The notion that Jewish men are somehow less masculine than their gentile counterparts is an old anti-Semitic trope: Jewish men menstruate, medieval anti-Semites asserted, and need periodic top-ups of human blood.The ancient Greeks abhorred circumcision, and Antiochus IV, the Seleucid king, tried to have it banned. ‘The castration complex,’ said Freud, ‘is the deepest unconscious root of anti-Semitism; for even in the nursery little boys hear that a Jew has something cut off his penis—a piece of his penis, they think—and this gives them the right to despise Jews.’

No one has done more to spread the notion that Jewish men are not real men than Otto Weininger, the fin de siècle Viennese philosopher who divided humanity into two types:masculine and feminine. His distinction was based not upon biology but temperament, thus the world was peopled by masculine women and feminine men.Weininger (who converted to Christianity) conflates what he calls feminine traits (cowardliness, passivity, amorality, unreason and sex) with ‘Jewishness’. Genius, naturally, is Christian—or, to be more precise, Aryan. He excoriates Judaism, attributing to it all the faults he finds with modernity—capitalism, materialism, Marxism, amorality, decadence, deracination, decline. Avoiding both the ‘biological’ racism of the Nazis that followed in his wake and the religious prejudice that preceded him,Weininger identifies Judaism as ‘a tendency of the mind, as a psychological constitution which is a possibility for all mankind, but which has become actual in the most conspicuous fashion amongst the Jews.’ In his magnum opus, Sex and Character, he describes the paradig- matic feminised Jew. It bears an uncanny, albeit jaundiced, resemblance to The Herring Wonder, the boxing moniker of cult novelist Jonathan Ames.

Jonathan Ames—I hesitate, post-Baudrillard, to say the ‘real’ Ames, so let’s just call him the flesh and blood Ames— made his literary debut in 1989 with I Pass Like Night, the edgy, blackly funny story of Alexander Vine, a young doorman who trawls Manhattan’s underworld for sex.The novel, written in a non-linear ‘mosaic’ style, was published when Ames was 25 and established him as the successor to ultra-cool WASP doomster Brett Easton Ellis—all but inevitable given his age and the book’s hardcore sex scenes. He was compared to JD Salinger and Phillip Roth called Alexander Vine ‘a cross between Jean Genet and Holden Caulfield in the age of AIDS’. A decade later Ames wrote The Extra Man, a novel which catapulted more low-life male casualties into the pantheon of literary characters: Louis Ives, a disgraced cross-dressing schoolteacher, shares a shabby New York apartment with Henry Harrison, a flamboyant would-be playwright who supports himself financially as an ‘extra man’ (a companion to moneyed elderly women). Like Vine, Ives is a sex junkie who spends his nights consorting with transsexual prostitutes. In a further Weiningerian twist, Ives cultivates good manners and aspires to be the perfect English gentleman, ‘a sort of a Jewish Duke of Windsor’. According to Weininger, the English are less manly than Aryans though not as bad as Jews, and, unlike Jews and women, capable of being considered ‘gentlemen’. When Ives ruminates on the impossibility of being a gentleman and a Jew he could very well be talking to Weininger. ‘There were no such Jewish [gentlemen] characters in any of [the books he reads], and to make things worse, all my favourite authors, I always found out, were heart-breakingly anti-Semitic. I worshipped them and they wouldn’t have even liked me. So their anti-Semitism and my Semitism were the major flaws in my young gentleman fantasy, but I tried not to think about these things most of the time.’

A decade later Ames published his third novel, Wake Up, Sir!, in which alcoholic writer Alan Blair checks himself into a Saratoga Springs artists’ colony populated by an assortment of oddballs. Alan Blair is virtually identical to Jonathan A., the hero of Ames’s graphic novel The Alcoholic (drawn by Dean Haspiel), and readers will recognise not only his trademark perversions, afflictions and biographical details (Jewish, New Jersey upbringing) but also his peculiar physiognomy—the pale skin, white, near invisible eyebrows, closely cropped hair disguising a vanishing hairline and curved nose. Like Ives, Alan Blair also suffers delusions of Englishness, although this time it is not the delusion that he is a gentleman but the delusion that he is constantly attended to by a gentleman’s gentleman: a phantom Wodehousian butler called—what else?—Jeeves, who gives him succour and arch, but practical, advice. Once again, the disconnect between the romantic longing for a genteel way of life and the sobering reality of a dipsoma- niacal New Jersey Jew on a self-destructive bender receives satirical treatment. ‘Satire,’ says Weininger, ‘is essentially intolerant, and is congruous with the disposition of the Jew and the woman.’

