Languages

  I. Exile Let’s see. I grew up in Tel Aviv, in a neighborhood where almost everyone was Ashkenazi. I remember a literature teacher at school who claimed that mothers in fiction control their children through food. And indeed, my childhood friend’s Polish-Jewish mother used to say: “If they want to eat—they’ll eat. If they don’t want to eat—they’ll also eat.” Another neighborhood mother would fling open the window and yell in a...

Warsaw was awoken by a cold winter morning in January of 1943 that illuminated it with sad, gray light. Relli stirred in her sleep. She heard voices beyond the thick blanket that covered her up to the top of her head. Strange, she thought. It wasn’t Mommy’s voice, or Daddy’s, or even Grandpa’s . . . who could it be, so close to her? She tried to peek out without revealing herself, but saw nothing. She tried to stretch beneath the blanket and realized she...

"Another piece of pepperoni?" Ludwig offered generously. "Thanks, I'm full." I patted my stomach. "Full," Ludwig repeated the word, enchanted. "It's been so long since I heard that word." He glanced affectionately at the pepperoni stick lying on the uncovered table, as if looking at an old friend who'd helped him relive a pleasant childhood experience, and stroked the peel nostalgically. From time to time, they could hear the shelling out there and if you pressed your...

After the intermission, when they prepped the audience and warmed them up with an acrobatic display, clowns, and other supporting acts, the second part began, the main one, the part with the adored women. Wind instruments, festive but refined, herald the entrance of the star Dolly Scheinwald. She strides erect. She is very beautiful. Her form draped in a black dress with a deep reveal, her hair black and her alto a sensual rasp. Two bachelor spectators, high in the gods, know she’ll...

I met her on the day that I divorced the sow. She came up to me and asked if I wanted a hug. She was wearing a black T-shirt with the words “International Hug Day” emblazoned on it. Behind her trailed a flock of smiling huggers. On any other day I would have yelled at them to go get a real job, since I knew they were the type who turn the celebration of “international days”—days like “No-Smoking Day,” “Family Day,” “Accident-Free...

Your long years of service in this institution entitle you to at least this one privilege. You get your double espresso in a real cup over the heads of the students crowded around the counter, and you go find a seat at one of the tables. To say your spirits are low would be a wild understatement. You try to withdraw into yourself, but all you find there are fathomless recesses of blackness, gloom, and self-loathing. You’ve just come out of a class to which only a third of the...

At eight in the morning I looked at my watch and it was eight o’clock. At nine-thirty I looked at my watch and it was nine-thirty. At eleven in the morning I looked at my watch and it was ten to eleven. At twelve noon I looked at my watch and it was twenty to twelve. At one in the afternoon I looked at my watch and it was twelve-twenty. At four in the afternoon I looked at my watch and it was twelve-twenty. And at quarter past five when I looked at my watch it was still...

The Kid was back. Ziggy heard the dog’s toenails clicking on the floor while he did his usual dance. But for the Kid the dog also added yelps of joy to the ritual. The dog was more attached to the Kid than to Ziggy, or to his Wife or to the Uncle, who was his original owner. “Lucky, you goddamn sonofabitch you,” Ziggy heard the Kid say to the dog in a babyish tone of affection. He was seventeen, his only son, tall and thin and fair-eyed like his mother, clumsy and...

Because of an error on the part of the graphic artist, the map of the world was printed without Switzerland. The country was swallowed up in the mauve of France, the blue of Germany, the Italian yellow and the Austrian orange. Each of these colors ran a little. The graphic artist failed to notice the mistake, and the map was printed and distributed in thousands of copies to all the elementary schools in Senegal, the Dakar Courier reports. It was only when the son of the Swiss ambassador...

During the twilight hours of one day in January, the professor and his wife arrived at a small motel on the beach at Islamorada, and checked in. After the New Year’s Eve parties, the place had emptied of guests.  It was hot and humid. Seaweed and snails piled up along the main road. Alongside the boats that docked in the marina, pelicans stood like statues on beams of rotted wood. The couple were exhausted and sweaty after their long drive.  They showered, changed into...

My father-in-law, Feibush, arrived unannounced at my doorstep in the middle of the week. I was writing out a mezuzah and so, fortunately, my cabinet of secular books was closed. Feibush’s eyes brightened when he saw the parchment, the quill in my hand, and the large yarmulke upon my head. Only when his gaze rested upon the closed book cabinet did a kind of cloud descend over his face. I suspected that he knew full well what trials and tribulations hid upon those shelves. And though...

