The elderly woman had expressed - confessed, perhaps - the enormous void left by the deportation and annihilation of Motal’s Jewish population. He replied: “She said that ever since the Jews left this place, the place is dead.” “What did she say?” I asked Andrei, the translator who accompanied me. Just before we parted, the oldest in the group, a 93-year-old woman, approached me and, in a trembling voice, fighting back tears, said something softly in Belarusian. In the town of Motal, I spoke with a small group of locals, who recalled the Jewish neighbor who’d been a good friend of their parents, or that great klezmer band that had played at their uncle’s wedding, or the amazing raspberry torte cake you could buy at the Jewish bakery. In 2014, I traveled to Belarus to learn more about pre-World War II Jewish culture around Minsk. PEOPLE LOVE DEAD JEWS Reports From a Haunted Present By Dara Horn
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