IF IT WAS A DREAM
Yes, it was a terrible dream! But when one is only nine years old, one soon forgets, and Meyer was nine a few weeks before it came to pass.
Yes, and things had happened in the house every now and then to remind one of it, but then Meyer lived more out of doors than indoors, in the wild streets of New York. Tartilov and New York—what a difference! New York had supplanted Tartilov, effaced it from his memory. There remained only a faint occasional recollection of that horrid dream.
If it really was a dream!
It was this way: Meyer dreamt that he was sitting in Cheder learning, but more for show's sake than seriously, because during the Days of Penitence, near the close of the session, the Rebbe grew milder, and Cheder less hateful. And as he sat there and learnt, he heard a banging of doors in the street, and through the window saw Jews running to and fro, as if bereft of their senses, flinging themselves hither and thither exactly like leaves in a gale, or as when a witch rises from the ground in a column of dust, and whirls across the road so suddenly and unexpectedly that it makes one's flesh creep. And at the sight of this running up and down in the street, the Rebbe collapsed in his chair white as death, his under lip trembling.
Meyerl never saw him again. He was told later that the Rebbe had been killed, but somehow the news
