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מפּני מה מפּני מה ירדה הנשׁמה
The mail just brought my contributor's copy of An Alphabet of Embers (2016), edited by Rose Lemberg. It's a beautiful book. The cover by Galen Dara is full of fish and flame and dancing; the interior illustrations by M Sereno are swirling pen-and-ink, shape-changing as the stories they accompany. I feel fortunate to have one for my short story "Exorcisms," reprinted from Mike Allen's Mythic #1—a woman's face with eyes closed, her hair a spilling darkness and another woman's figure rising from it, the pitched roofs of a village, the crowded windows of a city, all spattered across with ink or blood or rain or weeping, the smoke of a blown-out candle, the billows of the sea. You don't care about my story, pick up a copy for the artwork. If it came in prints, I'd hang it on my wall.
"Exorcisms" was originally published in 2006, but the first version of the story was written in 2001, the fall of my junior year at Brandeis. It was one of my very first explicitly Jewish pieces; it was the first time I wrote about dybbuks. I put some of my own family history into it, specifically the story of my great-grandmother and her lost friend. I have written about him before: he is one of the two ghosts of my mother's family. He isn't the dybbuk, but he passes through her story:
She came over the sea in the skull of the student she loved . . . took up residence below the memories of his sister, who had come ahead with her lover until they turned him away at the gates—his health, he was never strong; strong enough to cross wheat fields and mountains and an ocean that almost heaved out his stomach but not to step through a doorway?—and swam in the woman's dreams of her dead brother already transformed into a saint, one of the thirty-six on whose back the world rests, sweet and sanctified and studying now in the company of the great sages of the past. Together, they shed tears.
I did not know, in 2001 or even in 2006, that my great-grandmother Ida Friedman had really had a younger brother. I never heard about him as a child. I thought I had made him up. But in 2010, sorting through a box of old papers, my mother and I found a letter from his son who had corresponded with my grandfather about family stories and genealogies. He told the same story about his half-aunt Ida and her boyfriend who could not pass the physical exams and was turned back at America's golden door. He didn't mention his father's name. I don't know when he came to this country or what became of him, whether he was scholarly or loved anyone in their shtetl or died young or whether he resembled no one I've ever written about. But he existed. And so, while I always believed that I invented the dybbuk as well, perhaps I should not be so sure.
Anyway, she is in this collection, along with fantastic work by JY Yang, Sara Norja, Nin Harris, Greer Gilman, Zen Cho, Yoon Ha Lee, M. David Blake, Celeste Rita Baker, Shweta Narayan, Sheree Renée Thomas, Tlotlo Tsamaase, Emily Jiang, Ching-In Chen, Amal El-Mohtar, and many more. In the meantime, the bonus poetry chapbook Spelling the Hours is coming together, if you have any interest in marginalized figures in the history of science, and my out-of-print poetry collection A Mayse-Bikhl (2011) will soon follow in a new edition from Stone Bird Press. I wrote this post sitting outside in the sun, which is the only thing to do when someone sends you a handful of fire. If you want to take it, here it is.
"Exorcisms" was originally published in 2006, but the first version of the story was written in 2001, the fall of my junior year at Brandeis. It was one of my very first explicitly Jewish pieces; it was the first time I wrote about dybbuks. I put some of my own family history into it, specifically the story of my great-grandmother and her lost friend. I have written about him before: he is one of the two ghosts of my mother's family. He isn't the dybbuk, but he passes through her story:
She came over the sea in the skull of the student she loved . . . took up residence below the memories of his sister, who had come ahead with her lover until they turned him away at the gates—his health, he was never strong; strong enough to cross wheat fields and mountains and an ocean that almost heaved out his stomach but not to step through a doorway?—and swam in the woman's dreams of her dead brother already transformed into a saint, one of the thirty-six on whose back the world rests, sweet and sanctified and studying now in the company of the great sages of the past. Together, they shed tears.
I did not know, in 2001 or even in 2006, that my great-grandmother Ida Friedman had really had a younger brother. I never heard about him as a child. I thought I had made him up. But in 2010, sorting through a box of old papers, my mother and I found a letter from his son who had corresponded with my grandfather about family stories and genealogies. He told the same story about his half-aunt Ida and her boyfriend who could not pass the physical exams and was turned back at America's golden door. He didn't mention his father's name. I don't know when he came to this country or what became of him, whether he was scholarly or loved anyone in their shtetl or died young or whether he resembled no one I've ever written about. But he existed. And so, while I always believed that I invented the dybbuk as well, perhaps I should not be so sure.
Anyway, she is in this collection, along with fantastic work by JY Yang, Sara Norja, Nin Harris, Greer Gilman, Zen Cho, Yoon Ha Lee, M. David Blake, Celeste Rita Baker, Shweta Narayan, Sheree Renée Thomas, Tlotlo Tsamaase, Emily Jiang, Ching-In Chen, Amal El-Mohtar, and many more. In the meantime, the bonus poetry chapbook Spelling the Hours is coming together, if you have any interest in marginalized figures in the history of science, and my out-of-print poetry collection A Mayse-Bikhl (2011) will soon follow in a new edition from Stone Bird Press. I wrote this post sitting outside in the sun, which is the only thing to do when someone sends you a handful of fire. If you want to take it, here it is.
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...Oh, Klezmatics lyrics.
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I love M Sereno's work. They've done the cover of a novella I copyedited (a very rare venture into fiction editing for me), and boy, I would **spring** for a chance to buy it as a cart. I should maybe tell them...
And Galen Dara's art is gorgeous too--I recognized the cover of one of Sofia Samatar's stories on the website.
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