Added Value
Published in Issue #26 Translated from Hebrew by Yaron Regev subscribe to unlock the full story“Do not be as slaves, who serve their master for the sake of reward. Rather, be as slaves who serve their master not for the sake of reward. And the fear of Heaven should be upon you.” (Pirkei Avot, Chapter 1, 3)
Teaching a writing class in a retirement home – well, that really marked the point of no return. Hadassah nearly burst into tears when the director of Eden’s Garden Assisted Living Home had called her. “It’ll be fun, you’ll have a blast,” the entertainment director joyfully proclaimed, swallowing Hadassah’s silence before it could turn into a No, thank you. They’re not invalids or demented. Some of the stuff they write – I’m telling you, there are a lot of late blooming S. Yizhars there, just waiting to write their own Days of Ziklag.
A bullet of goosebumps shot straight into Hadassah’s tailbone, splitting to travel up and down twenty-two locations in her body, like the worst acupuncture of all time — or the best; only the coming days would determine which. In the “cooperative,” S. Yizhar’s Days of Ziklag served as a code name for a convoluted manuscript written in elevated language, with dozens of names, people and places, and emotions and quotes – lots and lots of quotes, most of them littered with double spaces or a variety of fonts, fat ones, slanted ones, thin ones, or wavy ones. Days of Ziklag was worse than death.
Actually, it was one Days of Ziklag too many that had finally made her quit the profession and swear she would never work as an editor again. Only a single member of the “cooperative” – that was what the women of her small company had called themselves, a few colleague friends who had shared one hairdresser, one cleaning woman, and piles of unwanted, impossibly encoded manuscripts – had remained an editor. The rest of them had opened writing workshops. But, unlike the encoded manuscripts, they couldn’t possibly exchange writing workshops. Eachinstructor had drawn her own crowd. Ruthie had attracted the cool hipsters, the best of which she had even referred to The Mushroom literary journal, in return for the magazine referring their finest rejections to her writing classes. Raphaella worked only in colleges because of the “added value” involved. And, indeed, she had gathered, in addition to the six hundred shekels she charged per lecture, a few consensual, brief love affairs, half a book of poems, two free but worthwhile reading workshops, and a cat – while she, Hadassah, was stuck with the aunties.
They flocked to her house in north Tel Aviv from all four corners of the country, the aunties. Heavyset and sinewy, or scrawny and lean, all dressed in one-size (oversized) colorful clothes with pockets in all the wrong places, earrings as vast as the moon, and rainbowy, polymer clay necklaces snuggling into wrinkly cleavages. They brought with them materials it had taken an entire lifetime to accumulate in their drawers: folded papers scribbled with meditations, thoughts, lists, words upon words, all written in a round and legible hand. As early as the first meeting, all those notes were tossed into a large box in...
Subscribe now to keep reading
Please enter your email to log in or create a new account.