Yeshiva Student

by Larry Lefkowitz

July 27, 2010

He did not stop as was his custom to read the notices pasted on the wall, not even one signed by the rabbinical council which denoted a matter of extreme importance. Once he would have devoured such a message – perhaps there would be a demonstration. For a respected yeshiva student like himself, one who drove himself to excel, demonstrations were a way of clearing his head, in addition to performing a mitzvah.

Was God a Libertarian?

by Ted Roberts

Waiting

by Ted Roberts

September 12, 2009

As in every construct in G-d’s world, there are only two sides.  So it is with the Cosmos - not only stars, constellations, and galaxies, but the Divine mind we call the universe.  One side lived like us; suffering, exalting, hoping, dreaming.  In my villiage, they tell the story of Israel, the kite flyer, who lived a mile or two down the road towards Vlank. A nice stroll from the Shtetle.

Closing Doors

by Linda J. Goldberg

May 19, 2009

At last, the sun shone through the blue gray sky. Bessie fastened her glasses squarely onto her nose and remembered the phone call from her son Harry. “Come next week for the High Holidays. We all want you to come.” Bessie pictured Harry’s dark bushy eyebrows frowning as she said, “I’ll let you know.”

We all want you to come reverberated in her ears as she remembered the days when she entertained the family for the holidays. She spent the week setting the table with her Israeli hand-woven red tablecloth, her mother’s Russian wine glasses, and her grandmother’s silver candlesticks. For almost fifty years her husband Sam had reminded her to “Clean my Pa’s brass samovar so we can use it for tea.”

The Parade

by Martin Lindauer

Shmuel crowed with obvious pride. "Our boy is the first in the family to graduate from college--and the first to be an officer of the United States Army of America."

"And a Jewish officer, too," Ruchel beamed.

"Our boy is a real American," Shmuel said with matching fervor.

A son with a Lieutenant’s commission in the Army of their adopted country was well worth the five-hour bus trip from Brooklyn to Fort Evans, Massachusetts. Ruchel and Shmuel, impressed by the official invitations to attend officer’s boot camp graduation, stamped with the engraved seals of the United States Army and the Department of Defense, sent off their acceptance letter the day the announcement was received.

HAMSA

by Nina Schneider

On Ben Yehuda Street, you can get anything you want:  a meal, jewelry, fine wine, pastry, a lover, a fabulous haircut.  Six days a week, except for Shabbat, I work in my shop, Salon Yosi, next to the Cafe Rimon.  I like to watch people walk by, each with a story to tell, as I perform my magic with scissors and a brush.  Everyone in Israel knows this pedestrian mall in the heart of downtown Jerusalem—a few blocks outside the Old City walls--with upscale rents for shopkeepers like me.  Think Boston’s stylish Newbury Street, without the traffic, and add the random terror attack.  We live in the moment, I constantly reassure my nervous parents in Boston.  “Yeah, Ma, me and the girls, we never take the bus.”

ECHOD

July 11, 2008

by Hugh Fox

Feeling Friday after noon begin to run down into holiness, aiming the laser beam on her cornea, goofy disease, presumably the reaction of the body to a fungus generated by leaves, earth, dog-stuff...so that the eye began to devour itself. She was lucky, if the lesion had ruptured and bled into the eye, at least at the present state of the art, she would have gone blind.

The King and His Leg

(A Parable)

by Zohar Atkins

April 23, 2008

THERE was a king who lived in a splendid castle far from the rest of the kingdom.  One day, the king’s toe became infected.  For a long time, the king did not notice the infection.  The king, as it happens, was a giant, and it took years for his toe’s sense receptor to send signals to his brain.  By the time the king looked down at his toe, the infection had moved all the way up his leg.

An Excerpt from the Novel Who by Fire, Who by Blood

April 21, 2008

by Jon Papernick

      The sun was setting as Stone and Gabby arrived at the Fulton Landing, just in time to see a tense wedding party dressed stiffly in full regalia, mock smile, and pose at the photographers insistent commands, shrilly barked with all the decorum of a middle-school gym teacher. The party looked miserable. Gabby quipped, “And they wonder why I’m not married.”

Chopped Liver

(Part 1 of 2)

by Alexander Edelman

I boarded the L two blocks from my apartment. It was a cold, January afternoon. Bitterly cold. The kind where when the wind gusts up it feels like the cold is coming from inside your bones. It doesn't blow, it cuts.

The Clearing

by Nina Schneider

Before the Aktion reached across Mittel Europa into the small village of Soleczniki, off the beaten track of civilization. Before it encircled 900 souls that hot and sleepy June afternoon in 1941, just before dinner, while Irina, the farm girl in pigtails tied with straw, picked blueberries growing along the edge of the clearing.