I would meet him sometimes in the street or in the park opposite my house. Over the years it was as though we had become friends. He would nod his head to me, like an old friend, and maybe we were old friends, because it seemed he’d lived here for many years, like me. In the course of the years he revealed his name was Chaim-Shmuel. Really his name was Shmuel, but because he was ill a lot he added the name Chaim for life–so that he would recover and live a long time.

Recently I met him in the park. I sat on the bench in the shade of the tall trees and he asked me if he could sit next to me.

Of course, gladly, I said.

I’m also pleased to meet you here, he said, for we have known each other for many years.

My pleasure, I replied.

Suddenly he rose and started to dance.

He dances like a monkey, the children in the park laughed.

He stood under a tree as though he were facing a storm, and it seemed to me that the tree’s crown bent forward like someone bowing to him and offering protection. He jumped and hid behind the tree, standing there for a long moment–and then he embraced the tree’s trunk in his two hands and pressed himself against it hard. It seemed to me as if it were the only tree in the park. He squeezed it tightly, waiting.

Absence Presence, Kronstadt Military Chapel. Kotlin Island, St Petersburg, Russia. By Lara O-ReillyThe children suddenly stopped laughing and didn’t make a peep.

He’s not a monkey, he’s a human being, I said.

Everything is God’s will, he said, Life, fate, and it is all a mystery. Me, you, the dance, life.

But he dances like a monkey, the children’s laughter rang out again.

I said again, He isn’t a monkey, he’s a man.

He’s a man who dances like a monkey, laughed the children.

Then he appeared from behind the tree and started dancing in the park.

Is this what you do at home? I asked.

Yes, I dance, he replied by way of the dance, I dance all the time, the whole time I dance, I’m alive, because life is just one big dance–turning around and around and getting dizzy. You don’t dance?

No.

So what do you do all day?

I try to write, and that’s like hard-labor.

I understand, he said, But try to dance. Free your arms and legs, it’ll be easier for you, believe me.

I’ll try.

Excellent, he replied and a huge smile spread across his face. He continued to dance.

You’ll feel better, believe me.

I believe you, I said

And in God as well? he asked

I don’t know, I don’t have an answer for that.

I believe in God because life is hard.

Very hard.

That’s it, he said, and only God knows why, because that’s what He wants, He who sits on high and rules the whole world, and determines our lives and fate, and it’s all one big mystery. My dance, me, you, life, everything, all of it.

A wind started blowing in the park making the branches dance.

Yes, God even created the wind, believe me, and even that’s a great mystery.

He continued to dance in silence.

What can we do? He started speaking again, This is how God created the world, and it’s all one long shadow.

Maybe, I said

He laughed.

But the Lord has forsaken me, he said helplessly and stopped. Absence Presence, by Lara O-Reilly

After a moment he started dancing again.

Sometimes I think about the force the ties man to life, but with an old man this force disappears.

He stood now, as though a giant abyss had opened beneath him.

I ask too many questions, he said, but people think that there is order in the world, and it appears to me that it is all chaos.

No, God forbid.

He looked afraid.

The worst part is the lack of certainty, he said, and looked around him as though a fire had broken out in the park.

Do you eat at home? I asked.

He laughed.

I like olives, and fruit, and a plate of soup.

You’re a lion.

He looked at me with irritation.

And maybe despite everything, I’ll still receive God’s grace, he said.

Amen, I responded, and I envy you, I’d also like to dance.

That’s good, it does a person good, he said, and started dancing again.

Yes, yes, I said and looked at the man dancing opposite me in the park, bending his body and waving his arms.

His face glowed.

So that’s what you do all day at home?

Of course, its power keeps me alive, and I am an old man.

But you dance like a young man.

Because that’s what God wants.

An odd duck, this man, I thought, an old man dances in the park and he has God.

This dance is my life, he continued, if I stop dancing, I’ll die, and I want to keep living. As long as I dance, I’m alive.

I see

That’s it, he said, I still want to live, so I still dance.

I’m happy, I said, and I see that you’re happy when you dance.

Of course, when I dance I know I’m alive.

Please go on, I said, the whole park is yours, the whole street, the whole world.

I hope so, he said.

The lively children started to jump around him and mimic his movements.

It’s not funny, I told them, That’s his life, you see.

But they continued to play around him, and he continued to dance, and continued even after they got tired and went back to their games.

And you really dance the whole day without a break?

Of course, because I don’t want to die, in fact death is man’s true enemy.

God will protect us, and you won’t die because you dance.

I hope, I hope, he repeated, and looked right and then looked left, as though a bell was ringing inside his head.

I understand that you are afraid, I said.

Every human is afraid, everyone wants to live and is afraid of dying, and death is standing in the doorway, the great black angel.

Everyone has his own black angel, I said, and for each person he stands in the doorway.

Yes, it’s terrible, but this is how God created the world, he didn’t want us to live forever, he wanted everyone to die, everyone, and no one gets a holiday from death.

Even when his smile was easy his face was melancholy, and with a somber look he sat down beside me on the bench.

Maybe it’s good in the earth, or at least warm there, he said. Don’t think there’s no life underground! The earth is full of life. And here in the park there are a lot of crows and bats, and bats can see at night. And what does a man see? He can’t even see himself, he doesn’t even know himself, as though he were a stranger.

Everyone’s a stranger.

A stranger even to themselves, he said.

There was a long silence.

For years I’ve been walking with my face to the ground, he said.

Yes, yes, strangers to themselves, I responded, that’s how it is in this world, and it’s cold in this world.

Even in the summer it’s cold inside, he said, but where will salvation come from?

He turned to me, waiting for an answer.

When he saw I was silent, he continued: What can you do, this is how God wants it, he created the earth and the water and the seas, and the plants and the animals, and mankind he made into strange creations.

Maybe.

He wants to charm me, I thought. He wants us to be friends, but we are basically strangers.Absence Presence, by Lara O-Reilly

Each to his own, I said aloud.

Each to his own body, he said. You don’t know what it is when your body betrays you– old people like me know what it’s like. The body’s betrayal. A terrible thing. Every night, every night, I carry my grave in my head so that I can’t sleep at night. I lie awake and think and think, and the night is long, so long, and there is no end to my thoughts, and thoughts are cruel things, they don’t give me a moment’s rest, or a moment’s peace. The whole night I am pierced through by my thoughts. And in the end, every man has a plot the size of a grave. Think about that.

And I thought, who knows about him? Who even knows about his existence? About the energy he expends dancing in order to live. Maybe there is even some kind of heroism in it. But what kind of heroism? And anyway, it’s all nonsense, I said to myself. It is as though by dancing he takes revenge on life, on fate. But maybe it only seems to me that’s what I thought. After all, thoughts are one great mystery, always, and a great burden that’s written on our flesh.

He continued: Sometimes I say to myself that maybe I was born to dance, as though there is some peace in that thought, but that is nonsense too, believe me, and an old man lives both in the darkness and in the light of day.

He arose and went back to dancing like a lunatic, trying to dance erect, as tall,as can be

I looked at him.

Only now did I see that he was dancing with his large feet bare. He looked pale, and in the sunlight his glasses looked golden and it seemed to me that he danced in the sun as someone dancing in shadow, at odds with himself, as though the curtains had already closed on him.

I continued to watch him.

You know, he said and stood across from me, once I got involved in diamonds and thought that diamonds were the stars in heaven, but I learned they only bring curses, so I left the diamonds and started to dance. Would you believe it?

You’re lucky, I said, it’s clear that dancing makes you happy.

Man is never happy, he said, he is always caught on the rack of life, and at my age he already knows that everyone has a plot the size of a grave, and there is no way to escape from it, and every night, every night, I say to myself that there is a border to death and a border to life. And somehow I can still be found on the side of life, but every night I’m at death’s frontier. Death is a black plague. They say there is a white cat and a black cat, but at night there is only a black cat at my side, and each day I get up in the morning and think. Am I still alive? Am I still here? The body is tired at night, but the mind works, and doesn’t let an old man sleep.

He spoke about the power of death, but I looked at him and thought about the power of life.

You’ll live many more years, I said, and you are a strong man because you dance.

Because it gives me strength, and with this strength I live. At my age, people are already dying. All my friends are dead. All of them. Sometimes I think, Where are my dearest friends? But only empty houses are left, and I remain alone in the world.

We always remain alone, and we live alone, even young people.

Do you think so? Do you really think so? he asked.

Of course, otherwise I wouldn’t have had the nerve to let those words pass my lips.

He gave me a strange look and was silent.

And do you believe in a world to come? I asked.

Of course, he said, otherwise how could I dance? I believe that I’ll dance in the afterlife too, if God will help me a little. And do you watch television? he asked suddenly.

I told him I’m addicted to it.

He laughed. And when he saw that I was getting up to go home, he said: I hope that we’ll continue to meet in the park, but an old man is forbidden to say goodbye, and he went back to dancing, dancing a few centimeters above the earth.

