Arise, my people, awake from thy dreaming,
  In foolishness be not immersed! 
  Clear is the sky, brightly the sun is beaming;
  The clouds are now utterly dispersed!

Rapid growth is sometimes the cause of disease, and sudden changes the cause of disappointment.  This was true of the swift progress of Haskalah during the reign of Alexander II.  To comprehend fully the tragedies that took place frequently at that time, the disillusionments that embittered the lives of many of the Maskilim, the breaking up of homes and bruising of hearts, one should read Youthful Sins (Plattot Neurim, 1876) by Moses Loeb Lilienblum.  The author lays bare a heart ulcerated and mangled by an obsolete education, a meaningless existence, and a forlorn hope.  The hero of this little work, masterly less by reason of its artistic finish than the earnestness that pervades it from beginning to end, is “one of the slain of the Babylonian Talmud, whose spiritual life is artificially maintained by a literature itself dead.”  His diary and letters grant a glimpse into his innermost being; his childhood wasted in a methodless acquisition of futile learning; his boyhood blighted by a union with a wife chosen for him by his parents; his manhood mortified by the realization that in a world thrilling with life and activity he led the existence of an Egyptian mummy.  Impatient to save the few years allotted to him on earth, and undeterred by the entreaties and the threats of his wife, he leaves for Odessa, the Mecca of the Maskilim, and begins to prepare himself for admission into the gymnasium.  “While there is a drop of blood in my veins,” he writes to his forsaken wife, “I shall try to finish my course of studies.  Though the physicians declare that consumption and death must be the inevitable consequence of such application, I will not desist.  I will rather die like a man than live like a dog.”  And on and on he plods over his Latin, his French, his history, geography, and grammar.  Two more years and the university will be opened to him, and he will read law, and defend the honor of his people.  But in the midst of his ceaseless toil the spectre of his simple wife and his former innocent life appears before him and “will not down.”  Is Haskalah worth the sacrifices he and his like are daily bringing on its altar?  Is not the materialism of the emancipated Maskilim often greater than the medievalism of the fanatical Hasidim?  In his native town, gloomy as it was, there was at least the glow of sincerity.  Haskalah had to be snatched by stealth, but it was sweeter because thus snatched.  In Odessa, where the fruit of the tree of knowledge could be obtained for the asking, it turned into the apples of Sodom.  The “lishmah” ideal, the love of culture for its own sake, yielded to the greed which changes everything into a commodity to profit by.  Yet, since life demands it, what a pity that his early training had incapacitated him from following the beaten path!  He concludes his self-indictment thus, “I have taken an inventory of the business of my life, and I am heartbroken, because I find that in striking the balance there remains on the credit side only a cipher!”