CONTEST: Free Book Giveaway!

One lucky FailedMessiah.com reader will receive a free autographed copy of Joshua Henkin's wonderful novel Matrimony, which is newly released in paperback today. (Reviews.)

Here's how you can win:

Write a Jewish-themed short story of 300 words or less. The shorter, the better.

Think of this as the haiku of short sories.

Any genre is fine – except porn.

Leave your microstory as a comment to this post. My anonymous panel of judges will choose the winner. (If they are unable to reach a decision, Joshua Henkin will choose.)

Make sure your story-comment is left with a valid email address so we can find you and get you the book if you win. (For those of you concerned with privacy, your mail address will not post on the blog if you put it in the comments form on the email line.)

Authors give up all publication rights to their microstories. FailedMessiah.com and/or its publisher may choose to republish these stories in print or electronic form, perhaps to benefit a charity, perhaps to benefit FailedMessiah.com, perhaps just for the heck of it.

Deadline for the contest is Thursday, August 28, 2008 at 10:00 p.m. CDT. Good luck!

To kick things off, here is my microstory. It runs 190 words.

Aliya
©2008 Shmarya Rosenberg

Rain. It runs in sheets down the cold stone walls, oozing, seeping, permeating each stone as if it were a sponge. Nothing feels dry. It is hard to stay warm, even in bed, even covered with every blanket we own. It is not enough. Not when it rains.

Jerusalem is a low-lying cloud, heavy, wet and gray. It isn't the security situation or the drivers or even the loaves of uncovered makolet bread strewn in open baskets, touched with unwashed hands and dirty coat sleeves. None of that will get you.

Rain is the true enemy. It gives life, sure, but it takes it: coughing, hacking, gasping for breath; bones iced through to the marrow. The cough becomes larger than the body that makes it. Soon all that is left is the sound.

There is no cold like Jerusalem cold. Jill told me then. She had lived it once, and she knew. But I did not understand.

I do now. Without her next to me, sweatshirt up, legs wrapped around, pushing into me, her breath on my lips, her eyes on mine – without her now, I would be gone.

Joshua Henkin's 2007 FailedMessiah.com Guest Post.
JoshuaHenkin.com.
Buy Matrimony.

Comments

"pushing into me"? I didn't know you were one of those scotty.

[Rachel Batya]

--My anonymous panel of judges will choose the winner.--

Anonymous judges? So, what you are saying is that, to protect the integrity of the process, their relationship is strictly with you, under no circumstances can you permit that this relationship be compromised, and thus it is off limits to outside scrutiny, as is prescribed by Jewish law.

I'm not being critical. So long as they're also hand-picked and pious, I'm on board.

[shmuel]

"Without her next to me, sweatshirt up, legs wrapped around, pushing into me, her breath on my lips, her eyes on mine..."

I thought you specifically said no porn allowed.

[Archie Bunker]

I would ask how do we know that the contest isn't fixed but I'll hold off considering the grand prize is a paperback book.

[Shmarya]

Anonymous judges? So, what you are saying is that, to protect the integrity of the process, their relationship is strictly with you, under no circumstances can you permit that this relationship be compromised, and thus it is off limits to outside scrutiny, as is prescribed by Jewish law.

I'm not being critical. So long as they're also hand-picked and pious, I'm on board.

No. Rather tongue-in-cheek, I'm saying if I don't get that panel together in time, Henkin will choose.

[Rachel Batya]

--No. Rather tongue-in-cheek, I'm saying if I don't get that panel together in time, Henkin will choose.--

Thanks for the clarification. I was worried there for a minute.

[Ahavah]

My entry:

To go or not to go, that is the question. This will be my mother’s greatest performance – her opportunity to play the martyr extraordinnaire. She’ll be in rare form, “woe is me” to perfection, every little problem an insurmountable mountain. And if I show up – well, well, what a show it will be! But what kind of show? Do I really want to go through that? Is it worth it to try and see my sister and her kids? My cousins, some of whom I used to be close to?
Do I really want to look down at that dead lifeless face and wonder why he never tried to contact me on the sly? Nobody would have known. Even if it was just to yell and scream, at least he could have called me. Did he think he would do it “later” and ran out of time, not knowing he would die on the table – so much for a routine operation? Or had he made up his mind a long time ago that I was dead, cold and remote, nevermore to be seen on this side of the night? Am I dead? Sometimes I think so. A ghost to them – a shadow that troubles the edges of their world, nothing more.
No, I don’t think I should go. There are no answers in that box. I don’t need a public spectacle in order to mourn – I can do that with my own candle and my own siddur. No tears, of course – those were shed long ago. No, I will not go. Whether I am greeted with hate or with silence or with hypocritical congeniality will not matter, because the only one I need to hear speak or not speak is not there.

[Rachel Batya]

Here's my piece. (Hope the formatting works. I'm new at this.)

Mere Survival

Temple Israel, twenty-five years after the Holocaust. It is Shabbos morning, and the teacher is terrified. Week after week, he asks the same question: What kind of a God abandons us?

We are all deeply frightened--of the Nazis, of an indifferent world, of the future. But we are most frightened of a God whose ways we do not comprehend.

We have no time to learn about the compassionate God of Abraham. We do not believe that our God is the One who frees slaves. We read some Torah, but we don’t talk about it. We read some Torah because, in so doing, we are defeating Hitler. That is all.

And to defeat Hitler, we have to know Hitler. We have to know every detail of his evil. And so, in the sanctuary, we sing:

Kadosh, kadosh, kadosh, Adonai tzeva-ot, m’lochol ha-aretz k’vodo

And then, we watch footage of the final solution, Hitler’s everlasting monument to despair:

People are lined up in front of a ditch. They are shot. They crumple and fall. We see them at the moment of their deaths.

