Lithuania or a Hasidic one in Poland to a Petersburg bank or district court, a Kharkov shop or dental office, the stock exchange or a factory. They did not even have to travel very far. Cahan’s pious and penniless father was no “papasha,” and all he had done was move twenty miles from Podberezy to Vilna, and yet he, too, made in 1871 the “astounding decision” to send his son to the state-run rabbinical school, knowing full well “that in that school all teaching was in Russian, that all the students were bareheaded and that along with the teachers they were clean-shaven and wrote and smoked on the Holy Sabbath. To send a youngster to the Rabiner school could only mean ‘to turn him into a goy.’ ” Had he known what he was doing? Cahan did not know. “ ’Tis the time’s plague that madmen lead the blind”—or so Landau would imply, writing in postrevolutionary exile as an anti-Bolshevik Russian “intelligent” of Jewish extraction. Cahan himself, however, never regretted either his father’s decision or his own departure from home (even as he bemoaned, time and again, his emigration from Russia to America). Neither did Deich, Babel, Yokhelson, Moreinis-Muratova, or her brother, M. A. Moreinis, who had left their blind father one day before she did. To say nothing of Trotsky, and perhaps even Trotsky’s parents, who felt “ambivalent” as they sat at his trial in 1906. “I was an editor of newspapers, the chairman of the soviet, and I had a name as a writer. The old couple were impressed by all this. Over and over again, my mother tried to talk to the defense lawyers, hoping to hear more flattering things about me.” 56 Even Tevye the Milkman, in his darkest hour, was not sure. His daughter Chava had married a “gentile,” and he had done the right thing by mourning her death and pretending “there had never been any Chava to begin with.” But then again, “What are you doing, you crazy old loon?” I asked myself. “Why are you making such a production of this? Stop playing the tyrant, turn your wagon around, and make up with her! She is your own child, after all, not some street waif . . .” I tell you, I had even weirder thoughts than that in the forest. What did being a Jew or not a Jew matter? Why did God have to create both? And if He did, why put such walls between them, so that neither would look at the other even though both were his creatures? It grieved me that I wasn’t a more learned man, because surely there were answers to be found in the holy books . . . 57