His family connections included country peddlers, starving artisans, and ne'er-do-wells; but Israel was a zaddik--a man of piety--and the fame of his good life redeemed the whole wretched clan.

When his grandson, my father, came to marry, he boasted his direct descent from Israel Kimanyer, and picked his bride from the best families.
The little house may still be standing which the pious Jews of Kimanye and the neighboring villages built for my great-grandfather, close on a century ago.

He was too poor to build his own house, so the good people who loved him, and who were almost as poor as he, collected a few rubles among themselves, and bought a site, and built the house.
Built, let it be known, with their own hands; for they were too poor to hire workmen.

They carried the beams and boards on their shoulders, singing and dancing on the way, as they sang and danced at the presentation of a scroll to the synagogue.

They hauled and sawed and hammered, till the last nail was driven home; and when they conducted the holy man to his new abode, the rejoicing was greater than at the crowning of a czar.
That little cabin was fit to be preserved as the monument to a species of idealism that has rarely been known outside the Pale.