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At the time of the shortest, sleepy winter days, edged on both sides with the furry dusk of mornings and evenings, when the city reached out ever deeper into the labyrinth of winter nights, and was…
He burst into laughter that immediately frightened him. Just then he passed the “Cold Synagogue”—a synagogue in which, it was said, the dead came to say their prayers on Saturday nights, wearing white…
Older people still remember it. Younger people know about it from reading our classic writers of the older generation: how Jews once gave much thought to naming a child, long before it was born and…
Once there was a rabbi who had no children. Finally, he had an only son. He raised him and married him off. The son used to sit in an attic room and study in the manner of rich men and he always…
If my father had been able to foresee even a thousandth part of the trials I was to endure he might have been rather less ardent on the night my mother conceived me. . . . Now, of…
You will cast all their sins into the depths of the sea: You will show faithfulness to Jacob. . . .
—Micah 7:19–20
In the seventh month, on the first day of the month, while I was walking along the…
When I was still young, nineteen years of age, it entered my mind to fool the world (as was the practice of the “holy ones” in those days), and this was the scheme I adopted: I used to travel on…
Mendl said: This city of Kisalon [lit. “Foolsville,” Yid. Glupsk], where I’ll begin my story, is very important, for the entire Jewish Pale of Settlement is named after it. And it is not through…
[ . . . ] And we get out of their way; we move in the opposite direction, toward where they’ve come from, toward Petroshi.And you see, they do not forbid it. And it may be that in Petroshi, where they…
Anyone familiar with our Russian Poland knows what Jews mean by a small shtetl, a little town.
A small shtetl has a few small cabins, and a fair every other Sunday. The Jews deal in liquor, grain…