It's a Whole Spiel
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THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Compilation copyright © 2019 by Katherine Locke and Laura Silverman
Cover art copyright © 2019 by Lisa Maltby
Foreword copyright © 2019 by Mayim Bialik
“Indoor Kids” copyright © 2019 by Alex London
“Two Truths and an Oy” copyright © 2019 by Dahlia Adler
“The Hold” copyright © 2019 by David Levithan
“Aftershocks” copyright © 2019 by Rachel Lynn Solomon
“Good Shabbos” copyright © 2019 by Goldy Moldavsky
“Jewbacca” copyright © 2019 by Lance Rubin
“El Al 328” copyright © 2019 by Dana Schwartz
“Some Days You’re the Sidekick; Some Days You’re the Superhero” copyright © 2019 by Katherine Locke
“He Who Revives the Dead” copyright © 2019 by Elie Lichtschein
“Be Brave and All” copyright © 2019 by Laura Silverman
“Neilah” copyright © 2019 by Hannah Moskowitz
“Find the River” copyright © 2019 by Matthue Roth
“Ajshara” copyright © 2019 by Adi Alsaid
“Twelve Frames” copyright © 2019 by Nova Ren Suma
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 9780525646167 (trade) — ISBN 9780525646174 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9780525646181
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
Indoor Kids
Two Truths and an Oy
The Hold
Aftershocks
Good Shabbos
Jewbacca
El Al 328
Some Days You’re the Sidekick; Some Days You’re the Superhero
He Who Revives the Dead
Be Brave and All
Neilah
Find the River
Ajshara
Twelve Frames
Acknowledgments
Contributor Bios
FOREWORD
BY MAYIM BIALIK
Being Jewish and young in the twenty-first century is a spectacular thing. Jews have become a part of the cultural vernacular since I was a young woman in ways I never would have dreamed of. Judaism is more widely discussed and more prominent in the arts, media, and politics. Jewish-themed TV shows and films have witnessed an explosion. International attention is being given to aspects of Jewish life previously unexplored. Gal Gadot is everyone’s sweetheart. Fauda and The Band’s Visit have captivated a global media market. This is a new Golden Age.
But being Jewish and young at this time is not without complexity and tension. An emphasis on distancing oneself from traditional Judaism in many circles and even on detaching from the politics of our historical homeland has made for a potentially fractured sense of community among young people. Racism still rears its ugly head. Bigotry abounds. And in a country deeply divided by politics, Jewish identity is up for grabs.
The collection of stories you hold in your hands is an antidote to this divisiveness. A girl wrestles with being Jewish enough when she joins her more observant boyfriend’s family for Shabbat dinner. At space camp, two boys search for God among the stars. An Orthodox girl navigates unfamiliar territory at college orientation. These varied stories of faith and love and youth are a solution to a problem we may not yet fully understand. The notion that young Jews feel a need to attach to a Judaism that is fractured is important. The feelings many young Jews may be having about where they fit in are real. Jews of all backgrounds need to find a common ground where we all can stand together. This anthology is that common ground.
Judaism is not about choosing things you always agree with in your religion and clinging to them. Judaism is about seeing the world for what it is and being part of a community that is greater than the sum of its parts. The beauty of the Jewish experience is in its ability to adapt, and its enduring principles of faith, understanding, and acceptance.
There are so many ways to live a Jewish life and to feel Jewish. Growing up Jewish was, for me, a wonderful thing. I loved my cultural identity, I embraced the structures of Jewish learning, and I resonated deeply with the connection I felt to Israel and to my fellow Jews. I was raised in a climate aware of the uniqueness of Jews and simultaneously supportive of Jews fitting into the world in ways that allowed us the freedoms many of our parents and grandparents did not have the privilege of enjoying.
This book speaks to a larger vision of a Judaism that is engaging, open, and wise. Young people, especially, should take note of their awareness shifting as they explore the stories here. There is no “right” way to live, think, or be. What unites us all is our desire to fit in, to stand out, and to lean in to what has sustained the Jewish people for thousands of years.
Read on and find your place among those of us who are proudly and undeniably lost as wanderers of a nation that was once a stranger—and simultaneously find your place among those of us who have put in the hard work and discovered new ways to be found.
INDOOR KIDS
BY ALEX LONDON
It happened somewhere over Canada, although it had probably been happening since Australia. No one even knew anything had gone wrong until the International Space Station was over the Atlantic, a tiny dot of light heading toward the west coast of Africa, not a single earthly eye on it, and we only found out at camp because Jackson Kimmel had an aunt who worked at NASA.
She was not an astronaut.
She was in human resources, so she didn’t actually do anything with the space program, but she texted her nephew, because space was his “thing,” and her nephew told me, because he knew space was also my “thing,” and that’s how summer camp works: find someone whose thing is your thing and geek out together.
