“I became acquainted with the book when I was 5–6 years old, when I learned to read; The first reading lessons were taught to me by my older brother and sister, and by our neighbor, a Jew, a watchmaker, Zachariah Frachtman. He was a tall, slightly hunched old man, nicknamed the Shaft. He was a good man - gentle, kind, but the suburban Jews did not like him and called him crazy. They accused him, firstly, of reading a forbidden book, and secondly, of speaking very well, in general, about religion. This “forbidden book,” as I later learned from one of Zechariah’s eldest sons, was an old foreign publication in Hebrew, containing a religious and philosophical treatise by some religious rabbi...”