Literature & Music
7
The Ibbur's Tale
Authored by Lenny Cavallaro as Lenny Abelson
Professor Benjamin Dinerstein is more than a little surprised to find someone in his home when he returns from class. As he notes, "I was even more startled, because I realized that she was one of my former students. However, I was far more taken aback when I remembered that she had died a few weeks earlier."
MIRIAM explains that she is an ibbur. She has come to seek his assistance with the task, a last mitzvah she was unable to complete in her short lifetime.
The skeptical professor soon finds himself drawn into a remarkable family saga that began in a shtetl on the outskirts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire shortly before World War One. Miriam's family has been unaware of a shonda: the sister of Miriam's great-grandmother had an illegitimate child. Moreover, her Uncle Isidore (aka "IKE") has stumbled upon evidence that this child might somehow have become a Nazi war criminal, and that the entire family may be in grave danger. Can Benjamin help the ibbur overcome a klohleh (curse)?