***

Yehudit Hendel was born in Warsaw in 1926 and made aliyah in 1930. She was one of the first women writers to achieve success following Israel’s independence. Her best- known novel, The Street of the Steps [Rehov HaMadregot (1955)], was revolutionary for its depiction of marginalized Sephardic Jews. She received the Bialik Prize in 1997 and the Israel Prize for Lifetime Achievement in 2003. Hendel lives and writes in Tel Aviv.

Rachel S. Harris is assistant professor of Hebrew Literature and Language at the State University of New York at Albany (SUNY). Her latest research examines trends in contemporary literary journals in Tel Aviv.

Zeek’s Hebrew translations are made possible by a grant from the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, supported by public funds from the New York Sate Council on the Arts, a state agency.

The post The Dancer appeared first on Jewcy.

-Adam Rovner, translations editor  

Suddenly I can’t think rationally again and I know I just have to see her. I run out of the apartment taking the stairs three at a time, and when I remember that she’s not waiting for me and that she probably isn’t even at home, I stop running but I don’t stop my descent. I’ve already decided that I must see her again.

Two people can’t completely separate from one another just because a decision’s been made. It was lucky I left before I started thinking seriously about our separation. What do I mean ‘two people’? She left me. She doesn’t want me anymore. It’s cold outside and I feel alone. Night time. A side street. Everything follows the script, and even though I’m convinced the film will be more American than French, I’m not sure it’ll have a happy ending.

I get into the old Dodge I bought, even though the replacement parts are expensive and it guzzles fuel and oil. I drive down the familiar roads with my high beams on. How many times did I drive to her place in the past two years? Maybe a thousand. I put all that aside. I know I’m behaving like a lunatic. I know it just makes me weaker in her eyes, but nothing can be done. I have to see her. I have no idea what I’ll say to her if she opens the door. Certainly not that I love her, but I do.

Everyone speeds down the coastal road and too many cars go past me without their lights on. The cars seem like blind animals and I can’t see the drivers at all. She lives in Herzliya and I know exactly when each traffic light changes. I’m driving faster than I think I am, and my mouth and heart begin to feel dry. I’m cold. I can’t understand her. We were so good together. Perhaps I loved her too much, but that’s how you’re supposed to love, isn’t it? You can’t be tough all the time.

I switch off the radio. When I feel like this, without a chance of calming down, no song can help.

What is she doing now? Is she thinking about me? Yesterday my horoscope said I should proceed without any hesitation and hers said that she should re-think the past. That means something, doesn’t it? I decide that if the next car I see doesn’t have its lights on, I have no chance and it’s all over, she doesn’t love me anymore. At a curve a BMW drives past without its lights on. I tense up, but it seems to me the driver did turn his lights on as soon as he saw mine. Another minute and I’ll be at her place. I take a deep breath, deeper than the Loch Ness monster during tourist season. Her house is dark and there are no cars parked outside. Either she’s not at home, or she’s home alone,  or she went out with someone and is running her hand through his hair like used to do with mine.

Enough, enough, enough already.

I park the Dodge, get out and knock on the door. No one answers. My hands shake slightly and I curse her in my heart, and then she opens the door and is almost surprised to see me, though she doesn’t seem very happy. She says “Hi,” though it sounds more like “Ah,” and I go in to see whether anyone else is there, but no one is. She’s just watching television. Perhaps she’s lonely? I help myself to a drink from the fridge. I know the house so well, even how to turn the lights on in the basement, but she’s not happy to see me.

“Yigal, you shouldn’t have come,” she says. She is so beautiful and indifferent. I want to cry out to her: “It’s me!” But I hold on to my last shred of dignity, yes, suddenly it’s become a question of pride. I don’t reply, as though it was me who left and she’s the one who’s causing the disturbance. I know it was a mistake to come. I’m such an idiot. I knew it was a mistake the minute I left home. I’m already planning what I’ll do tomorrow. Maybe I’ll take four thick books out of the library and read them until all this passes. I tell her I’m going. She doesn’t say a word. It’s become so asymmetrical that I want to throw up. Tomorrow I’ll start calling all the girls I met when we were going out.

She escorts me to the door. I can’t help hugging her before I go. This time I switch the radio on. This time I mustn’t think of anything. I have to build my strength back up again. Bitch! She completely emptied me. Whores, all of them.

The traffic light at the entrance to Arlozorov is red and some guy in the car next to me signals me to open the window. I can hardly see him in the dark. “Your lights are on,” he says. I nod with my head. What does he want from me? To tell him what’s been going on this past week? That since she left me I can’t distinguish between light and shadow? If I drive with my lights on, it means I need to have the lights on, doesn’t it?

The traffic light changes and I zoom ahead. A cat is caught beneath my thick wheels but immediately runs to a nearby garden. I look in the mirror and hope it’s not a black cat. He looked black, but in this darkness everything looks the same.

***

Yoav Avni was born in 1969 in Israel. He lives in Tel Aviv. After his military service and a long trip to the Far East, he published a collection of short stories, Those Strange Americans (Ayzeh Metumtamim HaAmerikaim. Tammuz: 1995). His successful first novel, Three Things to a Lonely Island [Shlosha Devarim L’iy Boded], was published in 2006 by Zmora-Bitan. Avni’s second novel, [HaChamishit Shel Chong Levi], is forthcoming in May from Zmora-Bitan.

Evelina Kuchuk is a lawyer and a freelance translator working in Hebrew, Russian and English. She is based in London, England.

Zeek‘s translations are made possible by a grant from the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, supported by  public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

***

Images by artist Brent Faklis

The post Your Lights Are On appeared first on Jewcy.

Moshe Yungman

         I came from Australia to Kibbutz Gvat with a box of 300 pairs of socks, which were later handed over to Migdal Ha’emek–a new immigrant township in the making during the early 1950s.  Yesterday, forty years later, here in Jerusalem, during a hamsin day in the month of August 1998, I came across a pair of socks out of that very cardboard box I had brought with me from Australia.  I saw the pair of socks hanging behind glass on the wall in the clinic of an eye doctor in the Bell Tower, near the intersection of King George, Nathan Strauss, and Jaffa Streets.  The original label of the sock factory in Melbourne smiled towards my eyes:  Robert Rotberg– Kadimah Socks. 

         This Robert Rotberg had come to talk my wife and I out of going to Israel once word of our intention had gotten around.  “One doesn’t just leave a land of peace and prosperity for a land of war and austerity”, he said.  When he realized that his words had no effect, he took a large cardboard box from his car and said, “Well, so be it.  If you don’t have enough bread to eat in the Jewish Land, at least you’ll have enough socks to wear”.

         On the day of our arrival in Kibbutz Gvat, we already saw that there was enough bread to eat and that there was no need to open the cardboard box containing the socks.  We did open it, though, when the woman in charge of the kibbutz general store — a squinting spinster — came to our room to find out what we were in need of.  When she set eyes on the cardboard box we had brought along, she fell silent for several minutes and then decided that the existence of the package had to be kept a close secret.  If she took the entire batch along with her to the general store and word about it got around, her life would turn into hell.  It would set off a rush for socks in the kibbutz and the line-up for them would be endless.  She helped me return the cardboard box to its former place under the bed and admitted that she had the reputation among the kibbutz members of being stingy by nature.  But she was fully aware of the fact that her stinginess was merely on account of her concern for the common good of the members of the kibbutz.

         Two years went by and the woman in charge of the general store never returned to take the socks.  Her life had undergone a change.  She’d found a man, got married, and stopped squinting, though her stinginess for the sake of the common good had not changed.  Nevertheless, my wife and I didn’t give up hope that one of these days she’d turn up and take the 300 pairs of socks to the store.  

         But Moshe Yungman, a Yiddish poet, came instead of her.  One chilly but sunny winter day he appeared in our room with a big empty sack on his shoulder and declared that he was collecting shoes.  A new township — Migdal Ha’emek — had sprung up and he was the principal of the elementary school there.  But the trouble was that on freezing winter days the children didn’t come to school because they had no shoes to wear.  If there happened to be a pair of shoes in the family, the kids took turns wearing them.  Everyday the same pair of shoes would turn up at school, but each time on the feet of someone else.  In a large family each child barely attended school one day a week. 

         While we were having coffee, Moshe Yungman added that it was a damn shame that kids so keen on learning weren’t given the chance to advance in their studies.  He told us about a twelve year old who had a promising future ahead of him provided he attended school regularly.  If not, he’d be forced to become like his father a simple laborer for the Keren Kayemet, the Jewish National Fund.

 
       I hauled the cardboard box of 300 socks out from under the bed and opened it for Moshe Yungman to take a look and make up his mind what to do with them.  Shoes, I couldn’t provide him with, but I certainly could provide him with more than enough socks.  Moshe Yungman opened his sack, and I emptied the entire cardboard box into it . Together, we carried the heavy load along the narrow winding tracks between the long-established kibbutz and the new town of Midgal Ha’emek. 