We do not see God’s glory. We do not even see people living in another time and dying in another place. We see only ourselves. As the camera pans over layers upon layers of dead bodies, the words are whispered like a haunting chant:

My mother. My brother. My aunt. Myself.

Over and over, the same story, burned into our consciousness with more power and more tenacity than the very words of our Torah. Our minds are entranced by the evil. The madman is gone, yet still he has the power to efface God’s glory and to destroy our sense of wonder.

Such is the nature of evil. Such is the nature of our surrender.

[Rachel Batya]

Ahavah,

I identify so deeply with every word you've written. Thank you so much.

Kol tuv,
Rachel

[Yisrael Medad]

Small Victories

The phone rang and a man offered me an additional credit card from my bank. I told him I didn't need one. He insisted I did.

I told him that I try to keep within my financial framework of what comes in - goes out.

"It doesn't cost you anything," he tried. "Sir," I said, "this cannot be free. My reply is ‘no’."

Three weeks later, our personal account manager calls from the bank. "Can I interest you in an extra credit card?" she asked. "No," I said, "I don't need it. I don't want it. No."

Two weeks later, my bank calls. “We invite you to come in and pick up your credit cards."

Raising my voice, I stacattoed: "I told you I don't want them. Shall I sue your back for attempted extortion, theft, acting against my best interests and otherwise not listening to me?" I said, raising my force.

"But, but..." she attempted. "No buts," I cut in. "I want to speak to the bank manager. And if he’s not available, the highest paid employee of your bank who is now physically
present at the bank."

The deputy bank manager came on and, after I gave him an earful, profusely apologized. I accepted his apology and urged him to review his bank’s practices.

This morning, the phone rang. It was the deputy branch manager who informed me that a staff meeting had taken place. Decisions had been taken and I had made a contribution to the bettering of the bank's method in this operation. He then handed the phone to the bank employee, who, just after apologizing and before hanging up, asked me to come in and review the possibility of investing in a monetary fund of theirs.

I won.

But so did she.

My Entry:

I woke up at the crack of dawn in Mother's basement. Getting off the bottom bunk of the bed I had been sleeping on since the age of 6 I had a strong urge to blog. I haven't had a job since my dad fired me from mowing the lawn 30 years ago so I have a lot of time on my hands. Sitting at the blank screen I begin to type. I start thinking about my dream relationship with the Rubashkin girl who scorned me back in 1975 and the bitter words begin to flow. I onced wanted to be a songwriter, now I am just an empty shell of a person. Tommorow is my 52nd birthday, maybe this will finally be my year.

[Saul Stokar]

A few years ago, my family and I went to see my son's IDF swearing-in ceremony in Jerusalem. The ceremony, in which the new recruits swear their allegiance to the country, took place in the plaza in front of the Western Wall. As usual in the IDF, the soldiers lined up into columns three deep. The company commander made a brief speech extolling the ideals of serving the nation, and the company's rabbi read a chapter of Psalms. As the sun sank below the horizon the soldiers all shouted in unison "I swear" (the solders of the religious platoon showed "I affirm" instead) and the officers began distributing to each soldier his automatic rifle and Bible. As if one cue, the bells of the Old City's churches began to toll for evening prayers, and, a few seconds later, the muezzin of the Temple Mount mosques began calling the Moslem faithful to evening prayers. Ultra-Orthodox men and women on their way to the Wall detoured around the assembled soldiers, apparently oblivious to the entire surreal scene.

[Saul Stokar]

Corrected a few typos

A few years ago, my family and I went to see my son's IDF swearing-in ceremony in Jerusalem. The ceremony, in which the new recruits swear their allegiance to the country, took place in the plaza in front of the Western Wall. As usual in the IDF, the soldiers lined up into columns three deep. The company commander made a brief speech extolling the ideals of serving the nation, and the company's rabbi read a chapter of Psalms. As the sun sank below the horizon the soldiers all shouted in unison "I swear" (the soldiers of the religious platoon shouted "I affirm" instead) and the officers began distributing to each soldier his automatic rifle and Bible. As if one cue, the bells of the Old City's churches began to toll for evening prayers, and, a few seconds later, the muezzin of the Temple Mount mosques began calling the Moslem faithful to evening prayers. Ultra-Orthodox men and women on their way to the Wall detoured around the assembled soldiers, apparently oblivious to the entire surreal scene.

[Lilit]

Screw the book, send us your autograph on one of your Lipa Thongs!!!! YAAAAAAY

[Yisrael Medad]

what ever happened with this? a scam? no one won?

[Shmarya]

Josh picked this one:

A few years ago, my family and I went to see my son's IDF swearing-in ceremony in Jerusalem. The ceremony, in which the new recruits swear their allegiance to the country, took place in the plaza in front of the Western Wall. As usual in the IDF, the soldiers lined up into columns three deep. The company commander made a brief speech extolling the ideals of serving the nation, and the company's rabbi read a chapter of Psalms. As the sun sank below the horizon the soldiers all shouted in unison "I swear" (the soldiers of the religious platoon shouted "I affirm" instead) and the officers began distributing to each soldier his automatic rifle and Bible. As if one cue, the bells of the Old City's churches began to toll for evening prayers, and, a few seconds later, the muezzin of the Temple Mount mosques began calling the Moslem faithful to evening prayers. Ultra-Orthodox men and women on their way to the Wall detoured around the assembled soldiers, apparently oblivious to the entire surreal scene.

Posted by: Saul Stokar | August 28, 2008 at 06:58 AM