Book 2, Chapters 2-3 Summary

Simon Rabinsky, a bootmaker, and wife Rachel have two sons. Yakov in 1884 is fourteen, sharp-tongued and quick-minded; Jossi, sixteen, is a red-haired giant as mild as his brother is wild. The family is extremely poor and lives in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, the only part of the Russian Empire in which non-wealthy Jews may legally reside since 1804. Jews have lived here since the first century, when the Khazars select Judaism over Christianity and Islam as their official religion. In the 10th century, Russians disperse the Khazars while Muslims in the south reward the Jews with peace because of their ancestors' key role in the rise of Islam. When the czar drives the Muslims out, Jewish "heretics" are violently prosecuted in pogroms that end only when Catherine I expels most Jews to Poland. When Catherine II partitions Poland, she...