I climbed aboard the Little No. 5 as I did every morning on my way to work. “Little No. 5” is what I call the minibus-sized cab which follows the route of the No. 5 bus. It’s actually a cross between a bus and a cab. You get the best of both worlds—the familiar route and the cheapness of the bus, but they’ve got the speed of a cab and you can hail them and get off where you like. And since there are bombs all the time, I only ever took Little No. 5s to work...

Now he’s cold and he doesn’t believe it and he’s crying. Later there would be long mornings of playing in the sandbox and a pretty horrible memory that had something to do with a neighbor’s dog that had come off its leash, then a huge collection of matchboxes, one would even come from Japan, and years of trumpet lessons and a gymnastics class as well and the time everybody laughed at him because he fell off the rings and a long walk to the municipal library twice...

The old dog lumbers beside me, exhaling and inhaling laboriously and tracking my steps with her bowed head turned white with old age. Owls perch on the branches canopying the path, against the indigo background of the darkening sky. They give us sideways glances and emit long whistles like rubber toys. Their eyes are open in wonderment. It's a familiar route. It begins at the breach in the concrete fence, shortly before sunset, and ends at the exact same place half an hour later. A...

Adam Rovner interviews Etgar Keret as part of WWB's month-long discussion of Etgar Keret's Girl on the Fridge. You can find links to other posts and essays in this series at the bottom of the page, and feel free to join in the discussion in the blogs, all this month.—Editors Adam Rovner: Readers seem to be drawn to Israeli literature because of their interest in the political conflicts of the Middle East. Yet your work is only obliquely political, and you yourself...

Once I happened to visit a fishing village in the Andaman Sea, west of the Malay Peninsula in the Indian Ocean. Unlike typical fishing villages, this one was not situated on shore, but floated in the sea. Its houses were built on rafts that were anchored side by side and connected with ropes and wooden walkways. The village rocked tranquilly upon the waves, up and down, creating a strange sensation. In general, when you go from a boat to a dock, you feel at once the reassuring solidity of...

Laundry is a novel of psychological suspense that focuses on family relationships and the aftermath of childhood trauma. It is not a novel of the Holocaust, but like much Israeli literature, Laundry is driven by characters whose lives were shaped by the Holocaust—so much so that those events become a silent character in the novel. In 1960s Transylvania, where the novel begins, the main character, five-year-old Ildiko ("Kitschi"), experiences psychological abuse at the hands of an...

So what is the moment? What does it look like? What shape does it take and when does it occur, that instant which is not a moment and yet is everything? And why does it slip away from her time after time after time? Because to talk about the moment of conception sounds trite, too small for the occasion, for the words attempting to describe it, and utterly imprecise. And to talk of the meeting between sperm and egg sounds silly, like PR-speak, like the press releases she formulates every...

My only son has a soul mate I'm not fond of. But what can I do? They bonded in the army, and although they've been out for a while now, the ties have only grown stronger. Is such a friendship like a camel in the desert, drawing nourishment from its own hump? Does it persist only by force of their shared army experience, or does it draw sustenance from any new sources? What is it about this friendship that threatens me? My son's soul mate is a civilized creature, gentle and...

Now was the time to ask for a recommendation from David. In fact, he had already intended to raise the subject at their morning meeting, but then that student had appeared, whose name, he discovered, he had forgotten again, and the whole matter had dissolved. He really had to find supplementary sources of income, now that he'd retired. He couldn't depend only on his pension. That was especially true in New York, where the cost of living had become intolerable. Fisher planned to...

"Parting," first published in Hebrew in 1914, revolves around the biblical injunction (and the Jewish custom) that a man must marry and support his brother's widow. However, in later times, as bigamy was outlawed, wives were made to divorce their dying husbands. . . . then the sun began to set. And it sent its last rays to the window of the terminally ill man. The rays shone through the latticed curtain, and flecks of light collected on the wall near the bed. . . . The room was...

On my first day, I was overcome with dread. It wasn't even four in the afternoon and the sun had set long ago. They turn on the streetlamps here by two, two-thirty, and in the brief spell of sunshine, the colors are as dim as in an old photo. For five months now I've been traveling on my own, just me and my knapsack, looking at snow and fjords and ice. The whole world is painted white, and at night—it's black. Sometimes I have to remind myself this is just a trek....

