His father died when he was ten and his mother moved to the Bukovina capital Czernowitz (Chernivtsi). The city's multiculturalism, representative of the Habsburg Empire, strongly influenced his youth and character. The first languages he spoke were Ukrainian and Polish, learnt from his nurse; his first school was attached to the Czortków Dominican abbey, where the teaching was in Latin and Polish; and he attended private lessons in Hebrew. In Czernowitz he attended the German "gymnasium", passing the "Matura" exam with honours in 1867. By now the family was in reduced circumstances and he supported himself by giving lessons, later, as a student, from his writing.