to the Law, so that they should not have to go
to the Gentile courts. The Gentiles were false, judges and witnesses
and all. They favored the rich man against the poor, the Christian
against the Jew. The dayyan always gave true judgments. Nohem
Rabinovitch, the richest man in Polotzk, could not win a case against
a servant maid, unless he were in the right.

Besides the rav and the dayyan there were other men whose callings
were holy,--the shohat, who knew how cattle and fowls should be
killed; the hazzan and the other officers of the synagogue; the
teachers of Hebrew, and their pupils. It did not matter how poor a man
was, he was to be respected and set above other men, if he were
learned in the Law.

In the synagogue scores of men sat all day long over the Hebrew books,
studying and disputing from early dawn till candles were brought in at
night, and then as long as the candles lasted. They could not take
time for anything else, if they meant to become great scholars. Most
of them were strangers in Polotzk, and had no home except the
synagogue. They slept on benches, on tables, on the floor; they picked
up their meals wherever they could. They had come from distant cities,
so as to be under good teachers in Polotzk; and the townspeople were
proud to support them by giving them food and clothing and sometimes
money to visit their homes on holidays. But the poor students came in
such numbers that there were not enough rich families to provide for
all, so that some of them suffered privation. You could pick out a
poor student in a crowd, by his pale face and shrunken form.

There was almost always a poor student taking meals at our house. He
was assigned a certain day, and on that day my grandmother took care
to have something especially good for dinner. It was a very shabby
guest who sat down with us at table, but we children watched him with
respectful eyes. Grandmother had told us that he was a lamden
(scholar), and we saw something holy in the way he ate his cabbage.

Not every man could hope to be a rav, but no Jewish boy was allowed to
grow up without at least a rudimentary knowledge of Hebrew. The
scantiest income had to be divided so as to provide for the boys'
tuition. To leave a boy without a teacher was a disgrace upon the
whole family, to the remotest relative. For the children of the
destitute there was a free school, supported by the charity of the
pious. And so every boy was sent to heder (Hebrew schoo