Between Arabic and Dawn • A short story • At night a word occupies a shelf

My first prose book, the bride of the sea, this week celebrated four years since it was published. If you do the math, you'll see that it was at the end of January 2020, remember those days, when Corona was just a favorite beer for a part of the population that wasn't me? Somehow the years have lengthened since then and the world is divided into what was before the plague and what we inherited after it.

The bride of the sea conquered the shelves of bookstores, entered the promotions and I followed her on a journey across the country. I was not lazy and from shop to shop I got to know more places in Israel that I had never visited.
The whole thing lasted a month and a half. On March 15, the stores and we closed.

Months later, when they reopened, The Mermaid became yesterday's news and was taken out of the stores because, as I was told, new books were published and she "just occupies a shelf". Shelves in stores have limited space, the store owners will choose to leave books on them that the buyers will not keep, books that are sold before the dust accumulates. It's actually the opposite of the purpose of the home library.

"Just pick one and hope it's the one"

Towards the end of the fourth decade of my life, I decided that I deserved a library. And she is only mine. My love for the written word is a delightful habit I acquired from Mom and Dad, simply from the fact that the books were always there, waiting, just to choose one and hope it would be the one.

Every avid reader knows that when he holds a new book, at the beginning with the delicacy of a new acquaintance, he actually hopes that soon the moment will come that the story will make him tighten his grip, that the pages will taste the food that he could not put the book aside for, that some pages will shrink because only Sleep overwhelmed the reading and he fell asleep with the book in his hand, a bit like Yarit from that poem. And, no matter what I did during the day, the last thing that closes my eyes to sleep at night is the words written by the writers. 

Shmuel, from Golden Books in the center of Carmel, in one of our many conversations, once told me that in Israel many books grow mold because the bookshelves are placed on an outside wall. problem. In my house, most of the walls are exterior and it took a while to find an interior piece of heaven suitable for my book collection. 

And now, many months after the decision, I found Eureka, the dream came true and the library was installed.
I began enthusiastically loading my collection, back and forth, from the remote shelves to the center of the home literature stage. Pretty quickly I realized that there was no room for all the books and that I had to choose, filter, do what they do in bookstores. But my reasons for keeping a book with me are personal and I have a thorough filtering system, which I will share with you readers from week to week.

Quite a lot of books have accumulated on the remote shelves, which I haven't read yet. I collected them from my travels around the world, from the treasures Shmuel has every time I stop to say hello and don't hold back and collect more, and also gifts from my loved ones, who know that a good book makes me happy. I will tell my journey to build my personal library here. Each week I will write about the book from the waiting pile that I chose to read and the decision -Stay or free? I will honestly write my opinion about the book and what is the reason for the final decision. 

This is not a literature review section, I will not review friends' books or those given to me by book publishers. This is a personal journey of a book lover, very eclectic in her reading, who opens a window to her private bookshelf to the world in an effort to connect with the book-loving readers among you, to voice and maybe even hear from you about the special book you chose to keep with you.

In the festive opening of this literary column, I will share a short story I wrote, which won first place in 2013, was translated into Yiddish by Dr. Adi Mehalel and published in a magazine in New York in 2014, and finally became a chapter in my book, The Bride of the Sea.

Pleasant reading and may good words be by your side always,
Lily

Between Arabic and Dawn / Lili Milat

"I hereby announce the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel," boomed the chairman's voice at noon on Friday, May 14, 1948. Like the flapping of a butterfly's wings, the announcement traveled over the high frequencies and reached 809 aerial kilometers from Beit Dizengoff, Tel Aviv - to Qamishli, Syria. 

Eliyahu prepared for the entrance of Shabbat. He set up a feast in the small kitchen, and marveled at his nimble hands and his unique ability to divide attention to do the impossible. He allowed Juliet to rest, despite her protests. The ninth month came and from the experience of her last birth he saw that the day was near. He also remembered well her miscarriages in recent years. It was the first time she was able to hold a child in her womb since Sharin was born.

His two daughters, Bedar, eight years old, and Sharin, six years old, sat at the dining table, happily chatting and eating the dough from which Yapu made challah for Shabbat. Eliyahu listened to their chatter while cutting the mint for the tabulah, watching over the rice and the bean soup that were cooking, and sang with her voice playing in the background of Umm Koltum performed by 'Lisa Packer', you still remember. He knew how to time according to the segments in the concert, when to turn off the wick of the rice and when to turn off the wick of the soup, and when you reach the last, exciting part, it will be exactly the time to put in the dough, which will turn into a sickle giving off heavenly smells to the applause of the audience at the end of the concert.

The time for Shabbat's evening prayer approached and Eliyahu set his sights on the Hichal Avraham synagogue down the street. An eerie silence enveloped the houses and the streets. Eliyahu advanced another house and another, suddenly a strong hand grabbed him and pulled him down, his festive clothes were covered in dirt, a short second before the explosion was heard that testified that the 'Abraham Temple' was going up in flames. Elijah looked around but the stranger had disappeared. Frightened men, women and children crowded around. He stood up and surveyed the crowd. His gaze stopped when he saw him, Sheikh Tai, standing at the other end of the street and quietly observing what was happening. For one brief moment their eyes met in silence.

That night Eliyahu's sleep wandered. After the Qamishli thugs finished vandalizing the synagogues, they declared that they knew all the Jewish ancestral homes and no one would escape their hands. Sheikh Tai, an Abdkan with piercing black eyes, the figure on whom everything in Qamishli was based, sent the demonstrators to their homes and called them to stand in the city square with the dawn hawk. 

Eliyahu, suffocated and at a loss, went up to the roof of his house and tried to organize his thoughts. He looked out over the houses of Qamishli, which were now lit by faint wicks. From time to time the embers of the Abraham Temple glinted in the moonlight and drew his eyes to the place where he had prayed yesterday morning, innocent of what he would bring with him today. Still lost in his thoughts, he noticed a man carrying weapons walking towards the city square, where he put them down and returned to the weapons store to get more. For a moment the man raised his face and in the moonlight the face of Sheikh Tai was revealed.

Eliyahu prayed the morning prayer on the roof of his house, in the background the crowd gathered in the city square to hear the sheikh's speech in light of the Zionist declaration of a Jewish state. The sheikh looked at the smiles of the rioters from last night's events and the many weapons he had piled up with his own hands in the square, and began to speak. Elijah finished his prayer and silently closed the prayer book. In the background he heard the sheikh's deep voice resounding, "Whoever desires the blood of the Zionists, is welcome to take up arms and go fight on the border. In our city, under my watch, not a hair will fall from the heads of our honorable Jewish residents. These are my words and now leave me alone and come back here at the end of the Sabbath, so that We will rebuild the Avraham Temple."

He heard a rustling behind him, turned around and saw the midwife excited, announcing in a trembling voice, "Mabrock, you've got a son."