Welcome to this special issue of Jewish Fiction .net! It's hard to believe that this is our 13th (our bar mitzvah!) issue - so in honour of this, you’ll find two stories here involving bar mitzvahs. This is also, of course, our Pesach issue, so here you have, as well, two Pesach stories (plus another half of one: the Appelfeld excerpt, which starts on Purim and ends on Pesach).
In addition, we bring you 13 (!) first-rate works of fiction, originally written in Russian, Spanish, Yiddish, Hebrew, and English. Altogether 18 (chai) stories for your pleasure. For more details, please see our preface.
In these stories:
A bar mitzvah boy makes a terrible discovery about his father (“To Life”)
A woman at a bar mitzvah makes a terrible discovery about herself (“Korach”)
A naive American woman has adventures traveling to Greece for Pesach (“Fellow Travelers”)
A seder guest requests something surprising in exchange for the afikoman (“The Guest”)
A high school girl writes her teacher the tragic story of her father (“Letter to Mr. Carney”)
A Holocaust survivor and a former Nazi are each other’s best friend (“The Sad Hungarian”)
A tender relationship develops between a writer and his housekeeper (“Suddenly, Love”)
Two Jewish sisters survive Soviet Russia in very different ways (“The Two”)
A traveling Israeli rock band is forced to take refuge with a bizarre family (“Doolittle”)
A man in rural America discovers some shocking local Jewish history (“Bellies Full of Chow”)
A Jewish woman makes baseball history at Ebbets Field (“Frieda Metzger at the Wall”)
A Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied Poland doesn’t want to leave for America (“My Father's Keeper”)
A girl growing up in Montreal tries to understand her Holocaust survivor mother (“The Key”)
In Tehran in the 1950s a matchmaker finds a young woman a groom (“When Pari Was A Bride”)
An American journalist working in Tel Aviv gets drawn into a murder mystery (“Hotel Cinema”)
An Israeli man becomes obsessed with a pregnant shopkeeper (“Aliza with Child”)
An Israeli woman becomes obsessed with a prominent writer (“Trading Places”)
Two lonely people have a platonic friendship that is not quite balanced (“Platonic Love”)
We hope you enjoy these wonderful stories! If you do, please let us know on Goodreads.
And last but not least, we wish you and those you love a happy, meaningful, and liberating Pesach. Chag sameach v'kasher! from all of us at
Jewish Fiction .net
