hibited the significant portraits on their parlor
tables. My mother's own nephew went no farther than Vilna, ten hours'
journey from Polotzk, to learn to cut his beard; and even within our
town limits young women of education were beginning to reject the wig
after marriage. A notorious example was the beautiful daughter of
Lozhe the Rav, who was not restrained by her father's conspicuous
relation to Judaism from exhibiting her lovely black curls like a
maiden; and it was a further sign of the times that the rav did not
disown his daughter. What wonder, then, that my poor mother, shaken
by these foreshadowings of revolution in our midst, and by the express
authority of her husband, gave up the emblem of matrimonial chastity
with but a passing struggle? Considering how the heavy burdens which
she had borne from childhood had never allowed her time to think for
herself at all, but had obliged her always to tread blindly in the
beaten paths, I think it greatly to her credit that in her puzzling
situation she did not lose her poise entirely. Bred to submission,
submit she must; and when she perceived a conflict of authorities, she
prepared to accept the new order of things under which her children's
future was to be formed; wherein she showed her native adaptability,
the readiness to fall into line, which is one of the most charming
traits of her gentle, self-effacing nature.

My father gave my mother very little time to adjust herself. He was
only three years from the Old World with its settled prejudices.
Considering his education, he had thought out a good deal for himself,
but his line of thinking had not as yet brought him to include woman
in the intellectual emancipation for which he himself had been so
eager even in Russia. This was still in the day when he was astonished
to learn that women had written books--had used their minds, their
imaginations, unaided. He still rated the mental capacity of the
average woman as only a little above that of the cattle she tended. He
held it to be a wife's duty to follow her husband in all things. He
could do all the thinking for the family, he believed; and being
convinced that to hold to the outward forms of orthodox Judaism was to
be hampered in the race for Americanization, he did not hesitate to
order our family life on unorthodox lines. There was no conscious
despotism in this; it was only making manly haste to realize an ideal
the nobility of which there was no one to dispu