Can Two Walk Together?

London, 1934 — two of the great Zionist leaders, Ben Gurion and Jabotinsky — meet to discuss the character of the future Jewish State

Jabotinsky: (pouring for him) Careful. This is very strong vodka sent over by a priest in the Urals. Only this can stoke the fires of my soul when I’m writing.

Ben Gurion: Since when does your soul need stoking with vodka to produce another attack on me and my party? I though your writing was effortless.

Jabotinsky: True, attacking you and your party I can do in my sleep. But look, this is Russian, not Hebrew (shows him the papers) and it belongs to my alternative universe, my novel. My solace and refuge from the bickerings of the Jews. Read more

Proximity Talks

Runner

From a short story appearing here for the first time in English

Translated by Jessica Cohen

More than half a kilometer lies behind you and still you show no physical signs, your pulse holds steady at a moderate rate, you sweat only lightly, and although you are wearing heavy army boots instead of your running shoes, and the cold and hunger will doubtless take their toll further down the road, you will probably keep running like this, without stopping even for a moment, and your footsteps will be audible on the asphalt throughout the night from here all the way to the lights of Jerusalem, Read more

Janus in Babylon

Translated by Tess Lewis

Language sets borders.

Language designates border crossings.

Language marks a new homeland, like a flag planted on a foreign planet. People can always argue later whether or not the shadow cast by the flag in the documentary photographs is accurate or whether it is all a fake.

Few things reveal a loss of identity or a new beginning as clearly as language does.

I am a shape-shifter, a linguistic Oboroten*, a changeling my parents snuck into the immigration cradle, sharp- tongued and inscrutable and manipulative, drilled from earliest childhood in switching from one linguistic register to another with no concern for collateral damage: an interpreter and a bringer of chaos. Read more

Esther’s Version

Chapter 9 Verse 29:

Queen Esther, daughter of Avichayil,and Mordechai the Jew, wrote about the enormity of all the miracles that established the holiday.

What you read every year in that scroll? Not my version, which is too bad for you.The literary aftermath is a story in itself:

It was about a month after the hubbub, the fighting and killing and burying the poor dead gentiles; Uncle Morty came to my chambers and told me to write an executive summary about what happened, with a shout out to him and how the Jews owed him their lives. He was in a big rush, too; he wanted copy to send with his letter to the landsman, asking for donations and sponsorships for the first annual Purim memorial donor dinner.

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Intruders

Since you ask: the girl who got mixed up in the demonstration today, the one who arrived late, is called Sandra, and she’s from Los Angeles. She came here as a civil rights volunteer, an activist. There was no other reason for her to come—she wasn’t a tourist or an immigrant or part of an exchange system. Her parents, she said, were Zionists—fundraising there and holidays here, as she put it—so, of course, she had to take the opposite line. She said she’d swallowed all the Zionist propaganda until she got to college and started reading the papers and hanging out with people who knew the truth about the occupation.
It was a mistake to let her into our group. It’s difficult to keep people out when they want to help—there aren’t many volunteers these days—but I still think we didn’t need her. She could have gone to a demonstration in town, or gone back home to the States to wave banners against wars somewhere else. In a focussed group like ours, we need people who know the background, who understand the issues and who’ve lived with them for years, not someone who got involved with us on a kind of moral safari.

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Bad Karma

‘Fifteen shekels a month can guarantee your daughter one hundred thousand in the event of your death. Do you know what a difference one hundred thousand can make to a young orphan? It’s exactly the difference between life as a lawyer and as a receptionist in a dentist’s office.’

Since the accident, Oshri had been selling policies like crazy. It wasn’t clear whether this had to do with his slight limp or with the paralysis in his right arm, but people who’d sit through an appointment with him would take it all in, and buy everything he had to offer: life insurance, loss of earning power, complementary health insurance, you name it. At first Oshri kept recycling the one about the Yemenite who was run over by an ice cream truck the very day he bought his policy, on his way to pick up his daughter from kindergarten, or the one about the guy from the suburbs who’d laughed when Oshri had offered him health insurance and one month later called in tears, having just received a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. Read more

United

On the fifteenth day of October the Festival of Judaism began. Its slogan — draped on banners across the entrance and printed on the front of glossy Souvenir Brochures — was ‘the centre of Jewish life is the family home’. In celebration of this theme, the central exhibition of the festival was a Jewish Family Home and excitingly (and this was where bringing in the new young expo team, full of flashy headline-grabbing ideas had really paid off) for the entire duration of the festival, a real authentic Jewish family would be living in the space.

It was quite a coup, one that had attracted the attention not just of the Jewish press, or the British press, but even the worldwide media. Shlomo Luei, Director of the Festival, appeared blinking on various international news feeds. ‘It seemed the natural progression,’ he said. ‘For years, we’ve had demonstrations at the Festival of various aspects of traditional Jewish life that people no longer do at home: koshering chickens, baking challa, taking clothing apart to separate wool and linen and so on. This year we wanted to present a much fuller picture of that ancient way of life; we were very lucky that the Blattsteins  agreed to take part.’ Read more

Shadow Play

On summer evenings, Uncle Nathan used to put on shadow plays. With nothing but ten fingers and a beam of light against a plain white wall, he astounded us with lions and monkeys, alligators and train engines. All eyes watched, riveted, when the silhouette magic began. He didn’t ask for much — a wall, a light. In the back rows of wedding halls, or when holiday dinners were winding down, his fans would gather to marvel: a butterfly, an antelope, Theodor Herzl, a turtle.

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My Man Malamud

I never met him. I know exactly where I was standing when I heard he was dead. It was in March 1986 and a friend came in to tell me that the Jewish American novelist I admired had died. ‘Saul Bellow,’ he said, then paused, ‘No, Bernard Malamud’, he corrected himself.

It was a Malamud moment — mainly serious, half comic, also awkward. I remember I thought to myself: I will never get to meet him now, though I had never before thought of doing so. Malamud, not Bellow, was my man. In July 2005 I was sitting in the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, reading my way through the Malamud archive there and read this in a notebook entry for 21 October 1976: ‘Bellow gets Nobel Prize. I win $24.25 in poker.’ This was the little man, the one who always felt he came second, who, while shaving, would mutter unconvincingly to himself in the mirror, ‘Someday I’m going to win.’ He had known no real success until he published his first novel at the age of 38. I can guess what he would have said the day I heard I was shortlisted for the Wingate Prize. But at least it wasn’t alongside a biography of Saul Bellow. Read more