Donari Braxton has written brave quantities of fiction, poetry, theater, and "cross-genre work," and has also translated. His writing has been widely anthologized in the UK and the United States, and his first collection of stories, I, will be succeeded in 2008 by a second. Presently he lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he is at work on a novel.
Here are my favorite lines of this story - "These Hollows, and Suchlike" - which is funning on both us and itself, anything but "hollow" and yet, full of holes:
"Jewish humor, I supposed. Choggys liked Jewish humor. And so I asked him flat-out: ‘Jewish humor, my nigga?'"
Dr. Choggys West has appeared in Braxton's fiction before. One hopes he will have the occasion to consult with us again.

- Joshua Cohen, Fiction Editor


"I want you to tell me your favorite word in 1994."
"My favorite word."
"In 1994, yes."
"No."
"Be a sport," said Choggys real rationally-like.
But I was being a sport, I insisted to Choggys, who scowled and added:
"Be an art then," he added, so to that I quickly stammered off:
"Ask me again?"
"1994 please, your favorite word."
"Hiccups."
Choggys hesitated before asking, "And presently?"
"Yes."

†

Dr. Choggys West had one rule. Don't be a push-over, and the vowel, always, is the tonic syllable. I didn't see how the second rule related to helping me grow as an individual, so I said that to Choggys, and asked him what kind of therapy he practiced. "Hula-hoop." "The fuck outta here," I told him. So vaguely twinkling like a loose basement tug-incandescent he added, "And if I keep it up, I may even get my degree."
Jewish humor, I supposed. Choggys liked Jewish humor. And so I asked him flat-out: "Jewish humor, my nigga?"
And Choggys sniggered and uttered nonchalantly:
"Why, are you Jewish?"
"Would that premise my question?" I asked.

"Would that pr'e'mise my q'ues'tion?"
"Would that pr'e'mise my q'ues'tion?"
"Would that pr'E'mise my q'ues'tion?"
"Would that pr'E'mise my q'ues'tion?"

"Better, Donari, better."

†

"I want you to tell me about your very first memory."
"I was a hole."
"You were a hole."
"Correct."
"Do you mean you were a sperm?"
"No, I do not."
"Were you referring to your mother's vagina then, Donari?"
"I certainly was not."
"Tell me about it then," pronounced Choggys in a very phony Arabic with a fake German accent-Freud, I suppose, was the idea-that didn't entirely crucify the vowels; diphthongs, ablauts, even emoticons over obscure lower-case i's reeked of discriminate meaning when he vomited them up, so that if he were in the midst of confessing his sins, on the brinks of orgasm, making pp's or war-talking the enemy, each word made a kind of finger-print in the ear of the listener, not one identical to another and so on.
Choggys was actually a Russian and in reality one-half-parts Jewish but three-parts water, like a woman.
He wasn't listening and I wasn't listening and at some point Choggys was saying the following:
"My motto, prior to playing Rasputin under the Saudi Prince, is to always make of the vowel the tonic syllable."
"I know that already, doc," I told Dr. Choggys.
"Subsequ'ently, for example."
"Subsequ'ently, for e'xample."
"Wiederholen Sie bitte."

D'i'nosaur, l'it're'ture, e'xtra'o'dinar'y, supercalafragel'i'sticexpialadocious.
Sophistication will saturate you over motherfucker, he reassured me.
MEINE Raffinesse is sehr, sehr gut, he reassured me.

†

Our sessions took to the street when the traveling Russian circus came to make its three-day festival of our tiny, unpronounceable village, and Choggys, parading through it, exuded confidence for everyone's benefit, making small talk with peasant folk, women and Africans in the Russian language. Had they been Arabic speakers like myself, he'd never have acknowledged their existence. If I'd asked him: ‘What did that one just say, Dr. Choggys?' then Choggys would not translate their words, but rather summarize for them their words, and usually proceed by briefly psychoanalyzing them, too. I offer an example:
This one says that he wonders what I am doing in this country, and if I am a diplomat. I told him that he should be careful to ask only questions that require definite answers, the Maoist.

Dr. Choggys had pushed a young Slav into the mud who had stepped on Dr. Choggys' shoes. He tiptoed over the man and sniggered.
"In a mud-puddle, I am the absence of mud-puddle," Choggys recited above the filthy young Slav, temporarily blinded and very, very sad.
But then, just beyond the mud-puddle where the Slav had once been standing, some form of gambling slot-machine in fact was what was missing, and I said Look! and Choggys, half-embarrassed, turned and made to walk away. But I insisted for health reasons. I said: After all, Dr. Choggys, I'm paying for this!
Choggys had no choice but to walk back and pull down on the machine's ruby-knobbed lever.
First its currency detector declined Choggys' money, but secondly I put in a coin and the six reels started spinning patterns of symbols that couldn't have belonged to a rainbow, as if six-thousand eyeballs were rolling back in its head. Choggys would have glanced over to shit on my superstition, but he couldn't look away either, and soon the reels began to accelerate exponentially, and the ready symbols of colors bled into a canon, whipping around snow-gloss that gleamed like diamonds, then vacuumed itself up again suction-cup-like.
Through the loud, schlocky humming of the machine, the young Slav had risen to his feet and came to stand beside us. Choggys told me, "Put another coin back in, stupid Fuck!" And Choggys screamed to the Slav in Russian, "You, clean yourself up!"
But the machine was at rest, and the symbols were letters, and the letters, we couldn't help but notice, almost certainly spelled hollow.
"Us holes," I began to tell Choggys, who I'm sure was piqued by the sight of an irrepressible smile bubbling under my lips, "us holes just have nothing to lose."
"Oh shut the fuck up," replied Dr. Choggys.
I guess he thought I was only I-told-you-so'ing, but smugly, having figured him out long before, I wasn't.

†

"There's more to a hole than the gravity," I began to answer his question. "More than the plummet, there are also the feelings, like the feeling of passing from one thing to the next, hibernation..."
"Oh go fuck yourse-"
"Wonderland rabbits, for instance, will come and go through a half-sister of mine, and another one, my grandfather's brother, was the barrel through which Kennedy got slugged."
"Ja ja ja ja ja ja!" He exclaimed his disinterest.
"Friends of mine are just about everything imaginable, from trenches so-to-speak where tyrants pigeonholed, to Manhattan manholes, puncture wounds and wormholes, chimneys on anthills and assholes, et cetera."
And finally, I noticed, Dr. Choggys was beginning to listen.
"Believe me, Dr. Choggys, well-born parents will mobilize and leave eyelets for blue blood, exhaust-pipes on Benzes, famous popstars' gold pie-holes and other such things, though all prearranged, these hollows and suchlike, just as everywhere across the board in existing."
"You," diagnosed Choggys West, "are a dirty, dirty man."
Was.
I was a great gaping hole. Succussing the shit left from passers-by by gurgling it right into the soil. Ingesting it straight into the soul of the earth. Speaking to myself quite often.
But by then, however, Dr. Choggys was hup! so sorry, afraid that our time was up.

Yelena Akhtiorskaya was born in 1985 in Odessa, Ukraine, a city of prodigious talent, and the chauvinisms that follow: To those who left it following the fall of the Soviets, Odessa was "the best city in the world," its men were the funniest (but also criminals), its Opera House and young women the most beautiful. As the Jews left Odessa, so, too, did the intelligentsia: they were the same. Many settled in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, which is where Akhtiorskaya grew up.

