There’s a certain quality of sound particular to a waltz pattern picked out on a viola that never fails to inspire, in me, at least, some strange sense of longing for a shtetl life that I’ve not only never known, but intrinsically know to be undesirable. My ancestors left the shtetl, after all. It’s a…
BERSHAD, Ukraine (JTA) — At first glance, this drab town 160 miles south of Kiev seems nearly identical to the settlements that dot the poverty-stricken district of Vinnitsa. Shrouded in a seemingly permanent cloud of smoke from wood fires — still the standard means of heating here — Bershad, population 13,000, features two rickety bridges over…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The Jews of Uchanie, my father’s shtetl in Lublin province, used to say about the Jews of Wojslawice just down the road, that they were meshumodim. Turncoats. What worse epithet could you hurl at a fellow Jew? Slawek Nowodworski, the translator/genealogist my son and I hired in…
The abandoned 428-year-old synagogue in Sharhorod, Ukraine stands as a powerful reminder of why millions of Jews in the world now call themselves Americans. I traveled there last week from my home in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, to better understand where my family comes from. Six of my eight great-grandparents fled villages like Sharhorod – places…
KIEV — No Jewish visitor to Ukraine’s National Art Museum can pass this painting without stopping to look. A Jewish woman is being assaulted, not by anti-Semites but by a crowd of angry Jews. Pressed to the fence by the mob, her hair is undone, her blouse is ripped, her eyes horrified. The rabbi is…
A Jew arrives at Israel’s Haifa port, trying to smuggle two bags of coffee. “What do you have in the bag?” the customs officers ask him. “Bird feed,” he replies. “Since when do birds eat coffee?” “They’ll eat it if they want; if they don’t, they won’t.” Jewish bootlegging has not only provided material for…
When Mikhail Kivovich came to America from Belorussia in 1991, he knew he had relatives who had arrived here many decades earlier. But until he attended the recent reunion of the Israel Cantor Family Society, he had no idea how many. Or how far back they went. It was the print-out of the family tree…
The opening scene of Anna Solomon’s new book “The Little Bride” is one of the most harrowing that I’ve read in a novel. The reader meets 16-year-old Minna Losk in a dank basement where she is ordered to undress and then inspected like an animal. Orphaned at 11 and sent into indentured servitude to a…
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