The Gentile merchants and shopkeepers of Yaroslavl made a tremendous impression on me. Throughout my wanderings among the many cities and towns that I had visited on my way, I was used to seeing that when it came to shopkeeping, trading, the buying and selling of produce, merchandise, or whatever....that all of these were exclusively Jewish occupations. For buying and selling, only Jews had the talent since time immemorial. In fact, until now I had always thought that the only reason why the Lord of the Universe had created so many Gentiles, was in order to provide His People, Israel, with someone else with whom to do business.

It had even seemed to me like a small act of charity, the way the Jewish merchants had left a small corner for the Gentile merchants to stand in: that is to say, dealing in pig’s meat! In every Jewish village there was a Gentile who was occupied with that non-Kosher business. The whole village knew him as "the pig dealer", and although he could often speak Yiddish like one of us, you basically got the feeling that he was like a lonely, forsaken orphan in the midst of all the Jewish shopkeepers, among whom he would be found on market days, selling smoked sausages and pig’s meat by the pound. You felt sorry just to look at him. And we children would get a sense of revenge, that at least one Gentile should know what it felt like to be in his own little "exile", in the midst of so many Jewish merchants.....

Now however, all at once, to my great astonishment, I saw for the first time a whole Gentile world, consisting not merely of great monasteries and cathedrals full of God-fearing priests, monks, and nuns....rather, I saw great commercial enterprises, warehouses packed with all kinds of merchandise. The stores stretched for the whole length of both sides of Vlassevsky Street, the main thoroughfare. And their owners , with their managers, their managers, right down to the workers....all of them through and through Gentiles and sons of Gentiles! How could it be? That actual Gentiles with their Gentile brains should be able to conduct such great "Jewish" enterprises? I couldn’t stop marvelling at the fact of it.

But the thing that amazed me the most was that here, they knew absolutely nothing about "haggling". Have you ever heard of such a thing? That however much they asked you to pay....you paid! And none of the shop-keepers seemed to find it necessary to make a spectacle, to "swear on his mother’s grave" on behalf of any customer who might wander into their store....instead, the stoot there so calmly and peacefully, behind their long tables, looking so dignified, speaking to their customer with such respect, as though they were grateful for the great honor that they might buy something from them.

Now is that not the strangest thing you’ve ever heard of, that you would stare at in wonder?

Sometimes, in fact, in my free time, I would go out specially to observe that very "wonder". I would stand outside the store and gaze into the large show-windows, where all kinds of items were on display. Sometimes I would even go inside, making as though I were an actual customer who had come to purchase who-knows-how-much merchandise. And all the while, observing with wonder the transactions between Gentile merchant and Gentile customer.

I was altogether enthralled with my strange new surroundings, with their "outlandish" customs. I had a strong desire to become more acquainted with the genuine Russian folk-masses. Most of all, I wanted to know how the ordinary Russian felt about us Jews, his new neighbors, who had so recently come to settle on the banks of his River Volga?

To help me out, I had my slight knowledge of Russian literature. Through it, I hoped to find the key to understanding the true Russian....whether it was in fact really so that the ordinary Russian peasant posessed, under his tough skin, the warm soul and kind heart of which his writers and poets had written and sung?

I started by going to the tea-houses, the cheap cafes and restaurants, where the ordinary workingmen came together to relax and pass the time. They were always crowsded with people. Sitting around long tables, on which there stood samovars and teapots, you would find the factory workers in their dark, stained work-clothes. The room would be filled with a tobacco smoke and hot, seething steam which billowed out of every samovar and teapot, and mixed with the steam from their hot, sweating bodies.

They crowd sat about calmly, peacefullt. They ate; they drank. They spoke in loud, clear wholesome tones. I listened closely to hear what they were talking about: what was on the minds of these true Russians. They spoke about work, about livelihood, the city and the village, bread and land. Off and on you would hear the word "war". But nobody seemed to place too much importance on it, as thought it were a remote, far-away event, that had little to do with them.

