To see what remorse my mother suffered, or my father's mother, if by some accident she failed in any point of religious observance, was to know that she could never be brought to doubt the sacred importance of the thousand minutiae of ancient Jewish practice.

That which had been taught them as the truth by their fathers and mothers was the whole truth to my good friends and neighbors--that and nothing else.

If there were any people in Polotzk who had strange private opinions, such as I concluded my father must hold, it was possible that he had a secret acquaintance with them.

But it would never do, it was plain to me, to make public confession of his convictions.

Such an act would not only break the hearts of his family, but it would also take the bread from the mouths of his children, and ruin them forever.