White Challah

Lamed Shapiro

1919

1

One day a neighbor broke the leg of a stray dog with a heavy stone, and when Vasil saw the sharp edge of the bone piercing the skin he cried. The tears streamed from his eyes, his mouth, and his nose; the towhead on his short neck shrank deeper between his shoulders; his entire face became distorted and shriveled, and he did not utter a sound. He…

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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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