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candidates, of course; a nine-year-old Jewish child had to answer
questions that a thirteen-year-old Gentile was hardly expected to
understand. But that did not matter so much. You had been prepared for
the thirteen-year-old test; you found the questions quite easy. You
wrote your answers triumphantly--and you received a low rating, and
there was no appeal.

I used to stand in the doorway of my father's store, munching an apple
that did not taste good any more, and watch the pupils going home from
school in twos and threes; the girls in neat brown dresses and black
aprons and little stiff hats, the boys in trim uniforms with many
buttons. They had ever so many books in the satchels on their backs.
They would take them out at home, and read and write, and learn all
sorts of interesting things. They looked to me like beings from
another world than mine. But those whom I envied had their own
troubles, as I often heard. Their school life was one struggle against
injustice from instructors, spiteful treatment from fellow students,
and insults from everybody. Those who, by heroic efforts and
transcendent good luck, successfully finished the course, found
themselves against a new wall, if they wished to go on. They were
turned down at the universities, which admitted them in the ratio of
three Jews to a hundred Gentiles, under the same debarring entrance
conditions as at the high school,--especially rigorous examinations,
dishonest marking, or arbitrary rulings without disguise. No, the Czar
did not want us in the schools.

I heard from my mother of a different state of affairs, at the time
when her brothers were little boys. The Czar of those days had a
bright idea. He said to his ministers: "Let us educate the people. Let
us win over those Jews through the public schools, instead of allowing
them to persist in their narrow Hebrew learning, which teaches them no
love for their monarch. Force has failed with them; the unwilling
converts return to their old ways whenever they dare. Let us try
education."

Perhaps peaceable conversion of the Jews was not the Czar's only
motive when he opened public schools everywhere and compelled parents
to send their boys for instruction. Perhaps he just wanted to be good,
and really hoped to benefit the country. But to the Jews the public
schools appeared as a trap door to the abyss of apostasy. The
instructors were always Christians, the teaching was Christian, and
the regulations of