Brooklyn Book Festival OnePage
Week of 20-Apr-2012
This post is from my novel-in-progress, which is called The Pinch and spans about 300 years in the history of a Jewish ghetto neighborhood around North Main Street in Memphis, Tennessee. The page is representative of the general tone of the book.
There was an evening when she peered into Muni’s room, lit by a single yahrzeit candle, and saw the reams of pages that threatened to inundate or bury him alive. It came to her what an intrusion the birth of a flesh and blood child would be in a world composed entirely of words. After that Jenny began actively to resent the dream that had inebriated the street.
Once at sundown she surveyed, from the tarpapered rooftop of the Rosens’ building, the brazen surface of the canal with its lamp lit fleet. Rabbi ben Yahya had said that the water came from the perspiration of heavenly hosts singing the praises of the highest, and these days the rebbe’s word was taken as gospel. The night stretched south toward antiquity, north toward the end of days. That it was no longer confined by its former diurnal horizons could also be attributed to the Shpinker rebbe, whose Hasids had prayed a hole in the membrane separating the fallen world from its opposite number. The Hasids themselves maintained, paradoxically, that they had repaired the rift between olam ha-ba and olam ha-zeh, above and below, thus allowing free passage between the two spheres. This meant that an angel might cohabit with a mortal and a mortal become likewise a citizen of paradise. A boat could fluctuate between a floating barber shop and a shivah shel-maalah, a celestial academy. Children plunged into the canal and surfaced with novelties: an amphora, a wireless radio, a mermaid they were made to throw back again. From her vantage Jenny took in the broad expanse of that freakish street and rejected wholesale its garish goings-on. What kind of a normal childhood could be had in the midst of such humbug? The Pinch was finally no place to raise a kid.
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There was an evening when she peered into Muni’s room, lit by a single yahrzeit candle, and saw the reams of pages that threatened to inundate or bury him alive. It came to her what an intrusion the birth of a flesh and blood child would be in a world composed entirely of words. After that Jenny began actively to resent the dream that had inebriated the street.
Once at sundown she surveyed, from the tarpapered rooftop of the Rosens’ building, the brazen surface of the canal with its lamp lit fleet. Rabbi ben Yahya had said that the water came from the perspiration of heavenly hosts singing the praises of the highest, and these days the rebbe’s word was taken as gospel. The night stretched south toward antiquity, north toward the end of days. That it was no longer confined by its former diurnal horizons could also be attributed to the Shpinker rebbe, whose Hasids had prayed a hole in the membrane separating the fallen world from its opposite number. The Hasids themselves maintained, paradoxically, that they had repaired the rift between olam ha-ba and olam ha-zeh, above and below, thus allowing free passage between the two spheres. This meant that an angel might cohabit with a mortal and a mortal become likewise a citizen of paradise. A boat could fluctuate between a floating barber shop and a shivah shel-maalah, a celestial academy. Children plunged into the canal and surfaced with novelties: an amphora, a wireless radio, a mermaid they were made to throw back again. From her vantage Jenny took in the broad expanse of that freakish street and rejected wholesale its garish goings-on. What kind of a normal childhood could be had in the midst of such humbug? The Pinch was finally no place to raise a kid.
