Every Sabbath, the great Harkavey leather-factory was closed for business. During the week, the office would be full of secretaries and accountants, who were busy calculating exactly how many pairs of shoes, caps, suits, and finished boots each worker produced in a day. But today, on the Holy Sabbath, the office was transformed into a holy place, a little synagogue.

The prayer quorum consisted of the older workers - religious small-town Jews with beards and forelocks, who were evacuated here from the war zone together with their boss and his factory. The whole week long, while the machines continued with their banging and crashing, the distinction between worker and master remained intact. But as soon as the great steam drums ceased to boil with hot steam, and the machinery stood still, like clay statues....then, the line between bread-giver and bread-earner would become blurred....

Every Friday afternoon, when the factory whistle blew, indicating the approach of Sabbath, a noticeable change would come over the old boss, Harkavey. All week long he would sit in his office, wearing a skullcap, bent over a book, all the while keeping a close watch on his business. Now however, all thoughts about business and production were put aside, as they were of absolutely no concern. Instead, he now felt a kind of a warm longing for his back-home Sabbath and surroundings. There, among the friends of his youth, and the respected citizens of the town, he had once had his own place by the Eastern Wall, which had been passed down to him from his father’s fathers.

Like the boss, so did each worker have his own sweet memories of Sabbath back home....coming home to find his house all clean and tidy; his wife and children eagerly awaiting his return from prayers, dressed in their finest, their faces beaming. It used to be the happiest day of the week.

Sabbath in the afternoon, after waking up from a little nap, he might have gone out for a little walk to take in some fresh air. Later, people would have gathered in the House of Study, to listen to the beautiful stories from the Midrash, to talk about politics, or to hear a moving sermon from a travelling preacher. After the third meal of Sabbath, they would go back to the synagogue. And when the shadows on the walls of the old House of Study told them it was time to join together once more in prayer, they would once again sing the bitter-sweet melody, to hold the gray week at bay for just a little while longer ...

And so it was that here on the banks of the Volga, in a small office on the first floor of a leather factory, religious boss and religious worker would join together to try and recreate at least a reflection of the Sabbath that they would have had back home. Each of them, the the boss and his poor worker, longed for the old, back-home Sabbath, which, like them, had been driven away to strange new surroundings....

In that office-synagogue, Harkavey was the president of the congregation. In his capacity as master of cermonies, he would honor this one with one prayer, and another one with another recitation; he apportioned the calls to read from the Torah to his fellow townsfolk his workers, with an open hand. Here they were all equal Jews. The same prayer-shawl covered the boss and the worker....both prayed together with the same style of prayer as was used among all the other Jewish communities. For a little while you could forget, that you had been scattered far from home...instead, it was as though you found youself once again back in your old Jewish village.

"Good Sabbath!", the happy congregants would greet each other.

The sweet feeling of home and village lasted only as long as their Sabbath prayers; once it was all over, the boss would return home to his large family: sons and daughters, granchildren and sons-in-law. He would say the blessing over a glass of kosher wine, and conduct a rich Sabbath feast with all kinds of fine dishes. Meanwhile, his fellow tonwsmen, the the tradesmen who were his brothers in prayer, would go back to take their meager Sabbath lunch in the shared dormitory for the homeless workers, who had been brought here from the shtetl to work in the factory.

Sabbath, which for me had always been a day of deep relaxation, was now transformed into a day of suffering. On Sabbath I felt the full extent of my loneliness, my homelessness and my brokenness. I wandered about on this new, foreign soil, where fate had cast me, longing for home, for my own people. There was no one here I could confide in, before whom I could speak from the heart. But above all else, I mourned the loss of my writings, that had been stolen from me on the way to Yaroslavl.

I had hoped to find a city of refuge, but there was no rest here for my troubled heart. My cousins, Samuel and Fanya Voltchok, were themselves broken people, who were already struggling from constant need.

My cousin Voltchok had been already on intimate terms with Poverty for some time. They first became acquainted during his childhood, somwhere in a village in the Province of Mogilev, where his father was the rabbi. Afterwards, Poverty accompanied him to the yeshiva, where he experienced the bitter taste of sleeping on a hard bench in the cold House of Study, often on an empty stomach. When he was a little older, and he went off to study in the high school, Poverty followed him there as well. And later still when he became a Russian-Hebrew teacher, Poverty did not leave his threshold. But throughout all those years of need, he had been sustained by his great ideal: he was going to spread enlightenment and education among the poor Jewish masses of Lithuania. Many times he sang away his hunger with a Hebrew or even a Russian song, hoping all the while for a better future of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity".

But now that the former teacher had been forced to become a "black worker", to work in the factory to avoid going off to war, that old poverty was now much more bitter than in the early years. Now he had no songs left to sing away his hunger...as for his previous "sacred calling"....teaching....he now saw it as a waste of time. As he put it:

"What is the use of education, culture, and civilization, if mankind is nothing more than a wild beast?"

His young wife, cousin, herself a former teacher, was trying to help her husband to make his livelihood. She had converted their cramped lodgings into a kind of boarding- house for Russian seminary students who had come from the surrounding villages to study for the priesthood, and for homeless Jewish youth from Lithuania, who worked for local Russian employers. Every Saturday and Sunday she would be off giving "private lessons" for the sons and daughters of Jewish refugees, so that they should be able to speak the Russian tongue, the better to converse with their new Russian neighbors, their bread-givers...

And so both of them had no time for me. They wore not concerned with my longings, and were not bothered by my loneliness. I felt as though I were all alone in the great, wide world. The uneasiness which cried out from my face, and the sadness stared out from my eyes, simply caused other people to shrink back from me. People started to look at me as a kind of spreader of gloom. The strange boarders grated on my nerves. To my cousin's young boy, with whom I shared a bed, I was no kind of "uncle", and to his parents, not even a "guest"...more like a burden, something that had been sent to them that they weren't able to get rid of.

To get away from myself, from the painful voices that surrounded me like dark shadows, I used to leave my cousin’s home and wander about the strange city, with her unknown streets, where my father’s fathers had never trod. Perhaps here, I told myself, I could drive away the troubled thoughts, which festered in my soul, like the buzzing of the mosquito inside the skull of the Evil Titus.