         Green wooden shacks lined both sides of the unpaved road.  Children crowded around us while Moshe Yungman handed socks out to them.  The twelve year old he had praised so highly earlier received a bundle of ten pairs so he’d have enough socks to wear during the winter days, provided he attended school every day. 

         Years later, Moshe Yungman wrote a poem in praise of the youngster beginning with the following lines:

Socks sent by someone far away,

Turned a poor boy into a doctor today.

         I entered the clinic of the eye doctor in the Bell Tower, sat down and pressed my chin and forehead down firmly against the optical machine. He had nothing but praise for the owner of the sock factory in Melbourne whose name on the label I had read out aloud.  He praised his generosity and would have told me something about him, but the line in his waiting room was long and so was the story.

         When the examination was over, I couldn’t resist and pointed to the socks and said that the woman in charge of the kibbutz general store also deserved to be praised, above all, because of her stinginess for the sake of the common good.  My remarks puzzled him for he couldn’t make out what I was driving at.  I added that I, too, had a long story to tell him.  One of these days, after having cured my eyes, we’d find the time to have a chat over a cup of coffee without the pressure of patients in the waiting room and we’d finish telling our stories to each other.  When I left the Bell Tower I put on dark glasses to protect my eyes against the blinding rays of the hot sun and walked towards the intersection. 

         And once again Moshe Yungman strode beside me on that windy and freezing winter day along the unpaved road between the green wooden shacks handing out socks from the sack and calling out in his gentle voice:

         “Children, come to school!  I’ve got lots of socks for you to wear!”

***

Zeek‘s Hebrew translations are made possible by a grant from the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, supported by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. Please direct submissions and queries to editors[at]zeek.net

Yossel Birstein was born in Poland in 1920. At the age of 17, he immigrated to Australia on his own and served in that country’s military during World War II. After the war, he learned that his family in Europe had been murdered in the Holocaust. He began writing Yiddish poetry during the war and later published several books of verse in Australia. With his wife, Margaret, whom he met and married in Australia, he moved to Israel in 1950. There he continued writing in Yiddish in addition to Hebrew. He became a member of Kibbutz Gvat and worked as a shepherd for a decade. Later, he became a bank manager and after moving to Jerusalem in 1970, served as an archivist at the National Library. He published throughout his career numerous books of poetry, short stories, novels, and translations in both Yiddish and Hebrew. Birstein died in 2003. 

Margaret (Waisberg) Birstein was born and raised in Germany. She immigrated to Australia after Kirstallnacht and there met Yossel and soon married. Margaret learned Yiddish from her husband, and has translated most of her husband’s work into English from Yiddish and Hebrew. She remains an active preserver of her husband’s literary legacy and still resides in Jerusalem.

Images by artist Dubi Kaufman

The post Moshe Yungman appeared first on Jewcy.

            In short, this boy drove me crazy and made me ask myself more than once: what is going on in that little head of his and what are his shiny black eyes looking for?

He approached my store and stopped. Then he put down his basket that was full of all kinds of spices, pins, sewing needles and other small items. He sold what he sold, and went back to where he came from, and no one knew where he belonged. Out of curiosity, I asked him where he was from. He surprised me by saying that he didn’t know. I asked about his parents, and he replied that he was alone in the world” I asked him about other things, and he said he didn’t know them, either. As time passed, I realized I was faced with a riddle.

             I took pity on him and worried that he’d be burned by the broiling sun, so I asked him to stand in the shade of one of the walls near my store. I also told all my customers what was in the boy’s basket. The boy started selling more and more and expressions of happiness appeared on his little face. After that, he began to greet me every morning and ask about my wife and children. I would answer him that they were well, and that I was trying to educate them about all that had been lost in this world.

           
At noon, when it was time for lunch, I would take out my food and invite him to come and eat with me. While he was eating, I observed him and tried in vain to figure out what made him so special. He would be quiet for long periods, and was always smiling, while I took pleasure in everything he did.

            Day by day, wordlessly, I became more attached to the boy. I called him Anees. Anees began to stand at the entrance to my store. I was very happy for him, although he was sometimes my competitor. At night, my wife would return after working at the store in my place. She’d return angry, saying that the boy annoyed her because I spoiled him for no reason, so much so that he’d follow  everything done in the store. I would smile and tell her that Anees deserved more concern and sympathy, especially from her.

            While I spent more and more time at home resting, my wife would go to the store in my stead. Occasionally the children would go with her and help. I didn’t protest; I trusted them. Sometimes, I ‘d visit the store by chance and find that Anees had left his basket outside, while inside he stood next to my wife helping her, and she would look at me with a warm smile. I was pleased at this, and confident that Anees wouldn’t disappoint me.

            My wife took my place at the store frequently. I diligently stayed at home to review the end of year accounts in order to submit them to the tax authorities. When she got back from work at night and found me busy with paperwork, she would kindly caress my head, and then prepare dinner and sit at the table, silent and deep in thought. One night she told me that Anees had become an adult. Her eyes bore into me, and she expected me to say something. But I didn’t respond.

           
One evening I went to the store before she returned home. I looked around and saw the pale sunset spreading over the neighborhood. I peered into the entrances of the other stores and saw that most of them were locked. The stench of rubbish and decay struck my nostrils. I continued on toward the store and stopped in shock: the boy, Anees, stood behind the big refrigerator passionately kissing the mother of my children. The two lovers looked at me with obvious indifference. After that, they glanced at their watches and said that they had to close the store and return home for dinner. The two of them left and I remained standing alone next to the basket. 

***

Zeek‘s Hebrew translations are made possible by a grant from the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, supported by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. Please direct submissions and queries to editors[at]zeek.net

Riad Beidas is a contemporary Israeli Arab author, born in 1960 in Shfar-A’m, Israel.  Beidas has published several collections of stories and novels. His most significant literary work, The Hunger and the Mountain, was written in Arabic and later translated into Hebrew  [HaRa’av VeHa’Har, HaKibutz HaMeuchad: 1998]. Beidas’ work frequently appears in Israeli periodicals, magazines and newspapers.

Mohammed Alghbban is a translator of both modern Hebrew and Arabic literature. He is a lecturer in modern Hebrew language at the College of Languages and Translation at King Saud University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Alghbban is currently a doctoral student in modern Hebrew literature at Indiana University-Bloomington.

Images by artist Michele Feder-Nadoff

The post “Boy” appeared first on Jewcy.

The city of J lies at the top of the hills of J. That’s how I’d like to begin my story; at a calm distance, with a deep breath, in a panoramic shot focusing very slowly on a single street, and very slowly on a single house, "this is the house where I was born." But you’d be making a fool of yourself if your J wereJerusalem, since every idiot knows aboutJerusalem. And altogether it’s impossible to talk aboutJerusalem any more. Impossible, that is to say, without "winding alleys" and "stone courtyards," "caper bushes" and "Arab women in the market place." And I have nothing to say about caper bushes and stone courtyards, nor do I have the faintest desire to flavor my story with the colorful patois of colorfulJerusalem characters, twirling their mustaches as they spin Oriental tales.

Nor do I intend to mention here the hills of J, in other words the Judean Hills. These hills always depressed me with their thick history and the thin trunks of their pine trees, and the picnic leftovers scattered over the dry pine needles. And anyone who didn’t spread out a picnic blanket and open a picnic basket surely trailed behind their scoutmasters there in the footsteps of Judah Maccabee and Uri ben Ari and the continuing saga of Jewish heroism, which I somehow managed to forget, however hard they drilled it into my head.

***

And even if once upon a time, a great many years ago, I went for walks in the forests of J, it definitely isn’t worth the effort of distancing the camera for the sake of those ancient neckings. They’re about as riveting as the autumn crocuses. Or the spring. Or whatever you call them. The truth is that I wasn’t really born inJerusalem, either. I was eight when my parents left the kibbutz — for seven years after that we lived in Tel Aviv –and if I began by saying, for example, "I was born in the Emek Hospital," you’d come right back: "Ahaa, of course, my two sisters-in-law gave birth there too," and immediately want to talk to me about "that amazing midwife, the one with the faint mustache, worth more than all the doctors put together, you don’t mean to say you’ve never heard of her?"

It isn’t my personal problem as a writer. It isn’t my personal problem that a person who was born here can’t open with the words "I was born" — because so what? So you were born, good for you, you were born, okay, and then what? Because after "I was born" has to come an adventure story that will take the first person far, far away from his birthplace, and how far can you really get from here? To the Far East on the beaten track of the ex-warriors from the Golani Brigade? To Uman with the nutcases of the Bratslav Hassids to their rabbi’s grave? And however far you went you’d end up meeting someone who knew your cousin’s cousin. Not interesting. Not interesting at all.

Not that I’m complaining, God forbid. The facts of my birth and upbringing have nothing to do with what follows here, and even if they did, you need calm and composure to distance the camera like that; calm and composure and a sense of historical perspective, and as far as my situation is concerned, I clearly suffer from a severe lack of both.

