She had never known—and it was far better so—by what means her son had obtained the right to live outside the Pale. It was enough that she should have to live forlorn, where would have been the good of her knowing that she was forsaken as well—that the one of her children who had gone altogether over to "them" was Yossef?
TASHRAK
Pen name of Israel Joseph Zevin; born, 1872, in Gori-Gorki, Government of Mohileff (Lithuania), White Russia; came to New York in 1889; first Yiddish sketch published in Jüdisches Tageblatt, 1893; first English story in The American Hebrew, 1906; associate editor of Jüdisches Tageblatt; writer of sketches, short stories, and biographies, in Hebrew, Yiddish, and English; contributor to Ha-Ibri, Jewish Comment, and numerous Yiddish periodicals; collected works, Geklibene Schriften, 1 vol., New York, 1910, and Tashrak's Beste Erzählungen, 4 vols., New York, 1910.
THE HOLE IN A BEIGEL
When I was a little Cheder-boy, my Rebbe, Bunem-Breine-Gite's, a learned man, who was always tormenting me with Talmudical questions and with riddles, once asked me, "What becomes of the hole in a Beigel, when one has eaten the Beigel?"
This riddle, which seemed to me then very hard to solve, stuck in my head, and I puzzled over it day and night. I often bought a Beigel, took a bite out of it, and immediately replaced the bitten-out piece with my hand, so that the hole should not escape. But when I had eaten up the Beigel, the hole had somehow always disappeared, which used to annoy me very much. I went about preoccupied, thought it over at prayers and at lessons, till the Rebbe noticed that something was wrong with me.
At home, too, they remarked that I had lost my appetite, that I ate nothing but Beigel—Beigel for breakfast, Beigel for dinner, Beigel for supper, Beigel all day long. They also observed that I ate it to the accompaniment of strange gestures and contortions of both my mouth and my hands.
One day I summoned all my courage, and asked the Rebbe, in the middle of a lesson on the Pentateuch: