should be treated like this,
but at least there was this excuse for sending them back to Polotzk,
that they belonged there. For what reason were people driven out of
St. Petersburg and Moscow who had their homes in those cities, and had
no other place to go to? Ever so many people, men and women and even
children, came to Polotzk, where they had no friends, with stories of
cruel treatment in Russia; and although they were nobody's relatives,
they were taken in, and helped, and set up in business, like
unfortunates after a fire.

It was very strange that the Czar and the police should want all
Russia for themselves. It was a very big country; it took many days
for a letter to reach one's father in Russia. Why might not everybody
be there who wanted to?

I do not know when I became old enough to understand. The truth was
borne in on me a dozen times a day, from the time I began to
distinguish words from empty noises. My grandmother told me about it,
when she put me to bed at night. My parents told me about it, when
they gave me presents on holidays. My playmates told me, when they
drew me back into a corner of the gateway, to let a policeman pass.
Vanka, the little white-haired boy, told me all about it, when he ran
out of his mother's laundry on purpose to throw mud after me when I
happened to pass. I heard about it during prayers, and when women
quarrelled in the market place; and sometimes, waking in the night, I
heard my parents whisper it in the dark. There was no time in my life
when I did not hear and see and feel the truth--the reason why Polotzk
was cut off from the rest of Russia. It was the first lesson a little
girl in Polotzk had to learn. But for a long while I did not
understand. Then there came a time when I knew that Polotzk and
Vitebsk and Vilna and some other places were grouped together as the
"Pale of Settlement," and within this area the Czar commanded me to
stay, with my father and mother and friends, and all other people like
us. We must not be found outside the Pale, because we were Jews.

So there was a fence around Polotzk, after all. The world was divided
into Jews and Gentiles. This knowledge came so gradually that it could
not shock me. It trickled into my consciousness drop by drop. By the
time I fully understood that I was a prisoner, the shackles had grown
familiar to my flesh.

The first time Vanka threw mud at me, I ran home and complained to my
mother, who brushed off my dress and