forthcoming
forthcoming JEWISH IMAGINATIVE WRITING January, 1983 Vol. 1 No. 2 Editor's Note F2 Mark Jay Mirsky Franklin Park F3 Yonat and Alexander Sened Imagining Yodai Gone F6 Yoram Kaniuk The Last...
...I was simply disgusted by this shameful display in the street...
...How did that happen, Sir...
...On the other hand, she knew that far too many scholars were not like the angels...
...I am a simple person, a shepherd...
...But that may not have been in her mind at all...
...At the same time, she remembered somehow that the prophet Amos, whose birthplace at Te-koa she knew quite well, had also been a simple shepherd...
...He stepped out of his pants...
...Reilly's voice was low...
...No one in later times has ever seen Jerusalem in all her beauty...
...He twisted, frantic...
...That very evening, at the feast, with the candles burning low and the diners lounging comfortably, all attention was focussed around the learned conversation of the scholars who, uninhibited by their usual hair-splitting dissection of the law and relaxed by the abundance of good food and the convivial atmosphere, could allow themselves to talk freely...
...But don't you want to know the Law of God...
...The secret agenda, my own, was to white out the season with some industrious unconnectedness...
...She asked, Why did he say Poland, and the man answered, All Ashkenazi Jews are born in Poland as far as he's concerned...
...My other entertainment was listening to the kids shouting at him: "Khomeini...
...Did yuh...
...If she were at home now, so wide-browed and dreaming, she would be a dutiful wife with a wig, for our frowning comrade doctor is the daughter of a rabbi in Byelorussia...
...My mother's stocky, slow-walking aunt whose short, thick, straight white hair was combed directly back from a face so stern, so without playfulness that when she came into a room I slunk away from her...
...Dere's gold in a cave dere," said Mulvaney...
...Not even the bit of the iron sword that severed the wall of his crypt...
...And again she let the thought rise to her mind, "What if this Akiva had learned Torah properly...
...It could be said that when my great-aunt died, her few possessions legitimately carted away by some long-bearded, black-coated charity collector - a total stranger — there was nothing of her remaining on earth...
...9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 19 Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishers and the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature...
...Rivka wondered whether the gulls saw them as an ancient Phoenician ship...
...Her first collection, published by Achshav, appeared in 1966...
...Comes of a famous family, the Pi Avi...
...One fine day I stopped scowling and the mysterious malady disappeared...
...And always there were guests in their houses — guests of all sorts, not only those who were formally invited to the splendid feasts, but also simple folk who were hungry and came to eat...
...Moshe Kupferman, born in Poland in 1926, became a founding member of Israel's kibbutz dedicated to Europe's ghetto-fighters...
...Before she can even finish a sentence, a woman springs out of the dim chaos, and in an enraged howl, assails us with an anguished, rancorous harangue...
...When she died, her pension and small savings were left to several extremely Orthodox charities: from this peculiar list, you could never even have made a guess at the kind of life she had actually led...
...Nothing...
...Rivka whispered to the Jew in white, What's he saying, and the man translated for her...
...The crossroads were behind me...
...Placed them down in the rustling leaves...
...Comrade doctor, dear comrade doctor," I begin, but I see that in the milky light of dawn she is at last snatching a little sleep...
...Who sucks the life out of me with shoe reports and the thousand and one nights tales of the unheard of riches of Bonnie Brandwein...
...A green peg slipped into his open mouth before he realized it...
...Once a decision was made, he would carry it out — without arrogance or pride, simply and firmly...
...Who knows," says Tamar without blinking her eyes...
...The sailors carefully lowered her into the boat...
...A young and pretty woman and she's thrown her life away...
...she called into the dreadful, acrid, trestle-crossed darkness beneath the hooded platform and trembling tracks...
...Finally, as we approach the door, his voice rumbles toward us...
...he shattered a lamp...
...It reminds me each time within the frame of my familiar face that you do not necessarily only look like yourself...
...I ran back to the living room, and pulling the turban off my head, said to my great-aunt, "Do it again what you did with the towel...
...He would say things that, on her return home, made her wonder whether he had indeed intended to say so much in so few words...
...He's...
...He was not a particularly good-looking person, yet she seemed to be aware of some glow or radiance, an inexpressible beauty on his sun-scorched and toil-lined face...
...Do you see what I'm telling you...
...The gray-faced man resumed in an embarrassed rush...
...In future issues, it is Forthcoming's intention to bring together American and Israeli artists...
...The assignment was to do a piece about this peculiar corner of Africa, jungle and desert and a jutting horn across the Atlantic from Brazil...
...Economics, y'know...
...At his side stood his two sons...
...Natan took off his shoes, looked at his boyhood friend, and in the blinding light that had no corners, no edges, pummelled by a hot, razor-sharp wind, he began to dance with outspread arms while everyone stood as if petrified...
...It showed itself in the way he performed the mitzvot - despite the fact that his lack of education should have proven a hindrance...
...The Jew mopped his perspiration again, took a string of amber beads from his pocket, and began to play with them, murmuring, I don't care where you go, madam, nor when...
...They stuck thohns in'm," Mulvaney reminded...
...The donkey that pulled the merry-go-round with the camel came to a stop and a man in uniform thrashed it and cursed in Italian...
...he would ask teasingly...
...Reilly, who towered a half foot over him, descendant of Kerry giants, smacked a fist into Ostropol's lips...
...About The Fathers: A Novel in the Form of a Memoir, which appeared in 1967 and tells the story of a Jewish immigrant from Russia, Gold has written...
...what kind of a scholar would he be...
...You recognized, of course, he survived the concentration camp, so now he doesn't like to admit anything, anything at all...
...she repeats with such bitter force that a chorus of wailing fills the choking, fetid space...
...I know where there is still a kettle of weak tea to be had, so I say, "Comrade doctor, dear, I'll bring you some tea while you make your toilette...
...I refused to have anything to do with it...
...I have access to the Club -" I explained that I was very busy, working actually, and just took a swim after breakfast — "Understand, understand perfectly," he said...
...Amongst the latter, someone told about Hillel the Elder, how he learned Torah in the midst of great poverty — even when his own family was in dire distress...
...I was far from home...
...Since reading Shoffman's article I could barely suppress my loathing for the instrument...
...I felt timid, worried that it would be unpleasant...
...I stood and listened to the muffled sounds emerging from the house...
...Not just in my class...
...Through the door of her sewing shop, Rivka saw him walking about and the Jews reading his sign and looking into his eyes where the terror had frozen, trying to entice him to come near, while he held them off...
...It is said that he learned to read with his sons...
...It was full of the preparations for the Shavuot festival, with many farmers on donkeys or in wagons streaming in, bringing their produce to feed the expected pilgrims...
...Why must you say such foolish things...
...Real good...
...On the following Saturday, she joined all the people of the village in the synagogue, sitting among the women who received her with inquisitive courtesy...
...He smiled sweetly...
...Could that Amos of ancient times have looked like this Akiva here...
...Another Attempt was published in English translation in 1981, by Hakibbutz Hameuchad and The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature...
...Finally he lost his patience and played his last card: "Yoram," he called, "come with me and you'll get the badge of the Palmach...
...She had not the slightest sense of homecoming, she'd never arrived at a more foreign place in her life...
...O'Coogan put his eye to a knot hole punched out in the barrier...
...A downtown express train came rushing by overhead...
...this girl's twin sister died, and she herself just didn't get better...
...their clothes are in tatters, and they sit or lie in a sour, stuporous remove amid filthy pots and broken crockery...
...Their princely nobility was sufficient unto itself...
...Love, the meaning of life, and the community of lonely souls would have to take care of themselves while I did my job amid the distractions of homesickness and colibaccilus unfamiliar to my inner being...
...but when they tried to set their spades into the soft black soil, they found that beneath their sandalled feet, it was all swampland...
...his mother said...
...Well, I'd been told severe...
...The young vineyards, the crests of the newly planted trees, the stone wall that touched the houses...
...Yoram's father didn't react...
...Naked...
...my mother cried out, staring past the fidgety, freckle-faced boy who was playing with his Gene Autry gun and holster set...
...I won't give that murderer my child...
...Then she sees him undoing the laces of the army boots, while he perhaps is seeing her neck all the time, without respite — as if what's disturbing is that one cannot know if whoever were to touch that neck would be hurt by something hard, or else would harm something vulnerable...
...she said...
...or even something more complicated — one day perhaps they'll find time to be very precise) then they can try to see a picture: she lying on the Bedouin rug spread there from wall to wall...
...Among his roles as teacher and scholar in Jerusalem today, Steinsaltz is the director of the Shefa Institute for Jewish Studies...
...On our street I saw a crowd of people standing under the caesaurina trees in front of Yoram's house...
...Well, I'm really out of Zaire, y'know...
...Alfredi lent it as he played...
...But it had to be done...
...Patricia Neville," she said, extending a hand...
...And when once a decision was made, an anger or an ardor ignited, they could not be deterred...
...Akiva," she exclaimed, "if you promise me that you will study Torah, I would like to be joined with you in the sacrament of marriage...
...I was economic advisor to President Mobuto, and before that in the Congo, and you'll get used to it, I'm sure, if you're having a little stomach...
...He didn't seem inclined to fight with her...
...Evah har'a d'Save-yuh...
...It's only a lamp...
...Kaplan's writing, which includes stories, essays and reviews, has appeared in magazines ranging from The New York Times Book Review to Commentary...
...Don't you understand...
...What a question...
...You're Mr...
...C'mon...
...A mother who would make the beds and drink coffee - isn't that what you always come back telling me mothers do in other houses...
...Rabbi Eliezer, the stern-faced aristocrat in every fiber of his being, and Rabbi Yehoshua, the relatively small and ugly one, but so brilliant and charming, and the other young leaders of Israel, brimming with wisdom and Torah...
...It was before evening, among a large group of field workers returning to the village from the harvest...
...The next day, Rachel chose two of the older servants of the House of Calba Savua, faithful retainers who had known her from her childhood and were ready to do her bidding on all things, and asked them to accompany her...
...And when we took him out of the water...
...Wan' me to stick my finguh in...
...Yuh heah of his Muth-ah...
...Both came to Israel from Poland — Alexander as a boy, and Yonat after escaping the Warsaw Ghetto...
...And so they carried on, an aristocracy occupied with their responsibilities to the land, their houses open and their interests broad enough to include all aspects of Torah...
...All those sages of Israel had a certain dignity and learning, with generations of Torah tradition behind them...
...However, it wasn't long before she moved away to open a sewing shop in a neighboring town...
...It used to be known that those whom the clan of Calba Savua favored would be supported in any situation, under any circumstance...
...She was leaving the hotel alone and about to step into a taxi...
...They looked to the leaves, steaming...
...I said I needed another swim, and then I had a meeting in town, and he nodded farewell, folding my newspaper between his heavy gray arm and the thick gray chest of a powerful old guy...
...I had often browsed through his books and even borrowed some of them...
...He spoke of Rabbi Eliezer, friend of the great saint, Rabban Yochanan Ben Zakkai, and a man of great mystical power in his own right...
...As a matter of course, all their sons and daughters received the very best education that Jerusalem could offer...
...It is said that he made such phenomenal progress in all written and unwritten knowledge that few living men could be compared to him...
...Mulvaney whispered in his ear, "Wanna hear a story...
...Mulvaney, O'Coogan, even White broke out in laughter...
...He had two daughters...
...It's pleasant to walk along them barefoot...
...A tremor passes through Madame Sosostris, a visible shudder...
...But I'm not crazy...
...They lie next to each other, almost equal in length, except that her legs are bent at the knees to shade her loins...
...Bang-bang...
...Otherwise, they came home in the evenings — and she was able to accost him again in a few days with the same question...
...asked Mulvaney...
...His face glowed with happiness which had not been diminished by what he could see through the window or had seen through the cracks in the coffin...
...Her first novel, O My America, won several prizes...
...He is a man of noble mind and I know what I am doing...
...He wipes his wet finger on her hair...
...Her voice was clipped and cool...
...Rivka carried him home on her back, took winding sheets and utensils from beneath the old couple's bed and washed and purified his body, wrapping it in a prayer shawl...
...We'll get dressed nicely and go to them...
...But it was she who spoke first — even though it was not quite right for a woman, and a young one at that, to address a strange man...
...The dying old couple lay in their room grunting and groaning while Rivka tended them in their sickness and sewed in their sewing workshop...
...Her hair, always so sternly coiled around her head with net and pins has fallen onto her shoulders in all its deep, brown, satin solemnity...
...After they'd married they came back in order to be near her father's grave...
...Rivka sat on deck knitting a shawl...
...Look what the Tan-teh did...
...The sun began to shine over the hills that were now as dull and toneless as un-burnished copper...
...Alfredi's music school, another of those mysterious coincidences took place which highlight the symbolism and symmetry of my life...
...These relatives were not rich...
...but as for the cheap variety in the hands of pupils — a harmonica would be preferable...
...Her eyes are wide open...
...Khomeini...
...For a moment I believed Yoram was looking at me...
...It's a squirrel," whispered O'Coogan...
...What did it matter...
...Poem When the angels are fagged We fold up their wings With pleasure with pleasure Ready the whip When the angels start up We lash into them Until dew floods the earth...
...Not a soul peered from the windows...
...Whaddyah hear...
...Yuh okay...
...It's Ronnie Brandwein," I said, still crying...
...Matan Beseter she'd departed, and Matan Beseter she returned...
...She smiled with a sudden dazzle of healthy teeth — it was a smile of charity and forgiveness...
...How come yuh don't talk...
...It's impossible...
...Bonnie's last name is Altschuler...
...You know you can only look like yourself...
...Come what may, the violin prevailed...
...And perhaps not, perhaps the windows of the room are closed there...
...It did not look so large and heavy on his back, and he walked alongside her deliberately and quietly, like a nobleman who knew how to be kind without any display...
...White...
...I made my way home, filled with vague new hopes...
...And this included the wisdom of the gentiles as well as of the Jews...
...She raises her back slightly off the floor, the ends of her hair are still touching the rug, and with a single movement pulls her shirt over her head...
...Behind him, against the wall of a big mosque, Arabs sat smoking their nar-gillehs...
...The lashes of water at the panes, one for each rotation, measure their interim...
...Little O'Coogan, White, Mulvaney, slipped their belts out, uncinching the tongue of steel and Maishe Ostropol, heart in his collarbone, followed suit...
...He is naked beneath her, and refuses to close his eyes before her open eyes...
...She would have to learn more about him...
...Alfredi's summer vacation, which lasted a month or two, began after the yearly recital...
...When he began rubbing some coins together, flipping them in the air one by one, she saw the pleased look in the sailors' eyes as they followed the arc of each flipped coin, and she began to relax...
...Tootsie...
...and walked beneath starlight and a discolored moon until I was worn out and could sleep...
...The thunderous crack which shook Ostropol's crock did not fall from the two-by-four which little O'Coogan and White slammed down, for Maishe rolled to the side with a jerk and it caught Reilly on the arm...
...You evah heah of d'Save-yuh...
...And Rivka said, I'm not worried, sir...
...My eyes fell on the heading: THE VIOLIN...
...I forgot to ask you about the Christmas party — you do sort of celebrate Christmas, don't you, Mr...
...The dress she was wearing belonged to the daughter of Rabbi Yakuv Hahar...
...Her eyes were painted in colors bold enough to be seen from the window...
...she persisted...
...No, no...
...Not to you...
...Nehemia smiled...
...the worst was over...
...She had a Lebanese secretary, a sharp-featured, brown-faced, straight-haired little person, who said Mademoiselle Neville was in a meeting, but she could take in a note from me...
...One day her mother took her to a remote city, handed her over to distant relatives who were dying childless in their little house, and went back home...
...Yoram's mother was clasping her hands and screaming "Murderer...
...Dey stuck thohns in'm...
...Of course...
...Stop all the noise and the running this minute...
...A little R & R, as you might put it, Sir...
...Sometimes he'd read and read," laughs Tamar, "and I'd fall asleep...
...They sagged down not even covering Reilly's behind...
...Sometimes the brothers would try to restrain her a little, feeling that a daughter of the aristocracy and a possible wife of the greatest in the country should not be friendly to such diverse sorts of people...
...Soon, beneath its deepening, dissolute violet glow, the men will return home from synagogue, the Sabbath ended...
...Ostropol smelled the band's unchanged underwear...
...An Egyptian dancer dressed in flimsy red scarves gyrated nearby to the appreciative shouts and delighted clapping of a group of men who tucked money between her breasts every so often...
...slow, hesitant movements, fumbling in an invisible void, his eyes closed, deeply intent, and Nehemia threw his jacket to the ground, took off his shoes, and with all the fervor of the Hassidim who had stood on the roofs shouting The Lord is God, he hugged Natan, and the two of them danced while everyone watched in unmoving silence...
...the wagon driver freed his horses and let them eat and drink and Natan danced...
...they gleam like far-off snowy trails in the sweltering stillness...
...C'mon...
...Even in those days, such a thing was rare - a Jewish child who did not have the minimum of education: reading, writing, Torah...
...Rivka wasn't very enthusiastic, but the hotel wasn't endearing either, and so it was decided that they set out the next night...
...Wouldn't do without it at all...
...For a minute, the room was silent...
...Den dey scouhged him, dey give him somethin' to drink...
...The crowd followed these proceedings, inclining first one way, then the other...
