And my brother Mottel? Oh, he married before Esther was even betrothed.
He went to live with his father-in-law. But he soon returned, and alone.
What had happened? He wanted to divorce his wife. Said my father to him:
"You are a man of clay." My mother would not have this. They quarrelled.
It was lively. But it was useless. He divorced his wife and married
another woman. He now has two children--a boy and a girl. The boy is
called Herzl, after Dr. Herzl, and the girl is called Esther. My father
wanted her to be named Gittel, and my mother was dying for her to be
called Leah, after her mother. There arose a quarrel between my father
and mother. They quarrelled a whole day and a whole night. They decided
the child should be named Leah-Gittel, after their two mothers.
Afterwards my father decided he would not have Leah-Gittel. "What is the
sense of it? Why should her mother's name go first?" My brother Mottel
came in from the synagogue and said he had named the child Esther. Said
my father to him: "Man of clay, where did you get the name Esther from?"
Mottel replied: "Have you forgotten it will soon be '_Purim_'?" Well,
what have you to say now? It's all over. My father never calls Mottel
"man of clay" since then. But both of them--my mother and my
father--exchanged glances and were silent.

What the silence and the exchange of glances meant I do not know.
Perhaps you can tell me?

The Pocket-Knife

Listen, children, and I will tell you a story about a little knife--not
an invented story, but a true one, that happened to myself.

I never wished for anything in the world so much as for a pocket-knife.
It should be my own, and should lie in my pocket, and I should be able
to take it out whenever I wished, to cut whatever I liked. Let my
friends know. I had just begun to go to school, under Yossel Dardaki,
and I already had a knife, that is, what was almost a knife. I made it
myself. I tore a goose-quill out of a feather brush, cut off one end,
and flattened out the other. I pretended it was a knife and would cut.

"What sort of a feather is that? What the devil does it mean? Why do you
carry a feather about with you?" asked my father--a sickly Jew, with a
yellow, wrinkled face. He had a fit of coughing. "Here are feathers for
you--playtoys! Tkeh-heh-heh-heh!"

"What do you care if the child plays?" asked my mother of him. She was a
short-built woman and wore a silk scarf on her head. "Let my enemies eat
out