Copyright © 2016 by Beth Kissileff
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Designed by Barbara Werden
Cover photo © Can Stock Photo / lucidwaters
Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data
Names: Kissileff, Beth.
Title: Questioning return: a novel / Beth Kissileff.
Description: Simsbury, Connecticut: Mandel Vilar Press, [2016]
Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-942134-24-4 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Graduate students—Jerusalem—Fiction. | Jewish pilgrims and pilgrimages—Israel—Fiction. | Jews, American—Israel—Fiction. | Jewish way of life—Fiction. | Immigrants—Israel—Fiction. | Israel—Emigration and immigration—Fiction. | Israel—Fiction. | Jewish fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3611.I87 Q47 2016 (print) | LCC PS3611.I87 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 / 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Mandel Vilar Press
19 Oxford Court, Simsbury, Connecticut 06070
www.americasforconservation.org | www.mvpress.org
“When one is asked a question he must discover what he is.”
GEORGE HERBERT
A Priest to the Temple
Collected Works: 226
Contents
PROLOGUE—A Decisive Moment?
ONE—Holders of Foreign Passports
TWO—Walking in Jerusalem
THREE—Sabbath Peace
FOUR—Bayit Ne’Eman
FIVE—Centers and Margins
SIX—New Jerusalem?
SEVEN—Accompanying the Coffin
EIGHT—Wendy and Noah: The Aftermath of Desire
NINE—Shared Dreams, Shared Eternity
TEN—“Good Night World”
ELEVEN—Dr. Hideckel
TWELVE—Meeting Atarah
THIRTEEN—Purim: Until You Don’t Know
FOURTEEN—A New Chance
FIFTEEN—Rituals of Incorporation
SIXTEEN—Confronting the Question: The Seder
SEVENTEEN—Self-Counting
EIGHTEEN—Forty-Two Journeys
NINETEEN—Teiku
Glossary
Acknowledgements
Il n’y a rien dans ce monde qui n’ait un moment decisif. (There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment.)
—CARDINAL DE RETZ, quoted by HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON in the introduction to The Decisive Moment
To me photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.
—HENRI CARTIER - BRESSON, in the introduction to The Decisive Moment
“Who is asking?”
“No one’s ever questioned that. I’m the one who grills the subjects,” Wendy responded.
“So we’re reversing it now,” Jacob Lamdan added, smiling. “How did you get to your dissertation topic?”
Wendy looked at him and sighed gently, trying to suppress the queasiness she’d been feeling since the plane’s takeoff in New York, still with her in the air, now somewhere over Europe. “I almost didn’t. I’m studying newly religious American Jews in Jerusalem, to see how they discuss changes they’ve made in their lives. What they feel they’ve gained, what lost, what is constant, what radically new in their religious incarnation. I can’t believe I’m finally on this plane; I only got a dissertation Fulbright late last spring, after being rejected from everything else. So,” she said pausing, both hesitant to declare her pride in an as-yet-unwritten project and proud of her achievement thus far, “I guess it was basherte.” Her use of the Yiddish word was forced for a third-generation American in her twenties; it was solely to impress Lamdan, a professor of Talmud at Princeton, where she was a graduate student in Religious Studies.
He gazed at her, sitting next to him, closer together than they would be anywhere other than the cramped seats of an international plane flight. “I have a hard time with this thing fate. If everything is so basherte, why am I here, when so many others who deserve to be alive much more, are not? I can’t accept that all is foreseen. Humans have free will. Sometimes, we make terrible mistakes.”
Wendy’s left arm was on the armrest of the seat to his right. She could see the indelible mark of the six blue digits on his left arm even in the hazy dimness of this not-yet-morning hour. “But you’re religious? Do you really mean there’s no basherte, no . . . greater power . . . behind it all?”
He was surprised by her question; students weren’t usually bold enough to challenge him. Most held him in awe and approached him with reverence, distance. Lamdan never had Wendy in class; even though she was a student in his department, she didn’t have the Hebrew background to take his type of courses. Had they been somewhere else, he would probably never have thought to answer her seriously.
“No simple answers, young lady.”
She decided, glancing sideways at him, not to let go of the matter. “The people I’m studying don’t seem to think so. The prevailing view is that once you make a leap of faith, it’s all easy.”
“Halivei, would it were so. Listen, I’ll tell you a story.”
Wendy liked the soothing cadences of his voice, the soft accent his first languages, Yiddish and Hungarian, lent to his English. His voice and tone were melodic, as though he would begin to chant a sacred text at any moment. She had never sat so close to a professor; their knees were aligned, virtually touching. His frail skinny body, forty or fifty years older than hers, wasn’t attractive. His stomach was practically concave, his skin pale and his clear blue eyes as sharp as the laser of his intellect, able to bore into unprepared students and terrify them, she had heard from departmental chatter. His soft smile and the