...When she heard the details, she made up her mind to be of help, and the next day when she saw him striding towards his house, she accosted him...
...How can I endure it...
...As though in answer to her reflections on the man Akiva...
...Wallach's "We Were Ready For It" — and the internal split that permeates her consciousness — is relevant because it confronts the issues on its own terms...
...There were, of course, few matches more prestigious than the house of Pi Avi, with their high priests and their wealth, but, after all, the Calba Savuas were just as illustrious a family, if not more so, even if they never were connected by marriage with those noble houses of Jerusalem, and it tickled their vanity to think that one of their own shepherds was, in the daughter's eyes, preferred over the highly esteemed scion of the Pi Avi...
...His teeth glistened...
...The licence for your husband's coffin was no less expensive than the return ticket you'll buy from me...
...Giggles from eight-year-old O'Coogan...
...Sorry to be in such a rush...
...People had already forgotten about what had happened to the Armenians, she said...
...The cold that had prevailed the night before now abated and became a dry chill...
...On one occasion, after a few polite exchanges, she blurted out: "Akiva, why don't you go and study Torah...
...Money seemed to have no meaning for them...
...Five of his novels have been published in English translation, the most recent two by Harper & Row...
...The air seemed somehow inflexible, though it was clear, and there was a keen edge to it, even on this first day of January, nineteen hundred...
...He tiptoed along the face of the cliff, found handholds, footholds, scaling the sheer rock, like the hind, jumping to a path below...
...But when I introduced myself, he said, "Oh yes, my daughter mentioned you...
...She turned around to me, saying, "You will never be able to read a really worthwhile book...
...Now he grabs his sabre and lunges at the foe," the cavalryman sings...
...some of the people he knew, and others were known to him through hearsay and their letters which he'd read more than once...
...Oh, I've lived here ever so long...
...The woman shrugs...
...But I knew this already...
...Must be," he said...
...I scribbled...
...Yes," I said, twisting in her grasp, grateful suddenly for the thundering trains which continued going uptown and downtown, on to Yankee Stadium or Woodlawn Cemetery, oblivious and persevering...
...No London Times, London Observer, no Economist, no papers and pencils and sunshades and tray of drinks and peanuts from the bar...
...True, the ignorant ones could not help feeling respect for the Torah scholars, but it was tinged with a certain disappointment, even hatred...
...The women's eyes were full of laughter and when they burned they cursed and shouted but weren't afraid...
...And one of the listeners remarked: "One cannot draw conclusions from the lifei-of Hillel...
...No quarters, no box-tops, no ray-gun, no nothing...
...I too was trying to make myself into something other than what I was at Christmastime...
...my great-aunt suddenly called out from the sofa, holding out her arms...
...More ...something...
...I told him how difficult school was, that I wanted to devote more time to my studies...
...Abruptly then, withdrawing her hand, she turned me around and re-wound the towel...
...Finally, she pointed to the towelling dispenser above the sink in her niece's kitchen — that was what she wanted...
...The old woman very happily turned over the load to Akiva and he put it on his back...
...The flocks did not graze in the fields, except in the season of the year after the harvest...
...He got beat'n up," said Mulvaney...
...his writing has been translated into French, Danish, Swedish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese and other languages...
...Neville ardently greeting me, irked that we couldn't seem to get together for a good chat, still trying...
...The dawn itself, blue and ghostly, settles around our carriage like an old peasant granny's shawl, and I decide to put my question to our doctor...
...She charmed me in my Christmas need...
...Are you in need of anything...
...Tickle it," suggested Mulvaney...
...Leo's Church off Harvard Street where the priest expostulated on the allegory of Messiah and the Jews...
...I seen it shinin...
...But, as I said, even then, as a young woman, no one could control or deny her anything...
...Behind a huge heap of oranges, two skinned oxen hung on hooks in front of a small shop...
...the whole personality was suddenly lit up with an internal light, and he became heart-renderingly beautiful for a moment...
...No, not like Cinderella...
...The rush of the revolving sprinklers watering the large lawn on the hill: behind the closed shutters, the sound of a slow whispering...
...No one had to lead them...
...I didn't like his daughter...
...A barefooted Arab boy was holding a somewhat torn sunshade over his head and surrounded on all sides by the respectful void so well preserved by Arabs and Turks alike, he was making an attempt to smile at her...
...Can't yuh do no tricks with it...
...Before returning to Jerusalem, she saw Akiva once again...
...A whole bunch, long, like spikes, right in his head, laughin', tellin'm it was a crown, while blood was spurtin' out of his hair...
...Because my mother believed that you could perceive in small Elizabeth's olive-skinned face, especially in the precocious solemnity of her deep-set, very liquid, dark eyes, all the terrible suffering borne by the Armenian people, which was similar to, though less than, the sufferings of the Jews...
...Children are roasting potatoes...
...Not quite true...
...equally amiable to everyone, big and small, naturally sure of herself in everything...
...When the two of them looked out through the grubby, transparent curtain, Rivka and Nehemia were seeing two different landscapes...
...Ostropol cupped his hands over it...
...She perceived neither that the apartment was small, nor that her niece was unhappy...
...She would no doubt get in touch to inform me of time and place for her annual Christmas party...
...So I pointed to the brightly colored sandals and taking a deep breath, began, "Tina Kantrowitz has them, Stephanie Margolies has them, Enid Gottschalk has them, Shari Abarbanel has them, Lorraine Del Vecchio has them, Jessica Lapidus and her cousin Diane from New Rochelle both have them, Bonnie Altschuler has them, Claudia Lubin has them, Rhonda Mel-nikoff has them, Mindy Feierstein has them — everybody has them...
...He won't turn him into another murderer...
...He did not chat with the women or jest with them...
...I heard the old familiar melody...
...A slender maid with a great abundance of long black hair, blazing eyes and a personality that suited her famous pedigree...
...They can't stay here and do it...
...I'm rather busy these days," she said, "a year-end report, and my parents arriving for the holidays...
...Once, though, not long before she was preparing to go home, she called me over to her...
...We'd call her Sosos," says Tamar...
...they jumped away from the sound of the blade, fled up the fissure of the rock, witless, they did not recover until long after, running under the evening street-lamps of Washington Street as a paddy wagon screeched alongside four boys without pants...
...whispered Reilly...
...For the light of this star in the evening sky marks the end of the Sabbath — in her father's household, a time of such sudden, empty sadness that even now, on this train, as the fragrant, billowing Sabbath flies off into the lowering night sky, she feels bereft, immured once again in the dreadful, nerveless desolation of her first remembered grief...
...they were not among the ministers and the administrators even in the days of the Hasmonians, and certainly not in the time of the Herods...
...Neither making friends nor picking quarrels was the solution to the Christmas season...
...I cannot describe to you the unbelievable misery I've seen in just these past few months, and I finally realize that your husband and his friends were not so foolish in their ideas...
...Best not to drink water or eat uncooked things, y'know...
...Subsequently, too, there was not much chance for the young Akiva to learn any estimable trade, and he became a shepherd, which was perhaps the lowest of occupations...
...He ain't ready," Mulvaney interposed...
...I picked a book off the shelf and opened it at random...
...It doesn't matter what Shari Altschuler has...
...I would not ask if he had ever been economic advisor to Idi Amin or the Emperor Bokassa...
...There was the bar, of course, Welcome to West Africa...
...One day my mother looked at my face and asked me a question that seemed to come from somewhere far away: "Have you noticed anything about your face...
...He would stand in his coffin while she sat at the graveside talking to him in a whisper...
...I didn't want to inform my parents...
...Not where I come from...
...How is it possible...
...Kupfer-man's technique of layered drawing was recently put to a new test: the drawings in this issue are from his forthcoming book, With Beirut...
...Copyright 1983 by Liliane Klapisch: pp...
...She gazed beyond him at the breakers that stopped just short of her feet...
...Why, it's the office of UNESCO looming up in front of me -another great coincidence...
...The interpreter read: Nehemia Shneurson was born in Poland in 1880, buried in Palestine in January, 1900...
...my mother suddenly wheeled around at me...
...And it was also a city of great wealth...
...she inquired...
...But he has refused to admit it, refused to take the precautions with diet and medicines, refused to take care...
...Stomach...
...FAMILY OBLIGATIONS Johanna Kaplan Johanna Kaplan's "Family Obligations," part of a current work-in-progress, continues the author's exploration of roots in Isaac Babel's Russia...
...My dear sister, I long to see you again, but I don't know when that will be, or where, even...
...If only her clinic could have paper towels like those — so that patients would not all have to use the same cloth communal towel...
...She confirmed that in spite of his lack of learning, he had a profound wisdom of the heart...
...And when she realized that this modesty was his general attitude to women, not only to her, she also noticed that oddly enough women were attracted to him...
...The two living ones were Rivka and Yosef de la Reine...
...Natan, Nehemia's boyhood friend, arrived on a white horse and embraced Nehemia from afar...
...As soon as they could, the servants took to their heels, as though frightened of what they had just witnessed...
...But the song which so lovingly recalled the look of girls of her generation - their eager, unadorned, wistful, energetic charm - was at the height of its popularity...
...I'm normal...
...the snake sprung out from the pants, hooded...
...Miss doctor...
...With Rosalie it always had to be charms for her charm bracelet...
...and there were, of course, plenty of rich men too, some only too eager to be in high society and others anxious to lay eyes on Rachel, the daughter of the house...
...They bent their heads a minute to the wind...
...Little O'Coogan's went wide, flecking his ear...
...No one knows when and how she first saw Akiva Ben Yoseph...
...Especially since it was common knowledge that, as the only daughter of the Calba Savuas, she would be given a considerable part of their inestimable wealth...
...Look," instructed White...
...an endless covered-wagon train roaming across the prairies followed a slow, lurching trail on the window of a lingerie store...
...Can it be that the rabbi's daughter -that remote, austere, forbidding-looking woman might once have been one of the girls the song-writer had in mind...
...His eyes brimmed with tears which immediately melted...
...On the contrary, he was heavier of speech, more taciturn, almost as though lacking even the impoverished fund of expression of these men of the earth...
...I walked away and then turned around for a last look...
...Nails n'glass, n'all kindsah crap, right at d'tip so it tore right inta duh skin...
...Comrade doctor...
...Her eyes are amused...
...Every Jew with a Yuletide weakness for slipped soul, a melancholia whiplash in the aura of department store Santa Clauses, Handel's Messiah, and family turkey sacrifices amid rosy cheeks, should get the chance to spend the holiday season in West Africa...
...When they'd driven past some fig and sycamore trees, the sun blinding by now, they could see the settlement in the distance...
...I stood on the sidelines hoping Yoram wouldn't notice me...
...The members of Calba Savua traced their ancestry back to the biblical family of Caleb Ben Yefuneh, and they possessed vast stretches of land in southern Judea: vineyards, olive groves, flocks of sheep and goats, broad fields of grain...
...In the late 1940's, the rabbi's daughter, my great-aunt, by then a woman over sixty, came to America on a six-month clinical exchange program...
...It's still quite early," says Tamar in her usual voice and certainly not in a whisper...
...The actors were stuck in their roles, loving every minute of the old drama, the theme of the father and the mother and the child prodigy...
...You're the same size, the same width, almost the same height...
...Only the footsteps in the tops of the trees — the company could not pick out a tread...
...No matter what suffering it brought them or others, it was extremely difficult for them to digress from a chosen path of action or feeling...
...If she ever felt lonely or frightened, what did it matter...
...The Last Jew" is from the novel of the same title, published in Hebrew in 1982 and presently being translated into English and French...
...And instead, she broke out in not atypical family manner: "True, he seems rich and well-bred and may even be a scholar, but what is he in himself...
...Never...
...Alfredi said, "What a pity...
...One feels deeply what is happening, but it takes vision to resist journalism's priorities...
...He declared himself to be well and swore that never again would he spend ten days in a coffin even if it meant he must die...
...I had never noticed the book before...
...It's only the Jews who behave this way...
...The journey to Jaffa lasted ten days...
...It will never come back to her...
...And the opposite too was true, whether justly or unjustly: when once they had reason to dislike or hate someone, nothing could make them alter their opinion...
...Gouldl A blanket of dumb misery sank over me, the insecurity blanket recalled from childhood, a nearly forgotten exclusion, associated with the whispered word Jew sent my way in Lakewood, Ohio, which had marked me off from everyone...
...When they came to what Natan called the settlement center and which Rivka dubbed to herself, this miserable hole, the sun was already at its full power, and there, in front of the synagogue whose second story was still being built, stood some pitiful-looking people who were fruitlessly trying to present a more or less proud front...
...It was one of those poor households where one was grateful for whatever one was given...
...But his younger daughter, my great-aunt whom I didn't know, became a doctor and ultimately went to Palestine...
...For us, Russia is still a prison, I am now convinced...
...Yuh mummy'll be mad...
...A patch of blue sky showed between the top of this wall and the ceiling of the crib...
...Generations of haggard, black-coated rabbis with yellowing beards have raised their voices in phlegmy disputation all along these rutted lanes, but right now, in the crazing midsummer heat, there is no sign of squabbling life...
...He bore a sign about his neck on which was written: "Jew and son of a Jew, Survivor of Torture, Please Help this Mute Who Saw and Returned from Terror...
...It's alright for you to wear Yodai's clothes...
...Editor's Note The author of a current hit in Tel Aviv — a topical play about fantasies of Zionism — is caught by the Jerusalem Post's Marsha Pomerantz in the midst of his own fantasy: "I have friends who went to Los Angeles to make films...
...Never...
...What was there to see...
...What can I have done that God would choose to punish me in this way...
...The Turk asked the interpreter to translate this text for him...
...The father of the family sat at the head of the table, joyfully welcoming each new arrival and guest, no matter whether rich or poor...
...Many of Wallach's Selected Poems (forthcoming from Hakibbutz Hameuchad) were set to music by popular Israeli groups with whom she personally collaborated...
...Were they not somehow directed to her most secret thoughts...
...Then the coffin was brought down and placed beside her...
...Outside, fruit and flowers were on sale and a smell of charred flesh hung on the air...
...How could I tell that I'd stopped...
...The porters placed the coffin in her room...
...says Tamar...
...Bang-bang...
...Madame Sosostris bounds after the cast-off shirt, growls, then is quiet...
...They were actually of the old aristocracy of the tribe of Judah, and most of their houses, lands and property were situated in the hill country to the south, in the region of Hebron...
...Did this figure, breathing burning tow, touch them with the sharp point of his sword...
...A desert wind blew from Libya...
...Yes, melancholia...
...Down here...
...a novel in which I have used real names and the sense of some real people in order to make a particular bridge between history and the shaping of imagination . . . Like the name 'Gold', which is an imaginary name, this is an imaginary history...
...Next door to where my uncle lived was a big Hebrew library...
...Stop it, Gary...
...Sniff and you'll know...
...She isn't sleeping, just pretending...
...This was another thing my mother could never have imagined when she was a child in a small, muddy town in Poland...
...I do not care for this instrument and I hereby challenge its sovereignty...
...Want me to...
...neither her brothers, nor her father, the head of the family, could do anything...
...The High Holidays were drawing near, and with them a poignant expectancy, a flurry in the air...
...in several group exhibitions...
...Poking about in Senegal would keep me interested in other things...
...Please...
...His tormentors froze as an arm broad as their backs appeared through the hole holding the hilt of a crude Roman short sword...
...Indeed, she was elegant, tall, very slim, wearing some kind of mitigatingly delicate Indian gauze shirt, with a hawk nose and dark blue eyes accented by makeup...
...He replied without even a smile, "Because a dog bites but doesn't break anything, while a donkey both bites and breaks...
...She loved that sight...
...Walking home slowly, she reflected on the strange quality she felt in this unusual man...
...Her fifteen brothers and sisters were seated around her mother waiting for brides or grooms, and she said: There's no point in weeping...
...The doctor steps forward and begins speaking in Yiddish...
...asked Reilly...
...But perhaps when you send out your dispatches you might find a way to help me post this letter...
...I'm sure of it...
...At this time, too, he had an additional reason to be reserved...
...barked Reilly...
...I, on the other hand, didn't see an orange or a banana till I was fifteen...
...Recently an African village, Dakar is now busy becoming a metropolis of a million people, "the Paris of Africa," which means that the elevators don't work...
...They were quick to make decisions, easy to anger...
...not doing any of it...
...The lady emerged from her meeting...
...Excuse me, Comrade Correspondent," the doctor says, tapping me on the shoulder...
...A child who doesn't let me live, doesn't let me breathe...
...For the first time, he lifted his eyes which had been riveted to the ground and looked at her...
...She's just regular, my Rosalie...
...She may not have been considered a beautiful woman, but no one could fail to be impressed with her appearance, even then...
...Once, in the flickering light of Sabbath candles, our comrade doctor learned: "This world is a vestibule before the world to come: prepare yourself in the vestibule, so that you may enter the banquet hall...
...The new, ugly hotel was crammed with shouting Jews...
...Twice a day she'd go down to the hold and sit beside her husband's coffin and then sit once more on deck looking apathetically at the Christian pilgrims, the black-hatted Hassidic Jews who were squealing and shouting, and the pioneers reciting Yosef Reine's poems...
...It seemed right for him to be wrapped in a prayer shawl like the scholars of the Torah, his eyes agleam, his whole bearing full of great dignity and power...
...Out flew the web and floated wide...
