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Fetchke kept close to my mother at first for love and protection, but the petting she got became a blind for discipline. She learned early, from my mother's example, that hands and feet and brains were made for labor. She learned to bow to the yoke, to lift burdens, to do more for others than she could ever hope to have done for her in turn.
My uncle Berl, for example, gave me the name of "Zukrochene Flum," which I am not going to translate, because it is uncomplimentary. My sister Fetchke was always the good little girl, and when our troubles began she was an important member of the family. What sort of little girl I was will be written by and by.
She learned to see sugar plums lie around without asking for her share. When she was only fit to nurse her dolls, she learned how to comfort a weary heart. And all this while I sat warm and watched over at home, untouched by any discipline save such as I directly incurred by my own sins. I differed from Fetchke a little in age, considerably in health, and enormously in luck.
I suppose no little girls with whom we played had a more comfortable sense of being well-off than Fetchke and I. "Raphael the Russian's grandchildren" people called us, as if referring to the quarterings in our shield. It was very pleasant to wear fine clothes, to have kopecks to spend at the fruit stalls, and to be pointed at admiringly.
I did not go and play; I looked on, I listened, when Fetchke rehearsed her lesson at home. And one evening I stole the Russian primer and repaired to a secret place I knew of. It was a storeroom for broken chairs and rusty utensils and dried apples. Nobody would look for me in that dusty hole. I did not mind in the least being caught, for I had my new accomplishment to show off.
My father put on his best coat and silk skull-cap; my mother replaced the cotton kerchief by the well-brushed wig. We children bustled around our parents, asking favors in the name of the Sabbath "Mama, let Fetchke and me wear our new shoes, in honor of Sabbath"; or "Papa, will you take us to-morrow across the bridge? You said you would, on Sabbath."
At the opposite end of the table was a long row of brass candlesticks, polished to perfection, with the heavy silver candlesticks in a shorter row in front; for my mother and grandmother were very pious, and each used a number of candles; while Fetchke and I and the maids had one apiece.
She warmed her little hands over my mother's pot of glowing charcoal there was no stove in the store and even learned to stand astride of it, for further comfort, without setting her clothes on fire. Fetchke was like a young colt inseparable from the mare. I make this comparison not in disrespectful jest, but in deepest pity.
His children, if he started them right, would not have to bow to the yoke as low as he; his children's children might even be free men. And education was the one means to redemption. Fetchke and I were started with a rebbe, in the orthodox way, but we were taught to translate as well as read Hebrew, and we had a secular teacher besides.
Fetchke and Joseph and I, and Deborah, when she grew up, had some prospects even in Polotzk, with our parents' hearts set on the highest things; but we were destined to seek our fortunes in a world which even my father did not dream of when he settled down to business in Polotzk.
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