The Artist's Likeness Is Like an Artist This tale is rather old: Two painters wanted to see which of them could paint the painting that best imitated reality . . . One of the painters painted the front of a house, and the illusion was so perfect, so exact, that at first his competitor believed he had lost, but then understood that he simply had to enter the painted house and hang the painting that he had painted on a wall inside. The Angel Who Photographed God Who, these days,...

Copyright 2006 by Guy Morad. By arrangement with the author. Translation copyright 2006 by Riva Hocherman. All rights reserved.

Herzl Haliwa lets out a scream and jerks his head from the pillow in alarm. He comes to his senses very quickly—this had happened before—and lies still, gently inhaling and exhaling. Trying to quiet his thumping heart, he lets the body lying beside him twist a bit and return to the deep sleep of early morning. After making sure that the person—Anna von Something, he couldn't remember at the moment—has drifted back into slumber, he slowly rises from the bed. He...

Who would of thought that the Katyusha1 would catch me outside? Six years I don't go out. I walk without thinking, house-market-work-house-clinic-work-house-market-house-work. Comes the Katyusha and catches Simona off her path. I put the food on the table for them, the Tuesday couscous with chicken with pumpkin with hummus beans with everything inside. I stand with the Katyushas falling on my head, and what does my head have in it? If they ate the couscous before when the first one...

When I grow old, in however many three-month intervals, I'll gain more and more disabilities, cognitive and otherwise. I'll always be on edge and I'll always be thinking that it's late, too late, everything's now behind me. When I grow old, over and over again I won't be able to remember what I'd been told only a minute ago. Dazed, I'll stop in the middle of the street and ask myself where it was that I was going. At home I won't know why I'd...

© 2006 by Yishay Garbasz. All rights reserved. When Dudu Rotem was still a corporal, the squad of five he commanded was assigned to set up an ambush south of the Dead Sea. This squad commander, then a kid of twenty and a complete schmuck, was not happy with the location of the ambush as designated by senior military command; it was clear to him that his superiors had no strategic sense, and his unit had no prospect of success in prosecuting their mission. Naturally, he didn't...

I A young man, an eternal invalid, loved a girl, but she was merely fond of him. They met for a while and even kissed. How did this come about? As far as the invalid was concerned, it was clear: he loved her passionately. As for the beloved girl, one should explain that she met the young man during a transition period between one lover and the next, and the eternal invalid took advantage of this brief pause in her life to enter it as a lover without any protest from the beloved. The...

The Holocaust extended its reach beyond the neighborhood. Traces of Shoah lurked in the most surprising places, like the little shops where Dad went to order wallpaper or buy light bulbs. He often took me with him to Attorney Perl's hardware store on Yonah HaNavi Street. Apart from buying plaster or little boxes of screws, it was a place where you could talk, ask questions and watch Attorney Perl at work. People used to stand with their elbows on the counter and gaze at the wall...

Dina and Shlomo went out shopping. Their son, Dudi, stayed home. He didn't stay alone. Tally, his baby sister, stayed with him. His dog Rexie stayed with him too. Before Dudi's mother and father left, they stopped at the door for a moment, and his mother said: "If Tally cries, give her a pacifier." And his father said: "If the phone rings, just say we'll be back soon." "Okay," Dudi said, and they left. Dudi was sitting on the floor, playing with his fire engine....

A dove in the distance fluttered,    flitting through the forest—       unable to recover she flew up, flustered, hovering,    circling round her lover.        She’d thought the thousand years to the Time of the End    about to come and was       confounded in her designs, and tormented by her lover,     over the years was parted       from Him—her soul descending...

Why is my beloved so haughty,      and why is He so angry with me? Before Him why do I shake like a reed? He's forgotten how I walked in the wilderness after Him—and doesn't respond, though I plead. If He kills me still I will trust in Him. If He hides His face, to His goodness I'll turn. The Lord's favor to His servant will not alter—      for how could the finest gold go dim?     © Peter Cole. From The...

Dreams don't come to us without being provoked externally, which is what happened to me yesterday when I woke up at five in the morning, precisely the hour I had intended to get up. I found myself on someone's trail and soon I saw Kassem and said something as I approached him, even though I was astonished that I would be able to talk to him while he was no longer among the living; then I realized that it wasn't Kassem but my faithful servant Sha'aban and that I wanted him to...