...The tombstone had actually been ready since the day before, and it was inscribed NEHEMIA SON OF MOSHE ITZHAK SHNEURSON, BORN IN THE UKRAINE IN 1880 AND BURIED IN ISRAEL IN THE MONTH OF JANUARY 1900...
...He stood among the group of herdsmen and peasants who were illiterate and like them he repeated word for word the utterances of the reader...
...I am a poor and miserable creature...
...These things are of no importance in life...
...Keep away from this cradle...
...The rabbi's daughter got up at dawn to drink one cup of tea, while in the field all around her the small, flapping tents bobbed like toy sailboats on a vast, black, brackish sea...
...Yes, Jerusalem was a city of consummate beauty, full of remarkable people and a certain magnificence of its own...
...Maybe she thought of herself as a mother to all the children in the Upper Galilee she had treated and watched grow up...
...He asks - this of all things — in a lowered voice, "What's her name...
...But after Rivka had turned down thirty-one fine young scholars of whom quite a few had taken themselves off when they heard her venomous tongue, she found her mother in tears...
...I couldn't stop myself...
...I couldn't bear to watch any more...
...But work...
...Gulls swooped in old, geometric choreography above the two masts bedecked with myriads of multicolored flaglets that played and fluttered in the wind...
...the Republic of Senegal, removed from all average memories, will do nicely...
...Only occasionally did he express himself, and then with astonishing clarity and sharpness...
...I wish I could remember if her hand was warm, chill, damp, or dry — it was a brief handshake...
...Look," my mother said, quickly taking a wide step backward, because she was afraid of nuns...
...She seemed to relent...
...But from that first glance she was aware of an extraordinary expression on his face, which held her spellbound throughout the duration of the prayer...
...The doctor, my mother's aunt, white-haired now but as obstinate as in her youth, did not look at it that way...
...All four sniffed to determine if the victim had befouled himself...
...Please, Adina...
...Aim it, O'Coogan...
...During a day in the offices surrounded by Hebrew, I'll often be writing letters in English (for instance, to my co-editor in New York, Nessa Rapoport) with no idea of how a sentence will end until I'm there, which is great for poetry...
...And he smiled, and nodded...
...She raised her head from the kitchen table, still weeping...
...I tossed my bags on my bed at the Hotel Teranga, which means Welcome in Wolof, looked out my window at the bank skyscraper designed in the shape of a baobob tree, looked at the ocean and the island of Goree, through which thousands upon thousands of slaves passed on their way to America, meditated for three or four seconds on the many varieties of bondage to which we are all fated, looked at my finger which was dialing for an outside line...
...But almost every morning, just before I left for work, I used to take my coffee cup to the window, and stare and stare at all those beautiful little Quaker girls with their lovely, delicate, clear, sweet faces and their long, fine, shining red and gold hair...
...Later, stories circulated to the effect that his family had not been ordinary folk, but belonged to a certain noble line of princes of the gentiles...
...I didn't mean to...
...She has the primeval forest hair of so many sturdy provincial Jewish daughters...
...But I learned from her expression that my blinking was going away...
...Ronnie Brandwein has them," I said sobbing...
...She saw mosques and churches...
...sang out red-headed Gary to himself as he ran up and down the length of the living room, knocking into an end table...
...I brought my emotions and my stomach into line by pure will, plus drinking only bottled water and eating no uncooked vegetables...
...They did not hear the curse speak from the walls of the cave: as they had done violence, as that Messiah had promised, violence would be done to them...
...He fixed his gaze on Ebenezer, still in the sixth month of his gestation...
...was he not, perhaps, one of those rare sages whose wisdom comes not from books, but from life itself...
...Since he wished to speak his mouth gaped but no sound emerged and he sat and drank the water brought for him...
...Come here, Adina...
...What outrageous thoughts rise to one's mind...
...The heat weighed down and Rivka felt dizzy...
...He wants to take my boy away so he won't be a violinist...
...He said it would go away in adolescence...
...I had no grudge against his wife...
...The way he is...
...Everyone...
...His fingers clutched the belt of his pants...
...I first saw her when she was already a mature woman and I was still quite a young man...
...We was just testin' yuh...
...In the center stood Yoram, glancing fitfully from one to the other...
...Wounded while fighting with the Palmach in the War of Independence, he then became a sailor on illegal boats bringing Holocaust survivors to British-controlled Israel...
...Apart from this, nothing...
...When I think of how sure I was whenever I looked at your face staring up at me in the carriage, from your crib — how convinced I was that if I only, only speak to you honestly, if only I explain things to you as they really are, from my heart, that you would understand...
...He had spoken with the respect and gentleness to be expected of a shepherd addressing a mistress — but there was something else that baffled her...
...And Yoram's father said, "If you come with me you'll be a man...
...It was White, his face red...
...She shook her head, and turning to my mother, said pleasantly, "I don't know . . . With girls it's so different...
...I read the paragraph over and over and over again...
...The tears that were to flow from her eyes uninterrupted for eight years already welled behind her lashes...
...True, he came of a wealthy family, but he was raised to be a man of affairs, to be able to manage the family estate and finances...
...If they very much want to imagine that with her is the boy who had come to visit them, and come again, from Yo-dai's unit, saying certain things in the same way that Yodai used to, then perhaps Tamar laughs and says in a clear voice, "We didn't close the window once and when we came back the bed was soaked...
...In the accepted manner of the one in mourning, he merely nodded with his head...
...It seems that once, towards evening, when Akiva was hurrying home, tall and taciturn, looking at the sky as though to hold back the quickly descending darkness, Rachel noticed him and asked about him...
...By the time they start, you're already too old for it to make a difference...
...The clothes people were wearing seemed to belong to another climate, Rivka thought...
...MUSICAL MOMENT Yehoshua Knaz Translator: Betsy Rosenberg Yehoshua Knaz was born in Petach Tikva, Israel, in 193 7. He works as an editor of Ha'aretz and a translator of classical French literature...
...Anyone evah stick a thohn...
...A smell of sweat spreads throughout the room, a smell of uniform and army...
...To me...
...They were a lively group, with a relatively large number of girls and women, as is usual among harvesters and gleaners...
...In every Jewish household, the beloved son, whether he was gifted musically or a complete imbecile, had to 'saw away' on his violin, for the pleasure of his mother, who found her greatest fulfilment in the violin...
...Alfredi's together with our accompanist...
...But what the townspeople said was: Here lives a seamstress who sews bewitchingly beautiful wedding gowns, and she's a virgin, a widow and a divorcee at one and the same time...
...Rivka was startled, and said, Did he learn to talk with wolves during the night...
...The icy winds whip past as he fiercely strikes a blow...
...The spot was empty...
...Take yuh pants down, Mayshee...
...In slow, simple Russian, I attempt to explain who we are, but there is no response...
...The word "adolescence" coming from her sounded insulting for some reason...
...Listen...
...The same might be said for Adin Steinsaltz's unassuming fiction, as it touches one hot coal of today's Middle East situation, Jerusalem...
...It's the same money to me...
...With dawn, the jackals fell silent and a clear blue light began to fill the empty world...
...The doctor and I are longing for a glass of tea, so we stop at a house where some of our cavalry troops are billeted...
...She said, "When I was young and living in Manhattan, I could always have had the most beautiful, unusual shoes...
...When the vacation was over I decided to go to Mr...
...Let me show you how my little Arab patients look when they come to see me...
...The wagon driver told her, Those were jackals, lady, not wolves...
...I never forgot this scene...
...One summer, overcome again - "Oh, how I love red hair...
...If only her clinic could have a wonderful thing like that...
...The day that he and Rivka had arrived in Jaffa, the settlements had been transferred from the patronage of Baron Rothschild to the Agency...
...they were hypocritical and bigoted and greedy...
...O'Halloran at St...
...But to my great amazement, I found that I was playing more fluently and accurately than I ever had before, as if the music played itself without any guidance from me...
...They took his pants off'n stahted beatin' him...
...Jet lag turned the day around...
...Huh, don't yuh wanna see it...
...The reins were drenched in droplets of dew that were beginning to dry and in the distance the Arab village M'rar appeared, heaped like a beehive...
...So I darted ahead, saying, "Yes," and two weeks later, in the wake of the shattered lamp, I followed my mother into the kitchen, whispering, "It's only a lamp, Ma...
...Ostropol heard the chuckles scratching in the dry leaves around him, crackling the gold, red, purple flakes...
...but her wrists, curling out of the stiff sleeves of her uniform, are tiny, slender as leaf-stems...
...Certain low notes and transitional tones are especially unpleasant to the ear...
...It was a hard choice, between a murderer and a crazy woman...
...The trains, braking and squealing FI1 overhead, emitted leaping white sparks now and then, and each car drew out as it moved uncanny, disappearing shadow-worlds on awnings and storefronts in the sunless streets beneath the elevated tracks...
...The Turk, assuming a philosophic mien, said in French: One is born and one must die...
...I must have had then the flushed, radiant, wild-haired abandon of all small children emerged from a bath...
...She stood there quietly with downcast eyes, listening...
...They'd shut the door behind them on leaving and after the Jew in white had arranged everything and gone downstairs to join the Turk who had been behind them all the way, she went to the window and looked out...
...The rhythm of his movements was the same as that which throbbed in her when she was sewing...
...They're here...
...the splendor of their shirts shone only in the renunciant light of their own eyes...
...The sea remained still...
...Would I ever...
...Nobody deigned to go near him though he'd long since returned to faith and had begun to cultivate cherries in a distant orchard...
...The music was swelling as I climbed the stairs...
...I shouted, bounding into the kitchen where my mother was peeling potatoes...
...He said in Arabic: That's a fine woman for a dead Jew...
...She bore him two living and two dead children...
...The morning they left Alexandria for Jaffa, the storm abated...
...Gould...
...She could not restrain herself afterwards from asking him, "Akiva, what do you think of those scholars...
...Not really...
...a fire raged in his shivered chest bones, crackling across Dorchester...
...Neville, and she smiled toothily, waved four fingers, and then blinked and went back to sunning herself...
...Later in life he would be completely bald and would be known as a taciturn, silent man who had learned to keep his thoughts to himself in the great stillness of the desert...
...Sleep, teddy bear, sleep, All the past of my father and mother You have a glass eye Are of no account to them when they hunt And mine is just wet And I too am deposited as a souvenir Sleep, teddy bear, sleep, Of which there'll always be one lovelier...
...Stick;m Reilly, stick'm...
...They excitedly surrounded Rivka and Nehemia...
...They had this here trial, where dey talked all kindsa crazy lies, sayin' dirty things...
...And now the Messiah ben David, Simon Ben Kozibah, Kochbah, son of a star, "The star hath trodden forth out of Jacob," touched him with his spark...
...I was wearing, as instructed by a protocol secretary, my best approximation of tropical formality - tie, jacket, water-slicked hair, with the effects of a bit of money disbursed for a rush cleaning and a proper pressing of the khaki pants...
...Only for a couple of years, of course...
...I smell it," screamed O'Coogan...
...We guht somethin' to show yuh...
...When you asked about his accent, I saw that you recognized him...
...She was slightly breathless...
...No answer...
...His books published in the United States include The Essential Talmud (Bantam), Beggars and Prayers (Basic), and The Thirteen-Petalled Rose...
...Fair enough...
...Thinking of America, she could understand the Hassidic Jews and the pilgrims on their way to pay a passing visit to graves but she couldn't excuse the pioneers the impertinence that bred in them a longing for a place that had been removed from time and returned to them, a place in which they thought they could live as though it hadn't died thousands of years ago...
...And for all that, perhaps something confused about her loins through the fabric of her shorts, with the frayed ends round her thighs, and about her lap through her eternal dark-green T-shirt...
...And today is the Sabbath...
...He looked at her with a certain confusion...
...Anyone outside...
...This scene — skinny little Yoram standing between his parents, pale and torn with indecision, surrounded by the pitying crowd — this scene was unforgettable...
...The phlegm caught Ostropol, in his eye...
...It was the edge of the iron blade, wide as a shovel, that had thrust through the boards of the barrier and snapped by the hand wielding it backwards, shivered the wooden wall of the cave apart...
...For how could the rabbi's granddaughter cry at a broken lamp when her white-haired aunt still strode so cleanly through the taunting shadows of the vestibule...
...I thought about the disgraceful rubbing of surfaces against each other — and the Diaspora Jew in his ghetto, sniveling and begging for mercy — and I smoldered...
...I listened to him, moaning and wheezing as he always did, and I tried to remember the enigma of the music which had so enthralled me once...
...Her body knows more than his, they imagine...
...The author was G. Shoff-man...
...And shepherds with their flocks to provide the animals for the sacrifices at the Temple...
...He exerts himself quietly, flat on his back and without lifting his head, in what millions of his fellowmen exert themselves — pleasur-ably, roughly, hurriedly, with embarrassment, decisively, joyously, in despair...
...Madame Sosostris...
...But how can you make your Sabbath if no one assists you...
...On scattered empty lots and in the gardens of their private houses, the Italians of the neighborhood grew tomato plants, grape-vines and occasional fig trees...
...And so the two were banished to years of poverty and destitution in another village far away...
...I had never been able to see myself blinking...
...She lives in New York City...
...It began to seem funny as I went about my routines...
...Only Akiva turned to one of the old women who was tottering under the weight of a large bundle of sheaves...
...The Diaspora Jew practically venerated the violin...
...What yuh doin...
...The visitor nodded...
...The nightmare of the Jewish Ghetto screams out of these fiddles...
...Of course Rachel had seen him and she understood why he had been given the place of honor at the feast and where all this was leading to...
...Like Cinderella...
...At the close of the day of rest, O grant relief to thy people...
...Jews, wanting to leave on the boat that lay in port blasting its sirens, were trying to find buyers for their miserable belongings...
...Nehemia thought longingly of Avner ben Ner and his heroes and saw Arab children treading with their bare feet in the dirty stream as they carried bales of straw on their backs...
...My old father is in the house, but he can really do little...
...What's that...
...She was to say to Boaz, one day, that the State was nothing but a flag with a country...
...And suddenly her back arches, ready for leaping...
...A pleasant sea-breeze was blowing...
...At the time of which we speak, Rachel was the only daughter of this family...
...During the siege of Jerusalem, the child once emerged too early from a basement shelter and was hit by flying glass...
...Some of them had taken it upon themselves to brief the newcomers...
...It's from some poem that Yodai liked reading aloud...
...I went to look at myself in the little bathroom mirror...
...The gulls were an ancient sign proclaiming that the time of the Phoenicians and of the gods of wrath still existed, despite the dreaming pioneers...
...Sure...
...We wanna check," said Mulvaney...
...First I had to get through the recital...
...he cries in the hoarse, powerful voice which can summon wild, straying ponies throughout the entire breadth of the steppe...
...Know what it is...
...You can't make yourself at home in a uniform...
...Siddown," said Reilly, shoving him back...
...And no one here can allow himself not to be relevant...
...Rivka — knowing what he wanted to ask but could not — said nothing...
...First Tamar, slowly, pausing at the opening, looking at them with a smile and wide open eyes, then making way for who is standing behind her...
...Nehemia roared at him joyfully...
...In the breast of Ostropol, a flame struck, leaping from the brittle wood of backyard fences, rising from splinters, old rotten ballustrades, the slats of tumbledown porches...
...If such were the man Akiva, he would be the man to whom she would like to be wed...
...Who guided the people with knowledge and wisdom in the time of Herod, if not they...
...The birds were trying to bribe the heavens with their sensuous and demonic flying, however, her husband's coffin was not, in fact, conceived through the unknown wisdom of seagulls...
...She suddenly felt a sense of release, as though a great barrier had been removed...
...The artists for the current issue are among Israel's internationally recognized, as is American-born and Jerusalem-based Ivan Schwebel, who graced our launching issue...
...How their words came forth, like jewels fallen from the Holy Tablets of the Covenant...
...She was delighted to observe that when she approached him his face brightened and he listened to her without his usual reserve...
...Neville came strolling through the lobby, saw me, looked startled, and said, "Ho...
...People like me can't want anything that is beyond them," he said quietly and turned away to his work...
...and in the distance, as the dust rises in the shimmering heat, a rosy, crenellated castle looms blindly above the carnage like a hallucination of lordly, medieval Europe...
...Oh God, when I think back to my young self and remember how much I wanted a daughter...
...And if the force of the outflow isn't properly regulated, volleys of water lash against the panes at regular intervals, yet always unexpectedly...
...Whaddyah heah...
...AND THE LOVE OF ZION BURNS IN HIS HEART...
...Her father had just died and was buried standing up according to his request in his Will and, in Christian style, in a coffin...
...The day she came back the man began to speak...
...A few days of the field have given me a chance to think about this more seriously...
...And he, taller and stronger than the others, and far more youthful and agile than most of those younger than he, seemed to be oblivious of her...
...Tootsie...
...A far away smell of cardamom, raisins and dung rose to Rivka's nostrils...
...things are suddenly called for, for instance, "Want to try...
...She fixed up a towel so I look like a girl from the Elible...
...The Turks were busy beating each other in darkened rooms...
...Others there added details and additional facts and stories to those already known...
...Others remained, even if greatly reduced in wealth and power...
...She looked around, then drew the dirty curtain and opened the coffin...
...Beyond these, sand dunes stretched to the horizon...
...After the rehearsal, Mr...
...The family of Calba Savua prided themselves on their hospitality according to the example set by the patriarch Abraham...