I am writing this, as an introduction to Akhtiorskaya's "Albatross," trying not to mention Isaac Babel, another storywriter from Odessa concerned with the lapidary, or le mot juste - with putting the perfect word in the perfect place.

"Albatross" is a sand grain of a story: A man is abandoned by his wife who shares her name with that long-billed, overgrown gull whose literary presence, thanks to Coleridge, has grown synonymous with "burden."

This is Akhtiorskaya's first publication. Unlike her avian inspiration, it portends only great things to come.

- Joshua Cohen, Fiction Editor




Borya had a heavy way of swallowing: it was as if he were gulping down a large grape. It sounded painful, but was not. It was just his regular way of swallowing. The morning air was thick, and he sipped it. Although it was still early, he'd been buzzing about for hours. He finished the grocery shopping (food list: a bucket of tangerines, packaged raisin cake), cleaned the kitchen after breakfast, watched the washing machine chew, and was on his way to the post office, crumpling the little pink slip in his sweaty fist. The glistening concrete brushed against his muddy downcast eyes, while the sharp sounds of the street forced him to walk faster and faster and - too fast - he was gasping for breath. Borya was short and carried a drum for a belly. His legs were skinny and hard, adorned with small elegant knees. Each time a car honked, his legs skipped. The honks seemed to cry - Albatross.
The sidewalk was tripping Borya, hurting his toes. Thin clouds mimicked his movements, speeding up, moving smoothly, and then halting, bunching up like the dark lumpy traffic. The post office popped from the corner. Its glass door cradled Borya's reflection. He brought his face close, licked his fingertips, and used them to slick down his eyebrows. They were his best feature. Thick and dark, they compartmentalized his round face.

The inside of the post office was one long snake with an endless irritable tail. People stood in succession, weathered statues with deteriorating posture. Old people had been reduced to stumps. One might believe that for every year over a certain age a knife was swung above a person's head at a certain distance from the ground, with each passing year the knife swinging lower and lower. Only the tiny survived. The waiting people tried not to move, a form of hibernation, but when it became necessary their arms made all the sounds of paper.

Dust rose from the floorboards in the shape of ghosts, and they tickled sensitive, oversized nostrils. Borya was affected by oversized nostrils: he sneezed, sneezed, sneezed. Three heads spun around in irritation. Dust hung from each chin like a beard. The sun threw an arm into the post office, it landed next to Borya's feet. He teased it with his toes.

Borya waited in the line. It grew shorter and shorter, then longer again. He seemed to be just a few people away from retrieving the package, and then he was once again stranded at the end of the line. Hours passed - days, weeks, months. The young man in front of him grew an itch on his head. He scratched violently and a red crab jumped out. He looked around with flushed cheeks, scanning for witnesses, burning with embarrassment. He would be young for many more years: embarrassment preserves youth. Borya stood and did not consider leaving.

Finally, he retrieved the package. It wasn't for him, it was for Albatross. If it had been for him, he wouldn't have waited.

He looked at his watch, which was suffocating his hairy wrist. It was the motion of looking at the watch that was important. Not the checking of the time. Often, his eyes just scanned the circular shape. It didn't matter what the watch told him, it was never anything new. He always felt that he was running late because there was never a time when he had to be home. Albatross was a master at anger - she never even allowed her pinky to twitch, almost as if she wasn't angry at all.

The package was labeled from Panama, shipped with special fast speed. Special fast speed cost a lot of money and relayed the message: you are important. Borya held the package with both hands. His fingers tried to be gentle to the brown wrapping.
Albatross was built like a mountain. She dyed her short hair burgundy red and her face was carved from stone, hammer and rasp marks on her forehead. Cheekbones protruded. Her chin was a knot, growing tighter with time. Below a long neck, her body trembled and pounded the ground.

By the time Borya got home, the package was covered in greasy finger marks. His palms stung from sticking and un-sticking to the paper. He made soft footsteps, shhh-footsteps, up the serpentine stairs. He climbed upward, sucking in his stomach so as not to lose it, and he thought about the morning - he hadn't had a moment to sit down or relax. He felt as if he were always running; as if a hand were pinching the thick skin at the nape of his neck; as if he had to keep wheeling forward; as if behind him the concrete was caving in; as if a whirling Albatross was whispering into his ear, Go, Go, Go!

Albatross was sitting in the kitchen sucking on a kiwi and whistling. She did not notice Borya, or maybe she did, but either way she continued whistling while the juice ran down her neck and dripped down her breasts because she had a certain relationship with gravity that made spilling things part of her overall being and not an accident, as if her skin could swallow the spilled juice, or more so, as if the juice was already part of her, whether within or without.

Although he had worried about the grease marks, she was entirely blind to the packaging, tearing it within seconds so urgently and wildly that pieces of brown paper crawled all across the kitchen floor. From her large family back home in Panama. Photographs, letters, kisses, hugs. They sent her things all the time. Borya watched intently as she looked through the contents, noticing her every chin twitch and nostril flare. He meticulously devoured her facial expressions. Once she'd put something down, he'd snatch it up to study what it was and imagine what it might have tasted like to her.

Borya also had family very far away (how strange the way names change: very far away used to be called only one round word, which he had already forgotten - it was just at the tip of his tongue), but it was a place without post offices or telephones, so Borya couldn't keep in touch with them. He had even forgotten their language. Now he spoke only English, which he'd learned not that long ago, but had turned out to be such a demanding presence in his mind that it erased his native language. He wanted to go back to visit his family but he wouldn't know with what tongue to speak to them and would starve to death because their food was in a different language and wouldn't be digestible by his stomach because stomachs have languages, too.
There were many photographs in the package and Albatross wept in a silent and determined way as she held them and ran her fingers over them because she saw her long-toothed relatives, all shiny and fat, even the tiny ones with hints of fatness (if only in their forearms), and they were standing close to places she had once stood close to herself. Borya watched her with admiration but his lips grew rigid.

Within minutes, the photographs were covered in kiwi juice and tears and sweaty fingerprints and it looked as if her one sister had a large mole covering half her face (luckily the bad half) and her other sister lacked a nose (not a big loss, or rather, a very big loss) and her tiny niece had entirely disappeared behind a puddle of grease. Albatross put down the photographs and letters, shut them away in drawers, wiped the winding salt roads from her burning cheeks and forgot about her nostalgia almost instantly. Borya sighed with relief - Albatross wouldn't look at the photographs again or remember them until the next package arrived.
The windows were all open like screaming mouths. Albatross was perpetually in the process of overheating, even at night, in the winter. Borya snuck up to her and covered her neck in kisses, a woodpecker at his tree. She laughed with her stomach, but was rock at the base.



One morning, Borya woke at dawn, but Albatross wasn't beside him. Five minutes passed, and still she hadn't come back to bed. He knocked on the bathroom door. No one answered. He swung it open - empty. So was the kitchen.

