The Place Where Nobody Stopped, by Jerry Segal, 1991

For a place that's hardly a place, just a cluster of cottages between Smolensk and Vitebsk, the place where nobody stops keeps getting visitors. First Yosip the lonely Baker, the Sergeant Major and his platoon of cossacks, Mordecai ben Yahbahbai the impractical scholar and his intelligent wife Ginzl, then their ten babies ... An original story in Russian folktale's clothing, with many layers of sweetness and horror and complexity: love and loneliness, poetry and practicality, valor and violence, and the collision of cultures and ways in turn-of-the-century Czarist Russia. Recommended for middle grade and up.