Ames belongs to a long tradition of self-referential writers and comedians. He credits Kerouac, Hunter Thompson and other writers whose legends precede their art with his own ‘fantasy of being a writer’. Stories abound of Ames living out various writer fantasies, notably his ‘Hemingway phase’, in which his nose got broken in a bar fight, and his Fitzgerald fantasy, in which he adopted the sartorial style and alcoholic excesses of F. Scott Fitzgerald. These fantasies are part of a more persistent hard-man fantasy which Ames plays out through his curious boxing career, undermining the machismo of the violent sport by fighting under the moniker ‘The Herring Wonder’, while his fans waved home-made herrings made from tinfoil and cardboard.

‘The Jew,’ says Weininger, ‘is ready to be witty only at his own expense or on sexual things.’An uncharitable critic might say the same of Ames. Send him on an assignment, as GQ did, to cover the gentrification of New York’s Meatpacking district and he’ll tell you of an encounter there thirteen years earlier with a transsexual streetwalker. Give him a column in the New York Press and he’ll tell you about his pre-teen trouble with an undescended left testicle, or the nice French woman doctor who broke his heart when she smiled as she dipped his penis in brown liquid to get rid of his genital wart, or even the Mangina, a prêt-a-porter prosthetic vagina for men created by his performance artist friend Patrick Bucklew (a.k.a. Harry Chandler). But his emasculation, according to Weininger, begins before all this, in the very moment in which he picks up his reporter’s notebook:‘The congruity between Jews and women,’ he writes, ‘further reveals itself in the extreme adaptability of the Jews, in their great talent for journalism.’

Bored to Death, an HBO comedy series recently broadcast on Sky Atlantic, stars Jason Schwartzman as Jonathan Ames, a troubled writer (drinks, drugs and an overactive libido) who moonlights as an unlicensed private investigator. The show was based on a short story of the same name about a troubled writer named Jonathan Ames whose stint as an unlicensed P.I. ends as darkly as a David Goodis or Jim Thompson paperback. The show and the hardboiled tale were written by Jonathan Ames, a troubled writer who has never worked as a private eye. ‘The psychological contents of the Jewish mind are always double or multiple,’ writes Weininger. As the title of the anthology where you can find the story of Jonathan Ames, the troubled writer who poses as something he is not, puts it, The Double Life Is Twice As Good.

Bored To Death series 1 is on Sky Atlantic at 10pm on Mondays. The new second series will be on Atlantic later in the year

Sean Shapiro is a freelance journalist. He and co-editor Dominic Lee founded the (now defunct) South African culture magazine, MIMIzine. He is currently working on a comic book adaptation of Oliver Onion’s classic ghost story, Benlian.