In the closet by the door, he noticed a pair of his shoes in an unusual place. They were shoes he almost never wore, very black and polished, only for the most formal occasions, such as weddings. But no one had gotten married in ages; it was too late for that. In one of the shoes he spotted something white. A note. Nothing more.
He put on the formal shiny shoes, tying the laces slowly and carefully into neat bows.
She would return to Panama. The word Return made Borya swallow a grape. It sat in his stomach like a brick. One can return after a return, he said. One can make a visit. And so he walked outside, painfully, with toes cinching the loss in his feet, but aware that it was an impermanent loss, because she had left her country once, and so she would leave it again - one does not stay in places that have already been abandoned.
The splintered door of his apartment shut behind him, but he did not know which way to go. All directions looked the same, like dark tunnels, and the blinding sun provided no illumination. He decided that the frightening thing about city streets was their symmetry. Every time he walked a block, the trace was erased, as if he'd come from nowhere. He spun with disorientation like a dervish. Poor Borya. He walked for half an hour, an hour, two, and no matter where he happened to stop seemed to be his starting point. In the middle of the street there was a build-up of taxis, a mustard yellow honking river. People howled, clapping onto the coins in their pants. He had emerged from the east and west, from the north and south. He howled.
Borya realized that he didn't know any way back to his apartment, and that he could've been standing right next to it without knowing, and his feet were full of blisters from the uncomfortable shoes, and he didn't know why formal shoes were always so painful, whether it was just the pain that made them formal. On the street, he received only looks of respect because even though he was lost and disheveled (his hair was a nest), he had nice shoes, which made passersby understand that he was to be regarded seriously.

After walking for half an hour or days, Borya came upon a familiar building. It was the post office. It was the same post office from which he'd always retrieved Albatross's packages. Or maybe it wasn't. He examined it closely but could find no specific detail that made this post office have to be that post office. In fact, it could've been any other. Exhausted and pained, he sat down on the sidewalk and began counting the feet that flew before his eyes. He counted for a long time, and considered asking one pair where he currently was, the name of the neighborhood, or maybe even city (how long had he really walked for? where had he been?), but each foot flew by with such incredible speed and consistency that he thought maybe there was only one person above him, with thousands of feet that just went around in a circle. If he lifted his eyes he would see this being looking down on him, a gigantic wonder-wheel of legs.

Borya swallowed each word he tried to push out of his throat. Only saliva was at the tip of his tongue. Around his neck, he felt a carcass rotting, and his shoulders were stooped from the weight. A lamppost grew in front of him, strong at the base, but drooping up top like a swan's neck. Suddenly the light switched on: the day was bleeding into night. He recognized the lamppost. It was Albatross's finger.
Borya stood up and walked to the lamppost. It was real. The cold metal was more real than his hand. The fire hydrant beside it popped into view: it was Albatross's nipple. The grass blades were the small hairs on her thighs. Borya could not remember what her face looked like. He spit on the ground and knew exactly where it landed. This was an ugly city. The wild red of sunset burned quickly like her hair.

Continue reading...

Taking its imagery from the legend of the ten tribes of Israel exiled by the Assyrians and lost to the pages of history beyond the River Sambatyon, Tales of the Ten Lost Tribes follows the life-journey of a wandering narrator who encounters a series of displaced persons: the uncle whose endless travels seem romantic but are in fact a camouflage for a life of failure and malaise; the professor whose mastery of many languages can never assuage the anguish of his lost mother tongue; the girl student who may literally be invisible; the young man who spends his night hours obsessively writing and rewriting the slim volume he can never finish. With each encounter the narrator inevitably moves on, dreaming of home, unable to resist the lure of the world’s labyrinth. Tales of the Ten Lost Tribes examines the heart of human longing, and asks the question: Where do we belong?
— Tamar Yellin

We were on a white ship crossing the Mediterranean; we did not know where we were; infinite wastes of water lay all around us. For weeks we had pursued a disastrous journey. We had been unhappy in Paris and Zurich, unhappy in Venice; my father had crossed Greece with his head in his hands. In Athens he ate a poisoned cuttlefish. On the third night he took us down to the port of Piraeus, and there, with his body purged and his mind empty, he looked out across the black mucilaginous sea. It was his Nebo. He knew he would never enter the promised land.

The man at the shipping office was sympathetic. A vacation was no vacation if one was ill. One wanted to be home again, pure and simple. For himself, he always spent his vacations at home.

Home is where the heart is, he told us proudly, placing a fist against his ample chest. His office was bare however, a tornado-struck mass of papers covered in dust. Above a shelf of ancient ledgers was pinned a faded map of the Greek shipping lanes, and in one corner a monkey hung in a cage, of which it shook the bars every so often. We were introduced to it: its name was Jacques (it was a French monkey) and it pulled my father's glasses into the cage and broke them.

We booked passage with the Adriatic Line, dormitory class, which, the man told us, though cheap, was perfectly comfortable. Then, impressed by his native friendliness, my mother persuaded me to sing for him.

We were due to sail at seven P.M., and when we got down to the dock around five, there was the enormous dirty-white ship with a large crowd of vehicles and people waiting to board it. We waited with them until about a quarter to seven, when a rumor arrived: the ship was now full and would sail without us. We all climbed onto the gangplank.

After we had been standing there for about half an hour we saw someone we recognised. It was our shipping official, wearing a uniform jacket over his pyjamas. He looked like a man just stepping out of a dream. Our protest had dragged him from his couch of slumbers. He affected not to recognize us at first, but was quickly defeated by his better nature. He looked at us with reproach, as though personally injured by our stubborn refusal to be left behind.

You should not have done this. This is not necessary, he chided my mother, whom he evidently took as ringmistress of the whole affair. Ah, but it is necessary, my mother replied. You must come down from the gangplank, he demanded. But then, my mother said, you will sail without us. For you I will make an exception, he assured her. You and your family are a special case. The truth is, he added confidentially, the whole thing is a terrible mistake. They should have put the cars for Trieste on first. Well, let them do that, then! my mother exclaimed. He spread his hands. But then there would be no room for the cars for Brindisi!

We won't accept special treatment, my mother stated. And without releasing my hand, she climbed to the head of the gangplank.

The official gazed after us mournfully; he had good reason to regret having heard me sing. Meanwhile the clock ticked on. The captain of the vessel appeared among us, distinguished by a cap the same color as his ship, and assured us that if we would only descend from the gangplank our cars would be safely stowed on the first-class deck. He asked, as a mark of trust, that we give up our passports to him. Many did so, moved by fatigue or by his plausible manner.

But no sooner had we dispersed than the ship's engines started up. Doors were pulled shut and open deck rails closed. We all rushed onto the gangplank once again.

It was now almost midnight, and the captain himself was weary of the standoff. There was nothing left for him but to keep his word, and with great bitterness to load the remaining cars on the first-class deck. This would deprive the first-class passengers of their promenade, but by now nobody cared about them. The crane was recalled. For a few vertiginous moments I saw our white Cortina swinging unforgettably against the night sky, and at 1 A.M. we finally departed.

A steward directed us to our accommodation. For ten minutes we pursued him down a maze of throbbing corridors, until at last he opened one of the heavy, high-silled doors and the chugging engines burst full upon us. We had reached the very bowels of the ship. In half-light, beneath a vaulting of thickly riveted girders, various passengers were making themselves comfortable for the night. Women were undressing behind a makeshift screen. A large man in a string vest and underdrawers was sitting contemplatively on a near bunk with a child across his knee. Apart from the thump of the engines there was a murmurous quiet. Many were already fast asleep.

