Sublime

She slams the door of Landsman’s car and trades ritual glares with a gathering of women across the lane from the boundary maven’s shop. “This place is like a glass eye, it’s a wooden leg, you can’t pawn it.”

Once it was a young girl who entered the kitchen suddenly in a gust of wind, pale, thin, and strange, like a stray thought.

Frank wrote about people being “truly good at heart” before meeting people who weren’t. Three weeks after writing those words, she met people who weren’t.

So many of our expectations of literature are based on Christianity—and not just Christianity, but the precise points at which Christianity and Judaism diverge. And then I noticed something else: the canonical works by authors in Jewish languages almost never give their readers any of those things.

(Mona was my best friend—until one day she left the country without saying a word. I only found out she was gone later, once she settled into her new life in LA, as if we had been no more than two acquaintances, friends of friends.) (I guess that’s exactly what we were. I was a friend of one of Mona’s many invented selves, as she was mine.)

He sees Mark’s bag of fried flowers on the tip-pocked table. Funny thing about those flowers. Who’d voluntarily cook and eat a rose? It’s like planting and watering a breadstick. It’s perverse, and even sort of obscene, eating what’s clearly put on earth to be extra-gastric. Didn’t taste all that hot, either. And there’s still a piece stuck with th

lurid

How wise the Rabbis were: law on restricted greeting is really the law against rejoicing. Instead of a global, “You shall not rejoice,” which would be incomprehensible, they said, “You shall not do this little thing or make that small gesture.” I never knew how much pleasure there is in greeting a friend until the Rabbis forbade it on Tisha B’Av.