Some better writers won the contest. But I’m here.
And the winning stories are here.
I’m off to read them – to enjoy and to learn.
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Author: Miriam Drori
Author, editor, attempter of this thing called life. Social anxiety warrior. Re-Connections, a collection of short stories, published with Ocelot Press, 15/10/2025.
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Links from Israel This Week
Just some things I’ve seen recently. There’s even something nice from the BBC.
- Ann Goldberg praised two Israeli drivers.
- Marallyn was a bit angry with Barbra Streisand, who paid us a visit.
- Lisa Isaacs visited an oasis in the desert.
And the BBC talked about the well-known Israeli sport: matkot.
I hope you enjoy the links. I might do this again sometime….
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Time to reveal the mystery woman
Many thanks to the six people who had a go at imagining what this woman is like:
Your ideas were very interesting. Although they were all different, there were also some similarities.
You all portrayed her as a caring woman. Looking at the photograph, I can see why, but we never saw her as caring at all. At least, most of us didn’t.
Two of you rightly assumed the photograph is old. Not from the 1930s or ’40s, but probably the ’60s. We thought she was old then, but times change. We never saw her smile like that, but we did see that necklace.
Some of you portrayed her as having several children, while others said she didn’t have any. But you all thought she loved children. We didn’t see that either but, looking back, maybe she did. Maybe that’s why she went into that profession.
You see, this woman was our headmistress. For most of us – we who are going to meet up soon at a school reunion – she ruled us for seven years. Yes, Marallyn, with a will of iron. But soft spoken? Well yes, I suppose that, too. She had the gift of being able to control the girls without raising her voice. We were scared of her. And that’s not just because we were grammar school girls. The year after we left, the school went comprehensive, but this woman had no trouble controlling the usually unruly girls who were now part of the school.
But, in general, we didn’t feel she was there to help. Meetings with her were never pleasant. I’m not the only one to think she barely hid her antisemitic views – in a school where a third of the pupils were Jewish. She certainly made no attempt to understand my problems.
So no – not a mother, or a librarian, or a backstreet abortionist. And I can’t tell you how often she cleaned her home, or whether she cleaned it at all. But maybe, in some ways, you were closer to the truth than I will ever know.
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Bombs and Butterflies: a Review
I promised a different post next. I promised to reveal the identity of the mystery woman. I lied. Not intentionally, of course, but it seemed better to change the order of these posts and allow a little more time for anyone who still wants to join in and guess who she is.
Jo Carroll doesn’t lie. She tells factual accounts of her travels, and believe me they don’t need any embellishment. But they still need to be written so as to engage the reader, and Jo certainly succeeds in that. And sometimes she changes names and biographical details to protect the people she’s writing about. This is no secret. Jo writes about doing this in her new book, Bombs and Butterflies. After reading it, I understand that some of the people she meets need to be protected.
There are two main reasons why I prefer to read about Jo’s travels than to experience them for myself. One refers to things I’d rather not do; the other to things I find hard to do.
I’m not an intrepid explorer. True, I spent about three weeks in Nagaland, in north east India, an area that doesn’t see a vast influx of tourists. True, the conditions I encountered there were far from luxurious. But I went with a group. The only trips I’ve been on alone are those in which I’ve gone to visit people.
I couldn’t imagine going alone; I’d be afraid of being lonely for one thing. And there are things I would hate. Being woken up by a large rat, for instance, as Jo was. But Jo takes all these things in her stride and I can sit back in the comfort of my home and enjoy reading about them. I have read her previous book, Hidden Tiger, Raging Mountain, so I knew I wouldn’t be disappointed by this one.
What I would find hard to do is to connect to all the strangers Jo meets along the way, locals and other travellers, whose stories make Jo’s books so fascinating. While she tells of needing time alone, she’s clearly a very friendly person, too.
And she’s a wonderful writer. She knows what to include and what to leave out, and how to keep the reader interested with humour and fascinating details. And I love the short chapters, which make this book convenient for reading on a train, in bed or in a doctor’s waiting room.
In short, this is a book worth reading. Want to know how to get it? The information is here.
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Who is this woman?
I’m going to ask you to use your imaginations. We all have them. (I used to think I didn’t have one and didn’t know how to be creative, but I was wrong.)
Here is a photograph of a woman:
(It’s actually a photograph of a photograph. You can see the photographer reflected in it.)
What do you think this woman is like? What does she do or say or eat for breakfast? No, never mind the last one. Please write anything that comes to mind in the comments.
I will reveal all in my next post. For now, I’ll just say that this isn’t someone close to me and nothing you say will distress me.
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Festival of Light
The Jerusalem Festival of Light.
This is the fifth year it’s been done, but it was the first time we heard about it! Clearly, others are better informed. The routes inside the city walls were crowded. But we followed the throngs and saw some amazing sights.
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Outside the walls it was quieter, and still there was plenty to see.
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Of course we got there and back on our favourite Light Railway. It’s been going for two years and I’m still amazed to see these modern vehicles traversing our old city.
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FLASH MOB 2013
FLASH MOB 2013 is a hybrid blog carnival and competition celebrating International Flash Fiction Day, which is on 22nd June.
The organisers are looking for stories that take risks and experiment.
The competition is free and the details are at FLASH MOB 2013.
My attempt is definitely experimental for me:
The View from Heaven
They stood, she and he, embracing in the centre of a perfect garden. Flowers all around. Pinks, reds, yellows, purples, whites. Water cascading down the rocks into the pool. Maturing plums and kumquats nested by sun-frolicked green leaves. Sweet, juicy fruit waiting to be gathered and consumed.
