is the way we
treat one who has not held to her Jewishness, and has blackened all our
faces----'"

"Yes!"

"Yes!"

"So it is!"

"The apostates!"

The last words struck the hearers' hearts like poisoned arrows. A
deathly pallor, born of unrealized terror at the suggested idea,
overspread all their faces, their feelings were in a tumult of shame and
suffering. They thirsted and longed after their former life, the time
before the calamity disturbed their peace. Weary and wounded in spirit,
with startled looks, throbbing pulses, and dilated pupils, and with no
more than a faint hope that all might yet be well, they slowly broke the
stillness, and departed to their homes.

LOeB SCHAPIRO

Born, about 1880, in the Government of Kieff, Little Russia; came to
Chicago in 1906, and to New York for a short time in 1907-1908; now
(1912) in business in Switzerland; contributor to Die Zukunft, New York;
collected works, Novellen, 1 vol., Warsaw, 1910.

IF IT WAS A DREAM

Yes, it was a terrible dream! But when one is only nine years old, one
soon forgets, and Meyerl was nine a few weeks before it came to pass.

Yes, and things had happened in the house every now and then to remind
one of it, but then Meyerl lived more out of doors than indoors, in the
wild streets of New York. Tartilov and New York--what a difference! New
York had supplanted Tartilov, effaced it from his memory. There remained
only a faint occasional recollection of that horrid dream.

If it really _was_ a dream!

It was this way: Meyerl dreamt that he was sitting in Cheder learning,
but more for show's sake than seriously, because during the Days of
Penitence, near the close of the session, the Rebbe grew milder, and
Cheder less hateful. And as he sat there and learnt, he heard a banging
of doors in the street, and through the window saw Jews running to and
fro, as if bereft of their senses, flinging themselves hither and
thither exactly like leaves in a gale, or as when a witch rises from the
ground in a column of dust, and whirls across the road so suddenly and
unexpectedly that it makes one's flesh creep. And at the sight of this
running up and down in the street, the Rebbe collapsed in his chair
white as death, his under lip trembling.

Meyerl never saw him again. He was told later that the Rebbe had been
killed, but somehow the news gave him no pleasure, although the Rebbe
used to beat him; neither did it particularly grieve him