Homesick in Brooklyn, Sam Rothbort painted for decades the shtetl life of his youth. He had been a member of the Bund, the secular Jewish socialist party founded in 1897 by radicals in Vilna (now Vilnius).

MOLLY CRABAPPLE, a very gifted artist and writer, lives in New York. Her maternal great-grandfather Sam, whose life and paintings inspired this deeply researched book, was born in 1882 in Volkovysk, now in Belarus, then an undistinguished Polish-Jewish town in the Pale of Settlement, to which Catherine the Great had confined the millions of Jews the Tsarist empire had acquired when the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was dismembered. The Pale, now Eastern Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, became the Bloodlands where the vast majority of the victims of both Stalin and Hitler lived and died.

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