YITZCHOK-YOSSEL BROITGEBER 237
nowadays, who specialize in one kind of garment, for Yitzchok-Yossel made . everything: trousers, cloaks, waistcoats, top-coats, fur-coats, capes, collars, bags for prayer-books, "little prayer-scarfs," and so on. Besides, he was a ladies' tailor as well. Summer and winter, day and night, he worked like an ox, and yet, when the Kabtzonivke community, at the time of the great cholera, in order to put an end to the plague, led him, aged thirty, out to the cemetery, and there married him to Malkeh the orphan, she cast him off two weeks later ! She was still too young (twenty-eight), she said, to stay with him and die of hunger. She went out into the world, together with a large band of poor, after the great fire that destroyed nearly the whole town, and nothing more was heard of Malkeh the orphan from that day forward. And Yitzchok-Yossel Broitgeber be- took himself, with needle and flat-iron, into the women's chamber in the New Shool, the community having assigned it to him as a workroom.
How came it about, you may ask, that so versatile a tailor as Yitzchok-Yossel should be so poor?
Well, if you do, it just shows you didn't know him!
Wait and hear what I shall tell you.
The story is on this wise : Yitzchok-Yossel Broitgeber was a tailor who could make anything, and who made nothing at all, that is, since he displayed his imagina- tion in cutting out and sewing on the occasion I am referring to, nobody would trust him.
I can remember as if it were to-day what happened in Kabtzonivke, and the commotion there was in the little town when Yitzchok-Yossel made Reb Yecheskel the 16
