Her black-eyed Nikolai with the strong black hair and the virile little profile that hooked against the pillow as he slept.

Her red-headed Schmulka with the tight curls, golden eyes, and even more thrusting profile.  So different of feature her twins and yet so temperamentally of a key.  Flaming to the same childish passions, often too bitter, she thought, and, trembling with an unnamed fear, would tear them apart.

Pull of the cruelties and the horrible torture complex of the young male, they had once burned a cat alive, and the passion of their father and their cries under flaying had beat about in her brain for weeks after.  Jealousies, each of the other, burned fiercely, and, aged three, they scratched blood from one another over the favor of the shoemaker’s tot of a girl.  And once, to her soul-sickness, Nikolai, the black one, had found out the vodka and drunk of it until she discovered him in a little stupor beside the cupboard.

Yet—­and Sara would recount with her eyes full of more tears than they could hold the often-told tale of how Schmulka, who could bear no injustice, championed the cause of little Mottke, the butcher’s son, against the onslaught of his drunken father, beating back the lumbering attack with small fists tight with rage; of little Nikolai, who fell down the jagged wall of a quarry and endured a broken arm for the six hours until his father came home rather than burden his mother with what he knew would be the agony of his pain.

Red and black were Sara’s sons in pigment.  But by the time they were four, almost identical in passion, inflammable both to the same angers, the impulsive and the judiciary cunningly distributed in them.

And so, to the solemn and Talmud teachings of Mosher and the wide-bosomed love of this mother who lavishly nurtured them, these sons, so identically pitched, grew steady of limb, with all the thigh-pulling power of their parents, the calves of their little legs already tight as fists.  And from the bookkeeping one snow-smelling night, to the drip-drip of tallow, there came the decisive moment when America looked exactly four months off!

Then one starlit hour before dawn the pogrom broke.  Redly, from the very start, because from the first bang of a bayonet upon a door blood began to flow and smell.

There had been rumors.  For days old Genendel, the ragpicker, had prophetically been showing about the village the rising knobs of his knotting rheumatic knuckles, ill omen of storm or havoc.  A star had shot down one night, as white and sardonic as a Cossack’s grin and almost with a hiss behind it.  Mosher, returning from a peddling tour to a neighboring village, had worn a furrow between his eyes.  Headache, he called it.  Somehow Sara vaguely sensed it to be the ache of a fear.

One night there was a furious pink tint on the distant horizon, and borne on miles of the stiffly thin air came the pungency of burning wood and flesh across the snowlight.  Flesh!  The red sky lay off in the direction of Kishinef.  What was it?  The straw roof of a burning barn?  The precious flesh of an ox?  What?  Reb Baruch, with a married daughter and eleven children in Kishinef, sat up all night and prayed and swayed and trembled.