MEYER BLINKIN Women 449 LOeB SCHAPIRO If It Was a Dream 481 SHALOM ASCH A Simple Story 493 A Jewish Child 506 A Scholar's Mother 514 The Sinner 529 ISAAC DOB BERKOWITZ Country Folk 543 The Last of Them 566 A FOLK TALE The Clever Rabbi 581 GLOSSARY AND NOTES 589 REUBEN ASHER BRAUDES Born, 1851, in Wilna (Lithuania), White Russia; went to Roumania after the anti-Jewish riots of 1882, and published a Yiddish weekly, Yehudit, in the interest of Zionism; expelled from Roumania; published a Hebrew weekly, Ha-Zeman, in Cracow, in 1891; then co-editor of the Yiddish edition of Die Welt, the 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.