he official
organ of Zionism; Hebrew critic, publicist, and novelist;
contributor to Ha-Lebanon (at eighteen), Ha-Shahar, Ha-Boker Or,
and other periodicals; chief work, the novel "Religion and Life."

THE MISFORTUNE

OR HOW THE RAV OF PUMPIAN TRIED TO SOLVE A SOCIAL PROBLEM

Pumpian is a little town in Lithuania, a Jewish town. It lies far away
from the highway, among villages reached by the Polish Road. The
inhabitants of Pumpian are poor people, who get a scanty living from the
peasants that come into the town to make purchases, or else the Jews go
out to them with great bundles on their shoulders and sell them every
sort of small ware, in return for a little corn, or potatoes, etc.
Strangers, passing through, are seldom seen there, and if by any chance
a strange person arrives, it is a great wonder and rarity. People peep
at him through all the little windows, elderly men venture out to bid
him welcome, while boys and youths hang about in the street and stare at
him. The women and girls blush and glance at him sideways, and he is the
one subject of conversation: "Who can that be? People don't just set off
and come like that--there must be something behind it." And in the
house-of-study, between Afternoon and Evening Prayer, they gather
closely round the elder men, who have been to greet the stranger, to
find out who and what the latter may be.

Fifty or sixty years ago, when what I am about to tell you happened,
communication between Pumpian and the rest of the world was very
restricted indeed: there were as yet no railways, there was no
telegraph, the postal service was slow and intermittent. People came
and went less often, a journey was a great undertaking, and there were
not many outsiders to be found even in the larger towns. Every town was
a town to itself, apart, and Pumpian constituted a little world of its
own, which had nothing to do with the world at large, and lived its own
life.

Neither were there so many newspapers then, anywhere, to muddle people's
heads every day of the week, stirring up questions, so that people
should have something to talk about, and the Jews had no papers of their
own at all, and only heard "news" and "what was going on in the world"
in the house-of-study or (lehavdil!) in the bath-house. And what sort of
news was it _then_? What sort could it be? World-stirring questions
hardly existed (certainly Pumpian was ignorant of them): politics,
economics, statistics, capi