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The Newsletter of Fig Tree Books LLC |
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December 2023: Issue #49 - Fredric D. Price, Founder & Publisher |
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CHAPTER: The Kiddush Rabbi, by Simon Fleischer
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It started with a shot of whiskey during Shabbos morning services. That morning, he walked out of shul and headed for the upstairs library, where he knew the “Kiddush Club” was gathered, having watched them slip out after the Torah reading to take a break from the service and have a l’chaim. He heard them laughing through the door, and, taking a deep breath, he said, “Gentlemen!” as he walked into the library. An awkward pause followed.
Until they replied, with surprising cheer, “Good Shabbos, Rabbi!” five men draped in prayer shawls offered him the friendliest of greetings, a bottle of whiskey on the table, a plate of herring, crackers.
Simon Fleischer teaches English and Jewish Philosophy in a New York area Jewish high school, where he also serves as the co-chair of the English department. He has an MPhil in English Literature, and currently lives in New Jersey with his wife and three children. "The Kiddush Rabbi" is the first story in a recently completed collection of interconnected stories dealing with the lives of the congregants of a suburban Modern Orthodox synagogue.
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Facebook Group - Jewish Book Reviews |
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JEWS OF DIFFERENT HUES: My Iraqi Jewish
Grandmother’s Hands, by Sarah Sassoon
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My Iraqi grandmother’s hands shone with olive oil and faded burn marks. They were always moving — kneading, crushing, chopping, sautéing, pouring, and spooning — the turquoise-studded gold bangles around her wrist a glorious jangle. When I was a little girl in Sydney, she would sometimes massage my back. I could not speak Judeo-Arabic or Hebrew, and her English was a pidgin mix. Our language was that of our hands.
I wrote Shoham’s Bangle because I wanted to tell the story of my grandmother’s bangle, which I now wear around my own wrist. It wasn’t until later that I realized that the book also spoke to a larger shift in Iraqi Jewish women’s history.
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GUEST COLUMNIST - EVE BARLOW, Creator of Blacklisted
Sophie's Choice
First thing’s first: Every day since October 7th has been October 7th. For anyone sane that is the case. For anyone connected to reality, that is the norm. If you saw one image, it was enough. One video. One atrocity. It should have been enough. But instead we had to show an embarrassment of brutalities and yet it doesn’t seem to matter to those who already voted for the guys that did it all.
But let’s be clear for the millionth time: Hamas don't want peace. Maybe, just maybe, (but unlikely), the people who claim to just want peace actually want peace, albeit naively, but Hamas don't. That's why their disingenuous calls for peace are cowardly and harmful. Hamas just want death. Death is the ultimate goal. They fantasize about dying as martyrs from a very young age. You can't make peace with that.
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Eve Barlow is an LA-based music and pop culture journalist. She previously served as Deputy Editor of the New Musical Express (NME) and currently contributes to New York Magazine, The Guardian, Billboard, LA Times, Pitchfork, and GQ, among other publications. Barlow is also an outspoken voice on Jewish identity, Zionism, and fighting antisemitism on social media, and has also shared her views in publications such as Tablet. Barlow was also named one of The Algemeiner’s Top 100 People Positively Influencing Jewish Life in both 2020 and 2021. She is the creator of Blacklisted, a Substack newsletter.
Eve Barlow
@Eve_Barlow
"The interrupter" Journalist. Zionist. Feminist. Scottish.
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ESSAY AND VIDEO: Reform Judaism Will Lose Its Soul if It Forsakes Its Commitment to Jewish Peoplehood and Zionism
Re-CHARGING Reform Judaism Conference Keynote Address
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ARTICLE: How to Become a Jewish Comedian, by Joanne Palmer
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You know that guy walking up and down the aisles in a baseball stadium with that big box around his neck (it looks painful.) yelling something like “beah heah” or, more prosaically, “hot dogs!”
That’s how Eli Lebowicz got his start.
Mr. Lebowicz grew up in West Rogers Park — the Near North Side Chicago neighborhood that’s so thoroughly Jewish that it’s basically Chicago’s Teaneck — and spent his summers (and, he admits, the occasional spring Friday as well, even though school hadn’t ended yet) in Wrigley Field.
Mr. Lebowicz was a student at the Ida Crown Academy, Chicago’s big modern Orthodox yeshiva. He “started vending at Cubs games when I was 16” and graduated from high school in 2007, so this was in the mid-aughts. “It was a big thing in my day. There was a big Jewish contingent at Cubs games.” It was practically a rite of passage for Jewish kids — at least the ones with the personality for it — to work for food vendors there.
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GUEST EDITORIAL - Kristallnacht, Act II, by Thane Rosenbaum
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Kristallnacht must be remembered, especially now, precisely because Jews, and not just those living in their ancestral homeland, but in the diaspora, as well, are once again facing threats of mass murder. The threats are largely empty, ironically, because of the existence of a Jewish state—the very same state that today’s murderous antisemites wish to eliminate.
