The Ascent of Eli Israel and Other Stories

by Jonathan Papernick, Dara Horn (Introduction)

Overview

In a land where sudden death is an everyday fact of life, a boy dodges bullets and searches through rubble for news of his soldier father. A middle-aged man comforts his Holocaust-survivor mother as she faces senility, convinced that Nazis are conspiring against her. And the mysterious biblical red heifer makes a startling appearance in the midst of a decidedly contemporary struggle.

In these unsettling tales, the remarkable Jon Papernick transports us to modern-day Israel, a country torn by war, strife, and controversy. Giving voice to striking characters—Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans; Arabs, Christians, and Jews—caught in the ethnic, religious, social, and political conflicts of a dangerous region, Papernick brings the images we glimpse from afar chillingly to life. Suffused with rage, violence, humor, magic, and religion, the tragic carnage of the Middle East is rendered in unforgettable form.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781626368736
Publisher:	Skyhorse
Publication date:	05/01/2011
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Jonathan Papernick has lived in Israel where he worked as a journalist in the wake of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. He lives and teaches in Brooklyn, New York.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Malchyk

On the Fifth Day of Iyar, in the Jewish Year of 5709 (May 4th, 1949, by our calendar), which was the first anniversary of Israel's Declaration of Independence and attainment of statehood, a rabbi in Jerusalem suggested that women who bore children ... should name their infants Teshua (Redemption) if they were girls, and Herut (Freedom) if they were boys. ... Later on the semantics of maturity may cast a shadow across the word(s), but on the Fifth Day of Iyar, 5709, it meant only one thing to every man, woman and child in Israel, and they thronged the roads, filled the cities, shot fireworks into the air, paraded, applauded, cheered and sang in freedom's honor.

Irwin Shaw, Report on Israel

Pirkl slept an uneasy sleep and dreamed again of his father's death.

A dark legionnaire appeared at the head of his mattress, whispering in his ear between machine-gun fire and the incessant boom of the big guns sounding off throughout the city. "The Grand Mufti himself sent me." Flares and tracers from the sky flashed across the stranger's beard, his black eyes burned electric green. "The quarter has been sacked," the Arab said.

Pirkl closed his eyes tight, go a-way, go a-way, don't come back 'til Judgment Day.

"Beautiful boy," the stranger said, stroking Pirkl's cheek with an empty shell casing. There was blood on the legionnaire's chest, and Pirkl touched a deep stain on his uniform shaped like the Shield of David. "His brave blood," the stranger answered and a tear rolled from his cheek. Pirkl drank the tears down as they poured from the stranger's face and the Ras el 'Ain pipeline was flowing again with cool springwater.

He awoke to his mother stroking his hair. "Shhh," she said, mopping sweat from his brow. Only a small kerosene lamp burned against the early morning darkness. Her eyes were ringed in black. She was as gaunt as a baby bird and wore a blue bandanna around her neck. A soldier with a bandaged head groaned from a stretcher not five feet away. "Shhh," she repeated, holding a small tin cup to Pirkl's lips. "Drink."

He sat up in bed as a whistling shell fired from the Katamon neighborhood crashed in a nearby street. "I'm going to find Abba," Pirkl said.

When the Jewish state was declared two weeks earlier, Pirkl had followed his mother to the sixth floor of their apartment house, where an Arab Legion shell had crashed through the roof of a neighbor's flat. The shell did not explode but had smashed a large jagged hole in the ceiling. White moonlight poured in through the opening, lighting the room with a silvery glow. Pirkl watched his mother step through the shattered glass and plaster and thought she looked like an angel. The air was thick and hot and smelled of crushed stone as Pirkl kicked up the white dust into clouds, imagining heaven.

Someone's wireless set crackled loudly from a lower floor and echoed through the darkened stairwell and the now-abandoned apartment. "This is Kol Hamagen HaIvri, the broadcasting service of the Haganah, calling on a wavelength of thirty-five to thirty-eight meters or seven to seven-point-five megacycles. Here is our English transmission. ..." His mother pulled a bookshelf up to the hole and climbed the shelves, disappearing a moment later through the twisted steel into the hot night air. "Come, Malchyk," she called. Pirkl bristled at the childish nickname that had been his since he was six years old, and began to climb, careful not to step on the leather-bound commentaries. The broadcaster read from David Ben-Gurion's Declaration of Independence, his voice catching on the words, "... by virtue of the natural and historic right of the Jewish people and on the strength of the resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations, hereby declares the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine, to be called Israel. ..." Pirkl repeated the word "Israel" as he pulled himself out onto the rooftop.

