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Show Anting Alone Page 267 Abraham's objections. Something straight out of an Origins o' Superman funnybook. His dreadful, urgent feelings suddenly grew inside as he passed a bus-bench full of opened newspapers. Yes, he was the big redbearded commissar, and he had just decided to stay the pogrom, to allow this particular shtetlful of zhids to live long enough to indulge in the pipedream of making flight to Nebraska, America with perfectly good Rothschild rubles. By all accounts the tiny Nebraskan shtetl still survived, a fairly exact copy of the original, but of good sturdy American building materials. The ritual baths and the synagogue had both been rebuilt to resemble the originals, allowing for the inevitable cosmetic assimilations. It was something of a tourist attraction in that remote Nebraskan noplace, and a great source of ethnic delight to descendants of those strange, busy Belo- Russian Jews. The present day Abraham himself drove way out there on a regular basis, for several reasons: to see that his many nephews weren't turning into subliterate rednecks out there under the soul-desiccating prairie sun; to deliver KRotCHes proudly to the literate Jewish drugstore and library; to take his honorary seat on the town council (they had their collective eye on some real estate on the side of Cheyenne Mountain, part of the grounds of Saint Paphnutius, as a matter of fact, upon which they dreamed a kosher Catskills-like resort for the delight of all midwestern Jewry); and to get away from Zeitl, his roaring bitch of a childless wife, Dr. A.'s Xanthippe. Zeitl was apparently of shtetl stock, too; and she was such a weirdly un-American, withered old hag that Sam always caught himself assuming that |