Who Will Die Last: Stories of Life in Israel

Preface

Ken Frieden

You are lucky to be holding this book in your hand or reading it on a screen. Few American readers have had the opportunity to enjoy David Ehrlich’s stories, because until now little of his work has been printed in English. * This collection makes available a wide selection of Ehrlich’s stories, most of which were first published in Hebrew and appeared in his books Ha-bekarim shel shlishi ve-hamishi (Tuesday and Thursday Mornings; Tel Aviv: Yedi‘ot aharonot, 1999) and Kahol 18 (Blue 18; Tel Aviv: Yedi‘ot aharonot, 2003).

The stories in Who Will Die Last are a milestone of cultural transfer. Israelis know Ehrlich both as a fine author and a moving force in the ongoing literary life of Jerusalem. His bookstore café Tmol Shilshom has become an important site, where prizewinning books—like Nathan Englander’s For the Relief of Unbearable Urges—have been written, and it is a favorite venue for literary events. Readings by eminent authors such as Yehuda Amichai, Aharon Appelfeld, David Grossman, Batya Gur, Etgar Keret, Zeruya Shalev, and A. B. Yehoshua have been hosted by Tmol Shilshom. In his own fiction, David Ehrlich has echoed, combined, and transformed features drawn from many of these innovators.

While I was editing Who Will Die Last, I was reminded of Isaac Babel’s story Guy de Maupassant. Babel’s narrator describes the work of translating and editing: When a phrase is born, it is both good and bad at the same time. The secret of its success rests in a crux that is barely discernible. One’s fingertips must grasp the key, gently warming it. And then the key must be turned once, not twice.** As editor, I took the liberty of turning some words and phrases by the many talented translators who produced this volume of David Ehrlich’s stories. Babel’s narrator goes on to restate the secret of translation when explaining the art to his beautiful but inept collaborator: I spoke to her of style, of an army of words, an army in which every kind of weapon is deployed. No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.

All of the translators who made this volume possible have labored admirably to transfer the aura and graphic details of Ehrlich’s fiction into English. As one of the few people who have had the privilege to read all of these stories in both languages before their publication here, I have strived to make certain that nothing is lost in translation—or at least to ensure that where something has been lost, something else has been gained. In my editing I have not tried to smooth out rough edges or to craft the stories to sound the same, because they are narrated by many distinctive characters with dissimilar voices. Moreover, good translators like these also have voices of their own that should not be suppressed. As a result, the diversity of translators corresponds indirectly to the many voices of David Ehrlich’s fiction.

You will encounter surprising twists and turns as you move through this volume. In advance, I only want to promise that a slow and attentive reading will repay your efforts. There is a searing honesty in Ehrlich’s vision, matched by his concise style and subtlety. He has imagined so much, before and behind the scenes, that a novel or a screenplay could be written from each individual story. Take your time; there is no hurry. Ehrlich is waiting patiently for you to join him so that he can guide you on a mystery tour of his imaginary world, which offers a safe place to explore a set of alternate realities.

If you know Israel well, it will return to you in these stories with a kind of alienated majesty. If you have never visited Israel or the Middle East, let this be your introduction to an enigmatic country that is as magical as it is haunted by harsh realities.

* One rare exception was the inclusion of his astonishing text The Store in Michael Gluzman and Naomi Seidman’s anthology Israel: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (San Francisco: Whereabouts Press, 1996).

** Isaac Babel, The Collected Stories, ed. Nathalie Babel, trans. Peter Constantine (New York: Norton, 2002), 445.

Who Will Die Last

To the Limit

Translated by Charlie Buckholtz

Ileft a meeting in Ashkelon at 3:30, and at the first intersection a red Lantis tried to pass me on the right. Usually I let people pass instead of getting into a fight, but this guy pissed me off. In the side-view mirror I could see his gaudy, orange shirt and gelled hair, and so I kept going fast—I was not letting this guy in. When his lane ended he had no choice but to get in behind me. He didn’t leave it at that, the bastard, and wanted me to move out of his way—yeah, right!

Next he tried to pass on the left, but that wasn’t in the cards: in the left lane a bus was right behind me, so he ended up stuck behind the bus. I could see even from a distance how much this burned him. I knew he wasn’t really in a hurry, that something inside him was rushing, so I didn’t let him pass me on the right or left. He kept trying and pushing at all the exits, all the way to Tel Aviv, and I didn’t let him. We did a kind of dance on the highway. Even though I needed to get off at Ginot, he pissed me off so much that I decided to continue one more exit north. This time I did it to spite him: slowed down, and—every time he came to pass me—sped up. I was tired of the game but I was trapped, so I continued one more exit north, just to show him, one last time.

