He took the dispossession calmly. The yeshiva occupied him body and mind. It accommodated his quirks, defused his nefarious urges. He thrived in its cloistered masculinity, feeling safer between its walls than anywhere since leaving his parental courtyard. He was too sharp to be popular, too mysterious to become a teacher’s pet. But when he brought out his violin at wedding feasts and twirled off traditional melodies, with his own variations and intuitions, more celestially than these sheltered souls had a right to imagine, Dovidl was accepted on their terms as a yenuka, a young genius, whose gift must be sheltered and nurtured.

Days before his semicha was confirmed, the Rosh yeshiva called him in and, wasting no words, offered him the hand in marriage of his seventeen-year-old daughter, Broche. Dovidl was astonished. ‘But you know nothing about me, my family, where I come from . . .’ he stuttered. Scholarly lineage was paramount in arranging rabbinic matches, followed by piety and wealth. As a suitor, Dovidl failed on all counts.

‘I know enough,’ said the Rosh, an austere scholar from a Baltic seaport expunged of its Jews, ‘and what I do not know, I have closely observed. You are going to be a great rabbi, a light that will shine from our yeshiva.’

‘He was wrong,’ chuckles Dovidl, as the storm blows out the last of its energy across the North Sea. ‘I was never ambitious to excel in sacred studies. I had no urge to publish responsae and small-print commentaries; my stimulus was the chance to ignite the joy of learning in new classes of students. What I loved best was to watch a young man awaken to the cerebral and sensual love of Torah.

‘After my father-in-law passed away they asked me to become Rosh, but I did not want the administrative burden, or the representative duties within the yeshiva world. He wanted me to be a beacon for the institution, more outgoing than he had been. He recognised my extrovert qualities, but did not appreciate why I could not let them radiate beyond our four cubits. I must have been a bitter disappointment to him, as I was to all my mentors. On his deathbed, I refused his last request.’