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  All images are from the original Hebrew publication, courtesy of photographer Michael Brandeis.

  This book was originally published in Hebrew as קפה שירה [Kafeh Shirah] (Jerusalem: Tmol shilshom, 2018).

  Copyright © 2022 by Syracuse University Press

  Syracuse, New York 13244-5290

  All Rights Reserved

  First Edition 2022

  222324252627654321

  ∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

  For a listing of books published and distributed by Syracuse University Press, visit https://press.syr.edu/.

  ISBN: 978-0-8156-1142-4 (paperback)978-0-8156-5549-7 (e-book)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Ehrlich, David, 1959–2020, author. | Swirsky, Michael, translator.

  Title: Café Shira / David Ehrlich ; translated from the Hebrew by Michael Swirsky. Other titles: Ḳafeh Shirah. English

  Description: First edition. | Syracuse, New York : Syracuse University Press, 2022. | Series: Judaic traditions in literature, music, and art | Summary: “Café Shira is a wry and often poignant work of fiction, portraying, in interlocking vignettes, a colorful cast of characters who frequent a Jerusalem literary café”— Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021057559 (print) | LCCN 2021057560 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815611424 (paperback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9780815655497 (ebook) Subjects: LCGFT: Novels. Classification: LCC PJ5055.2.H47 K33513 2022 (print) | LCC PJ5055.2.H47 (ebook) | DDC 892.43/7—dc23/eng/20220208

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021057559

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021057560

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Contents

  Foreword, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi

  Café Shira

  Foreword

  The tables at Café Shira are wobbly, the chairs mismatched, the waiters at times grumpy or distracted. And still the customers keep coming: those writers or would-be writers, those lonely souls hungry for company, for conversation, for a good book or just a cappuccino with a customized design in the foam:

  Gaby, Café Shira’s veteran bartender, is the one who raised the designs in the crema on top of the coffee to the level of an art. At one time they could be hearts, leaves, blossoms, even cat faces with mustaches. But Gaby took it further: he started to work the milk foam into representations of the customers’ faces. It became an attraction. But here and there, problems arose. Ruhama Shittin has made a stink. She has a complicated relationship with her appearance and has not allowed herself to be photographed for twenty years. (There was one exception, when she received a literary prize from the mayor, but there she was far from the camera and out of focus.)

  They come from as far away as Australia and as nearby as the next street over in the heart of Jerusalem. They may have gotten a literary prize from the mayor—or not. Some—those who nurse one cup of coffee all day—seem never to be able to leave; they spend their time, from sunup to sundown, in that hungry spot, watching the door expectantly for the advent of one who will enter the café, spy them directly, and sweep them off their feet, or, barring that, at least join them at the table for an hour’s conversation. Some come for an hour or a day, leave, and never return. But most do return: the next day, a week later, a year later. (If they return a month or even a year later, they are incensed if someone else occupies “their” table.)

  Each patron is an “only child,” expecting Café Shira to remain exactly as they left it. Indeed, so all of us thought about its true-life model, Tmol Shilshom, the literary café that was the brainchild of David Ehrlich. His fictitious counterpart, the café’s proprietor, Avigdor, shares with the reader what few of David’s clients ever knew: his ongoing concern for the viability of the café. But, living as he does between the pages of a book, Avigdor can do what David could never do: simply turn his back on the problems and escape:

  Avigdor . . . after seeing from the doorway that Rutha [the waitress] is managing, turns to leave. He doesn’t feel at all like going into work just yet.

  First he escapes to another café (“what he wants is coffee and a table and some peace and quiet. That’s all he wants”). But even with a cap and sunglasses, Avigdor can’t remain anonymous (the waitress at the “other café” once worked at Café Shira!), and then one of his customers, Raymond, tracks him down and throws a stone at him, damaging his ear. Finally, when he gets home, Avigdor fantasizes that he will “withdraw into himself and disappear”: escape into another persona (a middle-aged man named Roman Efrati, or a heavily made-up woman in her forties with the inconspicuous name Champlaine Ostrowitz). Eventually, he just plain escapes, hands over the keys to Rutha and walks away.

  As the ubiquitous server, Rutha has already spent her time soothing ruffled feathers, penetrating beyond mumbled orders of coffee and toast to the very thoughts and unspoken desires of her customers:

  When it’s very quiet in the café, Rutha hears not only bits of conversation but also thoughts.

  People’s thoughts are a lot different from what they say. “Of course I love you,” says the man at the corner table, but what he’s thinking is, “Leave me alone—or I’ll leave you.”

  The problem with hearing people’s thoughts is that you can’t be detached. You’re forced to hear things you’d rather not know. You form opinions. You’re not just a waitress anymore.

  So who is Rutha? A waitress? A psychic? A therapist? (Let’s call the endless cups of coffee she serves aromatherapy.) She is, in a way, the true hero of the story—Avigdor’s alter ego, combining female intuition and compassion with her own hunger and fatigue.

