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It was a Saturday night, soon after the death of my elder brother Dovidl, within the period of the thirty days' mourning for him. Mother would not be consoled, for Dovidl had been her "very best." Three brothers had I. The first-born, Simhah, may he rest in peace, had been married long before; he was the junior Shohet in town, and a candidate for the Rabbinate.
In that way we spent a few days, hiding under the open sky, disguised in our Shaatnez clothes. Soon enough the time came when my parents had to understand what they would not understand when the rabbi wanted to give me up in place of the famous Avremel. For they caught my oldest brother Simhah, may he rest in peace.
I read it all, and shuddered: why, under that very stone lay the remains of my own brother Simhah! I wanted to shed tears, but my tears did not obey me. I read it again and again, and when I came to the words "modest," "pious," I mumbled something to myself, something angry and envious.
Perl's school was the pattern and model for a multitude of other schools, among them the one founded by Zittenfeld in Odessa, in the faculty of which were Simhah Pinsker, Elijah Finkel, the grandson of Elijah Gaon, and Abraham Abele, the eminent Talmudist.
And Simhah was a privileged person; he was not only the Shohet of the community and a great Lamdan, but also a married man, and the father of four children to boot. Only then, it seems, my parents understood what the rabbi had understood before: that it was not fair to deliver up my brother when I, the ignorant fellow, the lover of dogs, might take his place.
Out of sheer spitefulness I wanted to worry the poor old folks a little; may the Lord not consider it a sin on my part. I said: "Had Rabbi Simhah the Shohet been in his place, he surely would have withstood all temptations!" . . . . "What, converted?!" I kept silent, and the old people took it as a sign of affirmation. They hung their heads despondently, and kept silent, too.
The educated flocked thither from all parts, especially from Galicia. Simhah Pinsker and B. Stern are the representatives of the Science of Judaism in Russia, and the contributions of the Karaite Abraham Firkovich in the same field were most valuable, while Eichenbaum, Gottlober, and others distinguished themselves as poets and writers.
When the publishers, Simhah Ziml and Menahem Mann Romm, had completed their work in the new quarters, the copies of the book were destroyed by incendiaries . After some time, an effort was made by Joseph Eliasberg and Mattathias Strashun to continue the publication, but the Warsaw censor prohibited its importation into Poland, where the bulk of the subscribers lived.
And it was with difficulty that I could decipher the inscriptions on the stones. I do not know why it was so: either my Hebrew had got rusty, or else graveyard inscriptions make hard reading in general. "Here lieth . . . . the righteous man . . . . modest, pious . . . . Rabbi Simhah . . . . Shohet. . . . "
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