Jews vs Zombies

by Rena Rossner

  JEWS

  VS

  ZOMBIES

  EDITED BY

  REBECCA LEVENE & LAVIE TIDHAR

  First published 2015 by Jurassic London

  SW8 1XN, Great Britain

  www.jurassic-london.com

  978-0-9928435-3-3 (eBook)

  “Rise” © copyright Rena Rossner 2015

  “The Scapegoat Factory” © copyright Ofir Touche Gafla 2015

  “Like a Coin Entrusted in Faith” © copyright Shimon Adaf 2015

  “Ten for Sodom” © copyright Daniel Polansky 2015

  “The Friday People” © copyright Sarah Lotz 2015

  “Tactrate Metim 28A” © copyright Benjamin Rosenbaum 2015

  “Wiseman's Terror Tales” © copyright Anna Tambour 2015

  “Zayinim” © copyright Adam Roberts 2015

  Edited by Rebecca Levene and Lavie Tidhar

  Cover by Sarah Anne Langton

  www.secretarcticbase.com

  eBook conversion by handebooks.co.uk

  The right of the authors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Rise

  Rena Rossner

  The Scapegoat Factory

  Ofir Touche Gafla

  Like a Coin Entrusted in Faith

  Shimon Adaf

  Ten for Sodom

  Daniel Polansky

  The Friday People

  Sarah Lotz

  Tactrate Metim 28A

  Benjamin Rosenbaum

  Wiseman’s Terror Tales

  Anna Tambour

  Zayinim

  Adam Roberts

  Contributors

  About the Charity

  INTRODUCTION

  Zombies, like Jews, are ubiquitous it seems. They’re everywhere. In Judaism, of course, one expects the corpse to remain in the ground until such time as the Messiah finally comes, at which point we’ll all rise again, restored, and make our way to Jerusalem. In the meantime, however, we seem quite content to hang about getting on with stuff. There’s no hurry, after all – as the proponents of slow-moving zombies would no doubt say.

  Here, then, are several tales of Jews vs zombies, from the light-hearted to the profound, by writers from the United States, Israel, South Africa, Australia and the UK. I hope you have as much fun reading this book as Rebecca Levene and I had in putting it together. In the tradition of Tzedakah, all money earned will be donated to charity. You can read about our chosen charity in About The Charity at the end. A companion volume is Jews vs Aliens, which we hope you check out too! My thanks to my co-editor Rebecca, our publisher, Jared, and all our authors for making this possible.

  “If you will it, it is no dream!” as Theodor Herzl said: and no doubt he had just such an anthology in mind.

  Lavie Tidhar

  2015

  RISE

  RENA ROSSNER

  There were once 12 yeshiva students who were graced with long, perfectly curled sidelocks that shone in as many shades as the sample book at the local wig-maker’s store. Each one of the boys was an ilui – a prodigy of his generation. And they all lived and studied together at the great House of Learning in the mystical city of Safed.

  One day, Yossele, the oldest of the 12, was reading an ancient kabbalist tome he’d found discarded in the genizah. It was filled with stories about The Ari, Rabbi Isaac Luria, Lion of Safed, and father of modern kabbalah. Yossele read that The Ari once instructed his students to sleep on the graves of tzaddikim in the city’s holy cemetery, so that even in repose they could learn the words of the greats – wisdom rising up from the hallowed tombs. And so, Yossele read, each of The Ari’s illustrious followers would do so every night until the ancient cemetery resembled a campground, and the many-colored sleeping bags that dotted the cemetery began to smell from mildew, caused by the holy mist that blanketed the town each night. Nobody knows what stopped the practice, the ancient book went on to say, but one day The Ari called all his students back to their beds. “There is only so much one can learn from the dead,” he said. “Come back to the living, my students, come back.” And so they did.

  But, the book continued, it is said that those closest to him, the illuim of his generation, their souls never left the garden of the dead and sometimes you can see them still, those students he once called his lion cubs, curled up cat-like on the tombstones, sleeping soundly on the graves.