...She wanted her son to be named after a bold sinner...
...I, who had never been anywhere near a life like that — never even seen a party, outside of books never even heard of a ball, that I, in that backward, little, ignorant town, should have walked around imagining myself a Russian princess...
...Ostropol could see the shorts bunched up and streaked in the rear, the elastic limp...
...He's had nothing to eat, you see," a sallow, unkempt young woman says, as she stumbles toward the boy, and cradles his head...
...But the rich had a certain opulence about them...
...Nevertheless, there was something about him that made her feel that he did not need the words...
...The paths washed by the spray of sprinklers are smooth and cool...
...My great-grandfather, a rabbi in Minsk, was remembered even many years after his death, for his startling unworldliness...
...Nevertheless, it was a look full of a power that caused the folds of her dress to tremble, and for the first time in her life she was aware of how a dress could cling...
...The river flows back to its home in the sea The wind whistles back to its home in the hills The sun sinks back to its home 'neath the clouds Now the first shining star lights a path home for me" Our comrade doctor has already noticed the first shining star...
...No one had the slightest clue as to what he was contemplating, or the nature of his thoughts...
...We parted amicably and as I was leaving the house I heard him playing "La Follia" again, though it was hard to imagine why...
...The Turk doesn't care either way, since he doesn't know where Poland is...
...She received a special dispensation enabling her to name her daughter after herself and she called her son after Yosef de la Reine, remembering the tales told of him by her father...
...That's a start, I thought...
...Nevertheless, she continued questioning him...
...You evah get hit wid a whip...
...She had seen many of the great men of Israel in her father's house: Rabban Gamaliel, son of the President of the Sanhedrin, who was then still quite young, but looked like a king...
...the other herdsmen used to remark how for months on end he would say nothing at all except what was essential to communicate...
...The green finger of Reilly was shaking before him like a gas mask...
...In partnership with Israel's Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature, Forthcoming's publishers have committed themselves to the independence of creative expression...
...The doctor inclines her head and thanks the woman of the household with ceremonious gravity, but she sets the steaming glass down beside her on the earthen floor...
...Which brought home to her a contradiction she had preferred not to notice...
...Sissy," he mocked...
...I disliked him...
...Rachel listened to these latter comments with the utmost interest...
...Can you imagine...
...One can't hear her getting up...
...You'll get nothing here, Comrade Four-eyes...
...Alfredi's eyes when I told him the news...
...They were not quite like all the other great houses of Jerusalem, even though they dwelt in palatial enough residences in the city...
...His skin is brown, they're all very tanned, they train half-naked in the sun a lot — Yodai's back in the sun, the shade of ripened dates...
...Want to try...
...It was autumn, the time of fresh beginnings, the time I love the best...
...What remains today of that city are only a few houses, ruins, memories...
...You know you don't...
...How could I look in Mr...
...His American cousin and her red-haired little boy accompanied him for moral support since he was asking the doctor for an important favor...
...but the summer was 1939, and the man never saw his wife or sons again...
...What sacrifices they had made for my violin lessons in these times of austerity — and what happiness my progress had brought them...
...He's not a creature in the dirt, even if he is a shepherd," she said calmly...
...She spoke in the proper manner, rendering condolence for the loss of his wife...
...In death his face turned green and his eyes rolled backwards...
...The blood dripped into the ground, but Rivka didn't see it because of the blinding glare...
...I couldn't imagine what anyone would do with it...
...The signatures of five famous rabbis were affixed to the sign...
...For both of us sleep And I will do everything Sleep, teddy bear, sleep...
...I hadn't...
...Oh my God, the lampj" my mother clapped her hand to her mouth and ran out of the room...
...That...
...I hadn't...
...When she left him, she was rather shaken...
...A suit of clothes without a man, he said to Rivka...
...A broken bit of brown glass was biting into Maishe's palm, trembling in the wet leaves, seasons of them rotting on the cave floor...
...Trials, tribulations, every kind of care and woe, debts, installments, bill collectors — and the violin...
...How much I wanted a red-haired daughter...
...Oh, hullo...
...Was she in the grip of a fascination, or a love, that was out of bounds...
...But they did not see over the top of the broken fence the sun-blackened face of the giant...
...Know what d'Jews did...
...Her face is chalky from sleepiness, but already, tilting her head to the side, she has begun gathering up the hairpins from the dark, downy nape of her neck...
...But I've spent most of my days in Africa for so long now...
...When she took her daily meal in the cemetery with her dead husband, she felt close to Matan Beseter, her father, and she was able to talk to him...
...None...
...That he let this hour pass, or else clench his teeth: thus...
...What kind of man is he...
...God almighty, when will you take pity on me...
...White snarled, backing off...
...What was worse, the feeling was mutual...
...But they preferred to adhere to the ancient customs of Judah, which drew upon the traditions of the land which nourished them...
...His paintings have been exhibited in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Paris and New York...
...The scene must have been in progress for some time...
...You'd be screamin' Mayshe...
...They came and went in a steady stream...
...N'all kindsa stuff yuh can't even believe, like a whole tub'a candy...
...But then his wife died suddenly, and he was left with the small children, more solitary and pensive than ever...
...My lady," he said, "better that my Sabbaths be weekdays, and I be not needful of anyone...
...he seemed simply to be a person in his own right, a rather wonderful person in an odd and compelling way...
...It issued out of eternity, this music I had loved so dearly once, returning to me like an errant lover, strange and discovered anew...
...It isn't a snake-bite," he says, imbuing his voice with a tinge of regret — or more complicated, of inquiry: whether she, Tamar, regrets it...
...Some of them were entirely wiped out, all their wealth lost...
...Do come...
...O swiftly and in our own day," they sang, pleading each week in the clove-traced darkness that he hurry his return...
...These lousy Jews don't want to help the Red Army...
...The next morning, at the swimming pool, a short elderly man with a mat of gray hair on his chest watched me swimming laps...
...And of all the great teachers of the centuries of the Talmud period, scholars and sages of profound wisdom and purity of life, the greatest of them all was Rabbi Akiva...
...Hey," said Reilly...
...Sissy," sang little O'Coogan...
...Yodai liked to offer her his finger — look, like this...
...I was afraid it would make them very sad...
...This is the same campaign in which Isaac Babel served as a war correspondent...
...Ostropol wagged his head...
...or maybe her early years among families whose lives were so bleak and overburdened had bred in her a distaste for the entire enterprise...
...It was hard to deny her...
...I had other things to think about...
...And do you require anything more...
...To me he's just a well-dressed dummy...
...No, he isn't slow, and perhaps slow and quick by turn, like anyone who hasn't bothered to assume once and for all — or simply hadn't yet assumed — a specific image...
...During the night they put the body of a man dead of typhus into Nehemia's coffin and Rivka took a black silk dress from her trunk, and also a black scarf, in which she followed the coffin the next day, her face sweetly modest and full of grief...
...Rivka's mother, who was busy selling bread, sabbath loaves and biscuits, wanted to be rid of her daughter's anger by means of a swift and decent match...
...Two embers fell onto his caftan and someone squeezed out a pungent lemon extinguishing the sparks...
...crooned Mulvaney...
...Do you understand what I mean...
...He had married a woman, no longer young, and they had had several children...
...my mother turned away, her Oriental eyes suddenly hooded with contempt, as if with smoke or distance...
...I would change it according to whatever I was doing in my real life, and then simply because it was in my mind all the time, it made my real life seem different...
...She smiled, her wide forehead wrinkling above her rimless glasses, and putting her hand on my shoulder, my great-aunt sat looking up into my face...
...All of them," she mutters in a parched, despairing whisper...
...A familiar smell...
...A few months before we had played the Bach double together at the recital, and now he was a stranger, I didn't recognize him, I didn't pity him, and I didn't feel his pain...
...Everyone," said Reilly...
...his scimitar gleams beside him on the ground...
...4, 7, 23, 30 and November issues of Moment...
...He licked his lips at the corner and wiggled it...
...Everything's going down the drain...
...Hard," added Reilly...
...All the shepherds had to do was to see to it that the sheep did not get near the orchards and the vineyards on either side...
...The boys had listened that morning to a sermon by the Reverend S.J...
...Look, Ma...
...I hated to go upstairs again...
...Make it stand up...
...Don't cry...
...Natan, who used to sit with Nehemia in the forest and who had been his instructor before immigrating to Eretz Israel four years before, now wore a dusty cap and had a sun-scorched face...
...I heard," said Reilly...
...How long can you deal only with news...
...Because all they are is foolishness, silliness...
...Of course you're invited in...
...There has to be a place where Jews can have a real future...
...There was a bead chain of sweat on her upper lip, which somehow caused tender feelings in me...
...He has the hands of a great violinist...
...C'mon," said Reilly, taking Ostropol by the shoulder...
...The invitation, time and place, to the Patricia Neville Annual Xmas Party never came, but it happened one day that I was invited for a talk with the President of Senegal, Leopold Sedar Senghor, and was waiting in the lobby of the hotel for the car sent to pick me up...
...He wasn't shocked...
...Even the poor, who jostled each other to get to the table...
...It was rather a need to do something for him, an irrepressible urge to save him from the oblivion to which he was doomed by the circumstances of his life...
...Jews come and Jews go...
...I would leave it to Miss Neville to contact me if she had time...
...The illustrations here reproduced are from Klapisch's color silkscreens, printed by Nehama Hill-man in Jerusalem to compliment poems of Dan Pagis...
...Alfredi was playing all by himself in the studio...
...Ostropol stammered, wind in his chest...
...Naah," said Mulvaney, stepping on O'Coogan's foot...
...I knew who I was not...
...When I was single and I lived in Manhattan, my bedroom window looked out on that Quaker school all the way downtown — I can't even think of what the name of it is right now...
...Herself unseen, she was able to watch him...
...I told him...
...Ostropol removed his palms...
...Oh God, how is it possible...
...Most wondrous is the fact that he became a great leader of Israel — the undisputed head of the Sanhedrin, where the law of the Jews and the vast body of post-biblical literature called the Talmud were formulated...
...Mother," he said, as one addresses old women, "may I carry your bundle...
...We're showing ours," explained Mulvaney...
...So what...
...I didn't like him...
...No, Sosos," says Tamar, slowly, "you're wonderful...
...So that the city was filled with noise and bustle, and at the family mansion there were many distinguished guests...
...The few words he had uttered seemed to come like parables from the lips of the wise...
...he stuttered, "much as I wish it...
...Hillman also printed some of Schwebel's work in our previous issue...
...They said, Everyone has sold out to the Baron, but we refuse to be dependent on his charity...
...But that is not something any of the rabbi's descendants would have wished to teach me...
...I didn't know when yet...
...O'Coogan show him...
...Bravo...
...Terror took hold, bruising elbows, knees, scraping skin...
...The first woman, still loudly complaining about her defiled pots, brings us some tea made of carrot scrapings...
...From the next carriage, we can hear the plaintive, nasal strains of a harmonica playing a Cossack lullaby...
...Have you noticed...
...The very thought made her tremble...
...They turned and looked at Ostropol...
...Did he notice I had come without my violin...
...Then the stigma was gone, and quietude descended on my face forever more...
...I do not resemble her side of the family at all, so it's certainly true that if she had had a child, it would not have looked like me...
...To this there was no sharp reply...
...Their mothers were thousands of miles away in the impoverished Jewish villages of Eastern Europe...
...she inherited it from the place where time used to be, before it was created, said he...
...As I approached the crowd, I saw Yoram's mother weeping bitterly and someone supporting her arms so she wouldn't collapse...
...They sat down on bare rumps, having discarded trousers and underwear, on broken bottle necks, rusty nails, sharp stones, splintered timber...
...Of course, respect for sages and scholars was so ingrained in her that she was shocked to the core by any assault on them...
...For the first time in her life, she saw a person who seemed to be in a state of beautific union with God, a state of radiant contact with the object of his prayers...
...Then take it off...
...Murderer...
...I explained that I had an appointment, but politely inquired about the trouble...
...I suppose one ought to consider the excellence of such famous instruments as the Ira Stradivarius played by virtuosi (though I suggest we might be critical even here...
...he said...
...Tamar's smell reaches him...
...At the baby's cradle she stops...
...In gratitude he fixed her with a calm gaze in which, for a moment, the fear softened...
...Down with a bit of the stomach myself," he said, "but do you play tennis...
...they were not generous, nor were they light-hearted, gift-giving people...
...It's already summer outside...
...Apologize," interjected Mulvaney...
...I, myself, never knew her in her early years...
...In this way, a sort of contact was established between her and this man who was probably twice her age, and so vastly distant from her world...
...As I have said, they were essentially a landed aristocracy, the Calba Savuas, so that even though their wealth was less conspicuous perhaps than some of the great houses of Jerusalem, it was more stable and permanent, and was able to endure the wreckage of the destruction...
...Forthcoming's second installment demonstrates this concern in its sheer range: from the accomplished, visceral styles of Mirsky, Kaniuk and Sened, through the sophistication of Gold, Kaplan and Knaz, to the unembellished power of Steinsaltz and Wallach...
...I must speak to her at once and see if we can arrange something all together, perhaps a little dinner or a late supper if you're not continually occupied —" The weeks went by...
...You won't be able to do that — you've had the benefit of American nutrition...
...Good things...
...Gold is also the author of Family...
...When they learned of Akiva's misfortune they gave him work near to the village so that he could take better care of his children...
...The ever-present glass of tea brought by the Russian officer was sweet and contrasted the saltiness of the water that very nearly touched her soles, stopping just before reaching her...
...Even if the heart is a stone in its hard resistance to wisdom, will not the soft drops of water of Torah, dripping on the rock, serve to crack it...
...No," croaked Ostropol getting up...
...With an unexpected yet inevitable movement, like most of her movements, Tamar brings his finger to her mouth, licking it with a cool tongue, sucking the blood from the pricks left by Madame Sosostris's sharp fangs...
...At that very young, still-pretty one...
...She learned ways of embroidery and fine needlework that fitted the verbal combinations her father used to weave, and she picked out a melody that her own brocades could enfold...
...Editorial Offices: P.O.B...
...She saw houses closing her in on all sides...
...Much later in the day, the doctor and I make our way into the little town which lies huddled at the base of the nobleman's castle...
...Liliane Klapisch, born in Cachan, France in 1933, came to Israel in her thirties after several one-woman shows in Paris...
...The smoke from their nargillehs flowed serpent like among them...
...He shouted and cursed and filled himself with such passion, the words came out choked, scarcely articulated...
...And I am my teddy My father and my mother are in lavish hunting grounds Sleep, teddy bear, sleep, And I am bored and lazy...
...And now he discovers the sleeping cat, squashed in between Tamar's hip and the wall...
...My sins O Bonnie look at my sins One by one they rise up like endless children Rise up in blue caves bearing candles and flashlights Where will they ali go from where do they all come back One storm will go one storm return My feeling will go yet come back even if it reverse 0 Bonnie look at my sins all of them Like endless children they'll go they're all sweet Will my remembering go off yet return...
...She dried her hands on her apron and said, "When I was a girl, whenever I read a book, I would walk around for days — weeks — thinking I was a character in the book I'd just finished...
...He shook Ostropol by the coat lapel...
...Do you not need help of some other kind...
...My daughter, God bless her, is a brunette...
...The lips of the older boy curled...
...The following poems are from Harold Schimmel's recently completed manuscript of translations, Five Israeli Poets...
...she was now walking along dim, grimy alleys, passing alcoves that could have been shops where shadowy people with startled eyes stirred and murmured, and beyond, the single-engined train sounded its whistle in a vain, vain attempt to impart an air of urbanized consequence...
...Is this yuh house...
...Here for the holidays is all...
...This world is a vestibule," her distant eyes proclaim, as she bends over caved-in, bloody skulls and limbless torsos in the burning early sun, "only the vestibule...
...The UNESCO office happened to lie across the Place de l'lndependence from the Hotel Teranga...
...I fidgeted...
...Even though she'd never laid eyes on the Rabbi Krigaal she remembered him as a handsome man, without illusions, who had married Rivka Matan Beseter to her dead true love...
...Yodai's red shirt will suit you...
...C'mon...
...I've been noticing lately that your eyes are getting better," said my father, "sometimes you don't blink at all...
...A brigade of flies is lazily roaming over the infant's sweaty, emaciated body, and above his head, a worn printed sign says "Lilith...
...There is hardly a piece in the current or previous Forthcoming which does not grapple with family or forebears...
...Late in the afternoon one Sunday, there appeared in Franklin Park, Bar Koch-bah, son of a star, chasing off Billy Mulvaney, little O'Coogan, White and Reil-ly, who were beating a young Hebrew with a two-inch board on the crown of a head unprotected except for the purple stocking knitted by his mother...
...She said, "Come...
...Having escaped Christmas in the States, here I was by the side of a pool in a luxury hotel in Dakar with a nagging wounded grief in the sight of this muscled little overweight and gray-matted person...
...Neighbors and passersby were shaking their heads sadly or whispering together...
...Then, later, when I read War and Peace, for months - months I was Natasha...
...her un-tanned neck is illuminated in the dim light...
...And with a serendipity I did not deserve, a friend happened to call — an acquaintance, really - bearing^he name of a bright, pretty, "severe," he said, "but really quite lonely" young woman who worked for UNESCO in Senegal...
...Now one of the major Israeli artists of her generation, her work has appeared in the U.S...
