A Day Of Small Beginnings by Lisa Pearl Rosenbaum

A Day Of Small Beginnings by Lisa Pearl Rosenbaum – 384 pages

Book Blurb:

Poland, 1906: on a cold spring night, in the small Jewish cemetery of Zokof, Friedl Alterman is wakened from death. On the ground above her crouches Itzik Leiber, a reclusive, unbelieving fourteen-year-old whose fatal mistake has spurred the town’s angry residents to violence. The childless Friedl rises to guide him to safety – only to find she cannot go back to her grave. Now Friedl is trapped in that thin world between life and death, her brash decision binding her forever to Itzik and his family: she is fated to be forever restless, and he, forever haunted by the ghosts of his past. Years later, after Itzik himself has gone to his grave, his son, Nathan, knows nothing of his bitter father’s childhood. When he begrudgingly goes to Poland on business, Nathan decides on a whim to visit his ancestral town. There, in Zokof, he meets the mysterious Rafael, the town’s last remaining Jew, who promises to pass on all the things Itzik had failed to teach his son – about Zokof, about his faith, and about himself. And yet, like the generation before him, Nathan keeps what he learns hidden inside himself. With the family legacy in danger of being lost, Friedl’s restless spirit guides Itzik’s precocious granddaughter, Ellen, on a journey of her own to Zokof, where only Friedl can help Ellen unlock the mysteries of her family’s past – and only Ellen can help Friedl break her agonizing enslavement.

My Review: 4 stars

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Thankfully someone recommended this book to me on my Tell Me What Your Reading Tuesday Facebook post. I knew nothing about this book and picked it up because I was in an “I don’t know what to read next mood,” with the added bonus of its availability at the library. This book reads easily although it’s chock full of wisdom that can relate to all religions. I learned a lot about Jewish history during the war and its relationship with Poland. The mystical aspect was an added bonus to me and I really enjoyed when Freidl came to “visit.”

I was enlightened by the authors take on prayer…what it is, and how to do it. For those of us who pray, I suppose we pray in our own individual way and honestly, I’ve never thought to ask someone else if and how they do it. Overall, the author takes you on a journey of mystic, ethnic religious and generational history. Well done!

Quotes I liked:

Give the boy’s poor soul a chance to cook, to become a man.”

– “A man prays so he can speak to own still small voice. He prays to make himself change. In the beginning, the words mean nothing. Imagine a boy in the back of a shul, without a prayer book, reciting the Hebrew alphabet. When asked why, he says, ‘I don’t know how to pray, so I’m offering G-d the letters. I hope he will arrange the words.’”

– A Jew should not accept anyone else’s opinion about himself. You’re too afraid. We don’t stir up anti-Semitism by being pious, by wearing the tzittzit and the payess. Anti- Semites don’t need us to stir themselves up. They’re already stirred up. The mishegoss has nothing to do with us. If a man hates Jews, he’ll find a reason to hate the secular one as much as he hates the religious one.”

– “Dance is movement from the soul. It’s like your tunes, in a way, except the dancer sings through her body.”

– “What his eye did not see, his heart did not feel.”