The Only One in the Town

Yekhiel Falikman

1945

Meylekh Snitkever takes the heavy shears and looks at them silently. He holds them in both hands as if to weigh them. Then he shifts his stare to me, the muscles moving in his jaws, which are covered with sparse, curly hairs.

“What would you do if you were being led away to be shot?” he suddenly asks. “Would you go like a sheep to the slaughter, or…

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Creator Bio

Yekhiel Falikman

1911–1977

Yekhiel Falikman was born in Lyubar, Ukraine. He studied mechanical engineering and, in 1931, art at the university in Kiev. In 1932, Falikman moved to the Jewish Autonomous Region in Birobidzhan to work as a journalist. His first collections of stories concerning life there were published in 1937 and 1940. During World War II, Falikman served in the Red Army, writing for a military paper while continuing to publish Yiddish prose. After the war he completed his studies at the Pedagogical Institute in Kiev (1952) and later was an editor of Sovetish heymland. Many of his epic novels about the war were popular in Russian and Ukrainian translation.

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