It would’ve been nice if I’d had someone to geek out with who wasn’t a ten-year-old.
“They think it was an impact with space junk,” Jackson said, waving his arms around while he circled me. He was one of those kids in constant, exhausting motion. “Did you know that NASA tracks over half a million pieces of space debris that orbit the earth? It travels at seventeen thousand five hundred miles per hour, so, like, that could cut through a space station. Usually they have all kinds of warnings and ways to maneuver around space junk. They call it the ‘pizza box’ because it’s an imaginary box that’s a mile deep and thirty miles wide around the vehicle, and if anything looks like it’s gonna get too close to the ‘box,’ they take steps to keep the astronauts and the equipment safe, but not all the debris is tracked, so maybe they m
issed something? My aunt doesn’t know; she just does paperwork for people’s travel to conferences. She got to meet Leland Melvin once. Do you know who he is? He’s spent over five hundred sixty-five hours in space during his career, but you probably know him as the astronaut who took his official NASA portrait with his dogs? You ever see it? The dogs’ names are Jack and Scout. Or Jake? I can’t remember. Do you have a dog? I named my dog Elon, after Elon Musk, but now I think that—”
“Okay, Jackson.” I interrupted his monologue. He had actually made air quotes with his fingers around the words “pizza box.” What ten-year-old makes air quotes? “Take a breath and change for basketball.”
His smile vanished, his face a crash landing, no survivors.
“Do I haaaave to?” he whined. I wanted to tell him, No, of course not! Who sends their ten-year-old space nerd to a sports camp when there is an actual place called Space Camp! Your parents should be punished for this! But sports were required at Camp Winatoo, and Jackson had to go play basketball before he could come back for afternoon science club in Craft Cabin.
It was my unfortunate duty to make him go play basketball, just as it had been some other seventeen-year-old counselor-in-training’s job to force me to go play basketball when I was a ten-year-old space nerd here. That’s the curse of the indoor kids. People are always trying to make us go outside and play. The bastards.
Now I was one of them.
“Yes, you have to,” I told him.
I would have much rather spent the morning talking about the merits of the Falcon 9 rocket in commercial applications, but that wasn’t an option, not if I wanted to keep my job. The silver lining of this job was that I, personally, did not have to go to basketball. I had the entire early afternoon to do what I pleased. I was extremely lucky today, because I didn’t even have to supervise the aftermath of basketball, which was one of the worst jobs you could have. Those kids smelled ripe. Old enough for BO, not quite old enough to have figured out deodorant. And the ones that had figured it out? Axe Body Spray might be the worst thing to have happened in the history of mankind. It’s chemical warfare marketed to tweens.
After Jackson skulked off in his too-big basketball jersey, I pulled out my phone, trying to see if there was any news about the space station. Nothing had hit the mainstream media yet, but @GeekHeadNebula on Twitter had posted about a possible catastrophic hull breach impacting all ISS life-support systems.
That seemed a bit dramatic, in the way of breaking news, and I knew the reality would end up more mundane. Not that the mundane couldn’t be deadly in the void of space. It was usually the mundane that turned deadly up there.
Kind of like my life on Earth.
The Deadly Mundane could’ve been the title of my autobiography. Nothing dramatic ever happened to me. I was a junior counselor at the same summer camp I’d gone to as a kid, where I’d known most of the other junior counselors since forever. Back home, I lived in the suburbs and went to the kind of school where teenagers on the Disney Channel would go: everything was well lit and oversaturated, every adult was caring and concerned and a bit clueless, and every family was more affluent than the national average, but not so affluent that we’d be the bad guys in a dystopian novel.
I’d had my bar mitzvah and come out of the closet the same year, and both went…fine. I almost cried when my voice cracked during the haftorah recitation, and I also almost cried when my dad told me he was proud I was “living my truth.” The bar mitzvah involved me getting envelopes with eighteen-dollar checks in them, and coming out involved my mom putting a pride flag on our car. Neither was earth-shattering.
The bar mitzvah money went into a savings account I couldn’t touch, and just because I was out and “living my truth” didn’t mean I could get a date. Four years later and I’d never had a boyfriend, and not because I was the only gay kid. That would’ve at least been a good reason, but there were, like, five other cis gay boys in my class by the time we got to junior year, and a trans gay boy, and three other genderqueer kids, all of whom might’ve been dating material, except not a single one of them had any interest in a science geek with acne, no muscle tone, no taste in music, and more than one T-shirt with Carl Sagan on it. None of them were mean about not dating me—my life wasn’t even that dramatic. They just didn’t express any interest. So I mostly hung out in my room, read, and fantasized about being trapped in a Mars simulator for six months with Troye Sivan.