...The sound of barking dogs and the smell of dung and of sweet basil came from the huddled hillside village which, in a momentary flash from the swiftly rising sun, seemed to have turned into an ancient ruined city...
...the Arab swallowed the fetid air and lifting his foot to show the sole of it to the Turk who ignored him completely, he cried: I am the sole of your foot...
...But his father repeated, "Remember, Yoram, the badge of the Palmach...
...Reilly had to clip the baby across the mouth...
...His eyes cleared as his assailants fled through the rift in the rock...
...But the doctor's niece was no longer the lively, rushing, intense-eyed working girl who'd come to visit her Upper Galilee clinic in 1936...
...She took the two older boys with her...
...The strings, incidentally, are made from animal tissue...
...Or else I'm telling you right now - when that tooth on top falls out, the only thing you'll find under the pillow is the mattress...
...Now grab his finger...
...You see how it is," the tow-headed Cossack bellows from the yard as we walk off...
...The hospital she was working at was in upper Manhattan, just below the black-grid bridge and rocky outcroppings of Spuyten Duyvil, so she stayed with a niece who lived a bus ride away -across the oily, barge-lined Harlem River, among the humpty-dumpty hills and wandering, oddly-angled streets of the leafy northwest Bronx...
...He didn't even wince when Madame Sosostris pinned both fangs in his finger...
...Here was another sign that I had made the right decision...
...EIGHT POEMS Yona Wallach Translator: Harold Schimmel Yona Wallach lives on the street in Kiryat Ono named after her father, who fell in Israel's War of Independence...
...Hey," threatened White...
...Save him from that murderer...
...She thought, I've got a son of his in my belly, he'll learn yet...
...And it made me an envious, gullible spy in the world of ordinary desires...
...He's bleedin...
...When we went on to the third movement, I was surprised to note what great pleasure the compliment gave me — I had so naively believed that I was indifferent...
...He was simply in a state of soul communion with the Creator of the Universe...
...Akiva was thus alone for a large part of the year...
...To be sure, there were very many different kinds of people in Jerusalem, poor as well as rich...
...He was then one of the shepherds of the many flocks belonging to the estates of Calba Savua and, in the nature of things, hardly in a position to meet the daughter of the one who was lord and master of the vast holdings...
...Abarbanel when he came to talk to him behind the locked door about the struggling settlements...
...a scurry below — they started...
...White raised his torn brown corduroy, pink kneebone glinting in its sheath, and kicked as hard as he could at Ostropol's cushion...
...But she has none of the teasing, graceful languor of our wide-hipped girls of the South...
...Just don' do it again...
...Your accent suggests English, but —" "Ottawa," he said...
...They broke his legs," intoned Reilly...
...Neville advising, "Don't push too hard in this climate, old chap," and I thought I'd ignore the belly pains from the water or the unwashed vegetables and be very, very cool and easy for my morning swim at the pool, not pushing at all...
...Rivka, already wearing a wedding gown that didn't belong to her, said: I'll call you Matan Beseter, after my late father, and the stranger nodded his head, as though he was saying, Naturally, this was, is, and will be my name...
...Yuh gotta show yoah sorry...
...Instead, as the long, luminous shadows sweep across the fields, she sees in them the bare, primitive glow of wild, wasting sands and stony, thin, silver paths stretching toward an olive grove...
...I call out a greeting to our comrade cavalryman, but his splendid, massive frame is bent over a steppe pony's lean, cinnamon-colored flanks, and he doesn't answer...
...I arrived at the floor for UNESCO and found a door with P. NEVILLE printed on it — a severed form of her name living up to advance notice...
...D'yuh hear about it...
...Rivka brewed tea for them...
...He shook out the paltry contents from the purse he had brought, picked the silver coin and handed it to her...
...The sun is still blazing above us, enthroned in the harsh, white sky like a maddened, aging pharaoh...
...There she sees the highway near Winding down to Camelot: There the river eddy whirls, And there the surly village-churls, And the red cloaks of market girls, Pass onward from Shalott...
...They found Akiva already waiting at the appointed spot, and she said to him: "I have brought witnesses...
...squeaked O'Coogan...
...He jerked his head away, spit saliva on the ground...
...It sounded ridiculous — Rabbi Akiva...
...I'll be better tomorrow...
...The two servants stood there, dumbfounded...
...As for Maishe Ostropol, he did not behold the face of Bar Kochbah, Messiah ben David...
...11210, Tel Aviv, Israel...
...The sky was clear and waves splashed against the sides of the boat which blew its whistle while lowering anchor...
...With a single jump, his bare feet close together, as on the training field, he lands and crouches at her side...
...He gazed at me for a moment with a sickly smile...
...Would I give her his greetings...
...The tears she had wanted to shed the day before, now flowed primed, pretty and quite foreign to her...
...Listen to what he's saying, Yodai's friend...
...His father, Yoseph, had become a proselyte, and was said to have originated from one of the native Galilean families in the north...
...asked little O'Coogan...
...See," he pointed to the shining key of his fly as he drew down the tab of the zipper on a yellow pair of cotton drawers...
...When they looked up into the hills around them, they saw the green and stony terraced slopes where the psalmist had found his help...
...I know how it is for girls from strict Jewish families...
...We ain't sure yuh tellin' us d'truth...
...Sitting in her workshop, Rivka met one of the offspring of the apostate messiah...
...Reilly growled...
...The host resisted an impulse to follow the animal with stones...
...But this was all story...
...They were in a cave, high above the trees, stepping in the ashes of campfires, broken bottles, crate slats...
...Come over here...
...Nearby stood Yoram's father, the invariable visor cap shading his pale, proud eyes...
...Their hospitality was famed far and wide...
...Why would you want to bring up your children with such foolishness...
...A few days before the recital we rehearsed at Mr...
...This psychoanalysis of roots, more penetrating than in recent pop plays or movies, suggests a deeper commitment to an imaginative Jewish context in the future...
...He was asking, he wondered if you could come and have a little gossip, come to keep him company...
...Such things can never matter...
...All its greatness and wisdom...
...he lives in San Francisco...
...And sometimes I felt I was Topsy, and sometimes I thought I was Eva...
...Once, though, on a Saturday afternoon, a gray-faced Israeli bringing a bag of grapes came to see my great-aunt because his young daughter was in a hospital in New York...
...And if those shuddering, golden Sabbath eves seem far away and she no longer believes in the banquet hall, there is one part of the ancient, wine-blessed lesson which has stayed with her...
...Two tiny round drops of blood appear on the finger, like two shiny pin-heads...
...The Arabs, keeping their distance from him, laughed in the niche of the mosque wall, and one of them hiccupped and almost choked...
...The fragrance of lemons and the sea merely sharpened the smell of this flesh rotating on skewers, leaving an impression of roasted man...
...Ostropol was starting to slow down, drag, refusing to take steps toward the far reaches of the park...
...O swiftly and in our own day": the doctor lights her alcohol lamp, and in the pale flickering of its bluish flame, she hurriedly writes a letter in Yiddish...
...Y'know what," Mulvaney's voice rose, "Dey took off all his clothes...
...He lowered his eyes and answered: "But what have I to do with Torah...
...She was drawn, as by a magnet, to the sheep pen where Akiva was to be found...
...One evening I reluctantly returned from a stroll on the boulevard Georges-Pompidou, where I watched a Wolof Santa Claus with white cotton gloves in front of the Chaussures Bata shop...
...They arrived with gifts, messages and packages for the doctor to take back for them...
...Not well, not well at all...
...C'mon...
...But altogether, he seemed to be under some profound" constraint in everything he did, like someone who really knew the meaning of awe and fear of Heaven...
...Ostropol was looking into green, green eyes, hearing of one covered with scars worse than O'Coogan's, bristles squeezed into his brain...
...and she did not refrain from taking part in practical matters of the family fortunes, land and money and decision-making of all kinds...
...Sort of celebrate, don't you, Mr...
...But this thought was instantly followed by the knowledge that the poor remained ignorant and only the wealthy could afford to give their sons an education...
...Maybe we should have a drink tomorrow and you can tell me about your meeting — quite fascinating old boy, I'd guess...
...my mother cried out, her eyes raised toward the ceiling...
...When my army duty is over, I am determined to go to Palestine...
...He was drawn to her as though by a compelling force...
...On the street facing the other side of the room, there was a small square with a merry-go-round rotated by a camel and a donkey...
...Despite his worry, Nehemia had a quiet sense of happiness...
...His captors looked at .his — shrunken, half hidden...
...When I read Uncle Tom's Cabin — I was hardly older than you, I read it in Polish — when I read that book as a child, I just cried and cried and cried...
...That you would really understand...
...I was invited," I said...
...But when I wash my hair and wrap it turban-style in a towel, this everyday routine still retains for me the private aura of ritual...
...This is also somewhat repulsive...
...But the palm trees were elegant and beautiful...
...He wants you to think I'm crazy so they'll take my boy away...
...This they know...
...It took me several minutes to identify the piece by name, the "La Follia" variations by Corelli...
...He's gettin' away, hold d'feet...
...Unable to speak, they looked on unbelieving, while Rachel and Akiva completed the ritual and turned to one another with calm and glowing faces...
...He's already taken off the boots and stripped off the shirt...
...These lousy Jews are hoarders...
...Having nothing better to do just then, I wandered over to my uncle's house and looked through the books in his library...
...His first novel appeared in 1964, the second in 1973, and a collection of novellas in 1980...
...groaning people lay in the crammed halls...
...At first, the head of the family of Calba Savua was too astonished to be angry...
...He had married a simple woman of Judea and lived in such poverty that his son, Akiva, could not even be sent to school...
...and thought, No, no, this is too dumb...
...All puffed out n'horrible...
...The Jew, who'd completed the negotiations, came up to her...
...While you, unfortunate child, are forced to suffer, day in and day out, with a mother who leaves beds unmade and drinks tea...
...AbarbanePs Arabs who were conveying the coffin on the back of a donkey...
...He answered, "Your family are very kind and they have allowed me to herd the flocks near the village, so that I can be close to my children...
...she asked...
...no, this isn't a picture to be imagined...
...The agility of her jump to shore made the Turk duck back under his sunshade with an affected gesture...
...She doesn't bite, she grabs your finger, it's a game...
...She shattered the ceremonial glass with her foot, saying, In exile we are wed to the Shechinah, my father told me, and my father your uncle Matan Beseter in his cellar wed a dead nation in order to give it life again...
...But she said again, "Look...
...Ascertaining who young Ostropol was by mystical symbols embroidered in his cap, interlocking triangles - and alone — they sprang from an ambuscade behind a fallen maple and drew him deep into the byways of the park, tugging at his frayed coat cuffs, slyly kicking his bum, while caressing his ears with blarney...
...They make the beds and they drink coffee...
...The feast of Shavuot that year was like all the great festivals of those days before the terrible disaster - with much rejoicing and amicability, in spite of the crowds of visitors and pilgrims...
...The doctors were hopeful, but the hospital was very strict about visiting hours: what he wanted my great-aunt to get him was a doctor's coat - any kind of hospital uniform, so that he could stay with his daughter as much as possible, especially when she woke up at night frightened or in pain...
...Do you know why they call us the sons of Calba Savua...
...This time he spoke more freely...
...Was she able to hear before her illness...
...Rivka stood looking at the fire...
...Similarly, they made no effort to marry into the families of the high priests...
...He wished for his tormentors...
...That's the ticket — thread my way through the season...
...Oh, sir...
...But paper towels were not available then in Israel...
...Just as I walked up the path to Mr...
...Our comrade doctor's sister, whom she hasn't seen for years, lives with her husband and children in a Polish village, perhaps like this one, but in western Poland, between the Vistula and the German border...
...First the Poles rampaged through the Jewish quarter as soon as they learned the Red Army was about to overtake the town, she says, and now that the Red Army has actually arrived, these Cossack soldiers have forced her to cook their foul meat in her pots, and on the Sabbath...
...and at the edge of a small, chewed-up pasture, a tall, gaunt Pole pulls a coppery calf through the dust...
...They came to a rift in the rock cliff - a far drop to the forest floor, below the tops of thick oaks and maples...
...this is no longer your house...
...Though they were not considered among the sages, they were proud of their learning and boasted some genuine scholars...
...I decided she was working to make herself into something other than what people expected of her...
...It's the one good thing I had in this house...
...For the time being I kept this decision to myself...
...It was for their sake that the prayers had been arranged in such a way that they could repeat it after the one who read them, with the proper additional responses...
...IMAGINING YODAI GONE Yonat and Alexander Sened Translator: Noel Canin Yonat and Alexander Sened write together on Kibbutz Revivim...
...All the All the insipid and the menacing The mighty kitchen sink In the crystal castle When the moment is stretched on the surface of life Like a stocking on a prostitute's leg The holy works history won't remember Plus all the works of the devil The muzzled plans the lying stories The lovers like cannibals sitting And counting the pains of life like condiments In a dark and entangled labyrinth like my soul Holy spirits and demons at large Death gently picks flowers In life makes eternal garlands Like fears in the darkness they glitter spiritual Children who live off me The wizard locks them up in the castle tells German tales On the other side I pass like a bridge The messiah a small boy passes beneath me Suddenly there's light there living children RACHEL AND RABBI AKIVA Adin Steinsaltz is the author of a new, ongoing edition of the complete Talmud: the first version with commentary and translation in modern Hebrew...
...But I knew this was the test of my responsibility, and I would have to face the consequences of living my life as I saw fit...
...her third, Poetry, in 1976...
...I said...
...I'm comfy with you My father and my mother hunt now My clever teddy...
...When his wife and sons did not come back, he and his infant daughter moved in with his sister's family...
...Maybe I hadn't deceived him...
...She has a violent, archaic look, said one of the lads trying not to think of her body...
...Not just in our building...
...Rivka's dress blinded the man...
...Probably frazzled singles, widows and widowers, and lifelong dignified bachelors and spinsters might also want to join the Jews in this salvation from Christmas depression...
...Alfredi and take my leave of him properly...
...A baby cries, and a small boy with a pinched, scab-marked face approaches us saying, "The Poles cut off my father's beard...
...Why this hatred, Akiva...
...Rivka dressed herself in one of the wedding gowns she had just completed and, with her shopgirl, went outside...
...Like me...
...feverish, they longed to wake up once again in the early morning mists, to set out water jug in hand, hoe and shovel against the shoulder, to fill the spongy, unfilled fields with eucalyptus seedlings...
...He looked at Rivka and she had the feeling that he was looking through her at the wall behind her...
...offered O'Coogan...
...Some took sides and pleaded for the claimants, others vacillated because it was so difficult to judge...
...I was transfixed...
...if there was any beauty in the frayed edges of the ancient orient so dear to hysterical women who loved to exaggerate its splendours, she was able to resist this mirage with contained fury...
...Maishe grabbed in the leaves for his pants...
...Actually, I'd have loved to chat with you, and I was supposed to go to your daughter's party, but she neglected to send word —" "Oh, Patricia, Patricia...
...The gang lowered itself into a crib through a fissure in the conglomerate...
...In the security of their lands and power and noble ancestry, they did not bother to enter into politics...
...Thus she understood that the man knew the melody of the holy numbers and letter combinations which perhaps, were handed down from her father...
...Want me to show yuh...
...I guht candy foh yuh...
...He lifts her again, away from him and to the side...
...As I have mentioned, the house of Calba Savua was of a generous temper and close in relation to their lands and their people...
...Tamar hears it as well...
...It was a bad one, his mother had told him when he asked...
...And he would even joke with some of the guests, to the point where it was almost embarrassing for the rest of the family...
...I'm sure you understand...
...More than the priests or the scholars of the age...
...He can raise Tamar almost without moving and place her on his body...
...She could say, "Your belt is hurting me...
...You are nothing of the sort," was her prompt reply...
...But certain members of my own family — which was not as rich as the Savuas, but occupied an honorable place in Israel — did have occasion to be on good terms with that illustrious house and knew her as a young woman...
...If you stay with her you'll go crazy like her...
...The nuns climbed up the subway steps, and my mother turned back to me crying out, "How will I ever explain anything to you if you don't let me...
...He might feel hurt, he might feel deceived after all these years, he might even yell at me...
...Franklin Park" is from the forthcoming novel, Franklin Park Puddingstone or The Messiah's Nose...
...While he was still some way off, Rivka saw how he wiped the sweat from his forehead after he'd removed his straw hat, and how his watery eyes seemed to be trying to hint something she couldn't catch...
...Most of these wealthy families lived in the upper city, in grand palaces, the like of which could be seen only in the urban centers of the Empire, like Antioch or Rome...
...The funeral will be tomorrow...
...Return like me, a child, forever from me to myself Thus I'll remember me at first here thus I'll love me 1 the happiness I'll build here with not great labor...
...The old servants had no idea what was meant, and she was not even certain whether Akiva was fully prepared...
...He heard the story on the radio...
...The bulge of her belly and the coffin with her husband in it promoted a feeling of respectful awe in the sailors and they were afraid to look at the beautiful face of this woman who'd been given a flower by the Russian officer...
...And in rage and disgust for my own need, for this stupid past which could be revived even in middle age, in Dakar, by a tone and a mispronunciation, I turned around and walked back through the evening dust and swelter to the closed-down ferry to Goree, stood gazing in the night at the "Blaise Daigne," the battered motor launch which carried visitors to the site of slave shipments, my head boiling and my nose itching with red grit...
...My mother said, "That's what the doctor said...
