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Welcome to the inaugural issue of Jewish Fiction .net! It is with great excitement and pride that we are launching this journal, an initiative born of love for Jewish literature and a desire to bring readers and writers of Jewish fiction closer together. Our first issue is filled with treasures and pleasures. Here you have 13 wonderful pieces of fiction (stories or excerpts from novels), written by authors from five continents (North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia), written in four different languages: English, Hebrew, French, and Spanish. (The great Yiddish writer, Chava Rosenfarb, has a story here, too, but one that she wrote in English.) Some of these authors are very well-known; others less so. But all of them have written powerful, beautiful, compelling stories that need to be told and deserve to be read. And here they are, yours to read at the click of a button.
13 stories – 13 like the children of Jacob. And just as diverse. In this issue we have stories about children, orphans, impresarios, actors, writers, students, soldiers, mikveh ladies, and Holocaust survivors – not to mention a giant and (in two stories) Tarzan! Some of these tales take place in the past: in the 19th century in France, and in the 20th century in Eastern Europe (preceding or during the Holocaust) or in Palestine under the British mandate. All the other stories and novel excerpts (including the novel, Exile, that will be serialized in this journal) are set in the present, in Canada, Argentina, or the United States.
All this diversity and richness (geographical, temporal, and linguistic) extends also to the topics of these stories. Thematically, they cover a remarkable range. They deal, among other things, with justice/injustice, history and memory, religious faith (or the lack thereof), Jewish vulnerability, Jewish power, resistance (individual and collective), Israel and the Diaspora, anti-Zionism and antisemitism on campus, politics and ideology, human yearnings and needs, and family dysfunction and abuse. But arching over all of these like a rainbow is the theme of love. Many different kinds of love: erotic love, love of parents for children and children for parents, love of siblings, relatives, and friends, love of homeland, love of Israel, love of God. And there are other loves, too, in these Jewish stories: love of laughter, and language, and of ideas, imagination, and dreams.
So get comfortable, curl up with these stories, prepare for a feast, and enjoy! And to you, our dear reader, we say, Shana tova. And on the birth of this journal:
Shehecheyanu v’kiyemanu v’higiyanu lazman hazeh!
IT IS BECAUSE of Werner Sonderberg that, one fine spring May, I found myself in court, in the bosom of the justice system. Not as a lawyer, as my mother had wished, but as an interested observer.
35m read Translated from French by Catherine Temerson
My first meeting with the German children was in nineteen thirty eight. The German Templars of Sharona began to march like ducks in noisy processions and to wave Nazi flags and the Arabs of the adjacent village of Sumayl cheered them.
23m read Translated from Hebrew by Dalya Bilu
Although he was approaching his ninetieth year, Professor Markus Fabrikant did not, at first, assign any significance to the indisposition of his bowels: since when is an experienced Jew, he said to himself, afraid of a little intestinal gas?
61m read Translated from Hebrew by Stuart Schoffman
Sometimes I wonder if they see me. These girls, these streams of hopeful eyes in tired faces, dreaming eyes, determined eyes, that pass here each night, each going home to meet whatever is really waiting - or maybe not waiting - to bump up against their expectations.
26m read
