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Excerpt: Black Shoe Polish

8/27/2014

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Picture
He woke up with his mother shrieking like a madwoman. She had come back from milking the cows and was so upset when she saw her son all blackened that she spilled some of the milk onto the floor by accident. Milk swirled around dried old clumps of black shoe polish, creating patterns on the floor she had never seen. Within seconds, the rented room on the farm looked worse than ever before.

“What have you done, what have you done?” she screamed.

“You look like a scarecrow. No mensch looks like that,” she almost cried with anger, “no mensch looks like that, not one – only scarecrows, black scarecrows.”

She hit him over the head, accidentally knocked over the milk jug fully, and started to cry.

“My blonde little son has become a black scarecrow. How terrible!” She cried uncontrollably.
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​Click below for a translation into your own language 
from Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, and  Azerbaijani to Vietnamese, Welsh, Xhosa, Yiddish, Yoruba, and  Zulu—​thanks to the latest version of Google Translate.
Picture
Tower Of Babel
by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1563).
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Update: December 30, 2020.
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