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.

My sister and I were very diligent pupils, and my father took great satisfaction in our progress and built great plans for our higher education.
My brother, who was five years old when he entered heder, hated to be shut up all day over a printed page that meant nothing to him.

He cried and protested, but my father was determined that he should not grow up ignorant, so he used the strap freely to hasten the truant's steps to school.

The heder was the only beginning allowable for a boy in Polotzk, and to heder Joseph must go.

So the poor boy's life was made a nightmare, and the horror was not lifted until he was ten years old, when he went to a modern school where intelligible things were taught, and it proved that it was not the book he hated, but the blindness of the heder.
For a number of peaceful years after my father's return from "far Russia," we led a wholesome life of comfort, contentment, and faith in to-morrow.