The Ecksteins raised their own chickens. They didn’t eat red meat. The poultry lived in the backyard in a large coop Dead Opa, Yidel’s father, had built in 1951. He’d had chickens in the displaced persons camp in Austria too. The birds picked worms and rusty screws out of the dry, pale gray dust. The Ecksteins owned twenty-five chickens at a time, thirty before Rosh Hashanah, but never a rooster. On Sukkos, when Tzila Ruchel, Surie’s oldest daughter, had a sukkah that stretched across the entire front of their house and the doors opened and shut constantly, the chickens wandered out into the
...more