...Would yuh spit on the floah in yuh house...
...Ostropol was aware that their eyes were on his fringe of flesh...
...These three families were superior to all the others, also by reason of the fact that the individual members of the families were close to the world of wisdom, close to the Holy Temple and were involved in the glory of Jerusalem...
...White grabbed OstropoPs belt...
...The loquacious old-timer continued to tell anecdotes of those former days, especially of fervor and zeal of study...
...She found their fear of the evil eye ridiculous, but she liked their assumed, formalized indifference making it a grand occasion acted out with great pomp...
...A splendidly dressed Russian officer brought her a glass of tea and said, For a courageous and beautiful lady...
...the rabbi's granddaughter said finally...
...But not in my family...
...K. Lyutov was the name Babel used when he wrote for a Tbilisi newspaper, and the name he gave to the central character in "Red Cavalry...
...The feeling of intense dislike behind the words made her shudder a little inwardly...
...Hey, Mayshee...
...And yet, she could not rid herself of an image of him, dressed differently, speaking differently, standing in front of an audience, teaching, lecturing...
...It was degrading...
...breaking it, swore an oath...
...If he had been born of a noble family and could study, would he not be called Rabbi Akiva...
...Maybe he was used to it...
...She has clapped her hands and snapped her fingers behind the child's ears several times with no response, and now, turning to the ruddy-faced woman, she asks in a stern, formal tone, "How long has this child been sick...
...And for all I know, they know exactly what they're doing...
...He wants to turn him into what he is...
...The sailors rowed briskly to port where a Turk holding a baton and wearing a green uniform and a fez awaited them...
...His paintings are owned by the Museums of Modern Art in both New York and Tel Aviv, among others...
...Yuh...
...Still, the swamp bred diseases...
...She left the web, she left the loom, She made three paces thro' the room, She saw the water-lily bloom, She saw the helmet and the plume, She look'd down to Camelot...
...and since he was still watching me when I had finished my Herald-Tribune, I offered it to him...
...And soon we'll be starting chamber music, and I thought you might switch to viola...
...My heart wasn't in it...
...You must have a long time...
...He could not conceal his astonishment...
...You can't want things like that...
...Why can't I have them...
...It was only after he came of age, when he was twenty-two, that he entered the Beth Midrash of Yochanan Ben Zakkai...
...The doctor slept on the living room sofa...
...longing for an answer to the meaning of life, but no friendly North Beach coffeehouses open...
...Typhus...
...The sea was stormy, and near Crete, the stairs broke and sailors stretched ropes along the mildewed corridors...
...I'd like to introduce you: This is Yodai's friend, from the unit...
...I've never met anyone from Ottawa...
...At night, in our darkened train, the moonlight casts long, white shadows across the scorched Polish fields...
...Writing something," I said, "and you...
...I wanna apology...
...My father and my mother went out to hunt Gogol's doll My father and my mother went out to hunt Sleep, teddy bear, sleep, And I am alone...
...One always gambles...
...Nehemia wanted to go to the settlement right away...
...Some people to see tomorrow," I said...
...In fact, he paid scant attention to anyone, men or women, though many of the latter, shepherdesses and wives of herdsmen, were clearly attracted to him...
...No movement of the head...
...I hadn't heard it in all the years since the recital at the Haifa conservatory...
...But, my lady...
...He seemed to hesitate, search for words and finally said, "If there really were any Torah in the*m, they should be like angels, while they...
...2 Editor's Note F2 Mark Jay Mirsky Franklin Park F3 Yonat and Alexander Sened Imagining Yodai Gone F6 Yoram Kaniuk The Last Jew F8 Herbert Gold Christmas in Dakar F13 Johanna Kaplan Family Obligations F76 Yehoshua Knaz Musical Moment F22 Yona Wallach Eight Poems F24 Adin Steinsaltz Rachel and Rabbi Akiva F27 Drawings Forthcoming, an Independent Literary Supplement, appears in the January/February, May, July/August, Moshe Kupferman: title page, pp...
...It ain't gonna et yuh...
...Pinned into a bed of leaves, glass, the steel points of nails scratched his nose...
...And he answered, distinctly and more sharply than was his wont, "Give me a scholar and I'll tame him like a donkey...
...They started as unlearned sons of converts and still they rose to be leaders of the Sanhedrin...
...There his hunger for knowledge was so great he was able to be oblivious to the privation and hunger of the body for years on end, until he became one of the giants of the generation...
...above the high ocher banks of the large municipal reservoir, straying gulls from the rank Harlem River continuously circled and called as if this trim store of fenced-in city water was merely the rounded placid inlet of a wide, unknown, eventful ocean...
...How could they take their problems out in public, out in the street, I wondered...
...Only the shadow rises up the wall and climbs to the ceiling...
...He flung over his arm, "He ain't no sissy...
...He did not offer it to me...
...Ostropol twisted from face to face...
...Everyone...
...Bless my good fortune...
...You're old enough to realize that...
...She laughs aloud, with wide open eyes, "Want to try...
...He sits down on the floor, at the angle furthest away from her, his arms round his legs and the palms of his hands on his knees...
...So the rabbi's daughter, just as arrogantly self-denying, as naively self-contained as she'd been as a girl, was merely making it clear that she wanted nothing...
...Or was her feeling of strong certainty something beyond what could be interpreted as womanly passion...
...The city of consummate splendor...
...Then there would be the lobby, the elevator, and my high-rise room with its view of sea and bank...
...The yield was good this year, so that they were a good-humored, if tired, bunch of laborers, with some independent farmers thrown in — men and women talking together and joking with the well-known wit of Ju-dea...
...Rivka paced behind Mr...
...concentration and effort are needed for this too, but less so...
...A very tall man, dark and already close to the age of forty, he was becoming bald...
...Rivka Soroka, who would come to Eretz Israel as Rivka Shneurson, was to recognize that look within herself and would live with it all her life...
...We like 'em...
...His strength was failing...
...I must hurry with my question, I know, for soon when the sun is up, as hard and yellow as these dusty fields of rye and buckwheat, the wagons of the sick and wounded will begin arriving, and our comrade doctor will have no time for the likes of me...
...How can I endure it...
...She has never been to her sister's house, and has not even seen most of her nieces and nephews...
...The shore was drawing closer...
...She grabbed his hand and raised it sky-high to prove her point...
...But she quickly ascertained that there was no need to underestimate his resolution...
...he said...
...She was not certain whether he even understood all that was being said — after all, he was unlearned...
...That was the big thing . . . What do you give your daughter when a loose tooth comes out...
...By herself, then, the rabbi's granddaughter - the doctor's niece — my mother stood at the living room window of her small apartment in the northwest Bronx, her eyes (of such a distinctly Oriental cast above the Slavic high cheekbones so common in her family, that even now, occasional news photographs of Japanese women in Western dress startle me with a rending, deceptive, primal familiarity) — her Tartar eyes so filled with tears that even the simple, heart-lifting, blue radiance of the reservoir, like a separate sunny country just beyond the glass, yielded nothing...
...She doesn't move from her place, only says, "Make yourself at home...
...The more I listened the more I hardened myself against the insipidity of the music and the excessive ardor Mr...
...her first job in Russia was as a medical officer to the Red Army during the 1919-20 civil war...
...My heart was pounding...
...She continued to call him by his first name, Akiva — as lords and masters have the right to do — and he spoke to her respectfully as "the lady," with his eyes modestly cast down...
...The pilgrims sang fervent songs, reading the words out of i9 musty old books that they held in trembling hands...
...she stared into my face pleading, and the echo of her fervor rent the air...
...Our own editorial line is an urgent concern for the quality of writing over and above the urgency of popular topics...
...Nehemia felt a longing for his wife and laid his hand on her belly, saying: This son, may he be mine...
...In her clinic in Moscow, they have signs in huge letters saying "Children are the flowers of our new life," but right now, in a backward Jewish village in eastern Poland, she is standing over a bed where there is a small, starved-looking girl with wild, dark hair and a remote, listless expression...
...The gray-faced man had lived in Jerusalem with his wife and children for many years before the war, he said, but his wife had always suffered from terrible bouts of homesickness for her mother and sisters in Poland...
...Just now, outside the windows of this train which serves with the campaign of General Budenny, a silent, scouting dawn mist is slipping over ruined Polish towns and blown-up bridges...
...Oh, excuse me, Mayshee...
...Bang-bang...
...America which her grandfather's grandfather, the Rabbi Krigaal had discovered on his travels from Hebron, was the map of Rivka's dreams when she'd been on her way to Nehemia's house to ask him to marry her...
...She was a married woman with an undistinguished husband, a small, thin, sallow daughter, and a cramped apartment, and she could not believe her life had declined to this...
...Little boats appeared in the distance, coming towards the ship...
...Don't yuh like candy...
...a few neglected houses, split apart, straggling, perhaps slipping away, Rivka thought, a stony fence that attempted to enclose the houses into a unit, a few young trees, and a desolation that neither abated nor quite despaired...
...Mayshee, look...
...After all, it was only the vestibule...
...My mummy wants me...
...During the following days, these reflections, outrageous as they obviously were, did not leave her...
...Later on, the inscription would be corrected and a document, signed by two rabbis as well as a photograph of the grave against a background of the Mount of Olives, would be dispatched to the dead man's family in Aleppo, Syria...
...Tamar holds Madame Sosostris in both of her large palms, on her stomach — between her knees (raised and close together) and her breasts, only slightly flattened as she lies...
...Bathed and slept...
...and here he paused and then awkwardly continued, "they're not even decent human beings...
...The profusion of gifts that poured in from kings and merchants and pious Jews from all corners of the world added to the splendor of the city, as well as to the majesty of the Temple and the royal palaces...
...In Palestine, in the 1920's, the rabbi's daughter who became a doctor -not in fact a character in an Isaac Babel story, but my grandmother's wide-browed, single-minded sister — lived, with other young Russian Jews, many of them perhaps like her, in a bare, tent-scattered field in the desolate Hu-leh valley...
...THE LAST JEW Yoram Kaniuk Translator: Riva Rubin Yoram Kaniuk was born in Tel Aviv in 7930...
...The water comes from far away: the Sea of Galilee is both a reservoir and the lake they'd once swum — and now, forever, Yodai's lake too...
...The quality of imagination can determine relevancy, especially today in Israel, where imaginative writers are up against very high standards of journalism, not to mention a shocking dose of daily events...
...The sages and scholars of the day were not at all admired by the poor and unlearned...
...Natan said, We'll give thanks that all of us are here, and a hum of assent rose from mouths that were part of faces that were trying to enhance the moment with smiles that years ago had become part of the old suitcases that now stood in empty leaking rooms...
...I asked...
...Send Elijah to the distressed, That grief and sighs may flee away...
...Why not just trot in to say hello...
...Naturally, he knew who she was...
...She stood near me, but did not suggest that either of us sit...
...Dipping his hands into the trash, Reilly scooped out a pale green rubber, stuck his finger in...
...My husband is confined to his room...
...My mother looked away...
...The straggling group caught up with a few slower moving old men and women who were gleaning in the fields already harvested...
...Yoram's mother had nothing comparable to offer, and she appealed to the crowd — only justice and mercy was left to rival the badge of the Palmach...
...That I should have a child who would cry over a pair of shoes...
...Who indeed can describe all the holiness, the divine worship, the priests, the sages of Israel in their hundreds and their thousands with their numerous pupils...
...Fat flies drone about the disorder, and outside, in the yard, the cavalryman begins singing with tuneless vigor about a legendary Cossack horseman who can kill with any weapon...
...The stranger entered the sewing shop and the shopgirl brought him water...
...One ,summer when their daughter was only a few months old, his wife was so overcome with a longing for the sight of her mother's face and the sounds of her sisters' voices that she decided she had to go to Poland, just for a short visit...
...Show me how you do it...
...Not yet...
...And she was too shocked by the excessive pathos of his words to respond...
...She found herself watching him, unable to throw off the superimposed image of the scholar...
...Or maybe you'd prefer it if you had one of their mothers...
...I had found myself a worthy enterprise: to stop my violin lessons...
...I'd staple my own greetings to his...
...But right after the festival, life returned to its routine flow and Rachel too was glad to get back to the village...
...Still, there was no one sitting around that kitchen table — with its bowls of fruit and cups of tea - no one who would not have immediately rushed out to the nearest hardware store and bought the doctor a towelling dispenser...
...Scai'd...
...but the town itself, with its narrow, curving streets and wretched, muddy houses is sunk in the sunless depths of gloomy Jewish centuries...
...Bad," cut in White...
...The pioneers had donned caps and were wearing jackets over white shirts, tieless, they gazed enraptured at the light which fell on the long, sandy coastline...
...Only for the Bonnies and Ronnies of this world...
...Above us, the Jerome-Woodlawn train rumbled on toward the bucolic, old-fashioned calm of Woodlawn Cemetery, the end of the line...
...He was already a scholar at a very early age, when he first came from Babylon...
...It was such a ridiculous thought she almost laughed aloud...
...That whole way of life — with its brusque, earnest, unbending Utopian rigor, had already come to be laughed at by the time she died...
...Ah, he hates to admit anything more can happen to him...
...He smiled, not waiting for an answer, then he laughed...
...There were a number of brothers, and as was to be expected Rachel was spared no love or affection, nor did she ever lack whatever could be obtained with money or influence...
...But there is no one really to take care of them during the day...
...One of the older of these pundits, whose rotund torso more than hinted at a certain leisurely indulgence in the pleasures of this world — all very clearly within the circumscribed rules of piety and good conduct, of course — told anecdotes about some of the outstanding sages of the generation...
...Some of Tamar's thoughts can be imagined, some of the words...
...And moving thro' a mirror clear That hangs before her all the year, Shadows of the world appear...
...Don't you want to...
...for some reason everyone seemed to think that what had gone awry over the last few years would now be put to rights by Nehemia, whose clear mind and honesty had been their carefully tended hope through the long nights and days...
...Gould...
...The mirror crack'd from side to side...
...The fact was that this Yoseph was not only a convert, he was also poor and had no clearly defined occupation, as far as anyone could tell...
...The clicking of the hammer-sprinkler can be heard inside the room now, revolving with small jerks...
...What are yuh," Reilly put in, "a sissy...
...A few distant treetops sweetened the bitterness of the yellow wasteland...
...Abarbanel, whose son would reign over Israel after these vagabonds had gone, arranged everything and the next day a wagon awaited them at the hotel's entrance...
...Above all, she wanted them to see her children...
...Tamar throws her off without rancor...
...Rivka looked towards the hill...
...Oh my God...
...One can imagine his finding the path to the building a few minutes before, his hesitating before beginning to run in the wake of the revolving arch of water, not to get wet, and before jumping over the three wet steps, and his saying, "Hallo Tamar," or just, "Hallo," or standing and not saying anything...
...And it was not supplication, he was not appealing for help or forgiveness from his God, as one was able to see men doing in the Temple in the days of spiritual awakening...
...Where was the enigma...
...Suddenly I am a cowardly person As to what I wrote, my name disappears...
...I clucked unhappily...
...But that is another, a much longer story...
...Yuh gutta beat'm first...
...Nobody dared approach his corpse...
...Why are you crying...
...Not to me and not to you...
...A fragrance of sea salt and lemons reached her nostrils...
...Dakar...
...What Rivka saw, as she said, was a godlike intractability...
...Who around here ever wants to read anything except the sales pages in the newspaper...
...We don't care...
...My God...
...If they very much want to agree to something (or more than that, locate themselves in something...
...Not even for the children...
...My clothes must have been nearly transparent from my exertions...
...You don't let me...
...Yooh Jewish, right...
...I heard Mr...
...The mouth of the hiding place in the cliff face was stopped up with heavy boards, a barrier propped with charred two-by-fours...
...F25 Suddenly I become Suddenly I become a cowardly person Why didn't I accept flattery for my courage And why didn't I become more brave And where's the criterion that was mine And someone else and why exactly me...
...Further on, slender horses stood whinnying and stamping their delicate hooves...
...But "La Follia" was now a tattered beggar, throwing herself at my mercy, asking me to remember the pride of her youth...
...Stick him," wailed O'Coogan...
...In the bare, stony yard, a burly, bare-chested Cossack is currying the tired horses...
...When he asked whether it was true, he hardly expected her to respond simply, "Yes, I am married to Akiva, the shepherd...
...That he make some motion, this motion or another, this motion and not another...
...Like the time when there had to be an inspection of the firstborn in the sheep pen by the scholarly experts to see if they were unblemished...
...Neville...
...Her life made as little sense to her as the first English verse she had been set to memorize when she first came from Poland as a girl...
...My father and my mother hunt serious beasts Sleep, teddy bear, sleep, They never hunt funny beasts This is your house Like badgers or rabbits...
...I was free and happy, optimistic...
...We pass a narrow, mucky stream, a shrine charred by artillery fire, and now, just as we approach the edge of a small birch woods, here comes one-armed Pawelko who rides with the engineer, to tell the doctor that the first-aid wagons have been spotted...
...I was ready to override even stomach trouble...
...Bitter water, spattered across Maishe's face...
...You are no longer my daughter...
...Little by little I lost my youthful, haughty contempt and I learned to love the play and the three players who wandered far and wide searching for a sympathetic audience to fight their battles and see justice done...
...the oblivious child still called out intently, and rounding the bookcase, "Bang-bang...