  Yossele was charmed by the story. After dinner and night-seder, he told it to Moishe, who told Donniel, and then Yerahmiel, and soon a crowd had gathered in the dormitory room that they all shared. Asher and Bentzion, Efraim and Leibel, Kalonymous and Zevulun, Samuel and the youngest of all of them, Gedaliah.

  “We should try that!” Asher was the first to say, his eyes blazing gold like his sidelocks.

  “Are you crazy?” said Yerachmiel, twirling his auburn tresses nervously.

  “Isn’t it cold outside?” offered Donniel, the most fragile and sickly of the bunch, his curly russet peyot frizzed and trembling.

  “It wouldn’t hurt just once to try it,” offered Leibel, sleek and dark-haired, always daring, the most athletic of the 12.

  “Of course you’d say that,” argued Samuel, of the thick chocolate-brown hair. “You could run all night and still show up for morning prayers.”

  “I say we go for it,” said Yossele, his voice loud and smooth like his caramel locks, “but all of us, as a group, nobody stays behind.”

  “Tonight,” chimed in Kalonymous, “at the stroke of midnight.” His eyes burnt wild with the same passion as his fiery red hair.

  “Midnight?” said Yossele.

  “Midnight,” said 12 voices in unison.

  “Don’t forget to dress warm!” advised the youngest of them all, Gedaliah, his face lit up with an inner glow that matched his pale blond hair.

  And so to bed they went, each one of them, side by side, in a chamber lit only by moonlight and the white fire of the holy books that lined the room. Though the books threatened to topple in on them at any moment, like most of the crumbling stone buildings in the city, they were held fast by dust and the comfort of the years.

  When midnight struck, it was Efraim who whispered first, “Wake up, my brothers! Wake up, the hour calls us!” He hadn’t really slept, but counted 24 formations of gematria as his clock ticked and every second showed a new prophetic formulation.

  He had been trying to decipher if tonight was an auspicious night, but every string of numbers set his mind wandering down different pathways in the number labyrinth of his mind, and he came up with nothing in the end, well, nearly nothing, only 12: “bay” or “yab”.

  “A number which could mean the abyss,” he murmured to himself, “a lost thing or a longing, a desire or a craving, a howl or a silence, a decision or a prayer, rejoicing or trepidation, a lamb, a bear, a fish, the banks of the river or the prince of Magog, a caress or a nail, a babbling, that ‘one and the many are one’ or it could have meant the shvatim, the 12 sheaves in Joseph’s dream, or 12 like the number that we are, 12 students, getting up at 12 midnight.” He took a deep breath, and then it was time to go.

  They rubbed the sleep out of their eyes and fumbled o
n socks and shoes, tzitit and pants, an exaltation of kippot and hats that covered their bare skulls. Lastly went the black jackets over the black sweaters until out of the window they all climbed, whispering softly with the breeze.

  They ran down the hill from the yeshiva, down the alleyways and steps, rushing off as if to prayer. If anyone had asked them where they were off to (but no one did), it would have been obvious: to pray tikkun chatzot, they would have said, each one of them, for that was what they’d all decided. And indeed, as they made their way down to the graves, one whispered, “At midnight I will rise to give thanks unto thee,” and then the next repeated after him, until it was something like a game, of call and answer, or a dirge, that rose from each of their mouths and was borne onto the wind of night.

  When they arrived they couldn’t see the tombstones despite the light of moon and stars, and while they would have liked to choose the sage whose eternal bed they shared that night, they didn’t think it mattered all too much, for every man buried in Safed was a saint, a holy man, a rav of sorts, and it is said that you can learn from every man.

  So full of rapture were the boys that they didn’t even think to feel the names beneath their fingers. Each one wandered until he found a promising-looking stone. Bentzion sought a comfortable one, and lay down on one rubbed soft by rain and snow, his raven sidelocks falling like silk to grace the marble, having lost their curl in the damp of night.

  Carrot-topped Zevulun chose a tombstone that looked ancient, cracking from the weight of years, and thought that certainly his choice was the best one: the older the dead the more he would learn.