His mother took his hand, and he wanted to pull away and say, I don't need to hold your hand anymore, but realized for the first time as she squeezed him tightly that she needed his hand. The bombing that had gone on nightly for weeks continued ; incandescent blood streaks across the sky, the east flickering like an undecided sunrise, gray plumes of smoke climbing into the night. "Do you think we will have a king at last?"

"I don't know," she said wearily.

"Father is there?" Pirkl asked, pointing to the smoke seething from within the besieged Old City. Only the Arab Legion's artillery answered.

He had not seen his father since the hamsiin began, when the hot sirocco wind blew from the desert at the start of May draining the life and color out of everything.

"How can they fight during the hamsiin?" Pirkl had asked his mother.

"Yihye tov," his mother answered, "It will be all right."

Pirkl knew his father was there within the twisting rabbit warren streets defending the ancient Jewish Quarter. He had heard rumors of a Haganah unit disguised as an Arab Legion marching band who arrived at Damascus Gate blasting their trumpets. When the gates opened Pirkl imagined his father's kaffiyeh dropping to the ground, his trumpet magically transformed into a Sten gun, his voice raised singing, "Rifle on rifle our guns will salute / Bullet on bullet our guns will shoot." His father had taught Pirkl the "Song of the Barricades," how to hurl stones at the British, and how to fashion a grenade out of an empty jam tin with bits of broken glass, shrapnel, matches, and gunpowder. It seemed like years since Pirkl had helped his father to sandbag windows on Gaza Road.

"Father is there," Pirkl said, "I know he is there."

A half-dozen smoke rockets blasted up into the sky from the Old City just two kilometers away. His mother turned her back on the distress signals and did not answer.

The wireless continued to echo throughout the dark stairwell, "All laws enacted under the Palestine White Paper of the British government, and all laws deriving from it are declared null and void. ..." Pirkl felt his way down the stairs, following his mother's breathing. And then someone was jamming the wireless transmission and a voice cut in laughing, "We will drink blood from your skulls. Into the sea, Jews!"

That night Pirkl began to dream about his father's death.

Pirkl slipped into his dirty overalls, which hadn't been cleaned since water-rationing began. He placed his knitted cap onto his head and tied his shoes. The morning sun was coming up blue through the slats of the iron shutters. His mother took the tin cup from his side and tried to smile, touching his cheek. The soldier with the bandaged head sighed deeply in his sleep. Tsrili had been injured defending Ramat Rahel and was anxious to return to the battle but fell down dizzy and confused every time he stood up. Pirkl enjoyed singing Palmach marching songs with the injured soldier but was tired of hanging around the iodine-smelling apartment plugging wounds and beating away buzzing clouds of flies.

Just the night before Pirkl had stood showing off with his girlfriend Hannah, wearing an oversized helmet on his head in the middle of the living room. He declared in his most official-sounding baritone, "Pirkl of Rehavia you are conscripted in the name of Zion."

"What are your duties, brave one?" Hannah said, batting her eyelashes dramatically.

"To save Jerusalem!" Tsrili shouted from his stretcher before losing consciousness.

Now his grandmother entered with a crust of bread in one hand, a satchel thrown over her right shoulder. She handed him the bread, which was thinly covered with bitter chocolate spread. Pirkl gobbled it down.

"Good morning," she said.

"The reinforcements are ready," he answered.

"You make a handsome soldier."

His mother interrupted, "Pirkl is not a soldier. He's too young."

"I'm older than David when he killed Goliath."

"Don't talk nonsense."

"What is he, a worthless shmatte, a worthless old rag?" his grandmother said. "Let him go. Every man must fight for Jerusalem. He will soon be bar mitzvah. He smells like a man," she said, pinching her sharp nose.

"You belong at home ..." his mother began.

"But what about the brave Trumpeldor?" Pirkl shot back.

"He was killed at Tel Hai," his mother answered, shaking her head.

