warmly, gave me a good meal and a comfortable place to sleep. The next morning Reb Elye said to me: “My son, you’re no stranger here. Your mother, may she rest in peace, was my own flesh and blood. You seem like a good boy. In the evenings you can help my daughters at the inn, and in return you can eat with me the whole week.”

Reb Elye took me to the yeshiva, and I began studying with real pleasure. After my first day, the rosh yeshiva [head of the yeshiva] called me in, asked me all about myself, and told me that my father had told him I was an orphan and a great prankster, and that he should keep a close eye on me. I told the rosh yeshiva what the shochet had offered me. He said I should accept it for now, and later he would see about getting me three more days of meals, so that I could stop working at night. There are some nights when yeshiva students need to study.

The first evening, right after supper, one of the daughters, whose name was Reyzl, called me to go with her to the stable and hold the lantern for her, because she had to feed the cattle. I went with her. In the stable she fell down. I set down the lantern and went to help her up, but she pulled me toward her and kissed me. I was frightened and told her she shouldn’t have done that. She was much older than I was: tall, pretty, with long black hair in long braids. She held my hand and told me that a boy who was already bar mitzvah shouldn’t be bashful. I answered that I was an orphan and only twelve years old.

I was terribly ashamed and kept my eyes on the ground. But when I glanced up at her from under my brows, I became even more frightened. She looked wild: her lovely hair was disheveled and her blouse disordered and open. When she put her arms around me, I simply couldn’t move. Suddenly we heard the older sister shouting: “Where have you two got to?” She let me go, quickly fixed her hair and her dress, and we left the stable.

That night I couldn’t fall asleep for a long time. I kept imagining that any moment she would come to my bed.

When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed of my hometown, Loyev, and suddenly saw how beautiful it was. It was not a big town, but it had lovely streets, some with sidewalks. The big marketplace is in the middle of the shtetl, with a long row of shops: first the grocery shops, then the dry-goods shops and hardware shops, and even a couple of wine shops. Not far from the shops stood the stalls where they sold bread, white challah, bagels and pastries, clay pots large and small, bowls and spoons.

Not far from the market flowed the Dnieper, a great and beautiful river. Steamboats would stop there at a handsome building that stood half on dry land and half on the water. When the whistle of an arriving steamboat was heard, the whole shtetl would rush down to the river to see who was coming to town. The market women in particular ran down with baskets of bread, rolls, bagels and pastries, to make some money off the new arrivals.

Next in my dream I saw the young people, boys and girls, parading out onto Sand Street on Shabbos toward evening. As it gets dark you hear klezmorim playing, and I run off with all the boys to the house where the music is coming from, where a wedding is being celebrated. The badkhn [wedding jester] stands on a chair reciting rhymes, and the bride and the women around her are weeping.

At that point I woke up. It was already daylight. I hurried to the shul to pray and then sat right down to study. But I couldn't concentrate. I keep wondering whether I needed to repent for what happened in the stable the night before. I answered myself that it wasn’t my fault, but when I came back from studying, I was ashamed to look Reyzl in the eye.

Studying at the yeshiva was very hard for me, because the group of students the rosh yeshiva had put me in had already been at it for more than a week. The rosh yeshiva made me go over the Gemara tractates Bava Metzia, Bava Kamma and Gittin again, even though I had already studied them at home with my teacher Borekh-Moyshe. It did no good to argue that I had already learned them once. At night I also had to help out at the inn. By the time I got the three more days of meals and no longer had to work nights, I had already started thinking about leaving Petrikov and going to my friend Grisha in Mozyr to work in the pharmacy. That was the plan I had been carrying around with me since I had been at home.

The Jewish socialist labor party, founded in 1897

A few weeks later, when I came out of the kloyz [study and prayer house], two grown young men were standing there handing out leaflets written in Yiddish. I began reading the leaflet they handed me. The proclamation was written especially for yeshiva students. It shouted out: “Darmoyedniks [parasites, from Russian], go to work and make yourselves useful to society!” It was signed by the “Bund of Russia, Lithuania and Poland”.³ Reb Elye the shochet saw the proclamation in my hands. He asked me whether Reyzl, his daughter, had given it to me. I said no. He retorted that I was lying. That offended me, and I immediately wrote a letter to my friend Grisha Radikovich telling him I was coming to them in Mozyr.