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A young Holocaust survivor arrives at a Brooklyn yeshiva with a little box he refuses to let out of his sight...
Anna Olswanger's Greenhorn is a
limited edition miniature book published by Anna Olswanger Books in an edition of 495. Hand bound by David Barry of Griffin Bookbinding, the book has 64 pages, measures 2 1/2 x 3 inches, and is case bound with imitation leather on
the spine and a gold-embossed title. Greenhorn includes a color pen-and-ink drawing by the artist Harold Eckstein.
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Excerpt from Greenhorn:
"I don't know what's so important the rebbe couldn't let us finish the inning," Melvin whispered to his brother Bernie. "Now the fifth grade's playing stickball in our part of the yard."
"What're you whispering for? The rebbe's practically deaf," Bernie said.
Rabbi Ehrlich sat beneath a Land of Israel wall calendar compliments of Goldberg's Delicatessen. He stared out the window at the playground between the yeshiva and South Second Street. Without turning his head, he pulled a wadded-up handkerchief from his pants pocket and wiped his eyes.
"The rebbe didn't like the boiled onions we had for lunch," one of the guys in the back row announced.
Rabbi Ehrlich cleared his throat. "We have twenty boys coming to us from Poland—" he began, then wiped his eyes again. "Their parents died in concentration camps."
For a moment, everybody kept quiet. Then Irving, the guy in the back row, raised his hand. "My mama's afraid our cousins back in Poland got sent to a concentration camp. But how come they're called camps, Rebbe? Camp is where kids are supposed to spend the summer eating chocolate pudding dessert."
"Oh, b-b-be quiet, Irving!" I whispered. "It's a terrible th...ing here. What are you t-t-talking for?"
Rabbi Ehrlich kept wiping his eyes. When he said we would have to share our dormitory rooms with the twenty boys, Hershel, the biggest kid in our class, jabbed his pencil into his desk. "What's the rebbe talking about? How're we going to squeeze more guys into rooms the size of closets?"
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Source Note
for Greenhorn
The real life "Aaron" is Rabbi Rafael Grossman. A descendant of over forty generations of rabbis, he was born in the Bronx where his parents lived after emigrating from Poland in the 1920's.
The rabbis in his community considered him an iluy, a budding genius, so his parents enrolled him in the first grade of a yeshiva at the age of four. When the family moved to a small New Jersey town, Rabbi Grossman commuted to a yeshiva in Brooklyn. There he met "Daniel" (not his real name) when HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, asked all New York area yeshivas with dormitories and cafeterias to take in orphaned boys who were Holocaust survivors. Daniel arrived in Brooklyn in 1946.
Rabbi Grossman left the yeshiva the next year to attend school in Baltimore. He wondered if he would ever see his friend and classmate again. In 1981, when he was visiting a hospital in Jerusalem, a pediatrician walked up to him. It was Daniel.
"What about the box?" Rabbi Grossman couldn't help but ask.
Daniel invited the rabbi to his Jerusalem home and introduced him to his wife and three daughters. "I have a family now," Daniel said. "I don't need the box. I buried it in the back yard."
To purchase a copy
of Greenhorn, send $20.00 (which includes
postage and handling) to:
Anna Olswanger
16-60 Chandler Drive
Fair Lawn, NJ 07410-2715
You can also purchase Greenhorn online with a secure payment through PayPal.
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Other Miniature Books by Anna Olswanger
Berl's Blues
Chicken Bone Man
Shlemiel Crooks
Greenhorn copyright © 1985, 2006 Anna Olswanger. Pen-and-ink drawing copyright © 2007 Harold Eckstein.
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