The Old Stories recall a twentieth-century uneducated Jewish immigrant, who later leaves the United States to help Holocaust survivors reach Palestine in 1946 – 47. While serving on a czarist battleship as a machinist during Russia’s loss of the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, he deserts the world of pogroms for Manchuria, and later arrives in Vancouver on a Canadian freighter, having sold himself as a laborer to build a Canadian railroad. Penniless, he is married off by a shidikh to a rabbi’s daughter, and he starts a family in the U.S., where he becomes sidelined, and an embarrassment to his sons because he lacks education and can only read in Yiddish. But lessons learned in his Russian Talmud Torah about being righteous and Tikkun Olam, as well as empathy for others gained from reading Sholem Aleichem in Yiddish, propel him to regain his feeling of self-worth when he volunteers as a machinist for the engine room of one of ten war surplus derelict ships, refurbished by Americans Zionists to transport displaced persons to Palestine during the migration of European Jews known as the Aliyah Bet.
Fiction
The Old Stories: Da Alt Geshikhtem
- From the Publisher
September 1, 2019
Discussion Questions
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