We almost had an accident on the exit ramp, and when he finally started honking, other drivers started to notice our little happening. But what could I do? I felt I had an obligation, called my wife, and told her I was held up at work. We continued until the Country Club exit, where we got off to take a leak. We parked close enough not to break contact but far enough apart not to have to speak, and we kept track of each other in the bathroom. Then we went back to our cars, pulled out at exactly the same time, and continued that way to the Pancake Place, where we stopped to eat. Just because you’re suffering from road rage on the highway doesn’t mean you have to stay hungry. By then we could already read each other and knew we were going with this to the limit.

So we sat at the same table.

Afterward we got up and left at the same time, and gave Wow! what a show all the way to Haifa. We freaked everyone out with our tire screeching.

But I managed not to get distracted by the good feeling I’d developed for him in the Pancake Place. I focused on my anger at this idiot who was holding me up for so long on the road, and I remembered that all of it was because he had tried to pass me on the right. We continued like this for another hour, which got more difficult with the traffic jams in Haifa, but we were obliged to continue. From Check-post North we crawled past a few exits side by side—he was ahead in the left lane, or I was ahead in the right lane—each time waving hello. When we got out of the Krayot suburbs, things became easier but also more dangerous on the two-lane road. In my excitement I forgot how the road went, and boom! We hit the northern border, the country ended, and we stood there gasping beside the cars.

We knew it would never be this good again.

The Store

Translated by Naomi Seidman

When Micha Rothman and his group founded our village eighty-two years ago, not a single road in Palestine had been paved yet, and hardly anyone had settled to the north and east. Once every day or two, a horseback rider or carriage would pass along the road, and everyone would gather around to hear the news and gossip from Jaffa and from the other villages.

Peace and quiet, that was our character throughout the years. Quiet, and hard work, and lending a hand when it was required, but also carefully guarding one another’s privacy, each of us minding our own business.

We take pride in that.

With all due modesty, it should be noted that our village thrived and prospered beyond the expectations of its founders. There was no farm in the village that did not supply the Tnuva company with fine milk, excellent eggs, or lusciously sweet fruit. There was no home that did not raise three or four children, most of whom returned here immediately after their army service without descending into drugs or dangerous treks through jungles. Even during the worst of the economic recession of the eighties, we were far from financial ruin. No one went into debt, no one asked for help.

Even when they built the new highway, which passed literally meters from the Barkays’s back fence, we weren’t much affected. Villages less solidly rooted than our own went through difficult transitions when the wave of modernization washed through their streets. But in our case, either because of our lack of interest in the world or because of the world’s lack of interest in us, the atmosphere of the good old days lingered, and each of us held our own against the evil winds that blew. Even when the trucks barreled past, hauling their loads back and forth, perpetually delivering newspapers that had more colors than news, even then we could hear, beyond the roar, the rustle of the wings of birds that still remembered that, once, there were swamps here.

And then Lucy Galili died. Lucy, Elchanan’s widow, was stronger than steel, with roots that were deeply and firmly planted, and the spark in her eyes seemed to have leapt from one generation to another, radiating wisdom and experience since the days of Adam.

The only thing was, they had no children.

Immediately after the funeral the great dispute over their house began. Some of us wanted to put in a library, a few suggested a small museum, and others thought that we should build a synagogue on the property.

But before the dispute could really heat up, to everyone’s amazement, a relative suddenly appeared. Needless to say, this person had never set foot in the village during the long lifetime of the Galilis. Moreover, there were some who remembered Lucy explicitly stating that she had no family, anywhere. But unfortunately this man, who was wearing what was perhaps the first suit that had ever appeared among us, proved that he was indeed a nephew of a cousin of Lucy’s who had been killed in the Holocaust. And before we could grow accustomed to the idea and put a stop to the rest of the process, the man entered into a selling frenzy.

It should be understood that none of us had any experience with such matters. We did not know whether we should be taking legal action to try to stop the man, and if so, how to do it, and we also were unsure about the ethical justification for such a step, since, after all, the house did not belong to us.

Now, of course, we regret our inaction.

We regarded with astonishment the cast of characters that walked around and into poor Lucy’s house, types we could scarcely believe existed in this country of ours, and wondered what interest they could possibly have in our village. The potential buyers appeared in succession as if in some horror movie, each with his own vision: one wanted to set up a stud farm, the second a restaurant, and the third intended to bring in beehives. What they shared was a basic unsuitability for our village, and also a complete lack of interest in the primary question of whether the inhabitants of the place wanted them or not.

Everything happened very quickly. In the course of two weeks, Elchanan Galili’s house had been sold to a couple from Netanya. Rumor had it that the price reached a half million dollars, a purely imaginary sum for most of us. Until that point it had not occurred to any of us that our plots of land had any particular financial value, the whole question of price having been simply irrelevant.

From Uri Samit’s nearby porch, we watched them unload furniture from a truck, and then take a stroll around the orchard, and a few days later paint the house a vulgar shade of cream. Every once in a while they waved hello at us. We responded unenthusiastically. At that point we were not yet aware of how careful we had to be with