The steward showed us to our numbered bunks. Here we discovered that not even bedding was provided. But by this time my mother was already dumb with horror. The nearest light bulb had burnt out and one of the bunks was hanging from a broken chain. When the steward gestured to the beds with an expression of complacency my mother burst out laughing.

This can't be serious, she said. You surely cannot expect us to sleep down here.

The steward plainly did; a look of annoyance came into his face. He may not have understood my mother's exact words, but he understood the laughter, and seemed inclined to take it as a personal affront.

Dormitory, he repeated, gesturing to the beds, and in another instant he would have turned on his heel; but then my mother noticed the damaged chain. Just one moment! she managed to detain him. And how do you expect us to sleep in a broken bunk?

This was a nuisance. He tried to mend it on the spot; it wouldn't mend so easily, it was well and truly severed. Meanwhile my father and I shifted from foot to foot. I was beyond exhaustion, and would happily have laid my head down anywhere. My mother, however, was not to be put off. She demanded that we be provided with alternative accommodation. She would not keep a dog in this place. It might be all right for these people (she indicated the man in the string vest) but not for us.

Here my father mentioned, in a murmur, that he did not mind sleeping there himself. This disconcerted her for a moment, but she soon realized that a woman and child alone had more appeal than an entire family. She agreed, therefore, to leave him in the hold, and without undressing, or even removing his shoes, he climbed wearily into the bottom bunk and lay there motionless, with one arm laid across his face, in the attitude of a lost soul.

The two of us followed our steward back into the upper regions, where he led us wordlessly to the third-class lounge and there abandoned us, on the mistaken understanding that he was gone to arrange us a cabin. My mother waited with rising irritation, clutching her overnight bag. The adventures of the evening had put her on her mettle, and she had no desire to sleep whatsoever. I, meanwhile, passed out quickly on the settee, and despite the bright lights and noise, slept like a lamb.

Eventually a young steward with a headful of brown curls and the mild eyes of a doe, stumbled upon us and asked if he could be of assistance. My mother told him we had nowhere to sleep. We had been waiting half an hour to be taken to our cabin, but the steward who was looking after us had disappeared. Our young man asked her for the cabin number. Well, the truth was that we had none; but we had been informed that one could be arranged. The doe-eyed man was sorry: there was not a single cabin available, every one was full. Surely we had not come on board without accommodation? He seemed gentle and sympathetic, and my mother confessed the truth of our predicament. If all else failed, she added, we would sleep in the car. We could not be more uncomfortable there than in the so-called dormitory.

The steward regretted to say that to sleep in the car was absolutely forbidden on account of safety regulations. But since our situation was so desperate he would see what he could do. He then vanished. We did not expect him to reappear, but within five minutes he returned with blankets, and seemed to indicate that, on his head be it, we would sleep right here in the lounge.

It was a tender moment. My mother thanked him in several languages; she told him he was an angel of mercy. He smiled in self-deprecation and shook his head. We made ourselves cosy, he dimmed the lights and wished us a comfortable night. Ten minutes later we were both asleep, rising and falling on a rapid sea.

The Apollonia – that was the name of our ship – was an elderly vessel, flayed by sun and water, patchily repaired and ready to rest her bones in some tropical breaker's yard, but our crew had not done with her yet. They, like the ship itself, were hanging on till the last click, attired in cosmetic uniforms which covered up a wealth of inefficiencies, but, like the ship's paintwork, were a tad shabby; it occurred to me that they wore the uniforms in order to trust themselves, and also, of course, in order that the passengers might trust them.

That was the flimsy contract under which we traveled. Since it had already been torn up by the shenanigans of the previous night, we felt no compunction on waking next morning in the third-class lounge to find the incurious eyes of the first officer gazing at us. We could not sleep here, he said. But we already had, indeed, replied my mother as she rose like Aphrodite from her couch, we could not sleep anywhere else. At which the officer, knowing the contract was hopelessly in pieces, informed us that breakfast was ready in the dining saloon.

The fact was announced by a tune played on the ship's intercom. We descended woozily. Down here there were no windows and very little air, and a few passengers were picking listlessly at a buffet of hard rolls and reconstituted juice. My mother, her hair standing on end like a weird headdress, drank a cup of very strong black coffee and with a stern gaze, dared anyone to pass judgment on her appearance.

After breakfast I went up on deck, where I was dazzled by an expanse of dirty white against a backdrop of glimmering blue. Everything was cold and hard and bright. A frill of fast foam ran alongside the ship; aft, I discovered a deep swimming pool full of nothing but air.

That day we passed Rhodes, and found that the gate between the third-class and the first-class decks was locked, necessitating a roundabout journey of five or ten minutes to reach our car. The captain, to whom my mother appealed, would not compromise. We third-class passengers could not be allowed direct access to the first-class deck. My mother was disgusted. In her heart she was always first class, and demanded her privileges as of right. But the captain of the Apollonia remained immovable.

So my mother picked up her overnight case and led me without blenching to the first-class lounge, which was upholstered in swirls of maroon, and was by no means luxurious, though it appeared so after our view of steerage. Here a bored and child-hating barman reluctantly served us Coca-Cola in the traditional bottles.

We set up camp within sight of our car, and before long I had made the acquaintance of a pretty, dark-haired girl in dungarees called Alex who was on her way to America and who knew everything, including the name of our doe-eyed crewmember, Nikos.

Nikos, she insisted, would fill the swimming pool for us and had only to be persuaded. In fact, she had done a great deal of persuading already. The moment she saw him pass the window she ran out, and with American boldness caught him by the hand. O Nikos, Nikos, she panted, fill the swimming pool for us, fill the swimming pool! I hung back shyly as I watched him, with his patient, gentle look, smile down at her, explaining that the swimming pool was being painted and could not be filled this voyage.

We made it our business to watch out for him. When the tune played for dinner we found him standing in the stuffy dining room, a napkin over his arm, before one of the mock-oak pillars. We tormented ourselves throughout the tedious meal by trying to catch his eye. Later we saw him at the far end of the promenade and ran towards him, but Alex had to stop halfway. I'm not supposed to run, she panted. I've got a hole in my heart. She added casually: I'll probably die before I reach eighteen.

I was stabbed by a pang of envy.

That night my mother and I waited for the surly barman to lower his shutters and depart, then bedded down in the first-class lounge with blankets and pillows, as if in our own private suite. It was Nikos who came to check on us, reacting with nothing more than a wry smile to our arrangements; in fact he carried an extra pillow under his arm. It was in his nature to be courteous and obliging. He sat down on the sofa's edge and talked with us for a quarter of an hour. His manner was deferential but friendly, warm but reserved; my mother, with all her curiosity, found out nothing about him. He answered her questions with a smile and a blush. The sea was his home, or rather, a succession of ships whose duties and facilities were all more or less similar. The endless back and forth of endless voyages was all he needed in the way of progress.

The next morning Alex and I spent trailing up and down the promenade decks, teasing Nikos whenever he crossed our path. He seemed distracted, but never failed to flash his brilliant smile at us. We demanded Cokes and more Cokes of the sullen barman. Alex told me they would soon be discontinuing the fluted bottles and that in a few years they would be worth a fortune. I secreted one in my suitcase, feeling like a thief.

