"Uncle Carlos took me back to his room and pulled out a book that he said his father had been given by his father before he had been forced to escape persecution in Poland. Apparantly his grandfather, my great-grandfather, was the most prominent rabbi in all of Bialystok near the Polish-Russian border before World War I. They called him Rebe Tuncom. 'This is the book he wrote,' my Uncle Carlos told me. 'It is The Essential Book of Creation,' he said, and then he tried to translate parts of it for me. Here, I'll give you a few excerpts just to whet your appetite..."