April 6, 2021
Courtesy of Ralph Snyderman
The bedtime stories my father told me in our cramped apartment in the gritty Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn sketched a magical, mythical place.
The Snyderman family house, just outside of Pechera in southern Ukraine, was a simple one, with goats often grazing on its grass roof. My father’s descriptions of the snow glistening in the air and the frosty breath of the horse were as vivid to me as Tolstoy’s descriptions of sleigh rides in “War and Peace.”
Then there were his much darker stories of how he and the Jews of Pechera hid from Cossacks among the tombstones of the Jewish cemetery. Hiding among the tombstones was an image I could never shake— Why would they do that? And how?