for me upon which I was soon able
to play simple melodies by ear.'

"By chance a well-known professor of the town heard him play, and so
impressed was he with the talent exhibited by the boy that he advised
the father to have him educated. Acting upon this advice, as far as
limited means allowed, tutors were engaged, and so much progress did he
make that at the age of nine he was admitted to the local Conservatorium
of Professor Grudzinski, where he remained two years. It was at the age
of eleven that a great calamity overtook the family, his father and
sister falling victims to the pogroms.

"Melsa's story runs as follows:

"'It was in June of 1905, at the time of the pogroms, when one afternoon
my father, accompanied by my little sister, ventured out into the
street, from which they never returned. They were both killed,' he added
sadly, 'by Cossacks. A week later I found my sister in a Christian
churchyard riddled with bullets, but I have not been able to trace the
remains of my father, who must have been buried in some out-of-the-way
place. During this awful period my mother and myself lived in imminent
danger of our lives, and it was only the recollection of my playing that
saved us also falling a prey to the vodka-besodden Cossacks.'"

APPENDIX D

BEILIS AND AMERICA

The close relation in Jewish thought between Russo-Jewish persecution
and America as the land of escape from it is well illustrated by the
recent remarks of the _Jewish Chronicle_ on the future of the victim of
the Blood-Ritual Prosecution in Kieff. "So long as Beilis continues to
live in Russia, his life is unsafe. The Black Hundreds, he himself says,
have solemnly decided on his death, and we have seen, in the not distant
past, that they can carry out diabolical plots of this description with
complete immunity.... He would gladly go to America, provided he was
sure of a living. The condition should not be difficult to fulfil, and
if this victim of a barbarous _regime_--we cannot say latest victim,
for, as we write, comes the news of an expulsion order against 1200
Jewish students of Kieff--should find a home and place under the
sheltering wing of freedom, it would be a fitting ending to a painful
chapter in our Jewish history."

That it is the natural ending even the Jew-baiting Russian organ, the
_Novoe Vremya_, indirectly testifies, for it has published a sneering
cartoon representing a number of Jews crowded on the Statue of Libe