Sasha’s Harlem: Excerpt from The Nightmares of Sasha Weitzwoman

Isaac was proud to be a Jew, it was true, especially an Iranian, as there weren’t many of his sort of traditional Persian family in Israel. But he was sick of this keeping kosher, and of the blossoming put-on holy sacredness of the Mea Shearim neighborhood his ramshackle hotel was in, which is why inwardly he had been glad that Shy, who was really religious, had actually left him. This Isaac thought as he turned past the photography shop on his corner, passed the dry cleaners and falafel shop and turned towards the hotel. Old Daniel began singing under the torrential Jerusalem rain out in the courtyard as Isaac turned in. Isaac sat down at his desk, fingering his left earlobe. He was a twin in the Zodiac—a Gemini, with Sagittarius, and Cancer—he couldn’t remember the word in English. Once Tamir, holding Isaac’s palm after a massage in the baths around the block before the fanatical fundamentalist rabbis had burned them, saying there was no place for gays in Jerusalem, had told Isaac that he looked into the lives of all the people who came to him, and saw, underneath, their living. Isaac ran a cheap hotel, a hostel-like place in the midst of Jerusalem for all the lost souls, people who couldn’t make it in the world, the Black Sheep, cut off from family. They returned to him, repeatedly. Like Sasha, that Americanit who poses as a journalist and says she comes to cover peace demonstrations of women. She couldn’t be, really. A woman that age should already be married, with children. How crazy to deny that life force within her. And like Old Daniel, in white beard and black coat singing. Daniel had an apartment, and children, but chose to stay here with the comforting Isaac rather than in his own place or with them. All the residents crawled on top of each other and burst out of the cracks, tripping over each other to get the free tea and coffee in themorning in the lobby, like flies crawling over a pail of garbage sometimes surprising those who had checked in taking the place for a normal hotel. But Isaac’s business wasn’t tourism. Now he could send the tourists over to Shy’s place, the hostel Isaac had helped Shy open by the bus station. Isaac had sent some of the excess furniture over to help his former employee once Isaac didn’t have so many rooms to equip any more, to indicate his blessings. Since Isaac’s mother had died, he had gouged out the communal kitchen that had been at the center of the hotel and—as a compromise with the neighborhood—he had rented space to a yeshiva. So the lobby before him and behind his back was piled high—the excess hostel furniture, the furniture that Shy hadn’t yet picked up from him. Shy thought it such a momentous labor to get all the damn heavy pieces out, the clutter of large mahogany. And so here Isaac sat in the crowded lobby filled with wardrobes, dressers, tables and beds, inlaid elaborately with mosaic wooden pieces. He knew anyway that the people he was interested in housing would come, over and over again. He could count on a steady stream of them to appear from all corners of the map and the bus station, be it from Jerusalem, Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Europe, NY, America or other cities, villages, frontier towns in Israel. They came to him, the lost and suffering Jews and Israelites whose souls and maybe even hearts needed binding. He continued ignoring demands for towels, hot water, heat and toilet paper from groups of Romanian religious clamoring in front of him. Though sitting behind his desk, Isaac was somewhere else, distractedly remp minding himself not to stare at the girl if she came back, claiming to cover some big demo, remembering how she had said enough is enough, tired and irritated with his overly-Zionist consciousness, when he was telling her in the kitchen...