Fiction Archives

                                        The Seated Couple  
                                          By Rachel Luria                

Since this is their last Passover, Elliot performs the entire Seder, even though it is just he and Eva at the table. They sit beside each other and when they get to the plagues, he dips his fingers ten times and leaves the first stains on the tablecloth his mother gave them. With each plague he thinks of his mother. With each drop of wine, Elliot thinks of his father. The red specks on white remind him of his father’s eyes the night Elliot came home with a bloody nose.

Elliot had been an athlete. He played baseball and football and ran track. On a day that shone with the red and orange of fall, Elliot led his high school football team to an unchallenged victory against their most hated rival. Afterwards, Coach Smith held a party that lasted late into the night. When only Coach, Elliot and the offensive line remained, talk turned to the nature of Elliot’s last name. They said he was too strong to be a Jew. He didn’t look like a Jew. They threatened to make him prove it.            
Elliot threw the first punch but not the last. Only his best friend Benny’s return from a beer run broke the mood and saved Elliot. When he told his father what had happened, he asked what he should have done differently. What should he have done when told he didn’t look Jewish? His father replied, say thank you.    

They haven’t even finished the plagues and Eva knows already that Elliot will leave. As she watches the wine drop from her fingers Eva thinks of her parents. She thinks of the day her father died. She’d come home to find her mother sitting on the formal sofa, her hands folded neatly in her lap. Her mother’s clothes were torn and the mirrors were not just covered but shattered. Little circles of red dropped from her mother’s fingers and blossomed on the knees of her pants.            

When Eva entered the room, her mother stood and took Eva in her arms. This is awful, she’d said. This is awful but the first night is always the worst. When Eva pulled away she noticed the way the stains on her mother’s knees had dried and looked brown in the sunlight. Only when Eva turned to leave did she notice that she too had a stain on her clothing. A crimson swirl from her mother’s finger stained Eva’s sleeve in the shape of a strawberry. Eva lifted her arm and brought the sleeve to her mouth.

They have finished with the plagues and the Seder is nearly over. Eva knows that when it’s done Elliot will leave. She knows that he will leave, but for now she keeps her hand on the small of his back and feels the rise and fall of his breathing. Elliot will leave Eva, but for now he feels her hand on his back and the sensation will linger on his skin for quite a while.


Rachel received her MFA in Creative Writing in 2006 from the University of South Carolina. She is currently an Instructor in University of South Carolina’s MFA program and PR and Marketing Coordinator for the university's Arts Institute. Her work has appeared in The Florida Review, Denver Syntax, and Down in the Dirt Magazine. Rachel's writing has received several awards, including having been chosen as a winner of the 2006 South Carolina Fiction Project and named a finalist in Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction contest.

                          Four Questions, Three Languages  
                                      By Martin Lindauer


“Mah nishtanah...?”
“Fa voos is die nacht von Pesach...?” 
“Why is this night different...?  

My parents and I took the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan’s lower East Side, a rare trip prompted by the Passover Seder at my grandparents cold-water flat on Delancey Street, near the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge. 

As the youngest, I would say The Four Kashas, or Questions, in Yiddish, Hebrew, and English, a trilingual performance that honored my family’s European heritage, demonstrated my competency in Cheder, Hebrew school, and showed-off my successful Americanization.  Zayda, bubba, and my parents understood Yiddish and read Hebrew, but hadn’t yet, as new immigrants, learned English. 

To enhance my linguistic prowess, I would not consult the Haggadah, the guide to the Seder, a feat of memory comparable to reciting by heart the introductory Brachot prayers before the Torah reading, a deed that, luckily, would take place two years from now at my Bar Mitrzvah.  I rehearsed my lines, accompanied by their sing-song lilt, while feeding sticks of wood into the bulky cast-iron kitchen stove that did double-duty by cooking the meal and heating the apartment. Fortunately, my recitation of the Four Questions was at the beginning of the Sedar, before the sweet wine, droning prayers, and heavy food made me too sleepy to remember my lines.  My parents watched me nervously, fearing I might mumble a word, miss a line, or switch the order of a paragraph.   “...but on this night we recline,” I finished with a smile as a flourish.  A perfect performance.  

Out of the corner of my eye I saw mom flash a look of approval and dad a nod of pride.  Zayda, though, was busy looking over the next segment of the step-by-step procedure, reviewing instructions, in Yiddish, in a yellowed Haggadah, and then reading aloud, in Hebrew, the prologue to the parable of the Four Sons:  rebellious, simple, ignorant, and wise. I followed in the English section of my Haggadah, my head buried in the translation, but stole a look at zayda as he read the section on the son who knew the meaning of the Four Questions.  Perhaps he would glance my way.



Martin Lindauer has published short fiction, essays, and memoirs in Ha!, The Jewish Magazine, New Vilna Review, Oracle, Poetica, The Short Humour Site, Slab, and several anthologies.  He has also published widely on psychology and the arts, including The Psychological Study of Literature (1975, Nelson-Hall), Aging, Creativity, and Art (2003, Springer), and Psyche and the Literary Muses (forthcoming 2009, John Benjamins).