  And so each boy made his choice and curled up cat-like on a stone, and tossed and turned and shivered until sleep came.

  What these bachelors never realized was that each in turn had picked a tomb not of a holy tzaddik but of his wife, the holiest of holy women, and when these women, dead so many years, felt the warm blood of a bochur sleeping soundly just above them, the ground began to rumble with desire.

  Tremors are common in Safed, city of earthquakes. Nobody knows what causes them, for no direct fault-lines ache beneath the city vaults. But that night it was a different kind of trembling, and with a gust of wind came rain. The skies opened up the earth with tender fingers, and as the boys began to wake from cold, 12 sets of bony digits held them fast. Some boys screamed in terror, while others froze in fear, and watched in horror, speechless, as 12 lusty zombie brides rose from the earth.

  Leibel thought that he could run for help. He knew he was the strongest and the fastest of the 12, but his bride Miriam, the daughter of the famed Rabbi Nachman, caught his ankle, and try as he might he could not escape the skeletal grip of her fingers. All the other brothers were caught in struggles of their own, until Leibel, swallowing his fear, decided to face her.

  He thought perhaps an incantation or a prayer might release him. He started chanting, but as he did he watched her. Her hair was dark as midnight like his own. She wore a tattered dress and had haunted, decayed eyes, but she smiled, he could have sworn she smiled, or maybe all skeletons looked like that. But there was flesh there too, not much around the bone, but enough to soften her in places, and soon from her lips she crooned a melody. It was the softest saddest niggun Leibel had ever heard, and she swayed with him, as dancers do, and his heart beat fast, electric in the night, with fear but also awe, and he stood straighter, and relaxed, and took her hand in his and slid an arm around her waist (or where he thought her waist once was) and closed his eyes and danced. It was not the frenzied dance of the Hasidim, but a soft wedding tantz, a waltz. And he felt all the other eyes upon him, eyes and lack of eyes. His brothers and their brides all saw them dancing, and in no time joined them, hand in bony hand and arm around depleted waist.

  The women sang songs the boys had never heard, niggunim, mouthing melodies like kisses that the boys took from their lips and sang back at them into the sky. And soon words followed songs and they were learning from each other, the boys how to dance, and how to hold a woman, the zombie rebbetzins remembering what it was like to be young and to be free.

  Yossele danced with Chana, and she told him in her droning voice about her seven sons. As she sang she imparted of their wisdom that she had heard and gathered as she cared for them and heard them pray and learn. His caramel locks twirled in the breeze around her rotting scarf, forming a halo, and if you looked you might have thought that she wore a living crown.

  The straw-haired Moishe paired with Raichele, the dreamer, who sang to him of the mountain of straw within her, always burning, but never consumed. They slow-danced as her skeleton crackled, indeed like straw, and moved in tandem above her tombstone that praised her as a modest lady. She told him all the secrets she had heard from Rav Vital, as she eavesdropped at the door to the attic of her home, and of his visions, and of hers, and of her courtyard where all the Kabbalists would gather, and she would serve them tea and read their fortunes in the leaves.

  Donniel was whisked into a tango by Donia Reyna, who grew up alongside the great Vital. His twin, she wrote her own grand Book of Visions and she serenaded the russet-haired boy with its words. He was entranced, not just by words, but by her still-red ruby lips, which looked as though they’d been stained with blood.

  And so they were all paired, Yerachmiel with Mazal Tov, righteous woman, daughter of the perfect sage, and blessed, blessed, blessed, she hissed through her missing teeth and gums. Asher paired with Mira and she told him all her vivid dreams, and gave him a long list of holy missions, escapades she never got to go on. Bentzion twirled with Frances Sarah, a maggid dervish dressed in furs, and Efraim learned the zohar’s secrets to the fox-trot of Fioretta, the wisest woman of her time.

