ABSTRACT
Born in Belarus, the son of a rabbi, Pinkhes Berniker emigrated to Havana in 1925. He published Yiddish stories. In 1931 he moved to the United States, where he worked as the director of a Hebrew school in Rochester. Several of his Cuban stories appeared in the book Shtile lebns (Quiet Lives, 1935). It includes the one below, about a Lithuanian Jewish peddler in Cuba who sells images of Christ. The tension between Jewish and Gentile environments and between tradition and modernity is at the core of the tale.
