This week’s post picks up on the theme that Howard Kaspin introduced in our most recent go ‘round.
It is in the form of a true story that I made up some 25 years ago. (Yes, one can make up “true” stories, for the reason we love stories is that they don’t have to have happened in order to be true.) It was the foreword of my book on America’s Jews.
Here goes:
It was 1860, or maybe 1861, in Minsk, or possibly in Pinsk. Wherever, whenever, there were a dozen Jews who used to get together every Tuesday evening for some good talk.
What did Jews talk about? Why, about what it would be like one day what, that is, Jerusalem would be like. In exquisite detail, they would imagine Jerusalem its climate and its curriculum, its cuisine and its culture. Their elaborate continuing conversation had long since developed a near ritual character including its periodic interruption by the one skeptic in the group, a fellow named Berl. Read on…
