So he let me have a much larger supply
of it than any other cloak-manufacturer in the country was able to
obtain. My business then took a great leap, while my overhead
expenses remained the same. My net profits exceeded two hundred
thousand dollars that year
One afternoon in the summer of the same year, as I walked along
Broadway in the vicinity of Canal Street, my attention was
attracted by a shabby, white-haired, feeble-looking old peddler,
with a wide, sneering mouth, who seemed disquietingly familiar
and in whom I gradually recognized one of my Antomir
teachers--one of those who used to punish me for the sins of their
other pupils. The past suddenly sprang into life with detailed,
colorful vividness. The black pit of poverty in which I had been
raised; my misery at school, where I had been treated as an
outcast and a scapegoat because my mother could not afford even
the few pennies that were charged for my tuition; the joy of my
childish existence in spite of that gloom and martyrdom--all this
rose from the dead before me
The poor old peddler I now saw trying to cross Broadway was
Shmerl the Pincher, the man with whom my mother had a
pinching and hair-pulling duel after she found the marks of his
cruelty on my young body.
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