29 Aug
Fiction, Latest

FICTION: A Rosh Hashanah Sermon Throws a Congregation into Turmoil

An Excerpt from the novel Congregation Eli Stone steadied the pages of his sermon against the motion of the car and jotted down a few notes in the margin. He still committed his sermons to memory.  It was a lifelong habit and even though he took the pages with him to the pulpit, he seldom referred to them.  He looked forward to this evening’s service. There was something immensely gratifying about being in the pulpit on the High Holidays.  Religion no longer held a central place in the lives of most of his congregants, but no matter how far they strayed during the year they still flocked back to the synagogue on Rosh Hashonah, like birds following some ancient migratory path, seeking to reaffirm a commitment to their faith. His wife, Rachel, took her eyes off the...

Continue reading

12 Jun
2010 November-December, Fiction, Uncategorized

Fiction // Jerusalem Stone

Margalit winds her way out of her small city, barely glancing at the well-tended cottages of Mevaseret Tzion, flower beds mulched for the winter, pine trees plunged into the ground like swords, couples piling into cars with plastic bags and backpacks and piles of books and umbrellas. She is late, speeding past the rows of houses, all of them topped with red roofs, squares of ceramic tile, all of them constructed from slabs of Jerusalem stone. That is the rock they are behind now, stuck behind a trailer truck with mounds of it lying on its bed. This uphill is so steep, its grade pitched at too sharp an angle. How can those rocks stand there without budging? Massive granite, or is it quartz? Heavier than a man, cut into wedges or unearthed in blocks....

Continue reading

24 May
Fiction

The Muskie

It’s a picture in one of 13 shoeboxes of pictures. 1973. Two middle-aged men stand leaning forward against the top rail of a fence. One of them--my father--towers over the other one, whose skin is taut against his face and neck. Between them six fish, four northern pike and two walleye from two to three feet long, hang from the railing. A white sign also hangs from the railing that says Brown Bear Lake Resort, although the fish obscure some of the letters. The short one--Eddie Nagler--is holding onto a 49-inch muskie hanging from a chain, its tail dragging against the dirt. The walleye and northern pike are nice adornments, but that muskie is why this picture was taken. It’s the “fish of 10,000 casts,” rarely found in the clear water lakes of the upper...

Continue reading

07 Mar
Arts & Culture, Culture, Fiction

From the Moment Bookshelf: Books in Brief

Books in Brief: Senior editor Eileen Lavine reviews new and forthcoming titles   A Grain of Truth by Zygmunt Miloszewski (translated from the Polish) is an unusual crime story starring a Warsaw prosecutor, Teodor Szacki, who has been exiled to the historic city of Sandomierz where he confronts an investigation into a brutal murder where the victim's body has been drained of blood.  Each chapter has an introduction in typewriter type, as though presenting a historical record, detailing events of the day starting with its Jewish relevance. The victim is discovered by a private genealogical researcher in the State Archive, located in an 18th century synagogue,  who describes the difficulty in his business of coming across Jewish ancestors. This theme carries through when the legend of Jewish ritual murder leads to anti-Semitic attacks in the community. During the investigation,...

Continue reading

01 Nov
2012 November-December, Fiction, Series

Fiction // Roots

by Joan Leegant Hirschman, unwilling to bend, was refusing to participate. A lifelong agnostic, and proud of it, he’d managed for 82 years to not observe a single of his people’s canonical festivals except in its breach, and he had no intention of starting now. It was his father’s way before him, and his father’s father’s, and now it was his. He ate bread on Passover, went to the track on Yom Kippur, and, since childhood, had miraculously avoided the trappings of this one, the relentlessly marketed Jewish Christmas when boys and girls with names like Cohen and Levy were commanded to ignore the country’s love affair with eggnog and fruitcake in favor of oily potato dishes invented by starving peasants in Galicia. Not that the so-called historic origins of the holiday were any better, Hirschman liked...

Continue reading

05 Mar
2012 March-April, Fiction, Issues

Moment-Karma Foundation Fiction: Infections

By Dalia Rosenfeld The onion Lotzi was eating could be smelled five floors below him in the entrance to Migdal Zahav, the Golden Tower of Jerusalem, where he lived. Lotzi always waited for me to arrive before retrieving his knife from the cupboard, a gesture that was never lost on me since I feared he would one day use it to take his life. With one clean cut the onion would separate into two halves, each half rocking on its domed back for a second or two before coming to rest on the countertop. Lotzi ate it with bread, one slice for every three bites of onion, and washed it down with a cup of tepid Wissotzky made from old teabags reduced to the size of walnuts. He always offered me tea but never anything to...

Continue reading

12