In My Place
by Yael Unterman


Lights.

Klezmer music.

Roundtables laden with silver and white cloth, small candles, people'slaughing mouths smeared in lipstick and grease from fish on littlecocktail sticks. Carefully written place cards waiting impatiently in aside hall. I search for mine for several minutes before I find it underthe wrong letter. I take my orange juice and sit down at my table, withmenopausal women in little black dresses, rolls of fat dripping outfrom under their arms and garishly dyed auburn hair, who squawk theiropinions, while their beer-bellied alpha males laugh loudly and answerever-jangling cell phones.

I search around listlessly for anally against the gluttony and din. And then I find him. My old friend,my erstwhile soulmate, who had been the sole creative spark in awilderness of dulled eyes, a lone spiritual ember in a frozen wastelandof materialism.  This man, my college friend, a visionary in a fetidpuddle of grades and meaningless pieces of paper they claimed provedwisdom but were actually just letters: B and A; M and A; P, H and D.

Therehe sits.  Alone at a table, conspicuous, looking almost, but not quite,like a drunk who has wandered in by mistake, or the modern equivalentof the shtetl idiot or the court fool. But I recognize him immediatelythrough the scraggly ginger beard, the swinging thick sidecurls that,together with his domed white skullcap, make him look like a happypoodle dressed in an appalling cutesy outfit. His long, white coat isbroken up by the string wrapped around the middle; beneath are whitetrousers. His clumpy black shoes do not match the rest of his outfitand are scuffed beyond hope of rectification and repentance.

Hecatches my eye and smiles beatifically, as surprise is not the domainof the ones of faith.  As I approach him, a small boy with blond curls,sidelocks and a large skullcap runs up and tugs at his coat.  As thechild clambers up onto his father's lap, I say, a little shyly, "HiShmool."

 "Shalom, shalom!" he says. "Long time!"

"Long time," I agree, and venture, "So how's it going? Everything OK?"

Awide smile is reflected in eyes that seem to glance off this world atninety degrees. "Thank the beautiful Lord, every day, every day. Andyou?"

"Fine," I lie. "And Rachel and the kids?" Once again, Ifeel the air empty beside me, the ghostly clamminess of unborn loves. Iam a unit of one instead of three or five, awkward as the last rottentooth in a crone's mouth.

"We're very, very well," he says, hiscaressing hand moving in circular motions on his son's little crown."Aren't you, Lapidot? My Lapidot Elimelech?"

I cough on mydrink. That's some hefty name for a little boy. There is a shortsilence, as Shmool plays unconcernedly with his son's golden tresses.

I was never good at ignoring the naked emperor, and now I blurt out, "You've changed."

"Thankthe Lord. We all change every day," he says emphatically, stillsmiling, and his too small teeth remind me in a flash of our manyintimate conversations about life and its discontents. "Otherwise we'dbe dead," he added. He seems the same old facetiouspseudo-philosopher.  The same Shmool with whom I could always beabsolutely honest. Or is he? Has he surrendered our complex ponderingsfor a seductive simplicity?

I say, trying to keep my voicelight, "Yeah, but you've changed big time." I laugh awkwardly, andsuddenly experience the urge to flee. This is Shmool, the man Ionce considered my parallel universe; myself as a man, how I might haveturned out faced with other challenges, making other choices. But whatto make of this most recent choice, to join the fanatics, the craziesat the fringe of the religious spectrum? I feel threatened and hostile.Is he comfortable speaking to me, womankind, a vessel of boiling filth?I look at his eyes, to see if they are lowered.  To see if they slideaway from me. They look back in brown simplicity.

The bandstrikes up a merry tune. I realize that what I feel most is envy of hisoutlandish, anti-Western dress.  His uniform as a Servant of God. Andthe fact that he no longer cares; is no longer enslaved. Had he been awoman friend, donning drab, long-sleeved outfits, transformed into ahushed Victorian anachronism, I would have felt more alienated,contemptuous perhaps. But he, this man, seems to have allowed himselfto release a part of us that I keep caged, and it is now purring withinthose incredible curly peyos, wild bowl-shaped kipa, flying tzitzit and long coat. I envision him shouting and clapping to G-d like a meshuga, dancing in the streets, and my soul fills with a distant rushing, like a seashell remembering its beloved shore.

Shmool'sface suddenly seems dazzling, blinding, and I do not feel there is roomhere for both of us. I mutter "good to see you" to his warm smile, andI hurry back to my seat next to a thin young woman with peroxided hairand a cigarette, where I inhale her stale vulgarity with theresignation of an addict who declines rehabilitation.



YaelUnterman is an educator, lecturer, author and life coach living inJerusalem. She has published articles, book reviews, stories and poems,has performed her own original plays around the world, and has authoredan analytic biography entitled,  "Nehama Leibowitz: Teacher and BibleScholar," due for publication in December 2008.