For the record I’ll simply mention here that I was favored by the luck of the draw. I grew up well fed and protected, and that’s another reason why where and how I "came into the world" is not a matter of public interest. People who’ve survived a holocaust, who were born into a world that no longer exists, they can begin their biographies with "I was born." The heroes of nineteenth century novels begin with "I was born," my heroic father can begin his story with "I was born." Not me. My early history is too boring, it fails to provide any explanation for what happened to me in later years, and I have never felt the urge to examine it or whine about it. Nor do I now.

In any case it’s no great loss, and if the right to say "I was born" has to be paid for in dire catastrophes, stepfathers, orphanages, and picking pockets in the market place, I say, "No thanks," and choose to enter this story at the age of seventeen, where the real me begins:

Me and my love for Alek — which against my better judgment I experience as transcendence. Me with my dybbuk — which is the only thing that gives me a sense of space.

Forty-seven, that’s how old I am now; forty-eight in September.

***

I told you to forget about a panoramic view, but there’s one panorama at least that I can offer you. A panoramic picture of the disease I’ve been dragging around with me for almost thirty years. The picture that comes up on the computer screen after midnight is at its brightest between two and four in the morning, and fades gradually towards dawn, Israeltime:

LAA – Love Addicts Anonymous – holding hands on the web. Lovesick ladies from the East Coast to the West Coast, from Europe to Australia, entering the forum for therapeutic encounters. All of them fell in love suddenly, once and for all. And through winter, summer, autumn, and spring they cling to the one and only love that never lets them be.

Women who love too much, is how they define themselves. Women addicted to love. Women whose neurons have been screwed up by their unhealthy loves.

Since discovering the LAA forum, whenever my own neurons begin to go berserk, I enter the web site. I call myself Adele there, a private joke which I have never explained to my sister sufferers and which I never will. Adele, after Victor Hugo’s pathetic floor-rag of a daughter, who followed some nothing all the way to Marrakech and went so crazy because of him that they had to put her in the loony bin. The Adele H. of Israel. Very funny. But the women-who-love-too- much wouldn’t find it amusing, none of them would laugh.

Maybe women who love too much have no sense of humor and maybe they just have no idea about Israeli names and how unromantic they are. Take Sarit for example. Can anyone imagine Sarit throwing herself under a train? Or drowning herself in a river? Which river, exactly? In the shallow trickle of the Jordan? Or perhaps in the fish ponds of some kibbutz? No, the most Sarit could do is give a revealing interview to the mid-week supplement of one of the tabloids. Some names simply impose an anti-romantic discipline on their owners: Pazit. Sarit. Yossi. Amit. Try fitting them into an old love song by Alexander Penn, for instance, "My plain winter coat and the lamp on the bridge, / An autumn night and my face wet with rain. / That was the first time you saw me, remember? / And it was as clear to me as two and two / That I was in love with Amit, and Amit was in love with Pazit, / Yes, it wasn’t any good, it was gloriously bad…..’

Gloriously bad. I actually understand these words. And they are the ones that creep up from my tailbone to my collarbone, in complete contradiction to my logic which tells me that bad can’t be glorious. And that all this romantic bullshit is basically a conspiracy against the female sex.

***

Women who love too much aren’t very interested in metaphysical sins of this nature. Squandering their child’s college-savings fund, throwing acid at the legal wife, abandoning their bodies to violence, self-imprisonment, subsidizing their man’s drug habit by prostitution, catatonic depression, drunk driving, these are the kinds of practical sins that preoccupy them, and in comparison to them my sins of thought and feeling turn white as snow. Well, maybe not quite white, but you could certainly say they pale in comparison.

It’s not the fact that I have no sensational sins that prevents me from confessing to the group. The problem is the language. They are all guilty of "co-dependency," they all want to free themselves of "harmful relationships" and make themselves fit for "meaningful relationships." They are all trying "to develop their spiritual aspect," to "grow emotionally," "to be in touch with their feelings" — whatever the hell that means — and all of them without exception believe in the liberating effect of archaeology. As a consequence of this belief they carry out energetic excavations in their family history, and on bad nights I definitely find their stories gripping. SenileSandy fromSeattle, for example, had an alcoholic father and an alcoholic grandfather, which in her opinion and that of the group explains the "co-dependency" she has with her clown. Brainless Betty fromBoston has no history of alcoholism in the family, but she had a neglectful mother who to this day is still a compulsive overeater. And it’s certainly touching to read how little Betty used to hide the bread in hopes of saving something for her school sandwich from her mother’s nightly kitchen raids. Except that according to Betty’s and the rest of the group’s logic, a mother who loves food sentences her daughter to a lifetime of compulsive love, and at that point I stop being touched and begin to laugh.

On a number of occasions I was tempted to make the girls happy and join the party at last by cooking up some sort of terminal explanation for my case. An eloquent etiology of my disease. Ready? Yes, they’re all ready. So what happened to me, girls, is that my father was hardly ever at home, my heroic father was in the army with men and other women, he was with other women a lot, and I never had a real home either, because the first eight years of my life I spent in the children’s house on a kibbutz. Allow me to confine myself for a moment to the story of the kibbutz.

Kibbutz, girls, do you have any idea of what a kibbutz is? No, of course you don’t, because the only people who know what a kibbutz is are those who grew up on one, like me. If there are any Jewish souls among you, if you grew up on the propaganda of the Jewish National Fund, kindly forget the fishermen spreading their nets, the female tractor driver and the sun-tanned women picking oranges and smiling photogenic smiles from the tops of their ladders. A kibbutz, my sisters, is not a poster, and even though the children’s house covered in ivy and bougainvillea looks like the Garden of Eden in the photographs, that’s what the island in Lord of the Flies looked like in the beginning, too.

The children’s house…let me tell you about the children’s house. In this house with the red-tiled roof I was abandoned every day to the violence of my peer group, and every night to my loneliness. Eight years times three hundred and sixty five days equals… You can work it out yourselves, but the sum is the number of nights that I was abandoned by my mother.

Eight times three hundred and sixty five days of violence and ridicule, and eight times three hundred and sixty five long nights of anxiety and fear, taught me to hide my neediness. When I ran away from the group to my parents’ room, my mother would lose no time in taking me back. When I complained, she pretended that she didn’t hear or told me to be strong and pull myself together. And I, it seems, was a good pupil, and gradually I stifled my tears until the weeping was silenced inside me and turned into quiet despair. That’s how they taught me to associate love with abandonment, and that’s how they got me used to the idea that love is not a refuge.

This kind of description, which is definitely not complete fiction, but only partly false, this kind of description would immediately reward me with an international wave of empathy. The trouble is that what I need is contempt, not empathy, and certainly not the empathy of blockheads.

A parody of self-interpretation will not bring me the self-disgust I’m looking for.

I say a parody of self-interpretation, partly because my childhood wasn’t as miserable as I described it, but mainly because I, in contrast to my sisters-who-love-too-much, do not believe that my dybbuk has a "psychological background." My father, my mother, and Yochie the kibbutz children’s caretaker, have no part in this story, and if not for the psycho-babble they hear on the television or read in the newspaper, it would never have occurred to the love-addicts of LAA to shove their parents into the picture, either. Think of Romeo and Juliet, for instance: it’s true that Romeo and Juliet had parents, and logic demands that before the play begins they had some kind of childhood too, but nobody would seek the reason for Juliet’s love in Mrs. Capulet’s eating disorder, the love came of its own accord, the love seized hold of her, the love made her what she was. And in the face of such a lightning bolt only an idiot would insist on asking, "Why?"

So even if I could easily offer a psychological explanation for my dybbuk, and not only just one but a few, in this matter you won’t get even a hint of a clue from me. Accept it, dear reader, or not; here I stand, and this is not a psychological novel.

And if, like some stubborn interviewer, you go on nagging me about the "why," I’m prepared to throw out the hypothesis that on the second of July, nineteen-hundred and seventy-two, somebody put a love potion into my coffee. It was black Turkish coffee, and I drank it from a thick glass purchased in the Machaneh Yehuda market inJerusalem. The kind of love potion imbibed by Tristan and Isolde, who as far as I know had no psychological reasons for their love either.

***

Zeek‘s Hebrew translations are made possible by a grant from the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, supported by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. Please direct submissions and queries to editors[at]zeek.net

This excerpt appears with kind permission of Melville House Publishing, publisher of The Confessions of Noa Weber. Worldwide translation copyright © by The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature.

Writer Gail Hareven was born inJerusalem in 1959. Hareven has published six novels and three story collections, as well as non-fiction and children’s books, and has had four plays staged in Israel. Her novel, The Confessions of Noa Weber (Melville House, 2009) [Sheahava Nafshi (Keter, 2000)], received Israel’s prestigious Sapir Prize in 2002.

Dalya Bilu immigrated to Israelfrom South Africa in the 1950s. She has translated some of Israel’s most well-known writers and has received the Israel Culture and Education Ministry Prize for Translation, and the Times Literary Supplement and Jewish Book Council Award for Translation. Bilu’s translation of Judith Katzir’s Dearest Anne was published by the Feminist Press last year.

The post “My True Love” appeared first on Jewcy.

