charm. They poured hot soup down my
throat, and filled my mouth with spoonfuls of preserves. Every one flew
around me. They cared for me as if I were the apple of their eye. They
fed me with broths and tiny chickens, as if I were an infant. They did
not leave me alone. My mother sat by me always, and told me over and
over again the whole story of how they had lifted me up from the ground,
almost dead, and how I had been lying for two weeks on end, burning like
a fire, croaking like a frog, and muttering something about whippings
and little knives. They already imagined I was dead, when suddenly I
sneezed seven times. I had practically come to life again.

"Now we see what a great God we have, blessed be He, and praised be His
Name!" That was how my mother ended up, the tears springing to her eyes.
"Now we can see that when we call to Him He listens to our sinful
requests and our guilty tears. We shed a lot, a lot of tears, your
father and I, until the Lord had pity on us.... We nearly, nearly lost
our child through our sinfulness. May we suffer in your stead! And
through what? Through a boy who was a thief, a certain Berrel whom the
teacher flogged at '_Cheder_,' almost until he bled. When you came home
from '_Cheder_' you were more dead than alive. May your mother suffer
instead of you! The teacher is a tyrant, a murderer. The Lord will
punish him for it--the Lord of the Universe. No, my child, if the Lord
lets us live, when you get well, we will send you to another teacher,
not to such a tyrant as is the 'Angel of Death,'--may his name be
blotted out for ever!"

These words made a terrible impression on me. I threw my arms around my
mother, and kissed her.

"Dear, dear mother."

And my father came over to me softly. He put his cold, white hand on my
forehead, and said to me kindly, without a trace of anger:

"Oh, how you frightened us, you heathen you! Tkeh-heh-heh-heh!"

Also the Jewish German, or the German Jew, Herr Hertz Hertzenhertz, his
cigar between his teeth, bent down and touched my cheek, with his
clean-shaven chin. He said to me in German:

"Good! Good! Be well--be well!"

* * *

A few weeks after I got out of bed, my father said to me:

"Well, my son, now go to '_Cheder_,' and never think of little knives
again, or other such nonsense. It is time you began to be a bit of a
man. If it please God, you will be '_Bar-Mitzvah_' in three years--may
you live to a hundred and twenty. Tkeh-heh-heh!"