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Reb Shmelke:
Well, I can see that you are a clever man, so I will tell you the whole story in brief. [He takes a drink.] As you see me before you, I’m called Reb Smelke [Shmelke, as pronounced by a…
I. Of Pimps, Prostitutes, and Other SeducersWe saw some ten richly-dressed women, accompanied by fat-bellied men in top hats, standing at the green metal gate of the immigrants’ hotel. Through the…
The city of N. is built in three rings. First ring: the marketplace at the very center. Second: surrounding the market, the great city proper with its many houses, streets, byways, back…
This was not a very big courtyard, a longish but narrow one, like hundreds of others of this type in the thickly settled part of Jewish Warsaw. One side, the innermost one, was a two-story…
The German holy community of Amsterdam was founded in the year 5396 [1635/6]. This I discovered in a few pages of a book written by Maharam Maarsen, one of the first German Jews in Amsterdam…
It was quite an adventure. The night was moonless and cool. The children had heard that demons lurk outside, ready to attack those who dare to go out on a dark night. There was also talk of corpses…
A man over eighty is seated at his desk, looking up at an old picture, one more than fifty years old. His eyes meet with those of a beautiful old woman, a woman who was born a…
Vilna, my great matriarch, an established Jewish city,
Jerusalem of the Exile, an ancient nation’s consolation in the north!
This [poem] is your patched kerchief, like the roof of the old synagogue,…
Someone in a tales is walking your rooftops.
Only he is stirring in the city by night.
He listens. Old gray veins quicken—sound
Through courtyard and synagogue like a hoarse, dusty heart.
You are a…
Every now and then a different door in the long corridor of the IsPolKom [Executive Committee] would yawn open, partly exposing the profiles of the office workers, emit a hum of muffled chatter and…