Fiction Addiction

Hello Visitor,
Welcome to my September newsletter! 
My favorite genre is still the short story. I'm delighted to share two newly published short stories "What We Are" and "Book Talk." Thank you to Jordan Blum (Bookends Review) and to Judith Roumani (Sephardic Horizons) for publishing my work. I would also like to invite you to my author talk in Modiin with fellow authors in Israel: Dalia Rosenfeld and Julie Zuckerman. I'm honored to speak with both of them. Please see details below.  
Enjoy!
Gila

WHAT WE ARE

The summer I turned nineteen I was broke. I had three more years of university to pay for and who knew when the Canadian government would cut student loans? I was living on my own in Ottawa. My parents were having a love-affair with Western Canada and I didn’t receive as much as a postcard.

            I was ill-equipped to compete in the job market in a small city that boasts two large universities and a big college. The economy was in recession and four empty summer months stretched out before me like a treacherous road. I was not the waitress type and the thought of selling ice-cream cones on Ottawa’s only beach held no appeal.

            After weeks of combing through the classifieds, I saw an advertisement for a front desk clerk at the Downy Woodpecker; a rundown motel, the kind you see in movies where the main characters have been run-off the road and walk for miles until they see a light in the distance.

            I had never stayed at a motel before let alone worked in one, but I could make change and the advertisement didn’t mention knowledge of French. I had to take a half-hour bus ride to the interview and I was supposed to ask for Salvatore.

            The motel office was built on the road, the thirty rooms crouched behind it. The parking lot was large and faced an isolated bus station. During the daytime this did not frighten me, but motels were open twenty-four hours.

            The door creaked loudly as I opened it, while I steadied myself on the slanted step. Salvatore was waiting for me. I could not tell if the couch was dirty from his pants or if his pants were dirty from the couch.

      
          

Book Talk

I took time out from translating my father's letters in his beautiful Hebrew script last night. Instead, I went to a lecture, a writer.

That’s not the part that did it to me. It was during the question period that I had to step on feet, push past on my way to the ladies’ room. It’s when I broke, sucked back the one tear that had reached my upper lip.

So many of us, like the fictional Atara, spend so much of our lives trying to please a parent, in this case, a mother. Atara could never make her mother smile; her mother was a hard woman.

But all the time her mother’s sadness had to do with a baby that Atara never knew existed. Her brother had mysteriously died at five months old. None of the siblings knew of his birth and death, but when her mother’s time came to die, she requested a grave next to her first born. This is how the family learns of the terrible secret, this invisible shadow of death over their lives.
Follow the read more button to read a review of White Zion and to continue reading "Book Talk."