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RESPONSE to Thane Rosenbaum's November Guest Editorial |
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And now we have the chant “From the river to the sea” reverberating not just in the Arab street, but in the streets of New York, LA, London, etc. Even from a Congresswoman who, thankfully, was censured by the House of representatives. These are code words for the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state, and likely for the murder of 7.2 million Israeli Jews in the manner of what happened on October 7. When we were studying what was going on in Germany in the 1930s from our vantage point years later, it was obvious to us what the Nazis said they were going to do.
So listen up, folks, to what Hamas (and its supporters) are saying now. Don’t soft pedal it. Don’t think their words are going to disappear. They mean what they say. It’s a new world and there won’t be any Nuremburg trials to get ‘closure’. It’s an open wound that will only stop festering if the majority of those in the Western nations begin to understand the gravity of the situation. What Westeners in the democracies don’t realize is that it’s not going to stop with Israel. “From the river to the sea” will be replaced by “From the Atlantic to the Urals” and “From sea to shining sea.” Mark my words. - Anonymous (Editor's note: we received many similar emails.)
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POEM: Hannah Bloom- Dream Juggler, by Jacquie Herz
time after time after time. . .
Buried and forgotten, the nameless rise up from sleep’s deepest
gravity and settle into the dusty corners of my muddled wakefulness.
Why do you come? I ask. Is it to help sweep away those strange
feelings and disbeliefs that remain as confusing and mysterious
to me as when I first travelled on the train from Berlin to Prague
and saw a forest of tree trunks all awash in ghostly white, and
hardly even wide enough to hide the smallest child?
Filled with shattered promises and painful
longings, the nameless conjure up fantasies from
long lost sun-drenched afternoons, where springtime
leaves shivered in gentle breezes and the soft blue
shallow pointillist waves licked at sandy shores; but
is this scene, so reminiscent of Seurat’s
La Grande Jatte, forever and only bound to his day?
And now that I’m here, in this past’s future, I want to
thrash out the old forewarnings, unbury the straw-
covered earth, hunt for the broken, the perished, the
forgotten, and find those worn-out souls traipsing
through mud, while their eyes—sunk deep into
gaunt faces—peer with hope between the twisted
bands of barbed wire.
Always remember us, my ghosts cry out in the dead of
night. Never again, they plead in shrill voices. But these
words remain unheeded in a world incapable of reimagining
its past. And here I am, next in line, and frightened by the ugly
rumors portending thunderous times ahead, while my ghosts
remain helpless and locked up in their own era; as if their
damaging world had never even existed.
Never again: A promise. A dream. A fantasy, where
deep in sleep, I dig to unearth the jewels of recollected
memory, wishing to display them for everyone to see, as
I might an array of twisty-shaped seashells gleaned from the
water’s edge; and it’s here I discover a forgotten, a raw emptiness,
where once upon a time, a gold bead lay gleaming, but then. . .
. . .the summons of a newborn’s cry ruptures my dream.
Jacquie Herz doesn't remember a time in her life—even as a young child growing up in London—when writing was not a part of it. Her debut novel, Circumference of Silence, was published in 2021 by Black Rose Writing. She has also been published in the Metropolitan Diary and Connecticut Section of the New York Times, and is a member of both the Women's Fiction Writers Association and the Women's National Book Association. Jacquie and her husband split their time between Florida and Connecticut. And currently, she is at work on her second novel, Hannah Bloom: Dream Juggler, which is where this poem is taken from.
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CHAPTER: The Whale Surfaces, by Ruth Rotkowitz
In this sensitive, probing, achingly passionate novel, Ruth Rotkowitz leads us into the haunted world of Marcia Gold, a child of Holocaust survivors at a breaking point in her all-too-American life. On the surface, 28-year-old Marcia succeeds beautifully. She is a gifted high school guidance counselor devoted to helping pregnant teens, and she has the perfect boyfriend for a “nice Jewish girl.” But just below, everything is wrong. Marcia struggles with mysterious panic attacks she confides to no one; she believes that demons have secreted themselves into her Brooklyn apartment; she roils over the naἲve girls she desperately wants to save; she obsesses over the Iranian hostage crisis that is rocking 1980 America. And when her private torment finally explodes, Marcia flees everything, her job, her lover, her home, only to discover that she cannot flee from herself and the traumatic legacy of her family’s past. A Jewish story, a woman’s story, a universal story about our struggle to defeat the demons – both human and imagined – that dare us to fight for our survival, our sanity, our humanity.
Andrew R. Heinz, author of Jews and the American Soul
Ruth Rotkowitz is the author of two novels, Escaping the Whale and The Whale Surfaces. Both books feature a protagonist who is a daughter of Holocaust survivors struggling with her legacy of inherited trauma. A daughter of survivors herself, Ruth speaks to various organizations about inherited trauma and has conducted a series of interviews with second-generation survivors. She has published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in literary journals and anthologies, has been a staff writer and member of the editorial board of The Woman’s Newspaper of Princeton (now defunct), and has taught English on both the college and high school levels.
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