Botchki

"The one un-Jewish feature about me is the light grey colour of my eyes, but whether I got this from a twelfth-century crusader, a fourteenth-century Black Death rioter, or a seventeenth-century Cossack, no one can tell. So numerous were the offspring of ravished Jewish women that the rabbis in their wisdom long ago ruled that every child of a Jewish mother is a Jew."These are the opening words of this memoir of shtetl life. Written with the humour and clear-sightedness of one who loved the shte