...The women were not in the same room, but the men knew that they were nearby and probably watching them through the lattice work, so that the young men were careful to look well and be on their best behavior...
...Her father and some of her brothers who had meantime entered all burst out laughing...
...I read these words by Shoffman and my heart began to pound...
...Outside, as we leave the blighted household, the hot, adamant sun is finally waning...
...To repair the injuries, particularly to her face and shoulder, she was now undergoing a series of operations in a hospital in Brooklyn...
...I would be just like an actress playing it out in my head constantly...
...The secretary took...
...When the ship anchored off the Jaffa hill, Rivka folded the shawl she'd been knitting, straightened her back and stood at the rail, her gigantic belly touching the metal cables...
...I had just taken a bath, and in the thrall of its odd, high, pure ecstatic energy, I ran into the living room draped in a towel...
...He did it...
...his look claimed and beseeched, was tender and not pressing, and she could see his bitter despair, and his silent self-certainty...
...asked Mulvaney...
...He grasped a limb out of the footpath, a cudgel, and slammed it against a tree...
...She could not hear his voice and could not keep staring at him too long...
...they knew they were in the vestibule before the world to come...
...White, hit'm with the boahd...
...In the 1960's, a popular song in Israel asked: "Where are they, those lovely young girls of our pioneering days With their long, single braids and their Russian tunics Why don't we have girls like them any more...
...They slapped him," Mulvaney sang...
...She was not obligated to do so, of course...
...She wanted to be born anew...
...I know I saw it in your face then, that understanding...
...It was better than ever...
...They sang: "Dress me, mother, in a striped shirt of splendor And at the break of dawn Lead me to work...
...Take yuh pants down, Mayshee...
...We Were Ready For It We were ready for it It didn't take us by surprise We always knew it would happen Not exactly like that but something like it We were educated for it Sometimes we were even glad it was like that The main thing: that something happens We gathered it in any event Snippets of life and happenings But only those that suited Rules of life as we knew Somebody would always want And always a bad end waited at the edge We knew it was like that what can you do We didn't direct it We just knew the outcome Maybe we should have given up in the midst On a little beauty and other such data But we weren't up to it Even if we had it in us to wait out the end We always found it an interesting point Gap between dreams and what there is to want We found here too the same rules To grasp which we knowingly gave life After that we would clarify Whether to be dead and not living Or to be some other life Again we aligned ourselves to rules That's what we'd do that's how we'd live Sometimes midway It was forbidden to call us by name Onto some peak we climbed Sometimes we'd hear and fall Moreover we were tortured It was no good for us through identity For us it was always good Even to this we didn't pay notice We were always busy like terminology And only for the name we opened our eyes We wanted to check if it was according to the rules What happened to us in love dimmed our intelligence There were deteriorated rules there And how very much like our rules There was ample strength there and warm enough Sometimes we descended below our hopes Because of love we didn't recognize our rules So, if we say so Who'll open our eyes We mean other things Not love necessarily maybe the consciousness of We grasped it like the soul an engine And bit by bit knew all its nuances Between love and freedom We had a long war Lord help us we have such struggles And Lord help him for whom it's atoase And only rarely when they were human And not in the sense they mean Rather after we had spat Our being super-human Or also when we identified When we were less and less godly And also when we wrote: we identify, We were in a whirlpool, lonely Until the body tore to pieces And still we'd dream the same rules Sometimes we'd fail About that we'd cry differently For the moment we're seeking unforgettable solace And we're careful about understanding times Between us and us even when we're still off-the-mark Sometimes wild happiness slips in Everything goes according to the rules Now there is a shape to be happy Indeed they show it but for the moment hidden So that loves won't bother us And won't be reaching our domain When evenings fall later When our enlarged hearts are pinched And we'll be with suchlike interests For some days, for some weeks and even years In mornings and in evenings the voice will pass And we'll await it with anguish Parts of our personality will emerge And something will rise like dawn in the land of our fathers Not without words one day may we remain And not without our letters and our questions And not within sight-rings of our animals Maybe we'll make do with loss Of some of our innocence and say amen to life And we'll be less reckless then And we'll be healthy like our rules And not sick from other rules Or even in our exposure may we not be naked As if a man would come then and approach our house...
...Though she could not help smiling to herself when she learned he had asked to be transferred back to the routine of the field shepherds, away from the precincts of the village...
...It ain't so special," complained little O'Coogan...
...I knew no one...
...Yuh know who he was...
...It is enough to consider the way it is played — by rubbing two surfaces against each other — to send shivers of revulsion up the spine...
...Across the street, the setting sun had so inflamed the top floor fire-escape, that it seemed to be moving off by itself - a separate, stately, orange-glowing ship slowly, slowly listing in a sea of its own brilliant hue...
...It was not that he was one of those poor folk who were so proud that it was frustratingly impossible to help them...
...Nobody had ever heard of a death wedding and so they called the Rabbi Haim Izak Karigal, Rivka's uncle who had gone from Eretz Israel to a place called America and had stopped on the way to visit his family...
...Too late...
...That...
...No one paid any attention to them, even though some of them were cripples who could barely keep up with the others...
...Now, in our rank, airless train, the doctor suddenly seems to smell that quickening aromatic scent of cloves, and pressing her face against the window, she can no longer find the moonlight illusion of gleaming snowy trails...
...It was madness...
...Unlike the other daughters of the palaces of Jerusalem, Rachel had spent much of her time in the family estates in the country, where she knew all the folk and they knew her...
...Someone else interjected: "And what about the sages Stamaya and Avta-lyion...
...A Jew wearing a white suit whose dirty creases were noticeable only close at hand, called to the two sailors as he approached her...
...Yodai bit his nails...
...asked Mulvaney...
...This odd combination of images made her laugh aloud, and she asked him, "Why a donkey and not at least a dog...
...How it was the only thing I really wanted in the whole world...
...Two days after the betrothal, he spewed blood in the middle of the street and collapsed with unintelligible cries...
...Listen to me...
...So, is her presence on our train an answer to my question, or does it, in the fashion of the swaying Polish Talmudists, whose miserable villages we travel through, merely answer a question with a question...
...You're made of leather My father and my mother are eternal hunters And I of my memory And I am in the house...
...Maybe that's how it was done in Odessa," she says, looking past me with distant, rebuking eyes...
...This time the scene appeared in a new light: it was a theatrical performance...
...Feeling the smart of an historical affront, the lads had been searching for an opportunity to avenge it...
...There was no point in trying to keep the matter a secret...
...His cousin was the high priest, Ishmael Ben Pi Avi, and he himself is very rich, besides being quite learned and clever...
...My face was sealed as usual...
...When I got home that autumn afternoon I was still disgusted with what I had beheld...
...The same smell, isn't it...
...Jerusalem, at festival time, was an entirely different city...
...As a sort of cultural phenomenon...
...And he continued on his way...
...I'll be here at the Teranga for two weeks — maybe if you have a moment sometime...
...give them a few years and they would be happy to forget about the Jews, too...
...Rivka became engaged to him and the city was in an uproar...
...Some women of the village took it upon themselves to feed the children during the day, and at night upon returning from the fields, he would assume all the duties of the household...
...One day a Jew, not old and not young, came to town...
...These stories are direct adapations of Talmudic sources, unique in their approach and integrity...
...I didn't earn so much money, but my feet were so small that I could always get sample sizes...
...Mulvaney...
...She was already of marriageable age, and there was certainly no lack of the most dazzling offers...
...What luck...
...Suck it...
...The plump pink blond lady by his side was Mrs...
...They were all of them rapt with the ardor of self-denial...
...That was a real Calba Savua answer...
...At last I had made up my mind...
...The rub of fabric against skin arouses the faint smell of bitter moisture...
...Among which were the choice sheep and goats of the herds of Calba Savua — not only for the Temple sacrifices, but also, as was natural at such huge gatherings of people, for sale and exchange...
...She pulls a shirt off one of the shelves in the cupboard, undoes the buttons, lays it on the floor not far from him, and lies down again...
...The streets were dark...
...A vengeful chill flowed from them and singed the fire...
...A train of camels raised a dust giant...
...He didn't even get a position in the orchestra...
...Ah, Natasha at her name-day party, Natasha at a ball...
...A shepherd was always a shepherd, and as such was at the very bottom of the scale of society, hardly worthy of being considered a witness in a legal action...
...First-rate guy, we said...
...she is so inflamed with anger that her reddened cheeks look bruised...
...Only the poorest of the poor were unable to pay for a village teacher of children...
...Why won't you try to study...
...I'm having my annual Christmas party...
...What I want to do is just write poetry . . . Maybe in the end I'll go...
...But that is impossible...
...It was just something external, a meaningless mechanism...
...He is well spoken of...
...However, she was the mistress, in a sense, and could allow herself liberties...
...And you can see a difference between them, is that what you intend to tell me...
...Yoram lost his head...
...Jerusalem is a subject for tomorrow's headlines, just as are the dreams of our grandparents in Johanna Kaplan's "Family Obligations...
...Yoram's mother screamed...
...No," he said "there is no need for charity...
...When I traveled, I returned to the Hotel Teranga to find Mr...
...Rachel and Rabbi Akiva" is from a book of stories in progress: Tales of the Talmud...
...Bang-bang...
...The gang smirked...
...Then the heat burst forth with an east wind blowing from the desert and the winter and the hot wind were engaged in a titanic battle...
...What brings you to Africa...
...Altogether, they were conservative in their ways, clinging to the old customs of the fathers...
...Even his mother forebore to ask him of his missing underwear, that night, instead washing his woolen cap, matted with gore, shaking her white hairs as the stains flowed away in cold, soapy water: while he lay in bed with blazing cheeks, speaking among the white sheets to the angels of Apocalypse, clutching the neck of chicken feathers in his pillow...
...Nehemia smelled the fragrance of lemons and honey...
...And I stood there in the Saharan heat, the red Saharan dust, as her taxi carried her away...
...The Israeli leaned forward stiffly, his eyes narrowed against the sudden, fierce, late afternoon summer light...
...At the end of the service, he seemed to be jolted back into the world...
...So though the sidewalks were alive with shouting, rope-jumping, ball-playing children and the small, grassy parks hummed summer and winter with the merciless energy of their hard-gossiping mothers, it was not in any way a neighborhood of urban blight...
...Bang-bang...
...Once again I set off on the long walk, by the same route without one detour or shortcut...
...One of the chief characteristics common to members of the house of Calba Savua was a certain proud stubbornness...
...But please keep Christmas eve," she said...
...Sherry Tabachnik has them, Nina Danziger has them, Michelle Piacentino —" "Bonnies and Ronnies...
...I dawdled, and then I saw her...
...CHRISTMAS IN DAKAR Herbert Gold Born in Cleveland, Herbert Gold is the author of several novels and books of stories, including He/She, recently released in paperback (Pinnacle Books...
...To be sure, it was not only a physical force that emanated from him, it was a kind of light, something to which everyone joyfully surrendered...
...Oh, yes," I said, swept off as always into my mother's stories by the force of her bitter passion...
...it was novel but boring...
...We gotta check though...
...Arabs were making shrewd bargains, while the more respectable Arabs spat in the direction of every Jew passing on his way to the ship, and Nehemia, who was gazing at his wife's face said to Rivka, I swear to you Rivka, that I've come home and I'll never leave...
...I had reached the crossroads...
...Sailors with bushy moustaches and burly physiques manned the little boats...
...Dirty water flowed along a channel in the main road where they were standing...
...Since the whole effort that is Forthcoming is about the integrity of imaginative work, we'll often want to stress our independence from both Moment's and the kibbutz movement's editorial line...
...I awakened in the night, nowhere to go, nothing to do, no sleep, no proper alertness, either...
...I was sent on a writing job to Dakar...
...They were the ones who, when the great rebellion came, gave huge sums of money to sustain the people in their struggle...
...Rivka asked him what was there to go down the drain and he didn't answer her, but cursed his horse...
...The line of wet on her upper lip, like the blue mascara on her eyes, made her seem vulnerable...
...He stood over the grave of Rivka's father and the words suddenly filled his mouth...
...An ordinary shepherd, an illiterate man of the soil — this Akiva, a prophet...
...In her father's house, in the forlorn dusk of the Sabbath's departure, they sat in the chilly, spicebox-scented gloom singing the ancient entreaty to the prophet Elijah...
...His wife's love accompanies him...
...I said, though only a few weeks before I had been caught out crying over a pair of bright red, blue and yellow sandals in the window of a shoe store...
...Gould...
...The sea had come to an end behind her...
...Hold'm White, Mulvaney...
...It is recorded, too, that only after many years did the House of Calba Savua relent, long after he became the most illustrious and eminent of scholars — leaders of his generation...
...On the other hand, he had made no gesture to receive assistance from her...
...And then, without waiting for his reaction, she added: "Wait for me tomorrow at sunset near the old olive tree by the well, and bring some money with you...
...I found indications of this gradual change in my milieu, but it had nothing to do with what was going on inside me...
...It doesn't matter what Bonnie Brandwein has...
...You, who could have married into any of the leading houses of Israel, dare to tell me that you chose some creature in the dirt, a shepherd...
...Nehemia hadn't closed an eye, and Rivka had only dozed...
...The Turk stood back, making way for the lovely lady, and two barefooted sailors carefully laid Nehemia's coffin on the pier...
...The startled doctor, her eyes only half-open, foggily takes in the amputee's flushed, sweating face and glittering eyes...
...Yuh...
...Why, even a shepherd, like our Akiva, seems to have more to him...
...Your husband has a particular style of speech — what do you mean...
...What did you get when your teeth came out...
...In the shades of the distant hills he saw scenes from his childhood, the wagon driver began to sing and one of the tunes was a sad song by Yosef Reine, about the rivers of Eretz Israel flowing to the Rabbi to ask for redemption...
...That was nothin'," spoke Mulvaney...
...They were intended for a man she didn't know, and another man she didn't know spoke in praise of the dead man, and a cantor recited the El Malei Ra-hamim, God Abounding in Mercy, and someone volunteered to recite the Kad-dish, the Mourner's Prayer, and the Turk, who had stood with his eyes fixed on Rivka all the while, asked them to erect the tombstone immediately...
...Her laugh is sudden and high...
...And again, Rachel found herself wondering how much he looked and acted like a true scholar of Torah, even though he was an empty vessel, an unlettered herdsman...
...Call her Patricia Neville...
...Nehe-mia rose, stretched himself, and embraced his wife...
...And, as with some rare people who do not have particularly handsome features, his smile brought a new quality to his face...
...And do you know," the old pundit exclaimed, "that this selfsame Chiger Ben Hyrcannus never studied at all in his youth...
...Did yuh...
...He studied...
...I had nothing against the pink wife half-asleep by his side...
...Reilly put his nose so close to Ostropol that the latter could see tiny red pimples and pockmarks...
...He was well versed in Jewish customs in Yemen, North Africa, and Persia, and so this Rabbi Karigal, who was to turn up in Providence, Rhode Island later, provided proofs and precedents, and when the nuptials were celebrated in the cemetery, the men trembled and the women hid behind trees and the Rabbi stood there with a stern face and married the harlot's dead son to Rivka...
...How big is it...
...He's a survivor...
...When they died on the same day and at the same hour exactly, she inherited the house and the little sewing workshop which adjoined it...
...Finally, realizing that she was as proud and adamant as any of them, the father disinherited her...
...The road was desolate and the sky was sprinkled with stars...
...whispered White...
...My erstwhile hopes had fled...
...But in spite of the fact that he was no doubt a pleasant and intelligent young man, well-dressed in proper Jewish robes, and at the same time evidently familiar with the Hellenistic style of the day, she could not bring herself to say what was expected of her...
...Someone else wrote it a strong Brave beautiful person And I meanwhile am a small nut, floating on my ground pink and round What's left of me may it be blest Pardon the error, most unintentional...
...He was on the whole more tranquil and reconciled after the festival, and sometimes would even smile in the middle of speech...
...Like that," Reilly spit...
...Her isolation and independence aroused jealousy...
...Imagining Yodai Cone" is from The Land Inhabited, published in Hebrew in 1981 and currently being translated in full...
...The Arab fell backwards with his legs crossed still and his white tongue protruding...
...Since he hadn't spoken for years, he'd been unable to tell exactly what had happened to him, and having mourned the fate of the people, he began to see his wife in the same way that the others saw her, and he began to desire her...
...There are only women and children in this room...
...Akiva stood apart, dressed in a very old robe which had clearly been patched more than once...
...Yuh believe dat...
...The gang giggled...
...They spit...
...Be consoled from Heaven...
...Alfredi clapped his hands and called out to me, "Bravo...
...Due to her beauty, kindness, and generosity, she had to make herself seem severe...
...He was a strong, silent fellow named Yona and was known as the harlot's son...
...The Arab tried to smile, despite his fear, but then the Turkish official farted into his face...
...And Adin Steinsaltz Translator: Yehuda Hanegbi among these houses of legendary wealth, there were three great families whose richness of style and power exceeded all others: the house of Nakdimon Ben-Gurion, that of Ben Tzitzit Hakesset and the house of Ben Calba Savua...
...Every single girl in every single first grade class...
...The window is closed, the curtains are drawn, both halves of the ashtray are in place, Morano glass conjuring up clear water...
...The scars of a former beating were crusted over...
...Once again, the times were savage and in addition to the smell of charred Jews there was the burning of thirty-four witches in the town square...
...Then he brings her back...
