The Cross

Lamed Shapiro

1909

Sensitive Content

This entry contains content that some may find disturbing.

5

We were too late. The pogrom erupted that very night, suddenly, like an exploding mine, and in my own neighborhood.

The first screams came to me confused, in a hazy dream. Then it dawned on me what was happening. I jumped out of bed, lit a lamp and threw on my clothes. At that moment my mother sat up in her bed, looking at me strangely. Her look…

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Creator Bio

Lamed Shapiro

1878–1948

The Yiddish writer Lamed Shapiro was born in a Ukrainian shtetl forty miles south of Kiev. Much of his life was peripatetic, as he struggled to earn a living, first in Poland and Ukraine, and later in the United States—in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, where he died a penniless alcoholic in 1948. Depressed and at times suicidal, he tried his hand at writing for the Yiddish press, running restaurants, and inventing a method for producing color film. His dark and troubling short stories and novellas were groundbreaking in Yiddish literature. Psychologically complex, they are riven with violence and extremes of human behavior, including murder, rape, and sadism.

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