– Adam Rovner, translations editor If a Citroen’s electrical system crashes and you’re inside, it’s a lost cause—you’re stuck. That’s exactly what happened to Yunis. He was with his boss in the apartment and they were plastering and putting the finishing touches on the paint. His boss was too lazy to get cigarettes, so he gave Yunis a fifty shekel bill and the keys to his Citroen and told him to bring back some smokes and a bottle of cola. Yunis didn’t know the area very well, so he drove around and around until he saw the commercial center and parked. He turned off the car and tried to get out, but the door wouldn’t open. He tried all the windows and doors. Nothing worked. And Yunis forgot his cell-phone at the apartment so he couldn’t even call his boss. He tried to start the car again, but it wouldn’t respond with even a single sputter. He slammed the steering wheel. The horn didn’t work either. It was as if the car’s heart had suddenly stopped. He thought of his boss back there still waiting for cigarettes and cola.  A whole day of work could be wasted on car problems, he thought. Maybe he broke something in the Citroen? He started to stress out. Or maybe, worse still, there’s no problem at all and it’s just that there’s something about the car he doesn’t know how to work? Yunis sat and stared at the customers leaving the stores with their bags of clothes, housewares, and gift boxes. He saw customers here and there, but he couldn’t make up his mind who to turn to. He was afraid to shout for help because his work clothes, his Arab appearance, and his accent would be a dead giveaway. Maybe they’d think he was a suicide bomber sitting in a car rigged with explosives, just waiting to draw a crowd before flipping his martyrdom switch. A young woman with a cart full of all sorts of good things passed in front of him. Yunis sat and watched her. She followed his glance, but pushed on with her cart without meeting his eyes. In his mirror Yunis saw her disappear behind the parked cars. He waited a bit longer and then spotted an old man walking slowly in his direction. Yunis noticed the logo of the medical clinic on the white marble wall of the commercial center and guessed he was headed there. He quickly abandoned the idea of flagging down the old man, who would certainly be alarmed and wouldn’t understand what Yunis wanted from him anyway. Inside the car a pleasant warmth surrounded him, making him wonder what it would be like to live in the Citroen.  If you got into debt, you could just live in the car with its upholstered seats and its radio. On cool nights you could pull into covered parking lots, recline the seats and go to sleep next to your wife, with your two children in the back. His reverie was broken by a kid on a skateboard sporting a school bag strapped to his back. He swerved and zigzagged between the cars and the people carrying their bags and pushing their carts until he reached the curb near the Citroen. The kid hesitated, deciding whether to jump the pavement with his board, which would require him to squeeze between two parked cars on the other side of the pavement. While still skating, the kid noticed Yunis and quickly turned away. Yunis wondered whether to use hand gestures to stop the boy in mid-flow, but because he was embarrassed, he procrastinated and the kid moved on. After missing his chance to get help from the young woman and the boy, he realized he had to find another way out. He couldn’t break the windshield. That would only make people suspicious of him and they’d immediately call the police. And besides, it’s better to try to get help without causing a mess. But he couldn’t keep sitting like this for hours in the car, cooking in this hunk of metal, so he resolved to call out to the next person who came along. A few minutes later, a middle-aged man passed by wearing a white button-down shirt and black pants, and carrying supermarket bags and dry cleaning. Yunis gathered his courage and shouted at him and motioned with his hands, “Sir, excuse me, I’m stuck in the car.” The man slowed his pace and looked with surprise and suspicion at the strange Arab who yelled something unclear at him from inside a beige car. For a moment he hesitated. On the radio they warned of terrorist groups plotting to kidnap Jews during the holidays, but he swept away the troubling thought and approached the Arab. When Yunis saw the man draw near, he worried that he wouldn’t believe him, but he hoped that he’d at least listen. “Mister,” Yunis flashed an embarrassed smile before turning to the man in a calm voice, “I’m stuck here with no electricity in the car and I can’t open the doors or the windows. Please, maybe you can call my boss and tell him I’m stuck.” The man saw that Yunis wasn’t a nutcase, but he still couldn’t understand what the problem was. “What do you mean, stuck in the car?” He responded forcefully but politely from the other side of the glass. Yunis was surprised that the man wasn’t embarrassed to raise his voice in the middle of the street. “Walla…I don’t know! Everything here is probably electric, and I bet there was a short and everything died.” The well-tailored man looked at the Arab in silence, like someone trying to digest a mechanical explanation or waiting for an official response. “You know these Frenchie cars,” Yunis continued, “all pose and all problems.” The man smiled as if he understood: This one’s not a terrorist, he’s all right. He put his shopping bags on the hood and pulled out his cell phone. “What’s the boss’s name?” “Moshe Yonah,” Yunis said expectantly. “Related to the contractor Yonah?” the man asked with interest. “Yes, but he’s a distant cousin.” The man nodded and pursed his lips as if to acknowledge that he had heard what was said to him. It occurred to Yunis that perhaps the man knew Moshe. “What’s your name?” The man asked while the phone rang. “Yunis.” He started to worry because Moshe hadn’t yet picked up. “Hello, Moshe?” He asked, emphasizing the second syllable of his name. “Yeah,” Moshe responded impatiently. “Yunis, your worker, is stuck here in his car and he can’t get out.” “Ahh, yes, I know the problem. It’s my car.” The man was now firmly convinced the Arab wasn’t a terrorist. He told Moshe where the place was. Moshe promised to come and send someone out to fix it. “Thank you,” Yunis said with an apologetic smile. “You’re lucky today isn’t a very hot day, or you’d dehydrate in there. Do you want me to stay with you until Moshe comes?” the man asked, fearing a response that would delay him here under the autumn sun in the middle of a boring parking lot. “No, but thanks, really, it’s okay, he’ll come quickly.” The man nodded, but before he went on his way he told Yunis he’d alert the security guard so he’d come check on him in another ten minutes to see if Moshe had arrived. Yunis thanked him again. He sat in the Citroen and thought of the symbolism of the incident. National Insurance wants him to prove he’s a resident of Jerusalem or they won’t give him unemployment for the months he couldn’t find work, but the clerks are afraid to come to East Jerusalem to check whether he really lives at the address he provided. His older son suddenly decided he didn’t want to hear about high school next year. Instead he wants to drive a cab and make some money. And yesterday he found out his father’s request to go on the Hajj was rejected Yunis watched the man wander away amid the sea of cars gleaming in the sun’s rays. He followed his steps up to the entrance to the supermarket where he stood and spoke to the guard and waved his hands. The guard looked in the direction of the parking lot, nodded, and then the man walked off toward his own car.
The sun grew hotter, and sitting inside the car was becoming more uncomfortable. Maybe I really am a suicide bomber, Yunis thought. Maybe Moshe and that man who helped me both work for the General Security Service and I’m about to blow up. And then they’ll report that the explosion was premature and thankfully a catastrophe had been averted. Yunis was lost in thought, scouting for hidden cameras between the cars and along the windows, but instead of cameras he found a class of school children walking in pairs on the pavement toward the Citroen. The children passed by at the level of the windshield, and two by two their eyes stared questioningly at him: an Arab just sitting in a car with the windows closed. An explosion rattled the windshield. The children raised their eyes upward and let out gasps of surprise. The alarm on the Citroen began to wail and the last pair of children and their escort shook with fear. The sonic boom of the American fighter jet shocked the car’s electric heart and returned it to life in a flash, jolting it from clinical death. Yunis got out of the car, turned off the alarm, and went to buy cigarettes. *** Zeek’s Hebrew translations are made possible by a grant from the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, supported by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. Please direct submissions and queries to editors[at]zeek.net Gilad Meiri holds a Ph.D. in Hebrew literature from the Tel Aviv University. He has published two collections of poetry, Tremors in Jelly (Za’azuim B’Jelly 2006) and Organic Paganic (Organi Pagani 2003), and one short story collection, The Department for the Public’s Stories (HaMisrad L’Sipurei HaTzibur 2008), all published by Carmel. In addition to founding Kvutzat Ktovet, Meiri serves as the director of the affiliated Makom L’Shira, based in the Nakhlaot neighborhood of Jerusalem. In 2008, he received the Prime Minister’s Prize for Literature. Adam Rovner serves as the Hebrew translations editor for Zeek and is an assistant professor of English and Jewish Literature at the University of Denver. all images from Leonardo Kaplan‘s series Surfacing

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Zeek‘s Hebrew translations are made possible by a grant from the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, supported by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. Please direct submissions and queries to editors[at]zeek.net

Excerpt from the novel Lily La Tigresse copyright © Alona Kimhi. Worldwide translation copyright © by The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature. English translation © by The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature.

Alona Kimhi immigrated to Israel from the Ukraine in 1972 at the age of six. She was an actress and model before becoming an author. Her first published work received the ACUM Prize, and later appeared in English as Lunar Eclipse [Toby Press, 2000]. Her novel Weeping Susannah received the Bernstein Prize in 1999, and was published in English by The Harvill Press in 2001, the same year she won the Prime Minister’s Prize. Her novel Lily La Tigresse appeared in 2004 [Keter Publishing], and has since been translated into several languages.

