An old Siberian woodsman, Ahmed Soulaïman, once told the Story of the Sparrow to Vasily Michailovitch Tolmatchoff who spent twenty years in a Siberian Gulag. No one knows how Ahmed Soulaïman came upon this tale. Nevertheless, Tolmatchoff retold the story to Tiberiù Péskuy of Romania, who spent seven years in jail, where he met Mircea Cãrtãrescu, who was also imprisoned for seven years for creating subversive poetry, and while in jail Tiberiù told Mircea the story. After Mircea’s release from jail, he told the story to Gezim Hadaj of Albania, who after having been tortured and condemned to death for refusing to kiss the feet of the Albania President, managed to flee to Romania; and there in a Bucharest café he met Mircea, where they exchanged the Story of the Sparrow. After eight years of wandering, Gezim arrived in Czechoslovakia and reunited with one of his cousins who had also escaped. And there in Prague, Gezim told his cousin Péter the Story of the Sparrow. Péter then told it to his best friend, Ivo Hlavizna, a young rebel who had nearly been killed by a Russian tank, when the Russians had occupied Prague. On a train traveling from Prague to Warsaw, Ivo met Maciej Swierkocki, as both of them were on their way to a conference on Ways to Improve Your Life in the Socialist World, and Ivo told Maciej the story. During the conference, Maciej then told the story to Jurek Patkowski, a friend he had not seen in years, because Jurek had been in jail for twelve years for reasons undisclosed to him; and when Jurek finally returned home to Krakow he told the story to Andreij Slominski, who had helped Jews escape from the death camps during World War II. Andreij then told the story to Rabbi George Goldstein, a survivor of Auschwitz, who many years later in a small U.S. town in New York told me the Story of the Sparrow. And now my dear reader, I will share with you that story, and perchance after you have heard it, you too may want to tell it to a friend, a kinsmen, or