...Inside, there is a stench of rotted, moldering onions, and in the sweltering gloom — a blackness as arid and airless as the last night on earth — it is impossible at first to make out more than lifeless, crouching forms...
...That's all they can ever be...
...Then he recited the accepted formula of marriage: "With this coin I sanctify thee...
...Akiva stood out among them by his height and aloofness...
...He had made no effort to hide his distress...
...The Turk smiled, accepted his due with official though modest formality, and went on his way...
...Beggars, salesmen of primitive carvings and original Swiss watches from Taiwan, tribal costumes, screeching taxis, and what's this...
...David Rosenberg, Jerusalem FRANKLIN PARK Mark Jay Mirsky Mark Mirsky is the author of Thou Worm Jacob, Proceedings of the Rabble, Bluehill Avenue, The Secret Table, and the memoir, My Search for the Messiah (Macmillan...
...She can be so careless, that girl...
...grounds Sleep, teddy bear, sleep, And what do I do...
...Neville in her flowered print bathing dress, running toward me from the bar entrance to the pool...
...They made his face bloody...
...Do not call me anything but Rachel," she pleaded...
...At Passover time, she says, all the children were sick...
...Yuhh," all assented as they urged their acquaintance forward, down a long grassy slope, the sheaves bending like grain, uncut, on into woods, clambering up a stone wall, over a fence, into the Wilderness, the unchartered west of Franklin Park: a place of deep puddles, thickets, shallow caves, puddingstone hollowed out in cones and pits along which he and his captors crawled...
...A peasant girl's wedding shoes...
...Don't you realize...
...Still the boy stood rooted in the path, straining to hear his mother's voice...
...And since contact with the common people was not unusual for the members of the Calba Savua family, she was able to move freely and to converse with Akiva at leisure...
...Her long untanned neck gleams in the dim light...
...It was Mrs...
...the red-haired boy shouted as he went circling through the living room, dashing around furniture, playing with his toy guns...
...And taking the striped towel that was meant to dry my hair, she wound it around my head so that it made a turban...
...asked White...
...His hand still upon his pants leg, clutching the belt loop, he did not search for underwear but drew on trousers, stepped into his shoes and put a foot through the wooden barrier: the rent large enough to squeeze out...
...I quickly ran through my credentials for taking her time — friend of a friend of an acquaintance - and apologized for interrupting and suggested we meet for lunch or a drink or...
...How can you ask life to bring you foolish things...
...He looked away...
...He nodded for me to wait...
...It was his sine qua non, Yiddel mil ein fiddle...
...One of these was the family of Calba Savua...
...Together they have published jive novels in Hebrew, the first — Earth Without Shadow - appearing in 1949...
...I wrote a new poem My father and my mother are in marvelous hunting To an old brown teddy...
...But Rachel made Akiva abide by his promise...
...Conscious of their noble lineage, they never tried to intermarry with the respectable houses of Jerusalem, though their wealth and power were enough to warrant entry into any of the venerable families of the priests and illustrious sages...
...In one simple turn of phrase - 'she's just regular' — the woman had revealed herself utterly...
...When once again she saw Akiva, it seemed to her more important than ever to get to know him — perhaps because of the very different kinds of people she had met in Jerusalem...
...FROM A TRAIN AT THE FRONT by K. Lyutov (Special Correspondent for Red Dawn) Do you wonder ever, my comrades, my countrymen, how our revolution, still only an infant, a tiny, bright-eyed nursling, has already brought about such an explosion in the hearts of all those who hear its lusty cry...
...Hard...
...He had been reading The London Observer...
...A group of nuns approached, their pinched-in pallor as eerie and disquieting as their long, black habits and remote, secretive sweep...
...Sharis and Sherrys...
...The hotel was in a turmoil...
...But many years went by before I could understand how much love and compassion were revealed in this play...
...The next day I got busy with my explorations of Dakar and of Senegal...
...Don't yuh want no candy...
...Are .you American...
...At this time of the year, however, they did not take the flocks to the desert...
...Maybe you'd even like to tell me that you can see a difference between their mothers...
...as if, indeed, it could not be otherwise...
...Moreover, since Rabbi Akiva lived to a very ripe old age, he managed to impress on the law and the wisdom of Israel the power of a unique and rich personality, moreso perhaps than any other single individual since Moses, the lawgiver himself...
...I did my swim and started back up the flowered slope toward the hotel...
...One of her eyes is clouded by a milky, iridescent film, and in a shrill whine she repeats, "We have no food...
...And I knew the recital would be the grand finale of my musical career...
...He stammered at first, but afterwards he spoke eloquently...
...Moreover, his family had a relatively low status...
...And I can't even read...
...Typhus...
...Hit'm White...
...When will you rescue me...
...his eyes were cast down like a scholar, although he did respond cheerfully enough whenever anyone greeted him...
...His reaction was even more violent than she had anticipated...
...And answer, "Because even a dog (calba) who comes to us, leaves satisfied (savea...
...What's yuh name...
...C'mon," said White...
...He is the editor of the leading fiction magazine, Fiction, and directs the prose-writing workshops at City College of New York...
...I thought his muscles twitched a little, as if he too were about to dive and swim...
...They see them clearly outside, and imagine clearly how they'll come in...
...Miss Neville...
...I tried, but the baker's wife already asked for it before me...
...Sweet smell of honeysuckle, and sharper than this the smell of a fire...
...She herself, however, was not in any hurry to decide, and since no one would dare decide for her, she continued her life of culture and study in Jerusalem, and her active life among the people of the land in the countryside of Judea...
...Gould...
...The idea was strange to contemplate...
...The next day, she continued to feel frustrated in a way she could not explain...
...You mustn't...
...Again he was one of the common shepherds, humble and useful, but bereft of anything unique or outstanding...
...Reilly unhitched the buckle of his thick black leather belt...
...Maybe that was just the way of things...
...Why are you crying...
...Yes, I had a touch of it, too...
...Your hands are beautiful," she says...
...Mayshee!' Ostropol's jaw hung open but the chords were stuck...
...They don't teach foreign languages here...
...You don't, you don't...
...Bathed, turned off the airconditioning, covered myself with a sheet, stared out across the harbor toward Goree, and in the tropical night, dreamed and tried to sleep...
...Those were hard days, and owing to worries about a livelihood and marrying off the children and an obscure fear of Matan Beseter's daughter, Rivka was left isolated and confronted with signed and unsigned petitions demanding her excommunication composed by aot a few of her routed suitors...
...You shall be a light unto Israel, a man great among men, and I shall be your wife...
...Never will I hear the sweet voice of God Never will I hear the sweet voice of God Never will his voice pass again under my window Great drops will descend in the spaces a sign The God doesn't come any more to my window How will I see again his sweet body To dive in his eyes I won't descend any more to draw out Glances will change in the universe like wind How remember this beauty and not weep Days will pass in my life like quivers in the body Near splinters of remembered touch more broken than crying The form of his gesture as he moves enchants the air Never will the voice of longing pass the threshold When man will quicken like his dead in memories, like being If only his sweet glance would stand by my bed and I'd weep...
...The doctor closes her eyes...
...For on the humid, late August Sunday afternoon before I left for college, when my grandmother, with her pride-ful indifference to the ordinary things of this world, the vestibule, put a tea-less teacup in front of me, and said, "Always remember who you are" she meant also: And who you are not — the whole tumbling, desiring, heedless, insensate world...
...they brought them to the grain fields which were rich with the leavings of the harvest...
...She found herself strolling towards the direction of the sheep pens, either by herself or in the company of an occasional companion or a servant maid...
...Go with him to your death...
...He's the only redhead in the family," the cowboy's mother said, uneasily stirring in her chair...
...all roused a clear feeling of disbelief in Rivka...
...Perhaps the same can be true in reverse for many Israeli writers, who read, speak and are culturally bombarded by English...
...Mulvaney opened his green eyes, wide...
...Everything suited Yodai, even the uniform," he says then...
...She did legitimately seem busy, too busy even to wipe her upper lip, and what right has a passing stranger to demand her time...
...Her joy was in his triumph which, in barely twenty years, exceeded all that she could ever have imagined...
...How I wanted a red-haired child, a red-haired daughter...
...Reilly smacked him as hard as he could, a beam slammed in his face...
...Elizabeth Derounian has them," I finally cried in crafty desperation...
...The potato peel will blacken and thicken, cover the children's cheeks and noses with soot before they reach the pale inside which will burn their tongues...
...Ostropol shook his head...
...Do you...
...My Lady knows that I am no longer young...
...But bird-time differed from passenger-time: the boat was a fleeting event compared to the eternity of the sky and she longed for a different reality, for a place nobody yearned for and nobody returned to...
...I wondered whether anyone else noticed, and after I finished playing the slow, pensive second movement, Mr...
...Save him...
...And when I saw my first banana, how I laughed...
...After this, Rivka sold her property and vanished...
...The settlers knew that the new Company would not overcome the red tape in a hurry and the driver of the wagon carrying Rivka and Nehemia said, It's going to be bad...
...It's just been coming on him so...
...Her belly seemed too heavy to her...
...He repeats it after her like a slow child being told, "Say," and he repeats the question, believing that those are the words he was asked to say...
...Perhaps that's why Yona Wal-lach is so popular a poet: her poems in this issue of Forthcoming, translated from work over the past decade, could have been written yesterday — if poetry were journalism...
...In the latter case we have to bear with a mournful scream, a sniveling plea for mercy that is enough to induce a severe case of melancholia...
...Without being aware of it, a thought rose in her subconscious, that here stood one of the prophets...
...It is a melancholy tune, a song of evening yearning, and soon in a straggling, mournful chorus the soldiers raise their tired voices...
...Do you...
...My mother continued walking toward the steep, slanting subway stairs, her face upraised, in distress, to the elevated tracks overhead...
...I disliked his daughter...
...One day I noticed him not sunning himself, reading his English papers, reading his computer readouts, whatever he did at poolside...
...I saw he wasn't angry at all...
...One, at the end of the line, had very pink cheeks just like the little Irish parochial school girls in the playground...
...At the termination of one such evening's festivities, the father asked Rachel, "Did you notice the young man with curls sitting at my side...
...What is he thinking...
...Whatsa mattah...
...asked White...
...In spite of his poverty, he seemed more composed and complete in himself than anyone else she knew...
...His forehead was hot and his eyes red...
...The doctor says nothing, but she stands there staring with such transfixed ferocity that the bewildered young mother finally calls out, "I couldn't get the lucky cradle...
...Often when she returned from work, there would be visitors waiting to see her: cousins, distant relatives, landsleit from Minsk who remembered her father, or complete strangers who had recently found they had refugee cousins in Haifa or long-lost schoolfriends in a Jordan Valley kibbutz...
...She felt as though she was gazing into a mirror...
...she was up early and back late, and saw no shadows...
...The Turk wavered a moment, perhaps he thought they were laughing at him, then struck with his baton at one of the cross-legged Arabs who was just then blowing on the embers of his nargilleh...
...Perhaps that's why she makes her way through this squalid, airless room with the dazed, intent gait of a sleepwalker...
...asked Mulvaney...
...But I shall not speak of that Jerusalem — the Holy Temple and the holiness of the city — or of the great learning of Jerusalem, in the larger body of the Sanhedrin and in the smaller Sanhedrin...
...generous, quick-thinking, resolute and proud...
...Between the heads of the crowd I saw him look at his father, imploring him not to set such awful temptation in his way...
...He wants to ruin him...
...O'Coogan picked his bum out of the leaves and displayed six welts a parental hand had raised there...
...I climbed...
...She had spent her entire working life in a medical backwater, but now since her country was hastily absorbing vast numbers of refugee children — orphans from the war in Europe, and large, impoverished families from North Africa and the Middle East, she was suddenly in a hurry to learn what she could from American medical advances...
...Musical Moment" is from a novella of the same title which was published in Siman Kria in 1978 and will appear in an anthology of Hebrew novellas edited by Alan Lelchuk and Gershon Shaked, forthcoming from New American Library...
...When I couldn't reach the lady by phone — purgatorial telephone lines are one of the great traditions of French civilization — I showered, dressed, and decided upon a little stroll across the square to get a first impression of Dakar...
...She saw Matan Beseter and took pity on her father...
...I'll stay here a while and then I'll go to America...
...Ostropol looked back as Reilly pulled down the dirty shorts, snapping the frayed elastic, a zither...
...She noticed that Akiva, like the other shepherds, tried to keep apart from these scholars and he wore a certain cold expression every time he had to answer their questions...
...work...
...White cut him off...
...Only a few ragged, emaciated little boys with sidecurls peer up at us...
...She wondered whether anyone else was aware of it as she was...
...It was said of him that he never lost a drop of all the wisdom that he imbibed...
...Looking through his raised leg, now slowly lowering itself, the Arab saw Rivka's rustling dress close to his eyes, one of which was bandaged...
...When her many American relatives pressed her to tell them what she wanted now that she was returning home, at first she looked around at them bewildered...
...And who knows where he got it from...
...Never...
...And the pride of the House of Calba Savua and the modesty of her womanhood vanished in the rush of this happy release...
...Ostropol, his mouth half open, stopped...
...I never understood what brought it on, and I could no more understand why it vanished...
...Then she demanded to marry her betrothed...
...with her husband and children, and was my grandmother, so her life is familiar to me, not mysterious...
...What's a house...
...Rivka knew exactly how spurious was the fascination that had brought her here to walk behind her man's coffin...
...As her father had ordained, she was serving her people, and happiness or un-happiness as a personal claim did not come into her field of vision...
...Wait'U yuh see it...
...look, he's piped O'Coogan, hopping...
...Since the joke was in a way on himself, no one took offense...
...So the rabbi's daughter treated her comrades for malaria and tuberculosis...
...White's second hit Maishe across his lips...
...In nearby oaks, birds of prey hover over the summer meadow littered now with maimed bodies and dead horses...
...Was it just a coincidence...
...Some were more than generous in their charities, others were far from the ways of the Torah and went the way of the gentiles...
...I saw him wrench away from his mother and stop his ears with both hands...
...One can see his hand cupping her head, perhaps even groping for the boyish contour of her skull, then passing over her wide open eyes, reluctant at her quiescent breasts, not reluctant to nestle in her loins...
...the sages and scholars had nothing but contempt for the uneducated masses...
...It's the only good thing I had...
...Going somewhere, Mr...
...During the following days, she found herself wondering what it would be like if this man were one of the aristocracy...
...The points of four nails out of a tight thumb flashed...
...I was polite and busy...
...I'm glad to think that Forthcoming might be contributing to Hebrew poetry in that way, in the need to resist current conventions of thought — and not by perpetuating fantasies of the poet's need for privacy from the world...
...That it's like this and not like that, that it doesn't matter if it's like this or like that, that it matters...
...What would happen if a person of his caliber were to study...
...What had she to do with a life where women discussed methods for meat-browning as if these were ideas, or declared themselves partisans of a particular nailpolish color as if this could be construed as an issue of passion...
...An oblong lake and some long, low cottages appeared on the awning of a bakery...
...it was a matter of personal preference on her part to become involved in the life and problems of the countryside, to haggle with the merchants over the sale of produce, to discuss wordly matters with the many visitors to the house, and to converse with the simple workers of the land...
...Alfredi said he hoped I would play as well at the recital...
...She takes care not to touch his hand nestling at the base of her stomach and throws the shirt into the far corner...
...We guht somethin' foh yuh...
...The hum of flies irritated his ears, but he tried to ignore it...
...Only the shaking of a cold kiss — the leaves...
...Every word he said seemed to be pregnant with meaning...
...Nehemia wasn't impressed with the look of Mr...
...The waves darted at her feet without touching her...
...Constantly...
...The curse is come upon me!' cried The Lady of Shalott.' In the kitchen, my mother, in a teary rage, continued peeling potatoes...
...How well I remembered the boy in Haifa who had played the "La Follia" variations, but how difficult it was to recall the boy listening to him in the audience with so much envy and longing...
...He took off his hat again and said, Don't worry, Madam, there's a room, if it can be called that, ready for you at the hotel...
...Yuh afraid...
...And she replied, Jackals, wolves, it's all the same plague...
...He hugged Nehemia and looked over at Rivka, while a smile from the old days crept over his lips...
...Yuh gonna see d'dead get up...
...Because you'll only get it in English...
...Generally, they were led down to the edge of the desert of Judea, and there the shepherds would remain with the sheep and the goats for months at a time...
...I made acquaintances among the Senegalese and tried to puzzle out the meaning of this vast African nation which is lacking in the normal turmoil, tyranny, and brutality...
...Much of what happened to Rachel remains in obscurity, as she herself preferred...
...who knows what longings for home she might be feeling at this time, and what a miracle that I just happened severely, but with a crooked smile, to turn up at the right moment...
...Rivka Matan Beseter had rounded eyebrows, smooth cheeks and a mysterious expression in her greenish gold eyes...
...So that I am able to speak of her on the basis of more than just hearsay...
...He was very straight and firm, and yet loosely quiet, joining the others in intoning repetitions of the reader's words...
...Upon which she left him, with a look of gladness that made him realize that she had already triumphed somehow over all that was impossible for other men and women...
...Y'can't go home till yuh dry out...
...Whaddayuh scai'd of...
...One immigrated to the U.S...
...It was not a desire to possess or to be possessed...
...He praised me warmly and said that I had evidently been practicing a lot at home...
Vol. 8 • March 1983 • No. 3