In the afternoon she was ordered to take a siesta; I found my father on the second-class deck, attempting to read. The shipboard wind snatched at the pages of his book. He looked more unhappy than I had ever seen him, a man completely at odds with his situation. Where is your mother, he asked, in the melancholy tone of one who has been abandoned. The last time I had seen her she was engaged in fierce argument with the captain, but I did not tell my father so. Nor did he wait for an answer, but turned his glazed eyes out to sea with an expression of desolation.

Before dinner we noticed the strange phenomenon of the sun setting in the east. We were sailing out of the red of a blushing sunset. Some of us gathered on the rear deck to watch it. It is a miracle, we said. We have boarded a magical vessel. Not since the beginning of the world has such a thing been witnessed.

Down on the promenade I found my mother walking arm in arm with the fat captain. Evidently they had settled their differences, for as they parted he lavishly kissed her hand; a cynical half-smile played about her lips. As soon as I joined her she told me, with some excitement, that we were not going to Brindisi. The island we had glimpsed a little earlier, which some had claimed to be Sicily, was merely Crete, whose northern edge we had brushed and left behind. We were now circling the blue heart of the Mediterranean.

The story told her in confidence went like this: a sister ship of the Apollonia had sunk in a recent storm off the coast of Spain; there were not enough lifeboats on board, and other safety features were said to be lacking. It was the second such incident in the past three years. The company was being held to account, an inquiry was underway and all the ships in the line were to be impounded. It was therefore impossible to stop at Brindisi, and doubly impossible to return to Greece. We must bide our time; the fuss would perhaps blow over, but meanwhile, the captain affirmed with tears in his eyes, he would do all in his power to give us a pleasant voyage. Would my parents do him the honour of dining tonight in his cabin?

My mother graciously accepted.

He's a born liar, she concluded, but I think the story is true. Go and fetch your father. I went and found him still sitting out on deck, half-frozen, in the cold floodlights, letting the wind turn the pages of his book.

She dressed him in the brown jacket brought for special occasions and herself in the black evening dress she had fished from the back of the car, and together they sailed off to the captain's cabin, leaving me under the care of Nikos. He played draughts with me at one of the bar tables. His long fingers, gathering up the counters, trembled slightly; his breath smelt of something pleasant and unfamiliar. When he moved his head, the light on the lounge ceiling formed a halo behind it.

You are very quiet, said Nikos. I said, I like to be quiet. Well, he agreed, I also like quiet people. But if you are too quiet no one will get to know you. That is the way I prefer it to be, I answered. He smiled. I know you better already, he said.

That evening the wind grew stronger, and around ten o'clock the first flashes lit the horizon. The stewards went about shutting windows with long poles as the rain lashed down. By midnight the first-class lounge was full of people and the liqueur bottles were rattling on the bar. Thunder boomed; the sky turned violet. We're going to sink, I told Alex, and there aren't enough lifeboats on board. She stared at me in terror, clutching her sickbag.

I did not see why she should be afraid of dying, since she was soon going to do so in any case. In fact I was curious to see how her heart would hold out under the strain. But there is nothing to be afraid of, said Nikos, bending over us. The storm is miles away. Listen, count the distance between the lightning and the thunder. His reassurances were broken by an almost simultaneous flash and crash, but we occupied ourselves in counting, and the distance soon grew greater as Nikos moved among us proffering drinks and comfort, the bright lights of the storm illuminating his face.

That night we slept in wasted heaps on the floor of the first-class lounge, and when we awoke it was to find ourselves still circling in the midst of the Mediterranean, in brilliant sunshine, under a blue unbroken sky. That day, to our joy, they filled the swimming pool, and at the ocean's heart we struggled and swam and shrieked in the jostling water, whose high waves filled us with terror and delight. Afterwards we ran Hamelin-like after Nikos to the first-class bar and demanded Cokes for all from the evil barman, who replied that we were out of Cokes, there were no Cokes left, there were no more Cokes for any children. Nonsense, said Nikos, disappearing, and he came back shouldering a case of bottles which he opened and distributed among us. They were not chilled, but we did not care so long as we had defeated the hated barman. For the rule of children had broken out on the spellbound ship.

From that time we sailed in a zone of enchantment, through blue days, through nights brilliant with stars. Round and round we sailed in our magic circle, until the days ran together, we could not say how many, nor how many still and perfect nights, in which the mesmeric tune for dinner played over and over, the captain broke open his best wine, and the after-dinner entertainments ran on far into the small hours; when music played from the white ship strung with lights over the dark and silent sea, and the captain danced with my mother, my mother danced with Nikos and Alex danced with me.

Nothing was beyond the multitalented Nikos. He soothed my father's restlessness by matching him at chess; he distracted him and made him smile with number puzzles and with long, intense conversations at the ship's rail. He flattered my mother with compliments, and drew the fascination of the children with demonstrations of magic and discourses on the curved nature of space, by virtue of which, he told us, if you travelled in a straight line for eternity, you would surely end up back in the place you started. He was the master of treasure hunts and distributor of sweets, keeper of secrets and healer of arguments. We were under his aegis, a dreaming contented crew. We would have been happy to sail forever with him towards an unreachable horizon.

Seated at the large table in the first-class lounge, he spread for me the map of his aspirations: the Mediterranean which he called the Blue; but also the other seas, the Black and the Red, the Arabian and the Caspian, and the oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific; the straits and bays, the gulfs and archipelagoes, all the waters he hoped one day to cross.

And this is how I mostly remember him: standing at the rail on the first-class promenade, in one of the idle moments his duties allowed him, gazing out to sea with a solemn expression, though if you were to speak to him his face would be lit, as though inwardly, by a benevolent glow. He was in love with distance, with the horizon pure and simple: the expanses of sea and sky which bored others to annihilation.

How often I watched him, on that voyage which seemed to go on forever, folding blankets with elegant precision, or mending a broken toy a child had dropped, his long brown hands quite certain of their movements, or bending, with just the right degree of intimacy, to hear the request of a seated passenger, nodding with unfeigned interest and concern. How often I saw him smile, and his perfect smile inevitably answered. He had the gift of getting people to talk; I could not resist him indefinitely, and, on a long dull evening of cards in the first-class lounge, he finally charmed me into parting with a few choice secrets I immediately regretted.

That was his fatal flair. He knew everyone and was known by nobody; and so it must have been on countless previous ships.

By the sixth day of the voyage too many hearts had been laid waste on that vessel. Wherever he went he was tagged by begging children. Even my father actively sought him out. My mother made eyes at him over the breakfast rolls. In the privacy of her cabin Alex showed me the small gold ring with which she planned to woo him. I was numb with resentment, and could not bear to speak to her thereafter.

On the night we turned north into the grey finger of the Adriatic, we older children were allowed to stay up for a captain's party in the dining saloon. The glow of those lost days had left us the moment we changed direction; the passengers were full of complaints and anxiety once more. Dinner was a gaudy, drunken affair. Colored balloons had been pinned to the walls and ceiling, and the stewards stood about with hangdog expressions, knowing that this disastrous voyage would be the Apollonia's last. This time next week they would be washing dishes in some landlocked taverna. In honor of the occasion the captain opened a jeroboam of champagne – no one knew where he kept this lavish stock of vintage – and sang a sentimental folk song, out of tune, through a whistling microphone and without accompaniment. It was absurd, laughable: the ship was herself again. Nevertheless, my mother stood on her chair and proposed a toast to the Apollonia, to her captain and crew, and most particularly to Nikos, loved by all. His name rang through the ship with the pathos of hundreds of unrequited passions.

