Status Updates From שכול וכשלון

The black-skinned wife of the Arab watchman focused on him with the whites of her eyes, then opened the small gate. The mass of clifflike boulders met his glance: in the crimson glint of the rocks piled before him, color heightened by the reddish beams striking against them, there was no suggestion of a father's forgiveness or a mother's sheltering breast, but neither was there anything sinister or somber anymore.

Miriam’s short chestnut braids flashed fondly at her tutor and guide. Ah, all she wanted, her one real desire, was to go on learning! Her braids bobbed against the well-shaped shoulders visible beneath her sailor suit, her face tanned and pretty, her dark blue, flirtatious eyes flecked with a catlike gray-green, the lines of her mouth fresh and attractive, for all their stubborn, uninviting, unfeminine energy.

His writing reminds many of Dostoevsky. I don’t dispute that. But it also reminds me of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Saul Bellow, even though the only work of those two he might have read was the serialized version of Satan in Goray in Yiddish. A very complex, rich and nuanced novel of the early years of the Jewish state and one man’s struggle of the mind and spirit.

Several years ago, aboard a ship bound from Port Said to Alexandria, a certain homely and unfortunate individual, who in his conversations with me, his fellow passenger, had repeatedly stressed the need for an attitude of good will toward all men, fell mentally ill. He was about thirty-three at the time, and his face, which even previously had shown the strain of perpetual tension, now expressed utter confusion.