In My Father's Court [antikvár]

AUTHOR'S NOTE In My Father's Court, or Beth Din, as this book is called in the Yiddish original, is in a certain sense a literary experiment. It is an attempt to combine two styles—that of memoirs and that of belles-lettres—and its approach to description and its manner of conveying situations differ from those used in my other writings. The pieces here were first published as a series under my journalistic pseudonym, Isaac Warshawsky, in the Jewish Daily Forward. The idea had been with me a long time: when still very young, I had actually thought of writing my recollections of the Beth Din. It was only after the newspaper publication of the series that I decided to release them in book form under my own name, because they portrayed a life and environment that no longer exist and are unique. This book tells the story of a family and of a rabbinical court that were so close together it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. The rabbinical court, the Beth Din, is an ancient institution among the Jews. It started when Jethro counseled Moses to "provide out of all the people able men, such as fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness . . . and let them judge the people at all seasons." There is a direct line between the Beth Din of today and the Talmudic annotators, Geonim, Princes, Amoraim, Tannaim, Men of the Great Synagogue, and Sanhédrin. The Beth Din was a kind of blend of a court of law, synagogue, house of study, and, if you will, psychoanalyst's office where people of troubled spirit could come to unburden themselves. That such a mixture was vii