Another one told his neighbor about his son and son-in-law, were were off somewhere in the south, on the battlefield. He talked about it with such calmness, as though they had merely gone off to fetch a bale of hay from the field, or bring a wagon-load of wood from the forest. It seemed that here in this remote Russian city of Yaroslavl, that no one really knew that somewhere in Lithuania, Poland, and Galician, Russian blood was being spilled "for Czar and Fatherland".

On the other hand, you would often hear the word "Moscow", the name of the nearby Russian Mother-City. And people talked about the not-so-long-ago "good times", when you could get a pint of vodka anywhere; about the present-day shortages of foodstuff, clothing, and boots. After "Moscow", the situation with regard to food and clothing was the second most important theme, that dominated their thoughts.

But the whole time, I heard almost nothing about politics. Barely a word about the "Tsar Batyoushka"....and as for the "Yids", who were supposed to have "sold out Mother Russia to the Hun", to the Germans...it was as though they had never even existed.

I saw before me a healthy, calm, established, settled people, a true "nation apart from the world". Nobody was fighting or arguing, no drunk voices rang out above the rest. Nothing at all like our back-home village Gentiles, who, whenever there was a market day in shtetl, would come to our Jewish taverns to get drunk, start fights (often with their best friends), right before the eyes of their own wife and children, frightening the wits out of all the Jews in the village. As often as not, whatever money we had made in the course of the fair would be spent repairing the broken windows that were left behind. You would give thanks to the Almighty if you came out of it in one piece....

This calm and equanimity on the part of the true Russian, that I noticed in the tea-houses, I also observed among dozens and dozens of Russian workers, with whome it was my lot to work together in the leather factory. You never saw by them a trace of arrogance, not a trace of resentment that "they" should be in charge instead of the foreign "Yid". Their attitude towards their Jewish co-workers was no different from their attitude towards their own Orthodox brothers, as though we were all in the same boat together.

I felt a great affection for my new neighbors. All of my fears regarding the war and its accompanying slanders and accusations against the Jews, that I had brought with me all the way from the other side of the Pale, where everywhere you went you were looked at with suspicion....these worries gradually faded away. Instead, there began to steal into my heart a feeling of hope, that perhaps here, in the heart of Russia, the wandering Jew might find a place to rest his weary bones, at least for a little while.

As additional evidence to support this hope, I remembered the story that the Jewish homeless, the Exiles of Kovno, used to tell all the time: that as soon as they arrived here with the first trainloads, the people of Yaroslavl, regardless of class or standing, had come running to the station with wagons loaded with food, and begun to distrubute it among the homeless. They did their best to provide everone with a roof over his head, so that no one should have to spend the night in the filthy transport wagons. This heart-warming, generous reception from the sons and daughters of the Russian People, who were ruled by the evil Czar Nicholas, Tormentor of the Jews.....this was altogether unexpected on the part of the tired, weary Jewsih homeless. They never fogot it. It was a shining manifestation of that generous Russioan soul, which was capable of rising to the highest level.

This same warm feeling towards these new surroundings was something that I noticed not only among the Jewish homeless in Yaroslav, but also in many other cities which lay up and down the length of the River Volga. Later, after the Kerenski revolution, as an organizer for the Zionist Workers Party, I would make a tour of the cities of Tver, Bezeshk, Ribinsk, Kastrama, and Vologda, where I met with many of our dispersed brothers and sisters from Lithuania and White Russia. From not one of them did I hear, that anyone had cause for complaint on account of his new Russian neighbors. On the contrary, many of them were already becoming established here, whether in a factory or as an artisan or shopkeeper, so that little by little they ceased to long for theirk poverty-stricken Lithuania. And afterwards, when the war was over, many of them stayed behind there as permanent residents.

Apparently this is the way of our history: the new Gentile neighbor is always better than the old one.