Dalya Bilu immigrated to Israel from South Africa in the 1950s. She has translated some of Israel’s most well-known writers. For her work she has received the Israel Culture and Education Ministry Prize for Translation, and the Times Literary Supplement and Jewish Book Council Award for Translation. Bilu’s translation of Judith Katzir’s Dearest Anne was recently published by the Feminist Press [2008].

***

All images by artist Jaime Permuth

The post “Going to the Circus” appeared first on Jewcy.

When I was a young man like you, I ran away from my father’s house to join the pioneers. In the Galilee mountains, land of the ancient prophets, we settled on a hilltop. What can I say, the terrain was rocky, there was no majesty and no glory. Arabs all around, their villages built around wells, while all we had was a vehicle that crawled down the hill once a week to bring back contaminated water. We had money neither for shoes nor for agricultural tools. On the hilltop we sat and suffered, clinging on day by day in the sun, the desolation, calling ourselves the keepers of the land, while the cattle grew thin in the barns and pens. From morning to evening we bore no fruits, but we were pioneers, having stood in the sun for another day without dying.

        And so we sat, pioneers with hearts of stone. Our bodies were empty, our souls were empty, and on we went for another day and another, malaria, desperation. But one day–reinforcement. A young boy arrived. He had come to Palestine to be a pioneer. His appearance? Gaunt, pale-faced, his cheeks sinking into his mouth seeking shelter. But all eyes were drawn to his hands, dove-white hands of muslin with long, pale, polished fingers, each nail carefully shaped. We welcomed him politely and asked his name and where he was from. The young man grew startled and tried to evade our questions as though we were probing at the depths of his soul, invading, uncovering secrets. He barely managed to give his name, and it was Yasha. The name of his village he did not disclose, it was too much to bear.

        We let him be. The next day we sent him out with a hoe, and by five in the morning he had fainted away. We carried him inside to cool his body and decide what was to be done with him. He awoke, shouting like a slaughtered calf, “I will not go back! I will not go back!” Recovered, he was sent to the pen to help clean and learn how to milk. By evening he collapsed in the middle of the pen, bleeding, and awoke shouting only when he believed we were discussing sending him to a sanatorium. He was miserable. An Abel who sees all the world as Cain come to kill him.

        A week later, a postal vehicle ambled up the path with a telegram. Imagine to yourself–a telegram arriving at our little place! It transpired that young Yasha was no mere dreamer, but a prodigious musician, a gifted pianist, his fingers worth their weight in gold. How could we have known, embedded as we were in a wilderness, a land of hot coals in the summer and swamps in the winter? How could we have recognized his name as being famous in all the capitals of Europe? We learned that the boy, being a true Zionist, had slipped away from his agents, teachers and coaches. Slipped away from his mother, a noblewoman from an affluent Zionist family, and she was sending us this telegram to the desert sun. Send the boy back! she demanded, as if we had taken him hostage, as if we were Ishmaelites and he Joseph.

        The telegram informed us that her delegate would be coming to collect her son on the sixth of April at precisely nine o’clock, at which time we must bring him to the fence for delivery. And indeed, on the sixth of April a vehicle made its way up the hill again, conveying Attorney Felix Shokef from Haifa. Scanning the wasteland of our settlement, he enquired whether he had reached the right place, and asked to see the boy.

        Yasha does not flee. He goes out to the attorney and faces him. Attorney Shokef wipes his brow with a handkerchief, looks at the boy and forms his impression. Then he looks this way and that at our garden of Eden, and stares into our faces. “Who is the leader here?” he asks, and we begin to pour forth a torrent of explanations on this bourgeois man, this urbanite–for we are a group, we are equals, we have no need for leaders. But Attorney Shokef silences us with his hand and says dryly, “I shall speak with one of you. Then the rest shall listen to the terms governing the grants you will receive in return for attending to Yasha for so long as he lives here.”

        He looks at us scornfully while the dizzying concept of grants dries up the refusal on the tips of our tongues. And I, who have recently been appointed treasurer, and who often look down from our hilltop to the valleys and see empty wallets, I announce: We shall talk! The group makes way and Attorney Shokef looks at me and makes his proposal.

        And what did he propose? He informed me that the whole pioneering business was a passing fad for Yasha. His future was in Europe in front of a devoted audience. But since this was Yasha’s desire, and his nerves were known to be fragile, and he himself had no intention of forcibly removing the boy, he would reach an agreement with us. Every week Yasha would write a letter to his mother. This was the first term. Every two weeks Attorney Shokef himself would come to examine Yasha’s welfare. If the mother was pleased with his letters, and if Attorney Shokef was satisfied with Yasha’s general condition, the mother would bestow a grant upon the group, as well as a personal grant to me, the leader. If Sasha were not well kept he would be removed immediately and the grants would cease. If his spirits were good–the grants would increase. Attorney Shokef then began to list numbers, advance fees and premiums. I was seized by a sweet sense of horror. How could we refuse? Attorney Shokef suddenly leaned in close to me, dwarfish and flushed with perspiration, his glare penetrating my depths, and said, “Keep his fingers from all harm!”

        A few days later a large package arrived from Europe. Inside, for Yasha, were a beautiful set of work gloves, a toy-sized hoe, a couple of rakes, a colorful funnel and several hats. There were also dishes, a fork and knife, and napkins. But we were busy with our own gifts–excellent boots, work shirts and dress shirts, kettles and pots and pans, pruning shears and forceps, a tool for picking dates and baskets for gathering fruit and various other agricultural devices for crops we did not even grow. How could we possibly have orchards? How could we have vineyards? We had barely a bunch of goats and two cows, and a donkey who produced nothing but pitiful neighs, as if he too had left behind a father, mother and sister in Mogilev.

        This was the beginning of an enjoyable era for us. All our efforts, both of body and soul, were concentrated on Yasha. He was our main crop. We had to protect his body from any hazard, and his fingers–twofold. We had to preserve his good spirits and allow him to amuse and befriend the women.

        Each one of us oversaw Yasha’s letters. Every week, with astonishing precision, a package arrived with a letter from the mother that overflowed with happiness and sorrow. The lovelier Yasha’s writing, the greater the package. We were soon able to build a new pen and a barn, restore the decaying coop, enquire about additional lands, and purchase new clothes and shoes. But there was a fly in the ointment–Yasha. He had complicated issues with his mother, hard to understand. On a crate in the communal room he would sit begrudgingly with a sheet of paper before him, and we would all stand around him, waiting. But Yasha? His letters were dejected. Barely letters at all. We encouraged, badgered, warmly patted his back, brought him a pitcher of water, some dried figs, an apple. Allowed him to take a short walk for inspiration. Put our arms around his shoulders again. But Yasha let out a trickle of words here, a trickle there. Not enough. We urged him, explaining that his mother’s packages were extremely helpful to the enterprise. We wanted her to send more so that our yields would grow, but Yasha would say, I don’t want to… I cannot… leave me be… it is impossible….

         Once a fortnight, like the great eagle, Attorney Shokef came to visit. He placed the money in the cash box, explained how the sum was calculated, with premiums and supplements and fines and subtractions and management fees and so on and so forth. He examined Yasha, talked with him, and asked again, “Won’t you go back to Mother?”

        This arrangement persisted for four months. The group was blossoming, there was plenty of money, and every corner of our home was handsome. Only Yasha was wilting. His face grew bronzed, but in the crack of his eyes lay a plea–Release me from myself, from my bonds. What ill did the boy’s soul suffer? I will never know.

        And then one day we were in a playful mood and took a majority decision that was senseless–to use the gift money to hire a bus and go off for a good time in the big city. Singing loudly, we set off on our way, knowing that the next day Attorney Shokef would arrive and our budget would be replenished. After all, a little enjoyment does no harm to anyone. We reached the city and had a wonderful time. A spirit of comradeship. Yasha was with us too, reticent and sullen, but when a hand patted his shoulder a smile would come to his lips. As we looked through a window into an inviting café, we saw a piano on a raised platform inside. The idea came quickly: Yasha must play. He refused at first, but we could not let it go. He lived with us, a member of our group, a supporting pillar–how could we never know the pleasure of his music?

        We sit him at the piano and he stammers, “The piano…it’s not tuned.” The café proprietor is called: It certainly is tuned, he retorts, Batsheva Fried plays her beautiful music here every Tuesday. Finally Yasha places his fingers on the keys. Silence surrounds us. His music is familiar, a simple melody, well-known, easily played on a harmonica. But what can I say…you would not understand. It is his fingers that we watch. Like ten white ploughs they drive on, injuring–injuring the soul. At a certain moment all you desire is to bury your face in your hands and weep. Weep over the ways of the cruel world. Your distress has no remedy, and there can be no peace. You wish to weep because the beauty of the world lives beyond the mountains, and beyond the mountains is your old father’s house, and there sits your mother at the window, longing to see you, her son. Perhaps you will understand….

