The mill changed hands, and the new owner put a protege of his own in my father's place.

So, after a short breathing spell, we were driven back into the swamp of growing poverty and trouble.
The next year or so my father spent in a restless and fruitless search for a permanent position.

My mother had another serious illness, and his own health remained precarious.

What he earned did not more than half pay the bills in the end, though we were living very humbly now.
Polotzk seemed to reject him, and no other place invited him.
Just at this time occurred one of the periodic anti-Semitic movements whereby government officials were wont to clear the forbidden cities of Jews, whom, in the intervals of slack administration of the law, they allowed to maintain an illegal residence in places outside the Pale, on payment of enormous bribes and at the cost of nameless risks and indignities.
It was a little before Passover that the cry of the hunted thrilled the Jewish world with the familiar fear.

The wholesale expulsion of Jews from Moscow and its surrounding district at cruelly short notice was the name of this latest disaster.