dish writer;
collected works: Yiddish, Gesammelte Schriften, Warsaw, 1910;
Hebrew, Sippurim, Cracow, 1910.

COUNTRY FOLK

Feivke was a wild little villager, about seven years old, who had
tumbled up from babyhood among Gentile urchins, the only Jewish boy in
the place, just as his father Mattes, the Kozlov smith, was the only
Jewish householder there. Feivke had hardly ever met, or even seen,
anyone but the people of Kozlov and their children. Had it not been for
his black eyes, with their moody, persistent gaze from beneath the shade
of a deep, worn-out leather cap, it would have puzzled anyone to make
out his parentage, to know whence that torn and battered face, that red
scar across the top lip, those large, black, flat, unchild-like feet.
But the eyes explained everything--his mother's eyes.

Feivke spent the whole summer with the village urchins in the
neighboring wood, picking mushrooms, climbing the trees, driving
wood-pigeons off their high nests, or wading knee-deep in the shallow
bog outside to seek the black, slippery bog-worms; or else he found
himself out in the fields, jumping about on the top of a load of hay
under a hot sky, and shouting to his companions, till he was bathed in
perspiration. At other times, he gathered himself away into a dark, cool
barn, scrambled at the peril of his life along a round beam under the
roof, crunched dried pears, saw how the sun sprinkled the darkness with
a thousand sparks, and--thought. He could always think about Mikita, the
son of the village elder, who had almost risen to be conductor on a
railway train, and who came from a long way off to visit his father,
brass buttons to his coat and a purse full of silver rubles, and piped
to the village girls of an evening on the most cunning kind of whistle.

How often it had happened that Feivke could not be found, and did not
even come home to bed! But his parents troubled precious little about
him, seeing that he was growing up a wild, dissolute boy, and the
displeasure of Heaven rested on his head.

Feivke was not a timid child, but there were two things he was afraid
of: God and davvening. Feivke had never, to the best of his
recollection, seen God, but he often heard His name, they threatened him
with It, glanced at the ceiling, and sighed. And this embittered
somewhat his sweet, free days. He felt that the older he grew, the
sooner he would have to present himself before this terrifying, stern,
and unfamili