Later he found me on the promenade, gazing at the stars through a blaze of tears. What is the matter? he asked, in that gentlest of voices, but I would not answer his too indulgent question. I could not tell him I wished he and the secrets I had told him were lying at the bottom of the sea. You're jealous of Alex, he said, because she is special. But she's not the only one with a hole in her heart. He looked at me then with a meaningful expression; and I did what I have ever since regretted. I turned my back and walked hastily away.

We sailed on comfortlessly northwards. It was late August, the fag end of the season, and autumn was already in the air. It was too cold to swim: they placed a rope net over the swimming pool. On board the Apollonia rations were running out. There was no more juice for breakfast, and a complete and catastrophic absence of gin. We survived on black coffee and bile as far as Zadar, where we were dropped off with the captain's apologies. Some of us promised to sue the shipping line. We embraced each other like the oldest and closest of friends; and then the Apollonia hauled anchor and sailed away, perhaps forever, but she must have been eventually impounded. The last glimpse we had of her was of a white ship plunging southwards through the grey waves of the Adriatic, as we made our way up the Dalmatian coast. It may not have been her. It may have been only a vision.

That was the end of our maritime adventure. We returned home, where it was quickly transformed into an anecdote, one of my mother's dinner party pieces, though my father never contributed to the telling. For myself it faded into the blur of childhood, into a vague trail of images and sensations: a dazzle of white, a restless glimmer of blue; a little dark-haired girl with a hole in her heart; a bottle, long since discarded, with a fluted design.

And yet for years we continued to hear from Nikos. A postcard would come, already faded and greasy, depicting some vessel in the Tyrrhenian Line, the Star of Ionia, the Delphi or the Heraklion. He would send his greetings from the ends of the earth, for astonishingly he had not forgotten us. This although we had no way of replying, nor of proving that we had not forgotten him; for he was, I suppose, one of those exceptional people, whom to meet once is to remember always.

The last we received was, I think, from the Damietta, a ferry which sank with all hands, under criminal circumstances, shortly after the close of the summer season; but I do not believe that Nikos was still on board. I think he moved further east, to the Indian Ocean, and later on worked the ships of the South China Sea, enslaving hearts in thousands of brief encounters, and meeting his end, if at all, by the blade of some desperate, envious devotee.

We never heard from him again, however; and while I continued to look out for him among the anonymous crews on numerous crossings – his brown curls graying a little, his mild eyes unmistakable – I saw him only in occasional dreams, where, asleep on the soft bed of the Mediterranean, he lay with my childhood secrets locked inside him forever.

Tamar Yellin was born in the north of England. Her father was a third generation Jerusalemite and her mother the daughter of a Polish immigrant. She began writing fiction at an early age, and the creative tension between her Jewish heritage and her Yorkshire roots has informed much of her work. She received the Pusey and Ellerton Prize for Biblical Hebrew from Oxford University, and has worked as a teacher and lecturer in Judaism. Her first novel, The Genizah at the House of Shepher, appeared from The Toby Press in 2005 and was awarded the Sami Rohr Prize, the Ribalow Prize and was shortlisted for the Wingate Prize. Her collection, Kafka in Brontëland and other stories, appeared from Toby in 2006 and was awarded the Reform Judaism Prize, was longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and was a finalist for the Edge Hill Prize. Her third book, Tales of the Ten Lost Tribes, appears from Toby Press in 2008.

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...and on the books' pages - not a single letter.

--Borges, "In Praise of Darkness"

 

for Margarita Meklina

 

א

They said of old Isaac that he didn't go blind, but one day simply stopped opening his eyes. Many believed that Isaac's lids were sealed by angels - with beeswax and honey. To amuse us, Isaac would enumerate the people in the room and describe them - one after another - but would sometimes err, adding those who weren‘t even there. His trade was healing with the laying on of hands, and giving counsel.

ב

In the synagogue, during communal prayer, his voice would break from our voices, and we - one after another - would fall silent, looking on in astonishment as his prayer ascended. When the service would end, the rabbi would bring forth a cup, so that Isaac could drink his fill, and then accompany him home, propping him up by the elbow.

ג

In Isaac's home there were many books, and when we would ask how it is he read them, Isaac would answer that he smells every page, and sees what is written just as clearly as if he were reading it with his eyes. When one of us doubted him, Isaac offered to pick a book, open it to any page, and place it into his hands. He smelled the page and read aloud:

ד

... and so it is that in the holy days the Creator appears to gaze at all the dishes shattered by Him, and he comes to us, and sees that there's nothing to be joyful about, and weeps for us, and returns to the Heavens, so as to destroy the world.

ה

Hearing this, we began to weep, for we considered the book's words a dire omen, but Isaac said: "Do not weep, for He appears to us not only in the holy days, but everyday; and every time we are given a chance to convince Him that the world is good, and then He returns to the Heavens, joyous of what he has created."

ו

But we wept more than before: "Isaac, your days are numbered. You will die soon, and who shall then convince Him that the world is good? Who will take up our salvation day after day, caring for us, loving us, and taking pity, as you do?"

ז

Isaac replied to this: "You shall have other advocates and defenders before Him. But if you do not grow wiser and raise up your spirits, you will grieve and suffer one way or another." We beseeched him: "Speak to us of this," and he opened the book to another page, smelled it, and read aloud:

ח

...my silence created a High Temple, Bina, and a Low Temple, Malkhut. People say: "The word is gold, but twice as dear is the silence." "The word is gold" means that I uttered it and regretted it. Twice as dear is the silence, my silence, because two worlds were created by this silence, Bina and Malkhut. Because, had I not remained silent, I could not have grasped the unity of both worlds."

ט

Then we asked him: "So how is it that your intercession takes place in silence?" Isaac replied: "A prayer is good, but a dance is better than a prayer. I prance with you and so I converse in the Temple." We recalled that we were often amused at him, seeing the blind man prancing, and were shamed by this, and left him.

י

The next day Isaac died and we again gathered in his home to determine who would now answer before the Lord. Since then we gather daily after evening prayers. The world still stands and the stars do not go out - does this mean that someone has taken the task onto himself, but did not wish to announce it to us? We speak, we argue, we ask, we read and write things down. Alas, this is all we can do.

 

Dmitry Deitch was born in Donetsk in 1969, and has lived in Israel since 1995. His short prose has appeared in the anthology Very Short Texts, various collections of new prose edited by Max Fray, including Prozak, 78, The Best Short Stories of 2005, The Best Short Stories of 2006, The Best Short Stories of 2007, and in the Russian-language journals Semicolon and Solar Plexus (Israel), and Air (Moscow). His books include Incomprehensible August (Donetsk, 1995), Griffith's Advantage (Moscow, 2007), and Tales for Martha (Moscow, 2008). In 2005, he won the international literary contest Dvarim.

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Lucette Lagnado is this year's recipient of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. Her family memoir is reviewed by Tamar Yellin who won last year's prize for fiction. Although only established in 2006, the Sami Rohr Prize has established itself as the pre-eminent prize for Jewish writers not least because it is worth $100,000 for a writer of, in alternating years, Jewish fiction and Jewish non-fiction.

