He tried to observe the Jewish holidays in his home. He himself did not know much about them. He remembered nothing about them, and appeared comical in his own eyes when he went out on the street to buy Kosher meat, or bread, or matzoth and bring it home. Yet the people in the house had taken it all very seriously; on Passover the matzoth were placed on a serving dish, put on the table, and all were afraid even to touch it. They all tried to be as serious about it as was he himself--but he knew that it was a farce. No one in the house knew anything about the holidays. The holidays they kept were the holidays of their neighbors. Where any part of the town celebrated, the doctor’s house celebrated with it--Easter with the Russians, Christmas with the Catholics, but of their own holidays they knew nothing. Because of this it was rather comical that he should all of a sudden try to celebrate their “own” holidays. Mainly he did it for his fourteen-year-old son, Solomon, who caused him more unrest than all the others. He knew that the boy suffered, that he was of a different make-up than the other children. It had been very hard to make it possible for the boy to enter the gymnasium. It was at a time when hate toward Jews was already raging among their Gentile neighbors, and was more than ever in style. The boy was forced to suffer much at the hands of his Gentile schoolmates. Often, when he came home from school, his wet, frightened eyes seemed to ask the terrible question: “Why?” In the beginning, when he was yet a child, he asked his father: “Why did the Jews do that?” He was tortured so at school, but when the doctor was unable to give him a clear, true answer, he ceased to ask the question. Soon the child knew the full taste of being a Jew; he grew used to it, and bore it like a grown-up, with humility and patience. He asked no more questions, and it was seen that he withdrew further and further into himself. He had grown very much in the few years he spent in the gymnasium. He read serious books, and his forehead was already wrinkled. He was quiet, and a sneering smile towards everything and everybody lingered about his lips--the smile of the suffering Jew towards the rest of the world. The doctor was more ashamed of himself before the boy than before his other children, and felt that he must do something to change the situation. He knew the responsibility he carried in the eyes of the child: that it was his to take care that this boy too did not become an apostate. This drove him to think of some practical remedy. He often wanted to speak to the youngest son about the older one’s apostasy, but he could not. He was afraid to hear the truth from him--a thing he had heard from none heretofore--that the fact that Mikhail turned Christian was due more to himself than to Mikhail. He did nothing to prevent his son from changing faith. He already read the answer in the sneering smile that hung on the boy’s lips, and even more, in that the boy