Dear readers,
I didn’t hear the messengers knock on the door. It was a bit after midnight and I was sound asleep. Amram was still up. He opened the door. You would think that the knock, considerate but firm, would wake me, but it didn’t. Nor did the whispers and the soft exhalation of cushions being sat on …
The narrator of “The Bridge between Yesterday and Tomorrow,” the fourth of my October 7 war stories, is Etti Badihi, the tough, cigarette smoking Yemenite who protects her neighbor Ruth Mutzafi in “Shelter.”
The story’s title comes from a famous modern Hebrew poem. Let’s see if any of you can figure it out!
The four stories I’ve written since the October 7 massacre, Hamas’s abduction of hundreds of Israelis, and the onset of war have been dark ones, raw expressions of my feelings. When I sat down today to start working on the next story, something in my soul, along with my artistic muse, told me that it’s time for a bit of a change. Tragedy loses its power if it goes on too long. Great tragedies in the real world may indeed last for years and get worse and worse, but tragic literature requires a bit of comic relief. I realize that many readers might find humor upsetting, even morally repugnant, at such a time. I hope that I’ll be able to find the right balance in this next episode.
I’m also tempted to experiment with something else in this coming story, but I’ll leave that for the next newsletter.
Tip: Ruth Franklin, a friend, critic, and biographer whose Substack newsletter Ghost Stories I highly recommend, will be announcing in her coming newsletter “an Israel/Palestine book club. Each month we’ll read a novel by a Palestinian or Israeli author and discuss in the comments. First up: MINOR DETAIL by Adania Shibli.” I’ve already downloaded the ebook of Elisabeth Jaquette’s translation. Shibli and her book, you may remember, were the subject of a brouhaha at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, when a prize they were to receive was postponed on the grounds that the Israel-Hamas war made the time inappropriate. I’m looking forward to reading it and discussing it under Ruth’s direction.
Israel lost a great scholar, statesman, and political thinker on Friday—Shlomo Avineri. When he called me a few years ago to ask if I would translate his biography of Theodore Herzl, it wasn’t our first phone call. During the years I worked as a journalist, I had many conversations with him. He was always available for a chat when I needed to be briefed on a detail of Israeli history he had played a part in or written about, to check a fact, or simply to provide an authoritative quote. I learned a great deal working with him on the biography. One that in particular stays with me is that the common wisdom about historical figures, whether great or maligned, is almost always an oversimplification and sometimes downright wrong. Avineri told me that he had not thought of Herzl as a great or particularly original thinker before setting to work on his book. But, as he perused Herzl’s diaries, he came to the conclusion that he’d been mistaken.
Here in Israel we’ve all adopted a new sign-off for letters and for parting from friend and family—besorot tovot, may we have good tidings. In this hard times, it is what we all need.
Besorot tovot,
Haim
Thank you for the shout-out! I appreciate it.