-- Dan Friedman, Zeek Associate Editor

The author: Lagnado Towards the end of Lucette Lagnado's memoir of her family's flight from Cairo to America, she describes the celebration of the Passover seder in her parents' Brooklyn home: the sorting of the rice, the polishing of the silverware, the candlelit search for leaven. Above all comes the retrieval out of the basement, from one of the twenty-six suitcases they brought with them on the boat from Alexandria and which, years later, still remain to be unpacked, of the porcelain dishes, liqueur glasses and tiny spoons with which they taste the haroseth. Yet at the climax of all these preparations, "No matter how loudly we sang, our holiday had become not a celebration of the exodus from Egypt, but the inverse - a longing to return to the place we were supposedly glad to have left."

This is the paradox which sits at the heart of Lagnado's Sami Rohr Prize-winning book, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: the paradox of exile. Jews who have left Egypt, who sing praises to God for having brought them out of Egypt, long to return there. The book is prefaced by a quote from Numbers 11:4-6, where the Children of Israel lament the "cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic" that they ate in slavery (and the book is a homage, as much as anything, to the glories of Levantine and Egyptian food). The Lagnado family's exodus is a fall from grace: no redemption, no Promised Land, but for some of its members, an eternal wandering in the desert.

The subversion of the Exodus is of a piece with the subversion of identity which Lagnado painstakingly anatomises. Early on we learn that her father Leon, the dapper-suited boulevardier of the title, is "both an Arab and a Jew." Raised in Cairo, he is an exile twice over, for his family originally hail from Aleppo, and the Jews of Aleppo are "intensely Jewish, intensely Arab." "‘We are Arab, madame,'" he tells Mrs Kirschner, the social worker in charge of their Americanisation. What's more, in the new land in which he reluctantly finds himself, he intends to remain Arab. These paradoxes of exile are as fundamental to Jewish experience as they are to the nature of Jewish identity.

The memoir offers us an insight into the sheer messiness and confusion of forced migration, something which those who have never experienced it simply cannot comprehend. Forbidden to remove money or valuables from Nasser's Egypt, the wealthy Lagnado family spend the weeks before their departure liquidating their assets and turning them into clothes - one of the few items they are allowed to take with them in bulk. Hence the twenty-six suitcases. Leon is measured up for handmade suits (but no more white ones; they will no longer be appropriate where he is going) and his wife Edith for polka-dot summer dresses she will never wear (it is 1963), while six-year-old Lucette (Loulou), the youngest of their four children, acquires numerous pairs of flannel pyjamas she will surely have outgrown in a year or so; but there is no real logic in these preparations. It isn't clear what they intend to do with the yards of Egyptian cotton and rich brocade with which the suitcases are stuffed. Sell them, perhaps? They never do. The suitcases become a liability, a heavy symbol of all they have lost and the weight of regret they carry. Ultimately, they and all their contents are destroyed in a fire.

In the same way, stranded in Paris, that universal transit point for European refugees, the family vacillates over whether to flee to Israel or America, causing much irritation to the agencies who are trying to aid them. Squeezed into a shabby hotel room with their suitcases, subsisting on handouts, they argue with each other, fall ill, miss appointments, lose interest in their appearance and change their minds. Israel seems the obvious destination, but life there for new immigrants is harsh and primitive, opportunities limited, the boys would be drafted and there is the constant threat of war. Three close relatives who relocated there have died in quick succession. It would take a harsh nature to judge the Lagnados - still in shock from their sudden fall into poverty - for their fears and indecision; exactly the kind of harshness which judges and condemns migrants the world over until this day.

America is no fulfilment of a dream. To the youngsters it is the land of Elvis and Chubby Checker, of "carefree, fun-loving culture" and Hollywood glamour. But it is also a land of apples wrapped in cellophane and plastic flowers, of roses without scent and profound cultural dissonance. "In Egypt, it was easy to be religious and worldly at the same time, but that seemed an impossibility here in America." Loulou learns not to mention that she is from Cairo; at school she pretends she is French. "To be from Egypt meant you were from a primitive country, backward, unsavoury." The children, each in their own way, become Americanised, but Leon never acclimatises. The contradictions between American and Egyptian culture are too wide to straddle: between individualism and community, feminism and patriarchy, freedom and tradition. For Suzette, the strong-minded eldest daughter, America offers the chance to escape her father's restrictive authority. But for Leon himself, it is a rose without scent: "He fixated on the flowers as an emblem of all that was bewildering about his new home and his new country, and all that he missed about his old home and his old country." In Mrs Kirschner's most telling observation, he "regards the immigration as a calamity rather than an opportunity."

It is a tragic story, but not unleavened by humour, as for example in the descriptions of the children's first English classes. The teacher holds up a cup. "Cup," she instructs. Then she smashes it. "Broken cup," she informs them. In future lessons she repeats the operation with saucers, plates and glasses, all of which miraculously regenerate next time.

Nostalgia for old Cairo suffuses and floods this book; there is no balm for it, other than the rich and sensuous descriptions that strive to resurrect the city. It is personified in the figure of the father, the man in the white sharkskin suit who in his youth resembled Cary Grant and who is broken and destroyed by exile. Above all, as the title intimates, this is a book about him. Loulou, the child of his old age, accompanies him on his tours about town where, nicknamed "The Captain" because of his impeccable British-accented English, he wheels and deals and makes money, functioning easily in seven different languages, a diamond pin in his tie and a straw boater on his head. (The tarbooshes he once loved are banned by the revolutionaries as a symbol of the hated aristocracy, but he still keeps them; even in Egypt, life is not without its nostalgia.)

"The Captain" is a creature of the night, a long-standing bachelor with a taste for pleasure who marries late in life, and who causes his wife anguish with his continued nightly jaunts to clubs and gambling places. In her vivid descriptions, Loulou, now grown up into Lucette the author, summons him back to life as he was in this period before she knew him, his charm and poise as he strides through the streets of Cairo and the offices where he does business, where as he passes by he will "fish out some bonbons and fling them on every desk along the way, as if he were throwing dice on a gambling table."

He is also deeply religious. "Dieu est grand," he often repeats, at times of great happiness or great stress: a direct translation of the Muslim expression, "Allahu akbar." The phrase increasingly becomes his refuge as he faces physical decline, transformed by an ineluctable process from the svelte boulevardier into a lame old man. Loulou alone can truly accompany him on this journey, lamed as she is by her own mysterious ailment. One of the most poignant images in the book is that of Leon and Loulou vainly seeking medical help through the streets of Cairo: "We made an odd pair as we toured the specialists' offices - a tall, distinguished silver-haired gentleman whose right leg dragged, walking hand in hand with a diminutive girl with long dark hair and dark eyes, who shuffled ever so slightly on her left leg."

It is the account of the father and daughter bond which moved me more than anything, as another child of an exile born to his old age; the peculiar and poignant closeness which can spring up between a small daughter and a parent old enough to be her grandfather. I recognised my own stateless father in the photo of Leon's identity card, with his nationality "à determiner," to be determined (my own father's never was). I was reminded of my dad's perennial love for the simple foods of his childhood, of his habit of walking, walking the streets with me, hand in hand, of "the sense of absolute safety I feel nestled in that favourite spot I've staked out in the nook of his shoulder, au creux de son épaule." I identified, too, with the sense of guilt and betrayal, the yearning sense that one did not do enough to give comfort, and the inevitability of loss.

