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When the Seven Years War broke out in 1756, I was the father of four children, and the cost of living was high. I had tried to make my way in the world like an honourable man. When the enemy Prussians…
For the two reasons specified below, I have given myself the surname “Wasserzug”; the first reason is that when I was five or six years of age, I was playing with some young children, I believe, in a…
I record how, in the year 1625, the Grand Duke came to Sienna, and Messer Abraham Pesaro and Messer Buonaventura Gallichi were appointed to collect the levy. From me, they demanded a pair of sheets, a…
On the third August 1889 I departed from London for South Africa on the steamship Drummond Castle. There were two hundred passengers comprising British, Hollanders, Germans and eleven Jews. We Jews…
This was not a very big courtyard, a longish but narrow one, like hundreds of others of this type in the thickly settled part of Jewish Warsaw. One side, the innermost one, was a two-story…
As for myself, I was constantly going back in my studies as well as in manners and conduct. After a while, my father decided to send me to Prague, which was a day’s journey. My older brother was also…
On the eve of the New Year I found myself with a new career before me. What kind of career? “I don’t know”—the American’s customary reply to every difficult question. . . . I was in New York, trying…
On the third morning, as soon as I was alone, I found the way to the mellah [in Marrakesh]. I came to an intersection where many Jews were standing around. Traffic was streaming past them and around a…
As a new arrival I wasn’t any good at shopkeeping, and not much of an expert with a horse and cart either. So I drifted round the streets, a sort of washout. I can never forget one day wandering about…
[ . . . ] Let us return to my maternal grandmother, Matte, of blessed memory. After she married off my late aunt Ulk, she was left penniless with the fatherless child my mother, may she live…