From: Emmental, Bessarabia
9 January 1912

Good luck in the New Year. - Esteemed Staats-Anzeiger! I am a reader of the dear paper for nearly one year now, but haven’t delivered yet any correspondence to the editing staff. Now I will risk it and if the editor Mr. Brandt will take my reports I will write more often. (*Editor: Will be taken gladly for sure. Please write again.)

I just want to ask my colleagues in America to order and pay the paper for me for one year more; I’ll pay them the money back with thanks.

We have very cold weather, down to 10-12 degrees below zero and during the nights even sometimes 18-20 degrees below zero. This is quite an unusual temperature for the south. We have also much snow, up to 20 inches on the open fields. We have only few drifts because the snow fell mostly in quiet weather. We have a great sled-run which is very much in use.

We have lived happily through the holidays and nothing important has happened. But I will report a story, which started about seven years ago and still isn’t finished. Seven years ago in our village there lived a widow, who kept a small shop and earned her bread in quiet loneliness. But humans don’t like being alone. Adam was tired of being alone and that’s why God created Eve who seduced him. This happened also to the widow just with the difference that a man from another village came to marry her. The widow accepted without much pondering the proposal. But not long after the marriage the man began to persuade her to sell the small shop. He told her to sell the shop and move to his home village where they would have a better living. “Why would you want to get annoyed by the people because of a few kopecks?” - Said and done. They sold the shop and moved to the man’s home village, but the woman found it very different there. In her native village she had her rich parents to whom she could turn to for help and comfort. Now the small shop where she earned the necessary kopecks was gone. The woman came into misfortune. But after a short while in the man’s native village, the woman started to talk her husband about moving back to her home village Finally he accepted and they moved back to her village. Here they lived a quiet life. The little shop wasn’t there any more, which bothered the woman a lot, while the man didn’t give it a single thought. Then a man opened another shop in her village but kept it only for one year and then pretended to sell the shop because he wanted to immigrate to America, but it was just a pretension since he wanted to get rid of the shop.

Finally, the woman heard that the shop was for sale. She didn’t leave her husband alone until he agreed to buy the shop, and so she bought the shop for 2,000 rubles. Now they owned the shop not quite a year and they saw that things were becoming fewer and the debts were growing. They had more debts than goods in the shop. She was blaming him and he was blaming her, but they were both guilty. Now the man wanted to sell the shop, cattle and horses to pay the debts, but he didn’t know if he would then have enough money to cover the debts.

After he paid the debts he had nothing left. He wanted to move back to his village because he was ashamed of his stupid actions and the woman was crying because she wanted to stay here. How it will end with the sale I will report later.

Greetings to all sides!

Sincerely yours,
Joseph Reis