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The small town resounded with whistling and shouting. The smell of stewing, the smell of frying, the smell of boiling.
Mr. Dykhes had sold all his defective soap to the army.
Mus…
It was close to Passover. In the house, Passover was already present. But Father was not in a holiday mood. He looked at nobody and even his appearance changed. A yellow cast covered his face.
He had…
My steps are set down stiffly
on tired, empty paths.
This morning a little town of Jews
called me “Anti-Semite!”
All of them in wrinkles and in rags
out there pointing at me:
“Him! That guy! We…
In the province of Mollive, there is an old woman who is known for her shtetl wisdom, her old sayings, and her folktales. I met her quite by chance. Her…
The heder was in the basement. It was a dark, damp room with a low ceiling. There were two windows on the ground level. In the middle of the room, there was a long wooden table covered with books, two…
. . . An empty street. An unfamiliar shack. A tightly shut gate. And hanging over the gate, over the dead street, over us all—a Cossack cap with a raspberry-colored band. A trail of smoke from an…
Pass on, pass on, you lonely grandfathers,
With frightened beards covered with snow,
In the last sorrow, in the final grief
You’re still here, the final witnesses.
Pass on, pass on, you lonely…
A visitor came to the shtetl,
A stranger, with unrest in his step . . .
No-one recognized his unrest. No-one asked him:
“Stranger, are you weary?”
Across the blue sky the evening drew its curtain…
The Jewish theme in Ru.Shtetl is a metaphor. The closest mainstream parallel explaining the essence of what Patrick Lisidze conceived of is Siniavskii’s pseudonym, Abram Terts. Terts’s Jewishness was…