Fic­tion

A Day of Small Beginnings

Lisa Pearl Rosenbaum
  • Review
By – April 16, 2012

After acci­den­tal­ly killing a Pol­ish peas­ant, Itzik Leiber flees from Zokof, his native shtetl. Pro­tect­ed by the ghost of the child­less Frei­dl Alter­man, whom Itzik awak­ens while hid­ing in the ceme­tery, Itzik heads to the Unit­ed States. Years lat­er Itzik’s sec­u­lar son Nathan trav­els to Poland where the ever-watch­ful Frei­dl guides him to Zokof and Raphael, the shtetl’s only remain­ing Jew after World War II. When Nathan fails to ful­fill Freidl’s hopes, the respon­si­bil­i­ty to nur­ture a Jew­ish soul falls to Nathan’s daugh­ter, Ellen, who is removed from the life that Itzik once knew. Freidl’s final chance to redeem Itzik’s soul and her own arrives when Ellen gets a job chore­o­graph­ing for a Pol­ish dance troupe. But can a Jew­ish soul repressed for two gen­er­a­tions tru­ly ignite? 

Rosenbaum’s prose is awk­ward in its attempts to lend a Yid­dish ring to her dia­logue. In a cast of one dimen­sion­al char­ac­ters, Frei­dl alone ris­es above type, coa­lesc­ing into a vivid indi­vid­ual. Rosen­baum does, how­ev­er, tack­le an impor­tant issue in this debut nov­el, explor­ing the case of the child whose lim­it­ed con­tact with the foun­da­tions of Judaism pre­cludes his or her abil­i­ty to find the rich­ness of Jew­ish cul­ture and to relate Judaism to con­tem­po­rary life. With the rise of a gen­er­a­tion whose con­tact with the old world is like­ly to be lim­it­ed, A Day of Small Begin­nings casts a wary eye ahead. Will the Jews of the future, at the very least, know how to ask?

Jes­si­ca Dara Bod grad­u­at­ed from Brook­lyn Col­lege as a mem­ber of the CUNY Hon­ors Col­lege.

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