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, and you can listen to them with the relief of knowing they are your own feet, and the familiar tranquility of running—or rather, the familiar oblivion of running—will ease the burden of the next few hours, the fear of what lies hidden in the villages on either side of the road, and the damp, sticky coolness of the wind, and the burn of the smoldering red ember in your gut, and you know how the precise rhythm of your steps will translate into syllables and words and melodies, you know this from the hundreds of races and meets and runs, and although the conditions tonight are especially harsh, harsher than ever before perhaps, still your victory is assured, because tonight you will conquer the urge to run, or at least, with the sharp knife of night air that rips through your lungs, you will dismember the viperous tuber that has impelled you to run for over three years now, and all you must do is stick to the confident, manly beat of five and slide yourself, head and rifle, down into the stupefying motion of shin and thigh, using the centrifugal force to drown the needle-thoughts and the pin-thoughts and the rhythmic beat of the ember, so that the sight of her merciful-blue eyes or the memory of her fingers singeing your skin only ten minutes ago might surface in the watery expanse of your mind and float away, and you will grip the road with your feet again and again, propelling your body ahead with a broad but measured step, and maintain your breath to the beat of five so that you will not stop even for one moment on this long road that winds among Arab villages and tiny green plots and grapevines, and onward through the village of Sho’efat that sleeps with its eyes open, and you will run further down the narrow, pitted road to Jerusalem, which will blink at you in bewilderment with its nocturnal amber stoplights, and silently you will glide along the treeless boulevards of stone, and you will weave through the city like its walls aglow in the dark until you find the riverbed that leads to the sea, and even if you go less than half the way, it does not matter because tonight you are both the runner and the finish line, and the results are predetermined, yet still you will keep running as hard as your lungs allow, and in the past few minutes you have covered over one and a half kilometers, and at first, when you had just left the boy’s home, you moved in total blindness, staggering on your dizzy, disobedient feet, but then they found their natural rhythm and supported your body from below, and you were carried along like an animated being shedding perfect tears of glass, on your strong muscles that rescued you efficiently from the core of anguish that needed three people to bear it, and awakened your lungs to the rhythm and your blood to the beat, and it was they who led you confidently past the headquarters’ huts and the roll-call yard and the mess-hall, and from there, skipping quietly and mechanically over the slack rope at the camp’s entrance, to the main road that leads to Jerusalem, and it will take several minutes to accustom yourself to the idea that it is your body that is now exposed to the night winds and the odors of gasoline and burnt rubber that waft up from the road rushing beneath your shoes, and to the faint whispers coming from the villages that huddle as you pass them by, but this thought is obstructive and weakening and you will banish it from your heart and continue to run along the yellow line on the side of the road and fix your gaze on the drops of yellow that dance through the damned tears until you no longer know whether they are the village lights or only the stripe refracted in your tears, and in fact it is of no importance so long as you can flood them with rhythmic barrages of the blueness of the boy’s cousin’s eyes when she looked at you, and that was what sequestered you from his room only moments ago, wading through the turbid nightmare that erupted inside your head, fleeing, seduced like a moth by the lights, sacrificed with every step on the altar of the keen magnet that patiently waits behind you and inside you always. Foot road shin breath pause, air inhaled and compressed, one two three four five, breathe, everything is under control, including the usual stab of pain, run, launch words into the air and fly on them, or even just meaningless fragments of syllables, like the ones Yoash emitted in his final attempt to trap you, or perhaps the boy’s secret words that had no fixed meaning, and the more you keep speaking into yourself the more the foreign voices from outside will die down, the bitter bray of a donkey or the distant engine of a car, and you will be able to hear her voice better, even the loathsome giggles she emitted at first, so long as you understand her eyes, even if the cost is the rhythmic pain of the ember that has glowed in your innards for the past three and a half years, whose pale radiance you sometimes imagine you can see through the layers of flesh and skin, from that spot where it began to whisper many years ago, though only your mother’s X-ray eyes noticed, for she told you explicitly when she turned off the engine outside Yoash’s house and looked at you in the rearview mirror that even though she and Yoash believed this was merely a temporary crisis, it was still best to try and make good use of this unpleasant situation because, after all, we are thinking-people, and we must vigorously confront any obstacle or confusion we encounter and remove its sting by profoundly, and sometimes painfully, scrutinising the facts and the deeds, and it is possible, and please bear in mind that she does not say these things decisively, that your developmental pace up to now, all your accomplishments and successes throughout your fifteen years, have come too fast, perhaps, and have posed a certain danger to your true inner rhythm, to your personality structure, and she has guessed these difficult things, she has known them, she has preserved them in her mind for many years without wanting to utter them, but then this temporary, foolish crisis came along,

The familiar tranquility of running—or rather, the familiar oblivion of running—will ease the burden of the next few hours, the fear of what lies hidden in the villages on either side of the road

and with it the time to say these things, and she will tell you one more thing now, because this evening she sees you are willing to listen, which might be a sign of things to come, so she will tell you that life, son, is a long-distance run, and you have perhaps not paced yourself correctly, and so you have stumbled a little, and how fortunate that you have parents who love you and care for you and understand you, who are willing to give you any assistance, and if you let us help you, we will, and so now get out of the car and go into Yoash’s house and do not cheat him and turn off the light he leaves on for you, because I will be sitting here in this car just like I have done every Sunday and Thursday for the past year, week after week, from now until nine this evening, one whole hour, and I will wait for you to come back and I will watch the house, and I do not want to see the lights go off as soon as you go in, not only because it is unfair to Yoash, who believes there is a light on in the room, but because the light will force you to think, son, to be alert and vigilant, and that is also part of the profound scrutiny which I spoke of, and now go, I will wait. She is sleeping now, my mother. Every night at exactly midnight she covers her typewriter. Then she stretches, and from my room I hear a short sigh of pleasure. Now will come the rhythmic breaths.Ten sit-ups to strengthen her aching back. A few seconds of relaxation. Here come the dull clicking sounds. Sitting in her study, she cracks the joints of every finger. Father calls it ‘driving the nails in the day’s coffin,’ but she says it’s just the daily maintenance of her work tools. Everything that happens from then on is predictable too, and for that reason transfixes me: the hum of the electric toothbrush, the deep gargling of water in her throat, the decisive nose-blowing, the final rituals of the night. At twelve-thirty she is asleep, utterly indifferent to the staccato echoes of her routines still oscillating between the walls of the house.

