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The Pale of Settlement: Stories (Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction) (Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction)

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Publishers Weekly provides a synopsis of Singer's stories; the Product Description under Editorial Reviews encapsulates her collection in its entirety. But what both inexplicably fail to mention, as do other reviews and the tributes on the book's back cover, is what a gifted writer Singer is. It was, in fact, her well-crafted, descriptive prose that compelled me to read this collection in one evening, then reread countless passages the next. Be certain to read the "Search Inside" excerpt of the first story to see why lovers of good writing will be hooked by the end of the second paragraph. And savor the passages that I've included below to further establish that THE PALE OF SETTLEMENT is indeed a literary treasure.

But first, A NOTE OF CAUTION: Readers who prefer linear plots and action probably will not care for this book, which is predominately a collection of musings that shift back and forth between present and past and various countries, even within a single story.

PASSAGES FROM SINGER'S STORIES
In "LILA'S STORY," Susan studies photographs taken shortly after her grandparents had immigrated to Palestine: "Here is my grandmother...arms linked with her two sons, posing on the beach. She is beautiful, or almost, cat-eyed and slim, with an aquiline nose and prematurely white hair. Here she is leaning against a railing by the sea...The camera has caught that fleeting moment that precedes the self-consciousness of a smile, and that, with that slight squint and wind-blown hair, makes her look contemplative and a little reckless, both vulnerable and brave."


"DEIR YASSIM" begins with Susan ruminating about the ashes of her uncle: "All the way from New York to Tel Aviv, she keeps the box beneath the seat in front of her....Thirty-six thousand feet up, she's thinking about the many possibilities of return. In a Tibetan air burial, bodies are left naked on a rock for vultures to pick to bones. In India, pyres smolder along the Ganges, ashes and marigolds drifting with the stream. Maybe she'll just leave the box at Ben Gurion, revolving like a planet on a bagage carousel. Maybe she'll drop it inside Damascus Gate, ticking like a bomb. Or maybe she'll take it to a cafe deep inside the souk and stir the ashes, a teaspoonful at a time, into a cup of Arabic coffee, boiled sweet. She'll turn the cup over, twist it three times, read the prophecy etched into the grinds.

"As dawn splits over the Mediterranean, three men in black suits and rumpled shirts shuffle past her and place themselves in the space between the galley and the lavatories, behind her seat. They wind phylacteries around their arms and foreheads, drape prayer shawls over their heads, and daven toward the streaks of light. She feels the chanted words bending, bobbing, against her neck. The words keep the hurtling plane miraculously aloft. Susan touches the box with her toes and listens to the praying men. She's thinking that bodies, like words, dissolve, dry up, fly into the air. They fly away and are gone."


Midway through "EXPATRIATE," Susan imagines the mindset of her parents when she was very young: "They went to Israel nearly every year. They rented a flat for three weeks in the summer across the street from Ezi's parents, took their meals with them. They sat around with army friends on Shabbat, drinking Nescafe, picking at a bowl of grapes, the babies playing at their feet. They argued over Eshkol and Nasser, the discoveries at Masada and the Dead Sea, the successes of the kibbutzim, whether the lira could ever be shored up.

"Their friends in Israel always said, Nu, so when are you coming back? It was not really a question. It was an accusation, a matter of loyalty.

"Next year, they always said, and they meant it, at the time. Next year Ezi's fellowship would be up. Next year they would have saved enough to buy a car.

"So they went to the beach, took day trips to the Kinneret and Caesaria and Tel Aviv, but after a week or two they began to feel claustrophobic and bored. They shopped for gifts for the secretary in Ezi's department, souvenirs for their American friends...They exclaimed over the quality of the Jaffa oranges, the Tnuva cheese. But at night they lay in their borrowed bed and whispered how expensive everything was here, how Yoav was not satisfied with the equipment in his lab, how Nir was earning barely half of what an opthalmologist could make back home. Home. They turned off the light and lay sleepless in the dark.

"Back in New York again, everything felt oversized. Even their own apartment, with its twelve-foot ceilings and bay windows, felt out of scale. They sat around the table on Indian summer afternoons with Yitzhak and Carol, or Shmuel and Ruthi and their kids, the fans blowing grimy air through the windows. They complained about LBJ and Lindsay, the potholed condition of the roads, the declining standards of the schools. They didn't like the idea of their children growing up in such a materialistic society, they said, not to mention all the drugs and crime, hardly noticing that they'd switched to English, unable to find the word they were looking for in the language they spoke less and less frequently but never stopped thinking of as their own. The plank-and-packing-crate shelves had come down long ago, the card table replaced by a Danish Modern dining set in teak with matching chairs. They fanned themselves with sections of the Sunday Times and said, It's a khamsin! forgetting that the gritty yellow khamsin wind was nothing like this humid heat at all."

An astonishing collection; individually each story stands on its own but read together they achieve a novelistic depth and texture. Rarely does writing about Israel & Palestine by "outsiders" achieve this kind of insight and truth. Singer gets every detail right. But cultural specificity aside, these stories are timelesss in their beauty, piercing truths, and unforgettable characterizations.