"Defending Tel Hai," his grandmother said. "He didn't die in vain."

"You're not going to look for your father. Promise me," his mother said.

Pirkl smiled, but didn't say anything. He thought of the Russian-born, one-armed Joseph Trumpeldor. His father's hero.

Pirkl's grandmother winked at him.

"All right," his mother said. "Come straight back, Malchyk! Just go to the barricade. Hold this above your head," she said, handing him a piece of white muslin cloth. "Hold it high so the snipers can see. Look for the Red Cross, leave the package, tell them it is for those trapped in the city. They will listen to a child."

"Let him go!" his grandmother said. Though he was just five feet tall, she still had to reach up to kiss his cheek. "Be strong and brave," she said.

His grandmother had packed a small satchel filled to the top with two loaves of stale bread, three cans of asparagus soup, a tin of chocolate spread, a package of dried fruit, some potatoes, a cup of dried beans, sweet halvah, candles, a blanket, week-old copies of Ha'aretz and some small dark jars which contained a liquid that must have been medicine.

His heart quickened, he could feel it boiling in his chest as he bounced down the stairs. The full weight of the hamsiin hit him as he stepped out into the magic pink light of morning. He walked around behind the apartment house and emptied the bag onto the ground next to a jagged bowl-shaped crater where a twenty-five-pounder had hit one night during heavy shelling, and dug in the dry earth where Tsrili, the soldier injured at Ramat Rahel, would later be buried.

When his mother was busy tending to the wounded, he had hidden a pair of three-inch Davidka mortar shells made out of old pipes, a few dozen Enfield rifle bullets, three bayonets, and the pièce de résistance, a round Thompson submachine gun magazine. He held the magazine to his chest, like a stack of precious 78 rpm records that his mother used to play on the phonograph. And for a moment, he saw his parents dancing and laughing in their living room, his mother's head thrown back with such joy, he could hardly recognize her now.

He pressed the bullets into the stale bread until they all disappeared into the now-heavy loaves; wrapped the bayonets thickly in the old newspapers, and swaddled the Thompson magazine in the blanket, piling dried fruit on top in case he was stopped and asked the contents of his bag. Pirkl imagined his two rockets, marked "Dear King Abdullah" and "For Haj Amin Mufti," hitting their targets squarely on top of their heads. Two shells can win the war, he thought, and pictured himself riding along King George V Avenue in an open car with Hannah at his side. His reverie was interrupted by the thump of shelling from the east.

Hannah lived in the next apartment house with her mother and stepfather who were Communists. She was the first girl his own age Pirkl had ever thought was pretty, with her long almond-shaped face, spinning green eyes, and brandnew breasts. He liked her for that, but he also liked the fact that her parents let her do as she wished. Sometimes in the evenings, during the bombing, she would throw rocks at Pirkl's window and he would meet her in the stairwell where they would kiss in the thick darkness. She promised soon that Pirkl could touch her there.

He gathered up the cans of soup, the potatoes and the beans, the chocolate spread, some dried fruit, and even the sweet halvah, and left them on the doorstep outside her flat. She had gotten so skinny, Pirkl thought, so light, he could have carried her on his back all the way to the Old City. He heard her stepfather behind the door glumly singing the "Internationale." Pirkl ran off to gather his satchel humming "Hatikvah," The Hope, the nation's anthem.

Skipping over shell craters and tangled telephone wires, counting broken windows and garbage piles, Pirkl continued humming as he went. He counted in Hebrew, and then English, then in Russian. Sometimes he mixed the three together.

Farther on down the road Pirkl could see the barricade, and behind that no-man's-land. A high nasal voice called to him from behind a low stone wall, "Hey, boy. Curlyhead! Come here." Pirkl stopped beneath an almond tree and adjusted the heavy bag on his back, about to move on.

"Boy, you are going to the Ancient City?"

"Who wants to know?" Pirkl asked.

"I know," the voice said. "I know."

And then, the oldest man Pirkl had ever seen stood up from behind the wall. He was barefoot and dressed entirely in black, with a black felt hat tilted back on his giant head. He had a wild white beard, wispy like dry grass, and his eyes were pale and glassy.

"Come here, boy," the holy man said, holding out his long bony hand.