In his Instastory, Troye teased a new video while standing shirtless in the rain—seriously, I didn’t think Jewish boys could look like that—and NASA had an update in their Insta with a video of Japanese flight engineer Isao Tatsuta and American flight commander Anne Frisch explaining that they had sealed off damaged sections of the structure and were working with their international partners to prepare for a space walk to assess the best course of action. They reassured everyone watching that they had protocols in place. Commander Frisch ended the story with a view down at Earth through the window and then back up to herself giving a thumbs-up.
When, in the history of thumbs, was that ever a comforting gesture?
I put my phone away and thought about hitting the showers while I might manage some actual privacy. Being at summer camp was a lot like being on the International Space Station: privacy was nearly impossible to find, and sometimes it meant putting on a space suit and walking into the void.
In this case, “the void” was the boys’ showers, and the danger was more about what you took off than what you put on. My younger years at camp had been spent largely in dread of the showers, less for fear of a wet towel whipping across my butt than for fear of being noticed by anyone or being caught noticing anyone.
My fellow campers and I had matured since middle school; the shower stalls themselves had gained privacy curtains, and my showering was no longer ruled by terror and shame, but I still wasn’t going to miss an opportunity for quiet and privacy.
“You ever think about the golem?”
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who’d been seduced by the idea of having the showers to myself.
Levi Klein-Behar was standing at the wide mirror in the changing area, wrapped in a towel and studying a bunch of symbols he’d written in the mirror mist. I recognized the symbols as Hebrew, but that’s as far as my Jewish knowledge went. After my bar mitzvah, my parents didn’t make me go to Hebrew school anymore, and I’d worked pretty hard to forget everything I’d learned.
“Uh” was the brilliant reply I mustered, as befuddled by the question as by his lean back and broad shoulders and the way that towel hung off his hips as if balanced on a breath. He was not one of the Winatoo Lifers and had only started this summer…which wasn’t to say I didn’t know anything about him.
I knew he was from Philadelphia by way of Havana, Kampala, Buenos Aires, and Yangon. I knew that he was the son of a pair of traveling rabbis who supported Jewish communities in far-flung corners of the Diaspora; that he wore clicking Buddhist prayer beads around his wrist, which definitely deserved the eye rolls they got; but also that he didn’t care about the eye rolls. He was one of the few kids at camp who wore a yarmulke; his was a small black knit one with a rainbow border he said he got from an LGBTQ synagogue in New York. He was also an “indoor kid,” but not like me. He too did his best to avoid sports, even though he looked like the kind of guy who would be good at them, but he worked with the artsy kids, doing drama and painting and music. He was especially good at music and could play at least three instruments.
Why did I know so much about Levi Klein-Behar? Did I mention the towel hanging off his hips? My romantic life might’ve been as empty as the vacuum of space, but you didn’t have to be an astronomer to admire Orion’s Belt.
“Like, really think about it?” Levi turned around to look at me, leaning back on the sink in a pose that could only be described as insouciant, forcing me to fix my face into an expres
sion that could only be described as awkward.
I mean, I didn’t know rabbis’ sons could look like that.
He didn’t seem to notice my total lack of chill, because he just kept going. “Like, why hasn’t there been a superhero movie about the golem? Ferocious and holy, inhuman but lonely, called forth to protect the innocent?” He folded his arms across his chest, and my throat went dry. Also, I thought he’d been talking about Gollum from Lord of the Rings. That was not who he meant. I just nodded. This was the most we’d talked in three weeks. “He’s brought to life in times of need, activated by a word pressed into his forehead. Emet.” He pointed at the word behind him. I nodded like I knew that’s what it said. “I mean, how cool is that mythology? Someone at this camp has got to be related to a producer, right?”
“We do control the media,” I told him. “Or the banks? Or we’re all communists. I can never remember.”
He smiled and shook his head, and his braces caught the fluorescent light, and I wondered what it must be like to be a seventeen-year-old with braces and what it would feel like to kiss someone with braces.
“The golem is, like, a guaranteed hit! The Jews need our own Black Panther!”
“I think we’ve got Superman.”
“But imagine if it wasn’t some metaphor, but, like, an actual Jewish myth kicking ass on screen. It’s specific, but universal, right? Did you know that Fiddler on the Roof was one of the biggest international hit musicals ever made? They were worried it was ‘too Jewish,’ and it ended up being huge in India, and it is Jewish AF. We need the twenty-first century’s version, which would absolutely be a superhero franchise and— Sorry.” Levi stopped himself. His cheeks had flushed. The Hebrew words behind him on the mirror misted over. “I have this, like, mission to make Jewish stuff mainstream. Why do you keep looking at your phone?”