  1.Table seven has been wobbly ever since Avigdor bought it in the flea market, and it’s wobbling right now, as Shula and Arik are getting seated, and it’s going to wobble until the End of Days, despite all attempts to put sugar packets, folded pieces of cardboard, white plastic triangles, and business supplements under it.

  2.There hasn’t been a single successful blind date at table seven.

  3.Rutha calls table seven the Bermuda Triangle. It’s not only that odd encounters happen there but it also sometimes disappears from the computer, and people wait forever for orders that never come. Oh, and it’s only from that table that the wind blows napkins and important notes away.

  And yet: in her turn, Rutha will follow her beloved Christian (would-be pilgrim to holy Jerusalem who finds love at Café Shira) to a fairy-tale denouement in a small French parish, leaving the café to Rona. The caravan must go on . . .

/>   David Ehrlich was an early casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic; he died at age sixty-one in mid-March 2020, just a week after Jerusalem and the entire country had shut down. He wasn’t a casualty of the virus itself, but of fear of contamination at the hospital, where he should have gone with clear signs of a heart attack. So he decided to wait it out. The Angel of Death found him that night, and our only consolation is the hope that it was a peaceful leave-taking, as he so deserved. Mitat neshika (death by a kiss) is what we all wish for at the end. But the end came much too soon.

  Because he never would have done what his fictional doppelgänger did, David could, it seems, find release only in death from his ongoing concerns: for the welfare of his precious twins, Nevo and Ofri, who barely half a year later would celebrate their bar/bat mitzvah. They, along with his business partner Dan Goldberg and all their employees, were dependent on the economic viability of the café-bookstore that David had built entirely out of his imagination, as a child builds sand castles. His castle was peopled not with knights and suitors battling to enter a fortress, but with a community of pilgrims to a site as holy as any in Jerusalem.

  Indeed, most of the clientele were seeking the secular shrine of literature—Hebrew literature, Jewish literature, and world literature. Always on the verge of toppling, this shrine was saved time and again from disaster by ingenious acts of reinvention, culinary and cultural.

  The reader will discover that the poor souls who populate these stories infiltrate our own soul: Avigdor the proprietor, Rutha and Rona the waitresses, Fouad the cook, Benny the (absent) carpenter, and all the clients—Christian Joubaux, Naor Sela, Ruhama Shittin, Lilach, Princess Neurosa, Raymond, Raanan, Shoshi Gabbai, Netzer, Udi, Ora, the identical twins Noga and Yael, who no longer speak to each other (because of a colander, of course!) but meet at separate tables at Café Shira every week, Lila and Yemima, Arik and Shula, Nira and Lona with their humble sign (“bring back Matti Caspi!”), Yahel and her daughter, Shira (!), Kuti who sits in the garden and builds his dream town of matchsticks. Whether these are phantoms of the imagination or fictional constructs of real people, we come to believe we know them.

  The real café was named for S. Y. Agnon’s majestic novel Tmol shilshom (Only Yesterday). Café Shira is named for another of Agnon’s novels, the unfinished Shira (in Hebrew, the word is both a woman’s name and signifies poetry in general). Between them, these two novels, like the café and its literary namesake, cover all of Jerusalem, the sacred and the secular: Tmol shilshom takes place mainly in Mea She’arim, an Orthodox neighborhood of Jerusalem; Shira is oriented toward that shrine to learning on Mount Scopus, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

  But in some ways, reality would prove stranger than fiction. Café Tmol Shilshom has served as the venue for many first dates of members of two communities that rarely ever meet, in Jerusalem or anywhere else: the LGBTQ and the ultra-Orthodox. This improbable coincidence is only intelligible to those who knew David. And most of us will make no claim to be objective. David was my beloved student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who, in 1988, as the semester ended, told me that he had to leave Israel for a while because he refused to serve as part of the Israeli military reserves in the Territories during what would become known as the First Intifada. “But when I return,” he promised, a twinkle in his eye, “I intend to open a café-bookstore in Jerusalem.” That was when I did something I had never done before—or since. I told him I’d like to introduce him to my daughter Talya, who was then also a student at the Hebrew University. The twinkle intensified as he looked straight at me and said, “I’d love to—but I’m gay.” And yet: it turns out that Fate is larger than our tawdry schemes and faulty eyesight. Over the years, Talya and David became best friends, and her daughters and his twins became schoolmates, spending many hours and days together. Along with Tamar, David’s practical and soulful partner-in-parenting, we became, well, family; we traveled together, we celebrated together, we commiserated together. Such probable improbabilities populated much of David’s life—and his café.

  Between 1988 and 1994, the year Café Tmol Shilshom was founded, David traveled much of the globe, studied literature at Berkeley, and taught Hebrew in places as far-flung as Atlanta, Georgia, and the island of Corfu. And then, indeed, he returned home and, in 1994, realized his dream. Agnon had been dead for twenty-four years, but Yehuda Amichai, another scribe of Jerusalem, helped to inaugurate the café and spent many hours there, writing and reading and talking. (One of the old padded armchairs is still designated Yehuda’s Chair) When the poet became too sick to leave his home, David would insist on going over daily to bring him the bread he loved.