Over there, on the same level, stood a large bald prism. One triangular end thrust out through needle-sharp pine leaves. Acute angles pointed and menaced. Inside the prism, as clear as if its walls had been transparent and its position much closer, people wandered in a daze, struggling to grasp the horrifying enormity exhaled by tragic reminders.
“It looks quite near,” she said. “Could we walk there, down into the valley and up the other side?”
“Do you want to?” he replied in question.
“How long would it take?”
“Oh, about seventy years, going backwards.”
She glanced at him with a frowning half-smile. “We’d die before we got there.”
“Just as well,” he said, without smiling.
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“It’s His Choice”
I’m going to tell you about someone I haven’t seen for a few years. I sincerely hope he’s all right and in a better place than he was when I knew him. I’ll call him A.
One of the strange things about attending a large dancing group is that you can know people very well by sight and have no idea what they’re like. Often, you don’t even know what their voices sound like.
A stuck out. He was tall and usually danced at the centre in circle dances. I was in awe of him because he knew all the dances so well. One thing I noticed about him was that he danced in a lazy sort of way, not moving his body as much as he could.
Then there was a trip. This isn’t usual, but there were reasons I won’t go into why any of the dancers who wanted could join this free trip to a water park. In the coach on the way back, the instructor discovered I came from England and he introduced me to A who also came from England.
In answer to my questions, A told me which town he come from and what he did for a living. Each of his responses consisted of one word and he didn’t ask me anything. I said, “You know all the dances really well,” to which he replied, “Yes.” And I, being me, soon ran out of questions and decided he didn’t want to talk to me at all.
After that, when I saw him at a dancing session, we exchanged hellos and nothing else. But I took more notice of him. He didn’t talk much to anyone, but I noticed he often gave a lift home to one girl.
One time I saw the girl outside the hall and asked her if she was able to talk to A on the way home.
“He doesn’t talk,” she said. “But I keep talking and telling him about myself. I don’t know if he’s interested or not.” Maybe it was the look on my face that caused her to add, “You don’t have to feel sorry for him. It’s his own choice whether to talk or not.”
I was so shocked by her opinion that I didn’t respond. I should have said, “I don’t think so. I don’t think anyone chooses to be like that permanently.”
Maybe, like me, he chose to keep quiet for a while, to avoid being bullied, and wasn’t able to resume talking after the threat had passed. Maybe he was always shy. But to choose to live like that? I don’t think so. And it upsets me to think that’s what others think of people who don’t open up.
A stopped going to folk dancing. I think about him sometimes and wonder how he is. I hope he’s all right.
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Why, Oh Why?
Catdownunder, in her blog post today, talks about the brain and our lack of knowledge of it. She ends her post:
And perhaps that is one reason why living things are so interesting and why we have so many people interested in trying to find out more. It is because we do not know – and that can be the most interesting thing of all.
In Israel, today, a lot of people want to understand how a man can walk into a bank and kill four innocent people and injure others – all because he couldn’t withdraw money from his account, which was 6,000 shekels overdrawn – not much at all.
Clearly, there was more to it than that. It seems he’d sunk into depression since being dismissed from his job as security officer ten years ago. He was dismissed because of poor relations with his colleagues (but, surprisingly, allowed to keep his gun). Neighbours described him as a loner. Of course.
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I have to file this post under “Everyday life in Israel.” I started that category because I wanted to write about everyday life rather than the violence you hear about on the news. But this crime is far from usual. It’s the sort of crime we hear about in the US or elsewhere. Not here in Israel. We don’t do that sort of thing.
And that’s why ordinary people in Israel are shocked today. To think that even here there are people who are capable of shooting innocent bystanders for such an apparently trivial “reason,” or for any reason at all.
One more thing I have to say: There are many loners in the world. There are many people who suffer from depression. Very, very few of them could even contemplate committing a crime like this.
In quaint but comprehensible English, the leaflet from the Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery provides a lot of information. The main building, the Ten Thousand Buddhas Temple, contains over 12,800 Buddha statues as well as the lacquered and gold-coated body of the founder, Reverend Yuet Kai. There are several other temples and pavilions.
What it doesn’t say is how many steps you have to climb to get there. No, I didn’t count them, but there were many. Fortunately, we found plenty to look at on the way, and much more when we arrived at the top.
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Yuet Kai not only climbed the steps, but between the ages of about 71 and 79, he carried building materials up the mountain together with his disciples.
“Opening hours,” says the leaflet. “9:00 a.m. – 5:30 p.m everyday (except the heavy raining day or with over typhoon signal No. 8 or above is hanged)”
It rained the day we were there, but fortunately not heavily enough to close the monastery.
After visiting all the fascinating temples, we decided to eat in the small, vegetarian restaurant. We’d read the menu and fancied the spring rolls. I don’t know whether it was because not all the items on the menu were available or because the two women serving didn’t speak a lot of English, but we didn’t get our spring rolls. However the soup, noodles and tea were very tasty. The two women kept filling up our bowls and cups, and stood laughing at us as we ate. It was a little off-putting, but we took it in our stride and smiled back.
We didn’t believe this notice.
We also didn’t believe the young people from eastern Europe who told us to beware of the large monkey. After all, we’d climbed up those very steps and hadn’t seen any monkeys. But on the way down, there they were.
Fortunately they were too busy nit-picking to attack us.
Miriam Drori, Author 