Trafika Europe 12 - French Bon-Bons

A SOUVENIR FROM NEW YORK (story) By Marat Baskin Translated from Russian by Nina Kossman SHLOYME Gotynyu, I’m sorry to bother you. I’m not asking you for anything. I know what you can do, you are already doing everything you can. I just want to talk. I realize that your hands are full: war is everyone’s misfortune. Milhome! When a man feels bad, he thinks of you. I’m no different! I’ll tell you honestly, I didn’t always celebrate the high holidays or eat kosher. And I had to work on Shabes. My Etta used to say: Ha Shem sees everything from His heaven, and He knows that if we could all live as it is written in the Torah, we would live like that! What fool wouldn’t want to eat challah every Shabes? But the question is: where do you get challah? You know, Gotynyu, how we lived: we didn’t just sit around doing nothing, we all worked, yet when the time came to take Etta to the city, we barely had enough, we had to borrow from the neighbors. That’s how misfortune struck us-- my Etta got ill one week before the war. She used to take all her illnesses standing up , but that time she stayed in bed and moaned. Pusenkoff, our doctor, said: “Shloyme, take your wife to the city if you want to save her!”

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