All your accomplishments and successes throughout your fifteen years, have come too
fast, perhaps, and have posed a certain danger to your true inner rhythm, to your personality structure

Years ago a radio interviewer asked her if she wrote in the wee hours of the night,‘which are so felicitous for contemplations.’ Mother told him nights were for sleeping. In my room I would count by my heartbeats the time that passed from the moment they wished each other good night until I heard the sounds of her gentle snoring. Then Father would turn the light off and roll over in bed. A few hours later, on my way to the bathroom, I would look at them. Two pale beans in their pods on either side of the bed. I could have gone in and slept between them and they would never have sensed me. Me and another child. But always, as I stood there in wonderment, my mother would suddenly growl at me in the dark to go back to my bed at once. She always saw me, and I was never surprised—she had said more than once, after all, and often promised: Mother will see you wherever you are, son.
Now you must pretend, you must imagine, that this is a race—let’s say, the race for the Chief of Staff cup that will be held in a week, or next month’s inter-command track and field event, and in any case the silence around you is extremely sharp, the roar of the crowd and the chatter of the politicos and the grating songs over the loudspeakers all fade away after the third or fourth lap, replaced by the blood drumming in your ears, and the delicate pearls of thought shine their light, the events observed from their insides, the embered whispers, and all that time your feet drum a regular beat, and on the fifth step, where the inhalation ends, there will always be one breathless second, and again the five exhalation steps, and now too, in the lucid quiet around you, there is no one to surmise that this is not one of your public runs, that the low, tangled bushes are not coaches squatting by the side of the track, that the pale rocks are not referees or slightly bemused overweight clerks, and how fortunate that thus far, and it’s already been more than fifteen minutes, not a single car has driven past to violate the darkness, and you can keep running in peace, engulfing the night with your transparent web, like you used to do when you had only just learned of the serenity that comes with running, and together with your father you would spin around your childhood neighbourhood, make its streets gallop beneath your shoes, envelop it in the thin mesh of fibres you secreted from your brain, and after you had left him, tired and chuckling and defeated, at the doorway to your house, you would assail the side streets and the alleyways again like a silent bat, traverse the yards and the men and the women and the children, suffocate in the dense bubbles of their dreams and their strenuous groans, and not for a single moment did you wonder why you did this over and over again or what the meaning of this new pleasure was, except that every night, at an almost fixed time, you were once again unable to tolerate the tapping of the typewriter and the drumming of your father’s fingers on his lap while he listened to his choral LPs on headphones, and you had to get out immediately, you had to run even before you had finished tying the shoelaces of your sneakers properly, to conquer your secret routes again, and this thing that you were unable to explain to your mother when she wondered, and wondered again, and said that although she did not discount healthful athletic activity in and of itself, for some reason your new physical enjoyment, your physical addiction, if she were being accurate, seemed to her the furthest thing possible from healthful, and while she did not wish to judge in matters she did not understand, she had to tell you that there was a certain brutishness in the pleasure you derived from moving your feet, but, as she said, perhaps she simply did not understand it, and if you could ever manage to explain yourself clearly without stuttering, you might convince her, because, after all, you know she always admits her mistakes.
Here comes the first car, floating silently round a distant bend, its headlights striking the sky and the hills, and you must slow down a little and be prepared to slip onto the side of the road, where you will freeze like a stone or a rusty piece of iron junk, but for now, as long as it is distant, as long as it is silent, it’s best to keep running because the night is short and the work is plentiful, and the light of day, this you know already, will destroy you with its evil rays, its warmth will dissolve your nocturnal powers and thwart your painful sallies from the misty night into the inner darkness, where you are still allowed to maintain that which exists and the reddish ember does not trouble you with unfamiliar burns, because in the past three and a half years you have kicked it onto hundreds of asphalt strips and race tracks and sandy beaches, and you have dulled its sting along the imaginary elliptical line you ran around in stadia and huge sports arenas, and you have diluted its pungency in your classmates’ seething whirlwinds of joy, and the proud cheers of unfamiliar soldiers from your camp, and the slaps on the back from fellow athletes, so that you can now deceive yourself, you can believe that within you there lies a darkness almost like the one that teemed between your father’s hands when he allowed you to peek excitedly, or like the kind in the boy’s closet, where he took you so that you could teach him the double-mirror game, and even as your glazed reflections danced in front of you, turning you both into an intangible vision, even then you did not ask him what was troubling him, and in fact you never asked him a thing, because you knew very well how injurious the tone of the question would be, having spent the last three and a half years in a furious and exhausting effort to defend yourself against the stinging questions they dug into you, and even now you cannot rid yourself of those impenetrable tunes, which you gratingly repeat to yourself to the beat of five every time you run, what’s happening to you, what’s gotten into you, where did we go wrong, who is to blame, and over and over again those words, that slashing motion, alighting from the lower depths of guile and reaching upwards, where they ram into your refusal, stubbornly gather the shards of their fall and glide upwards again, this time carrying demanding hostility, you are to blame, only you, you hide, you lie, and for a deceptive blink of an eye they let you be, the kind and merciful people, and consult with one another, and they are so impertinent that they do not hide their intentions from you, they genially explain their methods and approaches, all with the friendliest and lightest of

