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New Society
May 2005
On Sale: May 1, 2005
32 pages
ISBN: 158838165X
EAN: 9781588381651
Hardcover
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Childrens
"In the middle of the night on a Thursday, two crooks—onions
should grow in their navels—drove their horse and wagon to
the saloon of Reb Elias Olschwanger, at the corner of 14th
and Carr streets in St. Louis. This didn’t happen yesterday.
It was 1919." So begins Anna Olswanger’s charming folktale
Shlemiel Crooks, the story of Reb Elias and the thieves who
try to steal his Passover wine. Based on a true story, Shlemiel is an imaginative
introduction for young children to the history of Passover,
as Pharaoh and a town of Jewish immigrants play tug-of-war
with wine made from grapes left over from the exodus from Egypt. A modern-day parable, Shlemiel has a music all its own. No
other children’s book has Pharaoh’s ghost coming back to
"pull one over on the Jews," nosy neighbors making a
"shtuss" outside, and a talking horse that sounds like it
has a "little indigestion." In its Yiddish-inflected
English, punctuated by amusing curses, young readers hear
the language of a Jewish community of another time, while
delighting to brilliant illustrations on every page.
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