The Bear and the Baby: Still More Tales My Great-Great-Grandfather Might Tell About Life in a Ghetto of Russia in the Time of the Czars - Hardcover

This is the third volume of Kantor's amusing stories about his great-great-grandfather, Shmul ben Shlomo, the rabbi of Orsha, a shtetl in Belorussia. The ghetto of Orsha was real, Kantor points out, and the ghetto of the stories is fictional, yet he lists several sources of factual information--including the Encyclopedia Judaica that he has relied upon in writing the tales. Further, he reports that one story, a portrait of a ghetto citizen, was first written by Rabbi Shmul and preserved in what the Kantor family calls the "Gold Book," a sort of diary the rabbi kept irregularly during his adult life. The stories variously focus on weddings, a bar mitzvah, superstition, the high holy days, and the Jews' relations with their non-Jewish neighbors. Jan Golden's illustrations add to the book's charm. George Cohen