Pirkl could see the veins in his hand so clearly they might have been above the skin. His back was hunched and he smelled of old books and damp soil. And then he spoke and his breath smelled of fish bones that had been almost picked clean.

"You are going to the Ancient City."

Pirkl put his bag down. "Do you live there?"

"Yes."

"But you ran?" Pirkl said.

The holy man laughed, but instead of a laugh it was a breath and not a breath, as if he had one of those fish bones caught in his throat. "I ran?"

"How long did you live there?"

"Five hundred years," the man answered, then wheezed and laughed again. "Your name, boy."

Pirkl told him. He could not stop looking into the man's glassy cataracted eyes, dreamy like cracked crystal balls.

"Your mother?"

He could hear heavy machine-gunning in the distance and the savage boom, boom, boom of the bigger guns.

"Rosa," Pirkl said.

"Take this," the holy man said, slipping a small silver amulet into Pirkl's hand. He gripped his arm tight and did not let go. Pirkl closed his eyes and began to sway. He thought he felt the old man reach into his overall pockets, but he ignored it, thinking the poor man was simply searching for hidden food. The old man's pink tongue rolled around in his toothless mouth trying to form words, his voice high-pitched and broken: "In the name of Shaddai who created heaven and earth and in the name of the angel ..." He was shaking faster and Pirkl felt an ache in his groin and a vibration down his spine. "In the name of Pirkl son of Rosa, protect him in all of his two-hundred and forty-eight organs against danger and the two-edged sword. Help him, deliver him, save him ..." He felt the man's soft hand sliding against him and electricity buzzing down all the knuckles of his spine and out into his rib cage. "Vanquish and bring low those who rise against him. May all who seek his harm be destroyed, humbled, smashed so that not a limb remains whole ..." He felt a fire in his legs and arms now, burning through his veins and arteries, a white fire cleansing his very soul. "Save him, deliver him from all sorcery, from wicked men, from sudden death. Grant him grace, and love and mercy before the throne of God and before all beings who behold him." The old man let go of Pirkl's arm, and his eyes snapped open. He continued to chant, his stinking pink mouth an open wound, "Yah Yah Yah Yau Yau Yau Yah Zebaot. Amen Amen Amen." And all at once the electricity was gone and Pirkl felt his body shiver as if he had exploded. The man again broke into a sepulchral laugh and Pirkl noticed the man had wet his pants. He felt damp in his own pants. He had been tricked by a madman.

"Pirkl, Pirkl, beautiful boy," the man cackled, taking the amulet back into his long bony hands. "Pirkl, Pirkl."

He walked away laughing, and Pirkl grabbed him by the shoulder not concerned anymore that the old man might crumble into dust.

"Why did you touch me?"

"For luck," the old man said. "For luck."

"I don't need luck," Pirkl said, sickened and angry.

"You want to die as a lamb?"

"I'm not going to die."

"Child, you exaggerate your own importance. Death is in the air." And with that, he raised his nose to the sky, sniffing, his nose hairs waving like tiny spider's legs.

"Come with me," he said, sliding a finger into his toothless mouth.

Then Pirkl said a word so foul that he had never said it aloud before. The old man's face dropped and he began to shuffle away.

"If you must go," he said, color rising to his pallid face, "enter through the small door, my little dung beetle."

When Pirkl reached the barricade, he removed the bayonets from his heavy satchel, throwing them on the ground in disgust. He was sticky and felt something dripping down his leg and wiped it up with the gauze his mother had given him to ward off sniper fire. Through a peephole, he could see a park where he once played, strewn with barbed wire and rough cement blocks. He didn't smell death in the air, only burned gunpowder and dust. His father, the best person in the whole world, was only a few hundred meters away, inside that stony prison. Pirkl felt tears surge up from his belly and he wanted to run to him as fast as his legs could carry him.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Ascent of Eli Israel"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Jonathan Papernick.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Page,
Dedication,
Introduction,
Malchyk,
An Unwelcome Guest,
The Art of Correcting,
The Ascent of Eli Israel,
For as Long as the Lamp Is Burning,
The King of the King of Falafel,
Lucky Eighteen,
Glossary,
The Ascent of Eli Israel,
Q&A with Jonathan Papernick,