English Programs
Video
May 11, 2020
Jewish men far away from home, who are crammed into a third class train compartment in tsarist Russia en route to nowhere—what do they do to while away their time? They gamble, cheat, cover up, and go crazy. They also tell each other absurd, harrowing and extremely intricate tales. This new species of Jewish stories drawn from real life is narrated by a very talkative traveling salesman hoping to earn a few rubles—a whole volume of Railroad Stories which in turn can be read as the ultimate expression of Sholem Aleichem’s art of laughter through fears.