When Ezrielk began to sing, poor people forgot their hunger, thirst, and need, the sick, their aches and pains, the Kabtzonivke Jews in general, their bitter exile.
He mostly sang unfamiliar tunes and whole "things."
"Where do you get them, Ezrielk?"
The little Ezrielk would open his eyes (he kept them shut while he sang), his two big blue eyes, and answer wonderingly:
"Don't you hear how everything sings?"
After a little while, when Ezrielk had been singing so well and so sweetly and so wonderfully that the Kabtzonivke Jews began to feel too happy, people fell athinking, and they grew extremely uneasy and disturbed in their minds:
"It's not all so simple as it looks, there is something behind it. Suppose a not-good one had introduced himself into the child (which God forbid!)? It would do no harm to take him to the Aleskev Rebbe, long life to him."
As good luck would have it, the Hostre Rebbe came along just then to Kabtzonivke, and, after all, Ezrielk belonged to him, he was born through the merit of the Rebbe's miracle-working! So the Chassidim told him the story. The Rebbe, long life to him, sent for him. Ezrielk came and began to sing. The Rebbe listened a long, long time to his sweet voice, which rang out like a hundred thousand crystal and gold bells into every corner of the room.
"Do not be alarmed, he may and he must sing. He gets his tunes there where he got his soul."
And Ezrielk sang cheerful tunes till he was ten years old, that is, till he fell into the hands of the teacher Reb Yainkel Vittiss.