I admit I haven’t read too many books which deal with Judaism and Jewish culture. I’ve read some about that awful period in the history of the world, of course, but not much about the culture, the traditions and the belief system. Maybe it’s because where I come from it has never been a topic. I’ve never had any Jewish friends, because there weren’t any in my class, not sure if there were any in my school. In Sofia I never met any, or at least I don’t know of it, because it has never been a topic among me and my friends. And so I started hearing about things like mikve, tzitzit, the chosen 36 only when I came to Budapest. And I found this world very interesting.
This is why I was very happy when I received my Czech book as a present, and it turned out to have a lot of this. Ivan Olbracht’s “Golet v udoli”, which doesn’t seem to have been translated to English. The Hungarian title is “The valley of curses” and I still don’t know why – I hope it’s not because of an unexpected, bad, sad turn in the story. Honestly – I decided not to look it up and not to read too much information. For this one I would really like to enjoy reading a book I haven’t researched, and know almost nothing of. So I’m going to visit a small village by the name of Polana somewhere in the Czech Republic, where people live very poorly, they don’t have the money to buy flour, and that’s why wives and children need to go and cry, shout and demand credit in the local shop. But people still go to the mikve, still live accordingly and still hope for the best. I’m off to the Czech Republic.
Care to join?
[reading rites] 
Show the way! 🙂