BS"D
When one thinks of the Twin Cities today, chances are (s)he (as the politically correct West Coast Rebbetzin of Creedmoor-Alcatraz has asked us to write) has Minneapolis-S Paul, Missouri in mind.
Yet, while one of those Missourible cities has indeed inflicted a Failed Creedmoorer upon us, when a true and unfailed Creedmoorer speaks of the Twin Cities (s)h(it)e (which includes all the genders registered on welfare by the Admou"r) is referring to the pair of remote villages where Kalman Schmoigerman, the great great grandfather of the Admou"r, who indeed is still alive aged 243 according to Medicare records, established the first Hungarian antecedent of Creedmoorer Chassidus.
Those villages, not found on any map but still reporting a huge number of suspicious fires and floods to this very day, are apparently nestled in a rocky and hilly outcrop on the border between Hungary and what is now Albania.
They are called Szarkonosvary and Arschvary, or in Yiddish, Schvartzyohr and Ossvorf. And if one were to compare them to an earlier set of two cities in the nether reaches of Eretz Yisroel, which are now best known as the source of the active ingredient in the Ahava cosmetics which many a Creedmoorer boycotts, namely Sodom and Gomorrah, one would be forgiven for noticing the many similarities.
Szarkonosvary and Arschvary were founded by the notorious Vandals, and indeed when Kalman Schmoigerman placed a white flag on the abandoned fortress of Szarkonosvary, vandalism was very much in evidence.
The fortress was practically uninhabitable, except for a few rooms which were permeated with a strong smell of fermented plums. Those rooms were the abode of Szarkoszlas (Sar-kos-lash), the Count of Szarkonosvary, who was bestowed by the newly arrived pidgin Yiddish speaker with the noble name of Schvartzawolf.
Now, Schvartzawolf was in no way even remotely Jewish, regardless of the name which his soon to be lord of the manor had chosen for him.
He was a descendant of some Vandal chieftain or another. Once a semi-successful plum farmer, the alcohol soaked local noble now eked out a living brewing a pathetically primitive, but quite strong, liquor from a few rotten plums, some ketchup which somehow arrived in the town from local Gypsy traders, and just about any other available material, be it wood shavings, paper, topsoil, or three day old moldy bread.
The entrepreneurial Schmoigerman immediately saw the commercial potential of this highly toxic beverage. Not entirely devoid of knowledge when it came to intoxicational chemistry, he knew that it probably contained enough methanol to render anyone who consumed it temporarily blind.
And that meant that Schmoigerman could open a kretschma, or inn and tavern, similar to the one he had operated in his former abode somewhere in Carpathia.
In this new house of deceit, he could sell glasses and bottles full of this evil potion at a very high profit margin, as its effects would render its consumers unable to realize how much they were spending. Then he would simply have the reprehensible little Schvartzawolf rob the guests of his inn of every last bit of their possessions and relieve them of their steeds or other four legged forms of transportation. Finally, he would then have his new vassal carry his customers outside the town limits while they remained blind under the influence of the evil Schvartzawolf Slivovitz.
When they awoke, Schmoigerman planned to appear as their savior and provide them with a luxurious horse and buggy to transport them to their home villages. Once back in the guest's home village, the driver of said conveyance would demand a huge ransom in order to allow his passenger to disembark safe and sound.
Now, the question was - how could Kalman Schmoigerman get travelers to visit this isolated and foreboding little village and allow him to build yet another successful enterprise.
And the idea was not long in coming. He would convert Schvartzawolf to Judaism right then and there, teach him a few words of Yiddish, and send him out to the Jewish villages in the area to announce that the abandoned towns of Schvartzawolf and Oisvorf were now the holy court of the great and exalted tzaddik, the Szarkonosvary Rov, who of course was none other than Kalman Schmoigerman himself.
A conversion ceremony, consisting of a bris done in a fashion that would qualify as animal abuse if it had been performed on a four legged beast instead of the bestial Schvartzawolf, was performed, with Schvartzawolf repeating the words: "Harei ani meshuabad lecha Kvod Malchis HaRov HaGaon Kalman Schmoigerman, kedas Moloch veAzazel".
As far as the new Rebbe was concerned, he now had a fully Jewish gabbai, a sadistic little fool who would be more than content with five per cent of the daily take of the new Chassidus, paid to him in liquid currency, namely slivovitz of a quality one step above the poison he would proffer to all who paid him for a brocho or eytzo, and in semi-hard currency, namely the infamous kokosh cake which the Schmoigerman family had been producing since the days of their first inn in Sodom of old.
And that very night, Schvartzawolf went out on his three legged donkey to the nearby shtetlach to announce the arrival of a great tzaddik, a descendant of the Motzi Shem Ra of Shteinkopf.
With the literacy rate as abysymal as it was in that time and place, most of the locals truly believed there was such a tzaddik as this supposed ancestor of the newly self ordained Grand Rebbe Kalman Schmoigerman.
And the famous adage "There is a sucker born every minute" would soon be proven in the twin cities of Szarkonosvary and Arschvary.
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