I recently read Richard Zimler's marvelous novel, The Warsaw Anagrams, which (to the best of my knowledge) was the first work to introduce an ibbur to the reading public. Shortly thereafter, I added a Sherlock Holmes tale involving this form of "possession" (cf., Sherlock Holmes and the Mysteries of the Chess World, Russell, 2022), and I have now added this novella to the canon. 

A Slow Train to Budapest is the title of an unfinished novel left behind by my late mother, Ann Abelson, whose surname I used for this project. I have thus far been able to salvage only the first two segments of the narrative, both of which are available in digital format. In the 1970s, we learned that my mother’s aunt had had an illegitimate child, and some of that story is loosely parodied in the present work. [The child was adopted by a Jewish family and almost surely did not survive the Holocaust.]

Some relatives on my maternal grandfather’s side of the family remained in Dolhinov, which is now in Belarus. We know that the Nazis sometimes herded Jews (and others) into wooden buildings: schools, synagogues, and various municipal structures. The victims were then locked inside, and the edifices were put to the torch. It is likely that most of the kinsmen living in Dolhinov when the Wehrmacht invaded suffered death in this fashion—a method deployed by Hauptmann Müller et al. in our narrative.

I have thus been inspired by tales from the shtetlach, literature I have read, and family history. I hope my effort proves a worthy addition to the ibbur legend.