The Ibbur’s Tale by Lenny Abelson
Professor BENJAMIN Dinerstein is more than a little surprised to find someone in his home when he returns from class. As he notes, “I was even more startled, because I realized that she was one of my former students. However, I was far more taken aback when I remembered that she had died a few weeks earlier.”
MIRIAM explains that she is an ibbur. She has come to seek his assistance with the task, a last mitzvah (good deed), she was unable to complete in her short lifetime.
The skeptical professor soon finds himself drawn into a remarkable family saga that began in a shtetl on the outskirts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire shortly before World War One. Miriam’s family has been unaware of a scandal: the sister of Miriam’s great-grandmother had an illegitimate child. Moreover, her Uncle Isidore (aka “IKE”) has stumbled upon evidence that this child might somehow have become a Nazi war criminal, and that the entire family may be in grave danger.
Another character looms over the narrative: a mysterious old woman seen clutching a tarot deck wrapped in a handkerchief. Who is she — and what is she?
Can Benjamin help the ibbur resolve the mystery. More importantly, can they overcome a curse?
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Author Bio:
Lenny Abelson, who usually writes under the name of Lenny Cavallaro, is a “Renaissance man” steeped in the classics: Greek tragedy, Shakespearean drama, and classical music. The author’s mother, Ann Abelson, was a novelist; his great-uncle was Jacob Adler, the poet and playwright who wrote under the name of B. Kovner. Kovner was the creator of Yente Telebende, the character who brought “yente” into the lexicography.
Cavallaro’s earlier fiction includes Trojan Dialogues: The Memoirs of Diomedes and The Greatest Champion Who Never Was. His interests in Shakespeare and Sophocles spawned Two Oedipal Plays—the one-act Hamlet, Revisited and Odysseus Acanthoplex, a restoration of fragments by the great Greek tragedian.
In 2022, White Bird Publications released the first two volumes of The Passion of Elena Bianchi, and (following the publisher’s demise) the author has since uploaded the last pair. Later in 2022, Russell Enterprises presented Sherlock Holmes and the Mysteries of the Chess World. In addition, Cavallaro has “edited and revised” Paganini Agitato, a novel by Ann Abelson, which was released by Fomite Press in 2023, and in 2024 he published Simone, a sequel to George Bataille’s The Story of the Eye.
An accomplished pianist and composer, Cavallaro performed Bach’s Six Partitas to the highest critical acclaim in Carnegie Recital Hall and achieved even more recognition as a composer. In 2015, he wrote a conjectural “completion” of Contrapunctus XIV from Bach’s unfinished masterpiece, The Art of the Fugue.