Haim Watzman

Unstocking the Characters: Thoughts on Three New Works of Short Fiction

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Haim Watzman

I almost stopped reading Aurelie Sheehan’s short story “Recognition” after the first sentence. Oh, God, another piece of fiction about a writer, written by a writer who only knows how to write about writing for an incestuous circle of other writers.

But I had a rare opportunity to dip into some short fiction on-line—I was at a bat mitzvah and the DJ’s bone-vibrating music had driven me outside—so I persisted in perusing “Recognition,” the latest short story published by the on-line journal Guernica . In fact, I had a chance to read two other stories as well: David Riordan’s “Mutts” at the Boston Review and ”The Waiting Room”, an excerpt from a novel by Leah Kaminsky at JewishFiction.net. It’s interesting to note that all three offer stock characters, ones we might feel, at the beginning of the story, that we’ve read about so often that we don’t care to read about them anymore. But the first two stories surprise us by using technique to give us a new take on old material. The third fails.

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Winter — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

“Can I get some cooperation here?” asks Yoel in the firm but plaintive voice of a reserve platoon commander.

Tourjeman, Brosh, and I are sitting like three monkeys (bald, sandy blond, bearded; wiry, fit, and flabby) on a small mound at the foot of the dusty spur that we’ve been charging up all afternoon. The cardboard targets scattered there, painted in green with the suggestive outline of a helmet-clad infantrymen aiming straight at us, are full of holes already. We have our arms crossed over our chests and our heads are down because we’re trying to stick our noses into the warm place between our arms and our torsos. 

illustration by Avi Katz

An icy wind inflates the backs of our shirts, which are soaked with sweat from our last charge up the hill with full packs. The platoon’s other guys are scattered around near us. Amar and Kochin, short and solid like Middle Earth dwarves laboring at a forge, are desperately trying to light a gas stove to make coffee, even though they know the canister’s empty. Mandelbaum the radioman switches on his flashlight so he can continue to read the book he’s been perusing during breaks in the training. He reads like a goat grazes, whatever’s at hand, halachic responsa, windblown newspapers, the labels on cans in ration boxes. Diki has splayed himself on the hood of the truck that brought us here, trying to absorb some of the heat that the gray metal has stored from the fierce afternoon sun.

Tourjeman, who’s the platoon medic, accuses Yoel. “We’re all going to die of hypothermia. You said we’d be back on base before dark.”

“Only idiots go out to train in the Negev and don’t bring their coats with them,” says Yoel, who did not bring his coat, either.

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Intermezzo — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

10 July 1922

To the editor of Kuntres:

My fellow music lovers in the Yishuv, tilling the land and laboring on the roads as they whistle and hum the works of the great composers, will no doubt be interested to hear of my encounter with the man who is perhaps the most notable of our nation’s musical representatives in the great cultural metropolis of Paris. However, they may be disturbed to hear that said representative is a broken man from a dying world.

The story begins with my arrival in Paris just last week, after the successful conclusion of my agronomy studies in Toulouse. 

illustration by Avi Katz

Eager to sample what the great city had to offer, I immediately examined the billboards and proceeded to the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées (yes, the same place where, just nine years ago, the premiere of Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps caused a riot!) to hear a program of piano concerti. One of the pieces was Tchaikovsky’s piano concerto no. 2 in G major, and the other a work in E major by a composer I was not acquainted with, one Moritz Moszkowski.

I will reluctantly pass over a description of a wonderful performance of the Russian composer’s great work, which I am sure is familiar to all your readers. Some will complain that it is overly long, but I maintain that its every moment contributes to a whole that is a sublime expression of the Russian national spirit.

I could not have been more astounded to find that the conductor chose to follow up Tchaikovsky’s great work with a piece so devoid of weight that it simply wafted through the air of the concert hall like chaff thrown to the winds.

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The Truth About Dave — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

I think it was my senior year in high school in which my friend Dave first discovered the truth. And since I was his best friend, he was determined to impart the truth to me as well.

It was a cover story in Time magazine, I’m pretty sure, that set Dave off. It was a big spread about the Shroud of Turin, a cloth that many Christians believe bears an image of the crucified Jesus. New research, the magazine reported, proved that the cloth and the image indeed dated from the first century AD.

illustration by Avi Katz

“Wow,” said Dave, putting down the magazine and digging into the chocolate ice cream I’d dished out to him in my family’s kitchen. “We all gotta become Christians now!”

“Ha,” I said. Dave had, after all, been in my Hebrew school car pool. His Mom made a mean kugel and his older sister was going out with the son of the military attaché at the Israeli embassy.

“I’m serious,” said Dave. “It says here that it’s Jesus on the shroud. That means you have to believe in him.”

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Team Niot Update

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Haim Watzman Here’s a brief update on what’s going on with Team Niot, the project to help learning disabled students that my family and I are setting up in memory of my son Niot. We are working on the project in cooperation with the Association for the Advancement of Education, an organization that runs Dror, … Read more

Plane Story — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman 

    illustration by Avi Katz

“The air is unexpectedly cool and damp for early September when I emerge from Terminal 3 and cross over to the AirTrain. I’m alone and there are no human sounds, only the roar of traffic on the highway. Even that is muted as the elevator door shuts.”

