Sample Sources
The sources below are those contained in our three curated collections—covering themes of Passover, Gender Roles, and Holocaust Resistance. They represent a fraction of the thousands of sources that will be available when the full site launches in 2024.
Smugglers
Pantel the wagon driver stretches out under the covers and sits up, yawning. The house is dark but a faint light is just beginning to penetrate through the peepholes in the shutter.
“It’s…
The Negation of the Diaspora
“A negative attitude toward the diaspora” is an expression frequently heard in discussions between the Zionists, who look beyond the diaspora for a solution to our national problem, and the…
Zoo, or Letters Not about Love
About Grzhebin on canvas, about Grzhebin in the flesh. Since the letter is written in a penitent mood, the trademark of the Grzhebin Publishing House is affixed. Here too are several…
Rag Pickers
Always, by the time the humid, breathless, summer night lifted its veil and a quiet, rosy dawn emerged, when some glimmers of soft, opaque light began to filter through the dried muddy, dusty window…
The New York Libraries and Readers
The library is an integral part of public education.—“Public Libraries.”
The library and the public school occupy the most important…
The Great Madness
For the past four years I had not seen the morning sun. The newspaper work generally ended about three o’clock in the morning and who can go to sleep right after work? After work one…
When the Candle Was Burning
Father had been able to save a little from his earnings and felt that it would last till the end of the war—but he used that money to buy back those prayers shawls! So now we were penniless.
Father…
A Dancer
At home they called her “dummy” and other names like that because she was always so quiet and still, never stirring when she was called. When she was nine years old, she went to school and began…
Azarel
Saturday is the worst of the week. Whenever I touch anything on this day, straightway there comes a voice: Don’t do that, today it’s a sin.
“Sin?” I ask.
Says Mother: “Sin is that for which the Good…
Memento Mori
And if Moyshe-Leyb, the poet, tells
That he saw Death on the high waves—
Just as he sees himself in a mirror,
And it was in the morning, around ten—
Will they believe Moyshe-Leyb?
And if Moyshe…
Condemnation of Women Singing in Cafés on the Sabbath
Along the quay, near the White Tower, there is a café where two young Jewish girls from Salonica sing every day, including Shabbat. In truth we do not find their behavior as low as that of other young…
Russian Jews Tricked into Slavery in America
As the Territorial Organization Information Bureau in Warsaw, 10 Marianka Street, writes in the newspapers that those wanting to go to America should go to their colonies in the state of Texas, as…