It’s best to keep running because the night is short and the work is plentiful, and the light of day, this you know already, will destroy you with its evil rays, its warmth will dissolve your nocturnal powers

attitudes, as though you were their partner, fighting on the same side, because what do they want, after all, they do not wish to harm you, or to hurt you, God forbid, their only desire is to help you, to lance the distress you harbour and allow it to trickle out so that you can go back to being as you were, and again and again they sigh involuntarily when they remember the child you were, such a talented boy, who won over the hearts of adults and children with his special wit, his sense of humour, which was not at all childish, and with his wondrously quick mind, but that is not what we are discussing now, not at all, and that, they tell you audaciously, is something we will surely come to as we continue our interesting conversations with you, and at this stage we are willing to settle for the bare minimum: that you talk to us, that you give some clue about what happened to you or what it is that you fear so much, and in fact, that you stop walking among us like a bitter and burdensome riddle. But pay attention, the yellow headlights are emerging around the bend too quickly, throw yourself to the side, be careful, you almost hit the rock, nicely done, and now keep running, do not stop even for a moment and do not look back, carry me, feet, one two three four five inhalation, one two three four five, like a silent glowing owl the Mercedes cut through the night, and in the illumined chamber you saw a fat Arab man with a cigar in his mouth and next to him a woman, not young, perhaps a little tipsy, who laughed inaudibly, and now the single molecule of light has melted into the mountains like a hovering firefly, leaving in its wake the odour of burnt gasoline and cigar smoke and women’s perfume.

Excerpt from Runner (title story from the collection Runner, 1983)

David Grossman was born in Jerusalem on January 25, 1954 and studied philosophy and theatre at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is one of the leading Israeli writers of his generation, and the author of numerous pieces of fiction, nonfiction and children’s literature. His work has been translated into 25 languages around the world.

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.

Even as a young child, I was, like all emigrant children, already skilled in blackmail and in using others. A captive word queen, imprisoned by her own court.The hierarchy flips unexpectedly; the parents are dependent on their children. This gives the child an unfathomable sense of power and impotence, being still at the mercy of parents, who, nonetheless, could not manage without her, who gasp for words like fish out of water.

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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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If you knew the damage she did today…. I wasn’t impressed by the tantrum, either, all part of the act. The village guy came off worse than she did, believe me—poor fellow—and we can’t ever go back there now. If this episode gets known it could make us notorious, let alone what it does to the people we’re trying to help. Let’s hope it gets forgotten as quickly as possible. So leave that shot out of the film, all right? Though I’m sure she’d be pleased if you left it in. Thanks. All right, I’ll explain. What Sandra really wanted, I think, was a good story to take back to her friends at college, about how she joined this group fighting apartheid and went out with them to back up the Palestinians who were resisting the occupation. It was all about her, not about us and what we were trying to do. At first we liked her. She had a lot of energy and she said she’d taught herself some Arabic and as there was only one other person in the group who knew the language we suggested she might join us. We thought she’d be useful when we went to the military courts.
Someone had told her that we’d adopted this village and wrote reports we sent to the army. Sometimes our lawyers took cases to the Supreme Court, though we couldn’t do that too often. But when we asked her to make notes on our visits she always made excuses—she didn’t know Hebrew, she didn’t have any legal background, and so on.
She was really looking for a piece of the action. Not to go along to big demonstrations, where she’d be anonymous, but to take part in confrontations with the soldiers, something to make her look like a heroine. But we didn’t see that at the time. At first she was useful, because she’d wangled an American press card somehow and waved it at the lazier soldiers at the road blocks. But after a while she began to get on our nerves. We were born and brought up here, we don’t hate the country, just the occupation and what it’s doing to us. For Sandra everything was black and white. Israel’s corrupt to the bone, every soldier a murderer, that kind of thing. What she didn’t understand was what a shambles the occupation could be. So she was surprised that the soldiers at the checkpoints sometimes let us through easily, like today, though we weren’t really supposed to cross the line—all those warning signs. And sometimes we split up and travelled in Arab taxis with Jerusalem number plates, by side roads, and met up with the villagers on the other side. She thought that was really brave. But the army doesn’t mess with Israelis, and even if we get arrested they let us go quickly. Nothing we do is heroic. Big disappointment for Sandra. We ought to have seen straight away that she was a liability. Look, our job is to get facts: where the boundaries of the village were, which land was cut in two by the Wall, which crops weren’t harvested or bulldozed, where settlers had taken their land and so on. Our reports get read and if we’re lucky someone takes notice. Considering how few of us there are, we get a lot of attention—people like you make that possible. Not that we really make an impact. But the main thing is that the army and the Shabak know we’re here watching. Sets limits. Sandra got in our way. She was too emotional, and she prompted the villagers to tell her stories we didn’t think were true but had no way of checking: a child taken hostage by the army until his father, who was hiding somewhere, gave himself up, or a woman who maintained she was given a body search by a male soldier at a checkpoint. Sometimes she even put words into the villagers’ mouths, like asking to see what damage the soldiers had done to a house looking for suspects, where no one had suggested there was damage. We wanted evidence, not complaints the army could just wave aside as rumour. We took notes and videoed, and then we checked maps and documents with our lawyers. That sometimes got results; Sandra’s bleeding heart wasn’t going to get any.

