en
left by her husband, to her son Yossef, and to inform him of her death
by telegram. "My American children"--she explained with a sigh--"have
certainly forgotten everything they once learned, forgotten all their
Jewishness! But my son Yossef is a different sort; I feel sure of him,
that he will say Kaddish after me and read a chapter in the Mishnah, and
the books will come in useful for his children--Grandmother's legacy to
them."

When I fulfilled the old woman's last wish, I learned how mistaken she
had been. The answer to my letter written during her lifetime came now
that she was dead. Her children thanked us warmly for our care of her,
and they also explained why she and they had remained apart.

She had never known--and it was far better so--by what means her son had
obtained the right to live outside the Pale. It was enough that she
should have to live _forlorn_, where would have been the good of her
knowing that she was _forsaken_ as well--that the one of her children
who had gone altogether over to "them" was Yossef?

TASHRAK

Pen name of Israel Joseph Zevin; born, 1872, in Gori-Gorki, Government
of Mohileff (Lithuania), White Russia; came to New York in 1889; first
Yiddish sketch published in Juedisches Tageblatt, 1893; first English
story in The American Hebrew, 1906; associate editor of Juedisches
Tageblatt; writer of sketches, short stories, and biographies, in
Hebrew, Yiddish, and English; contributor to Ha-Ibri, Jewish Comment,
and numerous Yiddish periodicals; collected works, Geklibene Schriften,
1 vol., New York, 1910, and Tashrak's Beste Erzaehlungen, 4 vols., New
York, 1910.

THE HOLE IN A BEIGEL

When I was a little Cheder-boy, my Rebbe, Bunem-Breine-Gite's, a learned
man, who was always tormenting me with Talmudical questions and with
riddles, once asked me, "What becomes of the hole in a Beigel, when one
has eaten the Beigel?"

This riddle, which seemed to me then very hard to solve, stuck in my
head, and I puzzled over it day and night. I often bought a Beigel, took
a bite out of it, and immediately replaced the bitten-out piece with my
hand, so that the hole should not escape. But when I had eaten up the
Beigel, the hole had somehow always disappeared, which used to annoy me
very much. I went about preoccupied, thought it over at prayers and at
lessons, till the Rebbe noticed that something was wrong with me.

At home, too, they remarked that I had lost my appetite, t