on
attracted him) and watch him write. And the little Ezrielk had more than
once tried to make a piece of parchment out of a scrap of skin; and what
Jewish boy cannot prepare the veins that are used to sew the
phylacteries and the scrolls of the Law? Nor was the scribe's ink a
secret to Ezrielk.

So Ezrielk became scribe in Kabtzonivke.

Of course, he did not make a fortune. Reb Shmuel Baer, who had been a
scribe all his days, died a very poor man, and left a roomful of hungry,
half-naked children behind him, but then--what Jew, I ask you (or has
Messiah come?), ever expected to find a Parnosseh with enough, really
enough, to eat?

YITZCHOK-YOSSEL BROITGEBER

At the time I am speaking of, the above was about forty years old. He
was a little, thin Jew with a long face, a long nose, two large, black,
kindly eyes, and one who would sooner be silent and think than talk, no
matter what was being said to him. Even when he was scolded for
something (and by whom and when and for what was he _not_ scolded?), he
used to listen with a quiet, startled, but sweet smile, and his large,
kindly eyes would look at the other with such wonderment, mingled with a
sort of pity, that the other soon stopped short in his abuse, and stood
nonplussed before him.

"There, you may talk! You might as well argue with a horse, or a donkey,
or the wall, or a log of wood!" and the other would spit and make off.

But if anyone observed that smile attentively, and studied the look in
his eyes, he would, to a certainty, have read there as follows:

"O man, man, why are you eating your heart out? Seeing that you don't
know, and that you don't understand, why do you undertake to tell me
what I ought to do?"

And when he was obliged to answer, he used to do so in a few measured
and gentle words, as you would speak to a little, ignorant child,
smiling the while, and then he would disappear and start thinking again.

They called him "breadwinner," because, no matter how hard the man
worked, he was never able to earn a living. He was a little tailor, but
not like the tailors nowadays, who specialize in one kind of garment,
for Yitzchok-Yossel made everything: trousers, cloaks, waistcoats,
top-coats, fur-coats, capes, collars, bags for prayer-books, "little
prayer-scarfs," and so on. Besides, he was a ladies' tailor as well.
Summer and winter, day and night, he worked like an ox, and yet, when
the Kabtzonivke community, at the time of the grea