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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. Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

Translated from Hebrew by Miriam Shlesinger

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.’

The Blattstein family: father Moshe, mother Leah, son Joshua, 12 and daughter Judith, 16  had been housed in a large enclosure in the centre of the exhibition. Soundproofed from the noise of the expo hall, and surrounded by electronically-controlled one-way glass, they could choose whether or not they looked at the people looking at them. Mostly, they chose not to. In the enclosure they went about their lives calmly and quietly. Mrs Blattstein cooked and cleaned, remembering always to keep meat separate from milk and to say the prayer before taking a lump of uncooked challa dough and burning it in the fire. Mr Blattstein  studied his holy texts and taught Joshua to do the same; it would be the boy’s barmitzvah soon. Judith studied too, but only the texts permitted for women. It was all very fascinating.

The exhibit drew record numbers. For the first time, the Festival of Judaism had to issue timed tickets to prevent undue crowding. Shlomo Luei received a special commendation. The young expo team were nominated for a prestigious award. In their soundproofed glass box, the Blattsteins  chatted and ate and sang and lit the Sabbath candles. Outside, the crowd moved mostly in silence, hands — and sometimes faces — pressed to the glass, like fish observing the world outside their tank, a world which was so different that anything more than a brief visit would prove deadly.

Ellie Markowitz had booked her tickets early, and with particular excitement. She’d always loved the Festival of Judaism, ever since her parents had taken her as a small child. Then, it had  seemed to her the very height of tradition, the essence of what it meant to be a Jew.  To read the preparatory materials, to study the exhibits, to attend the lectures: these were Judaism. She’d been astonished when her grandmother had said that, actually, the Festival of Judaism was a fairly modern invention, barely 50 years old.

‘But what did they do before that?’

‘Oh, before that…’ her grandmother rolled her eyes to the ceiling with the effort of recollection, ‘well, it had been dying for a long time you know. People didn’t feel comfortable anymore in those synagogues. Everyone thought that Real Judaism was meant for someone else. Not the average person. It’s better now: everyone can enjoy the Festival.’

Later in life, Ellie had educated herself about the history of the Festival of Judaism. Her grandmother had been right, broadly. There had been a slow but inevitable decline, predictable for generations. Traditional Judaism was for a certain kind of person: married (but only once), straight, both partners born of Jewish parents, themselves parents of children. Each element was slowly chipped away. The divorce rate hit 50 per cent, and even those who remarried remembered how hard synagogue life had been when they split up, and stayed away. Those who’d  never married understood that they weren’t welcome in the synagogue once they were over 35. Those who fell in love with someone who wasn’t Jewish found no place. Those who were gay came to understand that a 3,000-year-old religion was too stiff and inflexible ever to accommodate them. Those who were infertile found the emphasis on Jewish Continuity too painful to bear. Those women who, with every passing year found the ladies’ gallery and the kiddush rota harder to stomach, received no relief. And even the few remaining married, Jewish, heterosexual couples with children found the thing difficult: one had to be wealthy enough to buy a house within walking distance of a synagogue, one had to ensure that one’s children also married Jews or face ostracism, one had above all to be willing to tolerate the exclusion of one’s friends and family. The numbers fell, and fell, and fell. The great progress of human civilization and thought moved on, while Judaism sat in the dust at the side of the road and watched it pass by.

The Festival of Judaism had been initiated when, for the first time, the active membership of Britain’s synagogues dipped below 1,000 people. The Festival had been a great success: at last, an inclusive Judaism. One had only to buy one’s ticket, spend an hour or two at the festival, and take a brochure home. No one knew how many active members there were of the handful of synagogues still remaining. Most people were surprised that any were left at all.

In their enclosure at the centre of the exhibition hall, the Blattsteins were preparing for Sabbath. This was a popular time of the week and scalped tickets were changing hands for high prices. Ellie felt pleased to have booked early. With her friends Steve and Adam she wandered the concourse, eagerly following the Blattsteins around the areas of their temporary home. Here was Judy Blattstein, in the dining room, laying the table for the Sabbath. Here was Joshua Blattstein, in his bedroom, practising his bar mitzvah portion again.