I look up from 60C on my Delta flight from JFK to TLV. A pudgy young guy in a white shirt and a beard is standing over me.

“I’ve got the window,” he says apologetically.

I snap my laptop shut and squiggle out of my aisle seat.

“Sorry,” he says. “You were writing something.”

“It’s ok,” I say as he squeezes past me with a hat box and a large plastic bag full of cookies. He places them on 60B.

“I saw at the desk that no one’s sitting here,” he explains. He points at the computer. “Work?”

“Yes,” I say. “A story. I have a column in a magazine and the deadline is coming up. I’m just trying to get it started before takeoff.”

“Well, don’t let me bother you. By the way, I’m Yehuda.”

“Haim,” I say. “Thanks. Actually, I’m not sure if I want to write it.”

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Visitor at Cambous — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman 

    illustration by Avi Katz

We passed him as we trudged up an earthen path in search of a Bronze Age site north of Montpellier in southern France. He had wispy hair and the soft contours of a man grandchildren love to cling to, but the steady stride of a good walker. Giving us a sideways glance, he walked past us under the oak branches that roofed the trail. But when my daughter, Mizmor, crouched down and exclaimed, in Hebrew, about a patch of wild thyme, he turned back in his tracks.

“So you, too, are seeking your roots?”

Mizmor and I looked at each other and the other members of our party.

“We came to see the ancient village,” I said.

“Oh yes. Down there. You’re just two minutes away. But it’s closed.”

“Closed? But I thought it’s just some ruins out in the open.”

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Slouching Toward Sodom — “Necessary Stories” column from The Jerusalem Report

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Haim Watzman

painting by James TissotAnd the Lord appeared to me by the sycamores of Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv as I sat at the door to my tent in the heat of the day, and I raised my eyes and looked, and lo, three men stood by me. And when I saw them, I ran out to meet them from the tent door and bowed down to the earth to be frisked, for they were surrounded by mean-looking buzz-cut security men with little thingies in their ears.

And I said, “My Lord Bibi, if now I have found favor in thy sight, pass not away, I pray thee, even though I didn’t vote for you and never will. Let now a little water be fetched from the kiosk over there and wash your feet because those black Oxfords are really the wrong thing to be wearing on the Mediterranean coast on such a sweltering day.”

Lord Bibi consulted with his companions, the Lord High Treasurer and Philosopher-King-in-Waiting and Mr. Daddy Landbucks.

“We can stand,” Lord Bibi said. “We don’t have much time as we have other engagements to the east. We just came by to offer our sympathies and to say that we’ve been trying for years to lower housing prices but have been frustrated by the monstrous bureaucracy deeded to us by our Bolshevik predecessors.”

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Me and the Marker

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Haim Watzman

The tent protesters have achieved one thing so far—they’ve convinced me to read the financial pages.

I had a lot of fun at the happening on Saturday night. It was a real pleasure to participate in a demonstration attended by more than 50 people—the same people all the time. There was a great deal of energy and hope. But brass tacks policy? Not so much.

photo by Yaffa Phillips

For a few months—since the beginning of the doctors’ strike—I’ve been complaining to anyone who will listen that I don’t see good policy analysis in Israel’s daily press. Everyone had the same response—read The Marker, Ha’aretz’s business and financial section, which up until now I removed from the newspaper each morning and placed in the recycling bag.

So I’ve been giving it a try. Each morning I read several articles in The Marker before going to the rest of the paper.

I’d say that it’s not quite as good as the policy analysis I get from Jonathan Chait and Jonathan Cohn, the two wonky bloggers at The New Republic. I still know a whole lot more about health policy in the U.S. than I do about health policy in Israel. I still haven’t run across a decent analysis of the doctors’ strike.

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Understanding Religion, Ethnicity, and Identity-Tamar El-Or’s “Reserved Seats”

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Haim Watzman

The tent protesters who’ve shaken the complacence of the Israeli leadership these last few weeks combine, as most protest movements do, radicalism with reaction. That is, they call for sweeping changes in Israeli society and government, but they also hark back to a mythical golden time when, they believe, Israeli society was kinder and more egalitarian, and when Israel’s citizens felt stronger bonds to and responsibility for each other. In this sense, they seek not only to remake Israeli politics, but also to restructure—or renew—Israeli identity.

Amnon Illuz. On Looker. 2005
Yet Israeli identity has always been fluid and divided. A society so diverse in its ethnic origins, religious/philosophical beliefs, and political creeds could hardly be otherwise. In particular, the identity of the country’s Mizrahim—those Israelis whose roots lie in the Islamic world—has never ceased to metamorphose.

One of the best books on the complex nature of this identity to be published in Israel in recent years was Reserved Seats (Meqomot Shemurim) by Tamar El-Or, an anthropologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Like the best works of anthropology, it almost reads like a novel. El-Or spent five years at the beginning of the 2000s doing field work in Pardes Katz, a Mizrahi neighborhood in Bnei Beraq, a Tel Aviv suburb. She attended classes, got to know a group of haredi (ultra-Orthodox) women, and sought to comprehend families in which religious practice and Jewish identity varies from negligible to ultra-Orthodox and in which ethnic Mizrahi identity alternately separates and connects women from their Ashkenazi counterparts.

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