Where the Shouting Began
By Steven Sher
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About this ebook
A real village called Slawotich existed long ago. Now Steven Sher brings this shtetl back to life in five eloquent stories in which the mystical infuses every day.
In the guise of a giant, Greed comes to Slawotich and menaces the villagers. A seller of mystical books inadvertently leaves plagues and destruction in his wake as he departs each town he visits. A young girl struggles to balance traditional observance with her compassion for a chicken. A peddler, weary of his wanderings, experiences a series of transformations, revealing the burdens that other creatures must carry. And in the title story, the village rabbi—modeled after the author’s great grandfather—finds a divinely-inspired way to protect the villagers from a pogrom.
Where the Shouting Began honors the past and speaks to the present with wisdom, insight, and humor.
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Where the Shouting Began - Steven Sher
Where the Shouting Began
by Steven Sher
Published by Montemayor Press at Smashwords
Copyright 2008 by Steven Sher
Cover art and design by Cat Tales Productions
This book is also available in print from your local bookstore, online seller, and many websites.. The ISBN of the Montemayor Press edition is ISBN 1-932727-08-6 See more books from Montemayor Press at http://www.montemayorpress.com . Montemayor Press, P. O. Box 526, Millburn, NJ 07041.
Smashwords Edition License Notes
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This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
For my children, Ari and Chaya
Preface
The town of Slawotich depicted in these stories may have little in common with the actual Polish town of the same name where my mother’s mother was born at the very end of the 19th century. Half a century later and a continent removed, although my family was for the most part reluctant to talk about Slawotich—too many relatives had by then been killed by the Nazis to allow those who got out
to linger on the past—I nonetheless pieced together scraps of information about the shtetl life that they had traded in for Brooklyn. My grandmother’s father was the rabbi of the area. His wife, the rebbetzin, ran a store. Slawotich was often paired with Domatchever, its twin village. A great uncle, my grandmother’s youngest brother, married a girl from Domatchever and spent the next sixty years deriding her for this, among other things. This uncle, one story goes, broke his trigger finger in order to avoid conscription in the Russian army. Crossing to America, he presided over the Slawotich-Domatchever Society, landsmen who congregated in Bensonhurst between the wars.
Today Slawatycze, in Poland, and Domachevo, in Belarus, still stand like a shy bride and groom on either side of the Bug River. There are no living Jews in either town. Yet in my mind, they are still there and the area retains its rural nature. My mother, who was born in Vilna just after the First World War, used to tell how she cried out and was pulled to safety at the last moment by her grandmother when a cow, bearing down the