Lagnado writes in her acknowledgments of "my enigmatic father," and it is clear that Leon is a man of contradictions, tender and fearsome, generous and selfish, passionately devoted to family and to his own pleasure. He is also a patriarch of the old school. She does not soften or try to justify the enigma; it is not possible, any more than it is possible to reconcile once and for all the Cairene she once was with the New Yorker she has become.

Nava Semel's IsraIsland imagines in one of its three sections what would have happened had the historical figure of Major Mordecai Manuel Noah, the most important American Jew in the first half of the nineteenth century, succeeded in creating his planned "city of refuge for the Jews"-- Ararat--on Grand Island, today a suburb of Buffalo. Her ingenious vision of Jewish autonomy on American soil offers an Israeli perspective on the alternate history genre employed most recently by Michael Chabon in his best-selling The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Semel's novel takes as its point of departure the success, rather than the failure, of Noah's Ararat. In this excerpt, Simon, a paparazzi, is assigned to dig up dirt on the Jewish female presidential candidate, a descendant of Major Noah. At the same time, Simon tries to uncover the secret to his lover's ambivalence about the Jewish island state. To learn more about Nava Semel and her work, please read the interview which serves as a companion piece to this excerpt. -- Adam Rovner, Zeek translations editor

 

"The Future Is Already Here": an excerpt from IsraIsland

By Nava Semel. Translated by Anthony Berris

 

Everyone says it's an unusual place. The only state in the U.S. I've never visited.

So that's it, partner, I'm taking the first flight to IsraIsland.

Don't change the apartment locks yet. I haven't left a note or a message on the answering machine because I was sure you'd try and dissuade me from going. Not because you see this kind of assignment as despicable, and not even because you could care less if I screw up the presidential candidate's meteoric career, but simply because I'm going to set foot on that there place which for you symbolizes everything you've turned your back on. Don't worry, Jake, I don't intend to be tempted. I'm immune to the spell the island of the Jews casts on its inhabitants. There's absolutely no chance of me wearing a Star of David with elm leaves like the candidate.

I just about manage to type a couple of words when the flight attendant rushes over and asks me to switch off the laptop because it interferes with the navigation equipment.

I'm dying to take a leak but the seatbelt sign is on and the captain is rambling on about altitude and the outside temperature. We have a headwind so we'll be slightly late landing, but there'll be nobody waiting for me down there except for your troubling scraps of memories. How can anybody despise his birthplace so much? Most people sink under waves of nostalgia about what they call "their homeland."

I know I promised you I'd stop raising ghosts and nosing around in your past. As far as you're concerned the IsraIsland chapter is closed. God, how much energy you expend on vanquishing that hackneyed term "homeland". Why don't you treat it with indifference like the rest of us? Something that doesn't really matter. And tell yourself once and for all: Okay, it's the place where I came into the world -- so fucking what?

Take me. What have I got to do with Africa? Am I beset by yearning for a place I've never known, despite its being etched on the consciousness of my ancestors ever since they were kidnapped in chains and sold into slavery in America? I don't even ask myself what would have happened if Abraham Lincoln had been born before his time and abolished slavery a century earlier.

Think about it, Jake. A guy gets stuck in a certain position along the axis of time and it's in his power to reverse the entire course of events. But I don't argue with history because what's the point in playing make-believe? Would a different shuffle of the deck of history have saved the suffering of millions? Not necessarily, because one way or another, sorrow will surely come.

The cloud cover breaks and I bring the lens to the plane's dirty window. The captain announces: We'll be landing at Ararat Airport in three minutes.

I can already make out "The Trio" piercing the clouds and I photograph them for you: Mordecai, Manuel and Noah. Each tower a hundred stories high. It's amazing to think that they were built so many years ago, shortly after the Empire State Building, but people haven't jumped to their death from their windows like they did in the Wall Street crash in the last century. Jumping from Niagara Falls was always a more tempting alternative.

From my angle the square Noah hides the cylindrical Manuel, and Mordecai, the triangular tower, commands them both. A gleaming cluster sending out innumerable flashes, which an eye observing from on high might interpret as distress signals.

 

So what isn't IsraIsland?

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I’ve been excavating in my childhood bedroom of late, and have found my stash of Jewish chapter books. I read most of these in 5th-8th grade, and though they weren’t my favorites (I was inexplicably obsessed with the books by a woman named Lurlene McDaniel who wrote exclusively about teenage girls with terminal diseases) I did love them to the point that the pages in most of them were practically falling out of the binding. One of my favorites—and one that I highly recommend to anyone with a preteen who has any interest in Israel is Lynne Reid Banks’s Broken Bridge.

Broken Bridge: buy it! You probably know about Banks because of her wildly successful Indian in the Cupboard series, but this book is about Canadian and Israeli teens on a kibbutz dealing with terrorism, politics, and normal teenage stuff like having crushes and forming secret clubs. Here’s the synopsis available on Amazon:

The murder of a Canadian teen by Arab terrorists in the streets of Jerusalem heightens political tensions and triggers conflicting emotions felt by members of his family in this sequel to One More River (Morrow, 1992). Twenty-five years have passed since Lesley Shelby and her parents emigrated to Israel from Canada; Nili, her daughter, witness to the brutal murder of her cousin Glen, is inexplicably spared. In the aftermath of the attack, as police forces track the murderers, Nili's family tries to come to terms with grief and anger. Nili, fiercely loyal to Jewish Israel, is torn as she tries to protect the terrorist who deliberately intervened and saved her life. Her uncle Noah, the murdered boy's father, faces demons that made him flee Israel, abandoning his first family, years ago.

It’s a little dated already, but definitely worth a read, and a great Bar or Bat Mitzvah gift. The book is actually a sequel to a book about living on a kibbutz before and during the 1967 Six Day War in Israel, but though I enjoyed One More River I think Broken Bridge is better and more interesting.

I think my favorite thing about Broken Bridge is that even as a ten-year-old I remember feeling like this was a book about how complicated the situation was in Israel, and how it didn't try to simplify anything, or dumb down anything so that I could get it. It's too bad that pretty much nothing I've read about Israel since then has shared those characteristics.

As an assimilated Negro, I find that black Jews just tickle my fancy. (Any Oprah/Sarah Silverman hybrids, call me!) I agree with the writer Julius Lester when he says, “What I find remarkable about Jews: They’re the only ethnic group that seems to care about blacks. At least Jews want to learn.”

I’ve certainly tried to learn a Jewish girl a thing or two on blacks, so I figured Julius Lester might have some words of wisdom for me. I first discovered Lester when I stumbled upon his must-read 1984 New York Times interview with James Baldwin (during which Baldwin exclaimed “Fuck Norman Mailer!” when Lester mentioned the author of “The White Negro”—sadly, the Times struck it from the record.) Besides being an academic and literary star—he's author of over 45 books and a decorated professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts—Lester also happens to be that most intriguing of exotic birds, a black Jew. He made a name for himself as a writer, radio commentator, and avowed atheist during the civil rights era, but converted to Judaism in 1982 after years of religious searching (