One Day, during World War II

Yossl Birstein

1986

One day, during World War Two, a military chaplain arrived at our army camp in the Australian outback, to celebrate the Feast of Hanukkah with us and tell us about the wars of the Maccabees. Apart from the Jewish troops, there were soldiers of other nationalities in the camp, most of them—Greeks. One of them, Papadimitrio, a giant from a village in…

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Creator Bio

Yossl Birstein

1920–2003

Born in Poland, novelist and poet Yossl Birstein came to Australia at age seventeen. He moved to Israel in 1950 and lived at Kibbutz Gevat and Jerusalem. Famed as a storyteller, Birstein wrote in Yiddish and Hebrew, and translated many works from one language to the other.

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