Yiddish Tales

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Again many years passed, and Reb Nochumtzi gradually came to see that poverty also is a misfortune, and out of his own experience.

His Sabbath cloak began to look threadbare (the weekday one was already patched on every side), he had six little children living, one or two of the girls were grown up, and it was time to think of settling them, and they hadn't a frock fit to put on. The five Polish gulden a week salary was not enough to keep them in bread, and the wife, poor thing, wept the whole day through: "Well, there, ich wie ich, it isn't for myself--but the poor children are naked and barefoot."

At last they were even short of bread.

"Nochumtzi! Why don't you speak?" exclaimed his wife with tears in her eyes. "Nochumtzi, can't you hear me? I tell you, we're starving! The children ar