        That evening Yasha went home with us, but he sat alone. The bus carried us along in utter silence. Where was the day of rejoicing, the day of foolish happiness? Yasha’s music had taken its toll on us and shown us how very, very low our lives were. The bus climbed up the hill and we sank lower, and did not turn to Yasha.

        The next morning was the day of Attorney Shokef’s visit. Yasha lay like a corpse, sickly, seemingly claimed by malaria. He raised his head and asked, When is Attorney Shokef coming? We responded in a merciful chorus, “At nine.” We wanted to bathe Yasha, refresh him, stuff him with medicine and food, give him hot tea. But Yasha refused and took to his bed. At ten minutes before nine the car appeared and we called for Yasha, but the poor boy’s body was already swaying lifelessly from a rope, with no hope of resuscitation.

        What did we do? We ran. We simply ran. Each in a different direction. We left everything behind in the flourishing settlement. One man loaded a goat on his shoulders and took off downhill, another grabbed a till and a woman and left on horseback. Catch as catch can. I fled on foot. For three hours I walked, I almost died by the time I reached a side road. The whole way I carried with me the communal funds in a heavy box. I waited for another twenty hours, almost a whole day and night, until a vehicle from Kibbutz Kotshim came by and picked me up. And here I am before you today, two decades later, a land dealer. All my initial capital was from that cash-box. Twenty years have gone by, and the conscience? Shall we enquire as to its state? Well, life has turned out this way and not another.

        Listen, I will tell you something. When I was a child I had a beloved uncle who brought gifts every time he visited. One day he gave me a little compass and taught me how to find the north. I took the compass with me everywhere I went, and the first thing I did was find out where the north was. In every place the needle showed the north. At school, in the playground, in my room, in Father’s store. On his next visit, my uncle asked me a riddle: If you stand right at the north pole, where will the needle point?

        His question stumped me, and he rejected every answer I could think of. Then he told me: There, in the north pole, the needle will go mad. It will point up, down, sideways, every which way. The compass is good for showing the north in every place on Earth except for the north itself.

        That is what my uncle said. And the moral?

        How easy was Zionism when all it consisted of was longings for Zion. In all the corners of the Diaspora, in Poland and Russia and Yemen and Morocco, the needle pointed the way, showed us what must be done. But from the moment we came here, to Zion, the needle went mad.

The post Israeli Fiction: “In Fact the Heat is Maddening, 1929” appeared first on Jewcy.

The only one of my mother’s melodies to remain is the sing-song of the shamash from the Remuh Synagogue in Krakow, as he passed at night through the streets of the ancient ghetto, Kazimierz, knocking on the window shutters and waking the Jews for selichot, "Yidelekh, yidelekh, tayere koshere yidelekh, shteyen oyf, shteyen oyf lavoydes haboyre uleslikhes." Jews, Jews, dear, kosher Jews, please rise, please rise to worship the Creator and for selichot.

My mother, Rina Govrin (Poser-Laub), left her beloved native city on the eighteenth of October, 1944, on a train going from the Plaszow camp to Auschwitz. Her first husband had been murdered three years before, and her only son had been sent six months earlier with the Plaszow Kinderheim children to the furnaces. My mother never set foot in Krakow again. The memories of her beautiful city, the chestnut-lined boulevards, the river, the castle, the many synagogues, the Hebrew gymnasium, the opera, the tennis courts, the Zionist youth movement–all these filled our Tel Aviv home with the hum of bustling life.  As to what happened after, my mother kept her silence until her death, twenty years ago.

The post Selichot in Krakow appeared first on Jewcy.

1.

“Motherfucker!!!”

Yakov jumped, but the driver’s attention was elsewhere. He spat out a curse and slammed on the gas pedal of the orange Fiesta, which sputtered and struggled up the road to Jerusalem. The wipers were barely able to push aside the rain, and the windshield kept fogging up. The driver pounded the wheel, hoping the blows would get the car moving. “I hope you’re not in a rush,” he muttered.

“I . . . I actually . . .” Yakov began, but immediately conceded for fear of burdening the considerate driver who had picked him up. “No, no,” he said, “It’s ok, I’m in no rush at all,” and turned to look out the window again. After some moaning and groaning the rust-orange hunk of tin succeeded in getting to the straightaway that came after Sho’evah, and then began hurtling down the hill. Yakov looked into the gorge full of milky-white clouds that spilled out onto the road, and it seemed to him as if any moment now the clouds would carry the car upward, sailing of its own free will, no earth under its wheels, until they, Yakov and the anxious driver whose grin now spread from ear to ear, would hover over Ein-Hemed, take off over the Castel, and a few moments later, land in Jerusalem.

You’re getting carried away again, Yakov chastised himself, and looked straight ahead at the windshield, which cleared and fogged up again. You’re flying off into the clouds again.

“I’m not saying don’t read books,” his father would repeat to him. “On the contrary, it’s important to read books. But why stories? Read geography, read math–that’ll help you in life. Stories just get in the way. And if you continue to daydream, if you float off into the clouds while you’re needed here down below, then we’re up the creek.”

Yakov fixed his eyes on the road but the milky clouds and visions of flying kept threatening to blind his spirit. With effort he pushed off the visions and tried to get back to the wet, slippery ground of reality.

It doesn’t matter anymore. He reached his hand to his neck to make sure the top button of his shirt was buttoned. I missed the exam. After that–it’s anybody’s guess what’ll happen. Now, they can send me wherever they want, near or far, to eat dust in the Negev or somewhere even worse, and Mother will be even sicker. Yakov silenced his thoughts, but his Mother’s complaining voice kept resurfacing in them, sucking the life out of him and leaving its usual discomfort in his gut.

2.

A bit over an hour ago, in the middle of the class on Form 630–the form better known as the “Complaint Form”–they came to get him.

It’s awesome, Yakov thought when he first heard of Form 630, how much power these pages contain. Here, with just a slight piece of paper, the Israeli Defense Force is able to maintain order. On the face of it, simple cheap paper, but how much power it gives to whomever fills in the empty lines, and how much sorrow and pain it brings for the one whose name, rank, and serial number are at the top. The Form was no longer just any form in his eyes, but a well-run military trial whose procedures flow together like a well-crafted piece of theater. His fingers already tingled with desire to get his hands on a Form 630, to grasp a pen and fill in the spaces above the lines with letters, and to realize–theory into practice–that the paper actually comes alive: skin, flesh, uniform, and beret, a soldier standing at attention in front of him like an accused man whose guilt screams from his face until proven otherwise. There were moments when Yakov himself was willing to be the accused. He didn’t even care what he’d be accused of as long as he got to see with his own eyes how his form would be filled out, and how the prosecutor and the judge would come together to pronounce judgment on him and turn the wheels of military justice.

Yakov was dreaming again, of course, a military dream this time, since he’d never been court-martialed, and if everything went well, as it had up to now, he never would.

At basic training Yakov finished with distinction and was promoted to Private First Class. Now, at the end of the week, he was about to finish the General Military Clerk Course, again with distinction. His commanders predicted a brilliant career as a military clerk since he was so good at filling out all the forms he had learned about in the course, and in beautiful penmanship too, just as he had done for his school’s Decorations Committee and for the lists he had prepared for the post office in Baka’a.

Except that on that rainy, wintry morning there was a problem which kept him standing at erect attention, despite the fact that his commander had already ordered him at ease. Yakov didn’t know what the problem was, but his uniformed imagination was already thinking that perhaps he had committed a felony according to the Code of Military Justice and was about to be slapped with a 630.

Yakov, who usually walked around not knowing what to do with his long arms, or how those long stilts called legs should carry his lanky body, was now standing at soldierly attention. Lieutenant Naftali, a squat man who had grown himself a gut and a huge rear end from sitting too long on the throne of command at the Military Clerk Course, was shifting behind his desk uncomfortably, as if he were sitting on an ever-rising ball of dough.

For a long while Naftali cleared his throat, rustled and ruffled the forms on the desk in front of him, tried to look up now and then at Yakov’s eyes, got up and looked out the window at the rain soaking the bald patch of grass outside his office, until finally, with all possible expressions of discomfort exhausted, the intercom buzzed.

“I told you not to disturb me,” Lieutenant Naftali thundered at his secretary, while secretly thanking her for saving him from the dark, human aspects of his job.

“Sorry, the Northern District HQ Officer of Manpower and Personnel’s secretary called. Itch’ele keeps insisting. He needs a soldier.”

It was as if Naftali had been waiting for this moment. Suddenly, his little body grew tall and widened considerably, diminishing the proportion of his rear end to his chest. Now his face glowed with charisma, and he said, quietly yet unequivocally, as if he were a full Colonel or at least a Captain, “Tell the Northern District HQ Officer of Manpower and Personnel’s secretary that even if the Chief of Staff calls me personally, and the Minister of Defense comes down here, and the Prime Minister himself calls me into his office, Lieutenant Colonel Itche’le is not getting a soldier. Period.”

