Synopsis

It’s 1998.  The old Soviet Union is dead, the new Russia is awash in corruption and despair.  Manya and Yuri Zalinikov, secular Jews – he, a gifted mathematician recently dismissed from the Academy,  she, a concert pianist — sell black market electronics in a market stall until threatened with a gun by a Mafioso in search of protection money.  Yuri sinks into a Chekhovian melancholy, emerging to announce that he wants to “live as a Jew” in Israel. Manya and their daughter, Galina, are desolate, asking “how does one do that,” and “why?”

Thus begins their odyssey, part tragedy, part comedy but always surprising. Struggling against loneliness, language, and danger, Yuri finds a Talmudic teacher equally addicted to religion and luxury; Manya finds a job playing the piano at The White Nights supper club, owned by a wealthy, flamboyant Russian with a murky history,  who offers lust disguised as love. Galina, enrolled at Hebrew University,  finds dance clubs and pizza emporiums and a string of young men, one of whom Manya hopes will save her from the Israeli army by marrying her.

Against a potpourri of marriage wigs, matchmaking television shows, disastrous investment schemes, and a suicide bombing, JERUSALEM AS A SECOND LANGUAGE confronts the thin line between religious faith and skepticism.

Amazon * Aubade Publishing

Excerpt

After finishing with my piano, I sat on the creamy sofa, folding my legs under myself. Kanov jumped up. “I have something,” he said, and disappeared into the office, coming back with a small, flat, square object. There was no wrapping, or even a card. A handsome young man seated at a piano greeted me on one side of the package.

On the other: “Yevgeny and Companions: Trios, Quartets, Sonatas.”

Not a squealer, I squealed. The St. Petersburg Players, their premiere pianist Yevgeny Stanislav

with other Russian artists, performing chamber music, the CD I’d seen reviewed in the weekly Rusky Olim arts review newspaper. Expensive. Stanislav recorded with the finest music studio in Moscow. I turned the disc over, stroking the cover. “So many thank-yous,” I said. My voice sounded hollow, false.

“It’s nothing, only music.”

“Music is never nothing.”

“I saw it and thought about you.” I, you. Dangerous, these words in the same sentence. I blushed,

turning from the lamplight. “I guessed at what would please.”

The room smelled of cigarette smoke, of the tiger lilies in the crystal vase on the coffee table, of

expensive soap and shaving lotion, so different from the straightforward, no-nonsense lotion Yuri used.

Volga, I think, the same scent for years, so familiar; background music I no longer heard.

Someone knocked at the door, entering to Kanov’s “Who?” Alexsei, whom I’d met on my opening visit to The White Nights; a man, I now knew, in charge of everything outside the serving of food in this place.

His skills were astonishing. One day, I was desolate because the piano keys were turning dark, and I had bought the wrong, wholly useless cleanser. Alexsei found a bottle of something he didn’t identify, washed the keys with a white cloth dipped into this mysterious, almond-scented lotion, restoring them to pristine, glistening, cream-colored splendor. We’d been friends since, often bantering about the weather, the irritating lack of parking spaces around the club, the rising cost of movie tickets.

His arms were full with small wooden sticks that smelled of hickory, taking me back to the forest

surrounding our dacha—our stolen dacha—smell I hadn’t known I missed until that minute. He looked from Kanov, who asked him to start a fire, please, to me. I nodded, but didn’t speak, turning away, unwilling to see curiosity or accusation in his eyes.

Alexsei was a funny little man, constructed of a series of contradictions: slender as an adolescent, but muscular, with the slack jaw and under-the-chin turkey wattle of an older man. A wrestler in Moscow, where he’d met Dmitri Kanov at a sports club. He’d worked for him since, coming to Jerusalem to be with him, calling him a genius, telling me I wouldn’t believe all the amazing things this amazing man had performed.

The fire was comforting, casting shadowy patterns on the white walls. I relaxed, the first time in

weeks. A waiter appeared with a salad of tomatoes and onion in herbed basil dressing, and more wine. Something about the aggressive red color of the tomatoes nestling against the sharp green of the lettuce, the slender strips of purple-and-white onion arranged in a spiral, alarmed me.

Alexsei turned to go. Kanov called after him, “Bring the shrimp at any time.” Turning to me, he

said, “I hope you like shrimp as much as I do.”

I did, but I couldn’t. I’d promised Yuri. Shellfish were forbidden, and I had promised. Everything else I’d promised to my husband seemed, for that moment at least, to be enclosed inside the matter of the forbidden shrimp. “I must go,” I said, and stood up, so suddenly, my movements brushed the salad plate, tomatoes, onions, everything, onto the carpet. “I must.”

Any other occasion, I would have been on hands and knees wiping, expressing my apology. Not

now. Kanov blinked, startled, I guessed, by both the fallen salad and the standing Manya. Alexsei stood in the open doorway, neither surprised nor especially interested. I excused my way out of the room, remembering, at the last moment, my gift CD. Later, I thought: Never could I tell Nadia this.

[From Rochelle Distelheim’s Jerusalem as a Second Language, p. 174–176]

About the Author

Rochelle Distelheim, a Chicago native, earned numerous short story literary awards, including The Katherine Anne Porter Prize; Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards and Fellowships; The Ragdale Foundation Fellowships; The Faulkner Society Gold Medal in Novel-in-Progress; The Faulkner Society Gold Medal in Novel; The Gival Press 2017 Short Story Competition; Finalist, Glimmer Train’s Emerging Writers; and The Salamander Second Prize in Short Story. In addition, Rochelle’s short stories earned nominations for The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize. Her stories appeared in national magazines such as Glamour, Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, Woman’s Day, Woman’s World, Working Woman, Working Mother, and more. Her first novel, Sadie in Love, was published in 2018 when she was 90 years old. She lived in Highland Park, IL.

Rochelle passed away during the summer of 2020 and you can read her obituary that ran in the Chicago Tribune