‘Bet that’s not the only thing he’s practising furiously at his age,’ whispered Adam. ‘Shhhhh!’ said Ellie. ‘Why? He can’t hear us. And even if he could, what’d be the harm?’ ‘It’s just not …’ Ellie frowned, ‘they’re from a more innocent time, you know?’ Adam rolled his eyes and wrapped his arm around Steve’s waist. Steve kissed him gently on the crown of his head and said: ‘I do think there probably wasn’t a time that was totally innocent about sex? Or masturbation? Embarrassed isn’t the same as innocent.’ ‘I know,’ said Ellie, ‘it’s just that…’ ‘Shhhh!’ said  Adam, ‘look, they’re going to light candles!’

This was one of the highlights of the week. Mrs Blattstein and Judith stood before the tray with its six silver candlesticks.  They lit the candles, almost perfectly synchronised in movement, then made that curious beckoning gesture with their hands, stretching out towards the candles and then bringing their cupped hands to their faces,  as if to scoop the light into their eyes. Eyes covered, they muttered the holy words and then, the tension visibly dropping from their shoulders, they embraced. ‘Gut Shabbes,’ said Judith to her mother. ‘Ahhhhh, see?’ said Ellie. ‘Wasn’t that lovely?’ Steve smiled. Adam shrugged: ‘Yeah, alright. What’s going to happen now?’ Ellie consulted the exhibition notes. ‘Now Mr Blattstein goes off to synagogue.’ ‘That’s the place where they men pray and the women watch, right?’ ‘Yup,’ she looked further down, ‘part of the order of service depended on whether you were descended from the Priestly caste. Adorable. And, not only could women not take part in the service, they weren’t allowed to become President of the synagogue board either.’ ‘What about gay men?’ said Steve. ‘Oh ummm … wait, I think that’s in another section.’ Ellie flipped through her guide, ‘oh yeah, here it is. Oh. Yeah. No, they weren’t so cool with it. Sorry.’ ‘What a surprise. Shall we get some food while Blattstein goes to pray?’

Twenty minutes later, after a warming bowl of Traditional Chicken Noodle Soup, they returned to witness the family meal. Mr Blattstein came home from synagogue. His wife welcomed him to the table. The family raised their voices in song: the traditional melodies to greet the Sabbath, to praise the woman for her hard work in creating the day. The expo hall fell completely silent as the Blattsteins sang the simple looping harmony.

‘Beautiful,’ whispered Ellie when they were finished. Adam nodded, thoughtfully. ‘Don’t you think they’re a bit like pandas?’ Steve said. ‘I mean, cute and cuddly, but it turned out to be a total waste of time spending billions of pounds trying to save a species that only ate bamboo and didn’t like having sex.’ They watched in silence for a minute or two, as Joshua told his father about the Talmud he’d studied that week while Mrs Rosenblatt scurried to rearrange the hotplate and make things ready in the kitchen, ‘Just like pandas,’ he said, ‘if they’d really had any kind of survival instinct they’d have moved with the times. They didn’t want to live.’

‘It’s not like the pandas at all,’ said Adam. ‘They weren’t cute and cuddly. Look at the literature. This way of life might look adorable, but that’s just because we know we don’t have to live it. They were vicious and bigoted and racist and misogynist and homophobic. They didn’t make people happy, they made people miserable. Including themselves. They weren’t pandas, they were smallpox. We should be holding a bloody party to celebrate that they’re gone.’

Steve shrugged. Ellie sighed. Adam was always outspoken like this, but she knew perfectly well that he and Steve had decided to have their son Tomas circumcised even while Adam continued to deny that he felt any link at all to his Jewish roots. ‘It’s just a tradition,’ he’d said, ‘like if I was part Navajo I might learn to raindance or something.’ She’d made a noncommittal noise and said nothing.

Steve and Adam left at 9.30pm; they’d promised the babysitter they wouldn’t be home too late. Ellie stayed, though. Her ticket was good until midnight, and she enjoyed the peace of the hall as the evening wore on and more and more people went home. Mrs Blattstein was the first to go to bed, changing into a nightgown in the modesty suite, before settling down to sleep in the bedroom whose see-through walls automatically pixellated after 9pm. Mr Blattstein followed soon after, while Joshua and Judith stayed up past 11 playing a complicated card game and reading. At last, Joshua too went to sleep and Judith went to her bedroom.

On the Sabbath, when the Blattsteins tried not to use electrical devices, the pixellation of the glass walls and the lighting worked automatically. Judith, a night owl, had set her lights to stay on a mild glow most of the night, so she could read in bed. Ellie was the last person left in this part of the expo hall. There wasn’t much to see, after all. Mr and Mrs Blattstein were asleep in a blacked-out room. Joshua was asleep too. Only Judith was still sitting up in bed, reading.