  Though Dona Gracia was under the shade of the Nassi in her lifetime, in her death she danced with Leibel and spoke only queenly prose, all about the flowers in her garden, and how each bush grew a thirteen-petalled rose. Kalonymous took the hand of the eldest lady, Safta Yocheved, whose bones knocked with every step, but tap-dancing into the night they went, as she pointed out the path of the Messiah she was certain would still come home to her that day. Zevulun snaked around the cemetery with Sonadora wrapped in his arms, and he could feel the oil of sorcery still on her fingers, as she stroked his face and told him all her divination secrets and her holy lore.

  Samuel took the arm of Hannah Rachel, much to his surprise, for he would have sworn he’d heard that she was buried in Jerusalem, yet here she was, the Maiden of Ludmir, in zombie form. Still dressed in tallit and tefillin, the two locked eyes and hearts and sang in tune. And then Gedaliah, youngest of them all, took the hand of young Anav. Dressed in wedding finery and almost whole, she who’d mastered spirits and possessions, told Gedaliah all the mysteries of souls, how to call them – from dybbuk to ibbur, and how to send them back to their abodes. With her he danced the longest, a form of wedding tantz, until the sun began to rise, and then with all the words she’d taught him, Gedaliah opened up the earth and one by one he and his bride sent them all home.

  He was the last one back through the dormitory window, the last to pack the earth of his beloved’s tomb, as all the boys fell into bed an hour before sunrise. They shed their shoes, bereft of soles and fell asleep, covered in earth and flesh and shards of bone. And when the rebbes came to wake them from their slumber, they were like the dead under their blankets, comatose and spent. They stumbled out of bed and zombie-like they filed into synagogue, eyes glazed and mouths contorted into constant yawns.

  The rabbis knew something had happened. They feared the worst: sexual dreams, they thought, and checked each bed for nocturnal emissions. Yet they found no such evidence, only traces of blood and bone amid the sheets and 12 pairs of shoes, destroyed and caked in muddy soil.

  When the boys all took a break for lunch and went to town and all came back with matching shoes, the rabbis only shrugged because their students glowed all morning with new levels of insight, drash and sod. Let the boys have their eccentrici
ties, the bearded men thought as they took notes. These illuim are priceless, minds like these come once a lifetime, what’s a pair of shoes destroyed.

  And as the day passed the boys grew anxious; they checked their shirts for stains and twirled their curls. Like young girls getting ready for a date they fretted, cleaning under fingernails and checking for blocked pores. They rushed to brush their teeth after the evening meal, and grinned at one another thinking only of what secrets would await them, yet again, in the cemetery down below.

  For many nights the yeshivah students woke at the stroke of midnight, then bedded down on their beloveds’ graves, and sweet Gedaliah with his newfound words would call them, his voice shrill and melodic, like a flute. And the zombie ladies of the night, the holy rebbetzin, would rise and take their places by the sides of boys. They turned them into men at night, and they would talk and waltz and sing and dance and speak of all the mysteries of the world.

  Every night they tangoed, rhumbaed, and hip-hopped to beats and jazzy jingles. They danced Israeli folk and then fox-trots, flamenco and ballet, and even tap, and all along they sang and learned Zohar and kabbalah, visions, dreams and conjured souls. And the boys marveled at these women and their knowledge: everything their husbands knew they knew, and so much more, until the boys began to fear that they would never marry, for what earthly woman could ever possibly compare?

  That was when the spirits realised their nightly jaunts were coming to an end. Nice as it was to be out dancing, as women priestesses and visionary greats, the place for these boys was with living women, partners who could give them more than ruined shoes. And so it was Anav who told Gedaliah that the night trysts had to end and how, and taught him how to curse them all back into an eternal slumber, and she sealed it with a kiss from her sweet and rotten lips.

  And so it was on the last night, after all was said and danced and done, that the lovers laid their ladies down upon each tombstone, and caressed their dead and lovely ones. Tears fell from the eyes of all the holy boys, and wet the eyes of their beloved zombie brides, and while the others listened for the last whispered words of wisdom, the last holy song and fervent prayer, Gedaliah slipped a ring onto the bony finger of his bride and whispered all the words he knew to say. She shrieked out loud as he did so, for he knew not what he’d done, but it was over in an instant and the brides all sank into the earth and all was said and done.