  Writing an introduction to the English translation of Café Shira is a privilege I have long coveted, just as I would have cherished launching the book at Café Tmol Shilshom. But never in my wildest nightmares did I imagine that my words would be a tribute to David’s posthumous presence in our lives and that I would have to address this book as his literary legacy rather than as a milestone in a projected future of storytelling and endless cups of coffee and glasses of wine. (Our last scheduled meeting, which we somehow missed, in early March, was to have been a tasting from a new vineyard.)

  Many visitors and would-be visitors to Café Tmol Shilshom, whose Hebrew is not quite good enough to read the original of Café Shira, will be delighted with this translation by Michael Swirsky. Translation also entails a kind of partnership. Sometimes, of course, the translator never even meets the writer; often they live on different continents or in different centuries—and then the partnership is virtual.

  All in all, I think, I would rather translate the dead. They do not complain. They do not argue. They do not fret about their reputations. They do not call you on the telephone at eleven o’clock at night to ask why they have not received the chapter you promised them a week ago. They do not think they know English better.1

  Those are the words of Hillel Halkin, meditating many years ago on the act of translating from Hebrew and Yiddish to English, on his noisy “conversations” with the living and the quieter ones with the spirits of the dead. But I can say unequivocally that Michael Swirsky’s posthumous translation has captured the nuances, the soulful pathos as well as the humor, of his dear friend. (Here again, a surprising fact: most of us discovered only after David’s death how many close friends he had—since each of us thought of ourselves as his best friend.) Mike is a seasoned translator, but never, I suspect, was any task so blessed, or so wounding, as this one: this Jerusalem-based and Hebrew-accented narrative has been rendered into an English that resonates with David’s language, and with his soul, in a way that I wouldn’t have thought possible. The reader is barely aware that the original was written in another language. Not because what emerges is a kind of unspecific Esperanto, or because the café in which these stories unfold is some universal space, but because its specificity is so accessible, so familiar. The loneliness of the café patron is as old as coffee itself; the intensity of the would-be writer chewing on her pencil stub or clanging at the keyboard is as recognizable as an uneaten croissant at Les Deux Magots in Saint-Germain-des-Prés or a cold toasted bagel at Barney Greengrass on the Upper West Side. And yet there is something inexorably Jerusalem about all this; it seeps through the lines like the combined sounds of the muezzin, the church bells, and the davening on the streets below.

  I comfort myself, in these dark days of mourning for David and for the world that we shared, that he did, indeed, live his life to the fullest, following the journey to that fork where he could take leave of us, fortified with endless cups of coffee whose foam spells compassion. One of the closing scenes in the book is Rutha’s letter to Rona, her successor at the café. She describes her happily-ever-after space in Christian’s French village, and tells her friend that Father Georges had seen her paintings and asked her to paint the ceiling of their parish church (they “can’t afford to hire a Michelangelo”). As she paints, her figures take on the aspect of familiar patr
ons: “One of the angels turned out to have the troubled look of Ruhama Shittin. And another angel had a nose slanted a bit to the left, like Raymond’s.” But when Christian asks her if she “wasn’t going to do an angel who looked like Avigdor,” she responds that she “hadn’t found a place for Avigdor in heaven yet, that he was still wandering between worlds, looking for himself.”

  Rest in peace, beloved Avigdor-David. As long as there are books in Jerusalem, your words will survive.

  Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi

  1. Hillel Halkin, “On Translating the Living and the Dead: Some Thoughts of a Hebrew-English Translator,” Prooftexts 3, no. 1 (1983): 73–90, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20689058.

  Café Shira

  Breakfast

  As soon as Rutha sees the blond guy come into the café in shorts, carrying a blue backpack, she pegs him: this will be her first time, and it will be today.

  It’s 8:30 in the morning, an hour after she opened up, and bright sunlight is moving across the right-hand wall, where rows of books are arranged. More than once, she’s thought of reading one, but she has a problem: whenever she opens a book, live, confusing thoughts—about herself and her loneliness, scenes from her distant and recent past, imaginings of what might be in store—jump out at her from between the dead lines. None of the writers could imagine a woman like her, tall as a beanpole, shy as an oyster, who appears—no, she doesn’t exactly appear, she feels as if no one ever sees her. It’s just “come here” and “you can take our order” and “what kinds of pastry do you have?”

  After coming in, she arranged the packets of sugar, yearning for something she couldn’t put her finger on, then opened one and treated herself to “a sweet,” as she calls it. What could she do? She loves sugar in all its forms, and none of Café Shira’s delicacies is as pure or good as sugar itself. Now the blond guy comes in, and she tells herself: he’s the one.