Lieutenant Naftali was silent for a moment and then added softly, “No. I will tell her myself. It’s not her fault. Tell her I’ll call her later.”

“That’s what I thought.” The secretary’s voice sounded satisfied and she hung up.

Slowly Lieutenant Naftali shrank back to his natural size while he fidgeted with his fingers and hunched his shoulders, until finally, before the figure of the charismatic commander crumbled completely, he let out, “Ezra called.”

3.

Yakov shuddered. Father must have cursed out Ezra in his lousy Yiddish, and Ezra, without playing any games, called Lieutenant Colonel Motti, who spoke with Lieutenant Naftali, and now they’re kicking him out of the course and he won’t serve close to home. They’ll throw him into one of those horrible places Ezra told him about, and Mother will make everyone’s life miserable.

“You need to go home,” said Lieutenant Naftali. That’s it. And with that the course ended and Yakov’s magnificent military career in the Israeli Defense Forces was over.

“But, Sir,” Yakov was fighting for his life, “there’re only three more days to the end of the course, and I . . .”

Lieutenant Naftali looked at the soldier standing in front of him, the one they called “Brakes,” whom Ezra, the reservist at the School for Clerks, had been driving him crazy about, and for a long moment he was at a loss. He looked over the impeccably shaven Private First Class, whose shoes were every Master Sergeant’s dream, whose Class As were dangerously starched, and whose pant folds were as sharp as Aaron the military barber’s razor blades. Gradually, he came back to his senses.

“Soldier!” he barked in relief. He was more comfortable barking at his soldiers than bearing non-military messages. “You’re going home. Period.”

“Yes, Sir,” Yakov replied like a scolded child. Lieutenant Naftali flexed all of his soft muscles.

“You see, Zilberstein,” his voice cracked a bit, “Your mother is sick. Very sick. You have to go home.”

Yakov gave out a chuckle of relief and breathed easier.

“Soldier!” Lieutenant Naftali’s voice hardened again.

“No, Sir.” Yakov suddenly startled himself from fear of his commander. “You see, my mother is very attached to me, and when she misses me she gets sick, and my father goes to Ezra and Ezra calls the army, Sir.” Without being granted an answer, Yakov pressed his luck. “Maybe I can finish the course first, and then, on the weekend, maybe, I’ll go home?”

Lieutenant Naftali looked at Yakov suspiciously. Nineteen out of twenty soldiers would request leave because their grandmother had died for the third time, and here is this Brakes who not only doesn’t jump at the chance for an unexpected leave, but also haggles, almost disrespectfully, for the chance to complete the course.

“Ezra called,” said Lieutenant Naftali abruptly, “He says it’s serious.”

The intercom buzzed.

“Yes, Yafit.”

“They called from the Commemoration Committee about Zvika’s memorial room.”

Naftali’s entire body stiffened. Yakov’s too. It hadn’t been two months since Zvika was killed in Lebanon and already he was a legend at the School for Clerks. After his death all the school commanders seemed to stand taller, and even Yakov felt uncomfortable about serving close to home.

“Tell them they’ll finish painting today.” Lieutenant Naftali gathered his wits, “They can come tomorrow. We’ll organize everything.”

The monument and the memorial room for instructor Zvika, the only clerk in the history of the school to die in combat, seemed like small potatoes to Lieutenant Naftali compared to the difficulty he was having talking to the miserable trainee standing before him.

“Go home, soldier,” he commanded. “If everything is ok, come back tonight, tomorrow, whenever you can.”

“Maybe . . .”

“Go home, soldier. One-two-three, move!”

4.

The driver of the Fiesta floored the gas pedal, forcing the car to climb the Castel in third gear. “Hauls ass, eh?” he yelled.

Yakov didn’t know what to say. It seemed to him that not only wasn’t the car moving forward, but that it slid backward on the water that covered the road.

“Dammit,” the generous driver pounded the wheel again, his other hand shifted gears. “Then at least climb in second!” The car advanced all right, but at a speed no faster than a quick walk.

“You’re not laughing, eh?” said the driver suspiciously.

“Laughing?” Yakov was shocked. “I don’t know from cars,” he lied apologetically.

“Ahhh,” the driver relaxed. “Bought it yesterday. It’ll climb the Castel in fourth, he swore to me, the seller, and in another second I’ll be down to first.”

Yakov tried to calm his benefactor. “My father says that with cars you need lots of luck and lots of money.”

“You’re not laughing, eh?”

“No,” said Yakov, and let out an embarrassed snicker. What’s to laugh about? “I don’t know from cars,” he lied again. First thing you have to check is the compression, he remembered Nathan, their mechanic neighbor saying. The driver looked at Yakov, and Yakov tried as hard as he could to display a conciliatory smile. But the driver would not be placated..

“Mmmmmotherfffffuckkkkker.” The driver pulled off to the shoulder just as they got to the top of the Castel. “Get out.” Yakov stared at the driver, looking for a hint of the joke he wasn’t getting. All the generosity, the charm, and the grace that Yakov attributed to the driver were now gone. The driver’s eyes bulged with rage.

“Get out, I said!” he yelled. “Get out. You think I gave you a lift so you could laugh in my face, you piece of shit!” Yakov’s hand searched hesitantly for the handle. I wasn’t laughing, he wanted to say, not only so he wouldn’t kick him out, but also because he felt wrongly accused. But the driver’s expression made it clear he better not say another word. He got out, and the moment the door slammed, the car zoomed forward and started racing downhill.

5.

Tell me, Brakes,” asked Lieutenant Naftali after Yakov saluted and turned to leave, “this Ezra, what’s he to you?”

Yakov was embarrassed. “Ezra,” he stammered, “he . . . I worked for him at the post office.”

“Not a relative of yours?”

“No.”

“And Lieutenant Colonel Motti?”

“Sir?”

“Lieutenant Colonel Motti, the branch commander, he’s no relative either?”

“No, Sir.”

“I see.”

Yakov waited for Lieutenant Naftali to dismiss him.

“Ok,” said Lieutenant Naftali energetically, finally reclaiming the staff of command. “Next time your mother gets sick or misses you, or wants to give you a kiss, let her do it through the local HQ. And if she doesn’t like it, let her go through the Chief of Staff. Clear?”

“Yes, Sir?” Yakov didn’t understand a thing.

“Dismissed!”

When Yakov reached the turn to Motza he was already soaked and his body trembled from cold. His beret looked like an upside-down mushroom, his clothes were stained with starch, the sharp crease in his pants lost its edge, and the military sweater, which his mother told him never to take off, had rivulets dripping from it. Only his shoes still shined, deflecting the heavy raindrops onto the road.

What the hell are you thinking? Fists of frustration pounded his guts. How can I get assigned close to home if I don’t finish the course? What do you want from me? I’m only doing this for you. Everyone gets it. Why can’t you?

And everyone did get it. Even the Major at the Induction Center.

“Well, soldier,” the older, almost elderly Major tried to sound pleasant while taking Yakov’s file into his hands, “how do you like our IDF?”

Yakov didn’t know what he was expected to say.

“Is this right?” The Major showed the file to a woman dressed in civilian clothes who sat beside him. The woman nodded.

“We checked twice,” she said.

“Well, soldier,” the Major asked in a fake French accent, “what would you like to do for ze countrie?” The woman giggled.

“I need to be a clerk, Sir.”

The Major looked at Yakov, amused.

“A clerk, soldier? Why not a Commander, soldier? Why not the Chief of Staff?” Yakov was silent. “According to this, soldier,” said the Major with an air of secrecy, “you can be anything you want. Anything you want, soldier!”

Yakov wanted to say that everything was settled since Ezra had already spoken with Lieutenant Colonel Motti and with Lieutenant Naftali, but the Major attacked again.

“You never wanted to be a pilot? Or at least,” he lowered his voice while tapping the file with his finger, “a computer programmer?”

“I have to be a clerk, Sir,” Yakov repeated his recitation, not hearing the squeak of the gate opened wide for him by the Major.

“I don’t get it,” he turned to the woman. She took the file and started rifling through its many documents. “Ah,” she finally said, “here it is.”

The Major looked at the document, hemmed and hawed with disappointment, replaced all the documents into the file, and prepared to jot down his conclusions.

“Ok, ok, only son, and the Holocaust and all that, but you, soldier,” the Major was curious, “what do you want?”

Yakov wasn’t ready for this question. Again and again Ezra had coached him on the answers he needed to give every time he found himself standing in front of an officer like this Major.

“I have to be a clerk,” Yakov repeated as if possessed.

“Yes, but . . .” the Major insisted and then immediately gave up. “Yes, I suppose you really have to be a clerk,” he said dryly.

Now, in the pouring rain, thinking about the Major’s tone made him uneasy for the first time since he had enlisted. Kind at first, it had even seemed to Yakov as if he might well walk around his desk to give him a hug. And then? What did he mean, “You can be anything you want.” What’s to want? I want to be a clerk, Yakov said to himself, but the words didn’t sound quite right. I have to be a clerk. That’s it.

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