Read an excerpt of Judith Teit­el­man’s Guest­house for Gane­sha 

A pre-Shavuot read

Ten years after my grand­fa­ther died, I found myself sort­ing through a shal­low plas­tic bin that held the accu­mu­lat­ed doc­u­men­ta­tion of his life. 

In some pho­tographs he looks like a fright­ened child; in oth­ers he is quite hand­some, almost sul­try, albeit in a boy­ish way. He had large, expres­sive, dark eyes and wore his black hair slicked back in the style of 1930s adolescence.