At 11.50pm the warning bell sounded in the hall, and yet Ellie still did not leave. She didn’t know what she was waiting for. She watched the quiet house. She wondered what it would be like to live somewhere like that. So narrow. A community full of identical families, who rejected anyone different. Ellie herself was 36 and single; a community of families like the Blattsteins would have no place for her. It would have no place for the marriage of Steve and Adam, no place for their son, no place for most of her friends. And yet … not everything that is lost is good, but it has still been lost and perhaps it is right to mourn for it. Perhaps one should occasionally mourn even for smallpox, still more for the panda.

At 11.55pm, Judith crept out of bed. Only Ellie was there to see her. Only Ellie, her hand resting on the glass of Judith’s bedroom wall, saw the girl tiptoe across the room to the row of dials controlling the one-way glass. Judith ran her fingertips across the dials and, decisively, flicked a switch. Ellie looked at her and became suddenly aware that Judith could see her too. Judith gasped, her eyes wide. Ellie, in her jeans and T-shirt, stared at Judith, in the long nightgown.

Judith’s hand went back towards the dials and switches. She held up a hand to Ellie’s on the glass. Palm to palm, fingertips to fingertips. Ellie smiled. Judith smiled. The girl flicked the switches and the glass walls turned black.
‘Time now please,’ called the attendant, ‘time to leave now.’

A week after the expo closed, it was announced that, very sadly for her family, Judith had decided to leave the community. She had met a man. A non-Jewish man. There was a flutter of interest: how had she met him? Then a flutter of embarrassment from the expo committee: he had in fact been one of the organisers of the exhibition. They had fallen in love. It was a very sweet story really. The Blattstein family refused to comment. It was understood that they were planning a move to one of the Traditional Reservations; perhaps in America or Israel.

‘That Judith,’ said Steve, ‘I knew there was a glint in her eye.’ ‘Joshua’ll be gone too as soon as he’s old enough,’ said Adam. ‘What kind of life is that for a teenager?’ Ellie shrugged. ‘What do you think they’ll do when there are just 1,000 of them left across the world?’ she said, ‘or 100? I mean, do you think they’ll ever think of relaxing some of those rules? Or welcoming more people in?’ ‘Nah,’ said Steve, ‘they’re locked in now. If they change their minds they’ll have to admit they were always wrong.’ ‘Until what? The last Jew?’ said Adam. ‘The last Jew dies and then they’re all gone? Like what happened to the Shakers and the pandas?’

‘Not really,’ said Ellie. ‘I mean, I’m a Jew, and you’re a Jew. Our mothers were Jewish. There must be millions of people all over the world who are Jewish by birth, even more who have a connection to it. Steve, you’re married to a Jew and you and Adam could just decide that your son’s a Jew. Maybe when the last one’s gone, the last person who felt like they had a right to call themselves a Real Jew, Jewish can just be something you …’

‘Something you can choose to be?’ said Steve, ‘something you can call yourself? Something where you are the one who gets to decide what it means.  Something to do just because you want to, because it speaks to you, because you think the idea of one God and the Sabbath are beautiful?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Ellie. ‘When you say it like that, it sounds a bit improbable.’

Naomi Alderman wrote this short story in response to: Connection, Continuity and Community British Jewish Women Speak Out, a review initiated and implemented by an independent group of professional and lay women led by Rosalind Preston OBE. The full report can be found at: www.boardofdeputies.org.uk/file/ConnectionContinuityCommunity.pdf

Naomi Alderman’s new novel The Lessons will be published by Penguin in April 2010.

In between shows, Uncle Nathan was a dutiful clerk at the VAT office. He was not bitter that life had led him to this — a narrow room, a desk, forms piled high. ‘You see, it was here on this wall that it all began,’ he would say, pointing to the plaster wall opposite his desk and drifting away into sweet remembrance. The wall was bare, with no pictures or windows. Only the roving silhouette of Uncle Nathan’s finger, no longer merely pointing now, but capering — a seahorse, a ballerina, a fighter plane.
As Uncle Nathan chuckled, his eyes aglow, his interlocutor would abandon any notion of pitying this man hunched over a broken desk squeezed between a door and a file cabinet. It was a miserable alcove, sliced out of a larger office. The partition had been ordered years before — six clerks on one side to help customers, and Uncle Nathan on the other with a broken ventilator wedged into the wall above his head.
‘But it’s all right. Without this wall, where would I be?’ And a jubilation of fingers would dance recklessly on the wall as Uncle Nathan astonished his guest: a shark, a tractor, a magician, a paratrooper.

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First published in Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and  Culture. Translated by Jessica Cohen