Rites: A Guatemalan Boyhood

Mar Abramowitz did not attend services in our temple. With a dozen or so other Ashkenazi refugees from Eastern Europe he worshiped in a tiny downtown loft that was said, by those who had never been inside it, to smell of rancid butter and pickled herring. Only on the High Holidays were the Poles and Litvaks allowed to defile our synagogue, and they…