After Abel and Other Stories Read online

  ADVANCE PRAISE

  “Michal Lemberger is a wonderful writer—empathetic and heartbreaking, generous and fierce. The searing beauty of these stories is matched only by the passion and intelligence of the women who inhabit these pages. After Abel is a stunning book.”

  —MOLLY ANTOPOL, author of The UnAmericans

  “Through intuition and art, Lemberger opens our hearts to the powerful women of the Bible. They come alive in her magical prose, and their wisdom, long stifled and marginalized, echoes across the millennia to warm our hearts and to illumine our turbulent age. They teach us not only how to survive, but how to thrive.”

  —RABBI BRADLEY SHAVIT ARTSON, Abner and Roslyn Goldstine Dean’s Chair of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the American Jewish University and author of God of Becoming and Relationship: The Dynamic Nature of Process Theology

  “What struck me most about these stories is their clear, assured confidence—as if Michal had pulled apart some of the lines in the old story, spied a new story tucked in there way off in a corner, shimmied in a fishhook and pulled it out. They make their cases very convincingly.”

  —AIMEE BENDER, author of The Color Master and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

  “After Abel brings biblical women from the sidelines to the center of the story, in a compelling narrative reminiscent of Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent. These beautifully written stories feel like meeting Eve, Lot’s wife, and many other compelling characters for the first time. Michal Lemberger—more, please!”

  —LAUREL CORONA, author of The Mapmaker’s Daughter, Finding Emilie, and Penelope’s Daughter

  “The Bible is predominantly a set of books by and about men, with women usually mentioned only peripherally. In After Abel, Lemberger portrays biblical women in a way that makes them come alive as real people, with perspectives, concerns, and emotions of their own. Her modern midrash is true to all the biblical stories but enhances them in a way that I never thought possible. This may not have been how these biblical women actually thought and felt, but it probably was!”

  —RABBI ELLIOT DORFF, Rector and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the American Jewish University and author of The Unfolding Tradition: Philosophies of Jewish Law

  “This is a beautiful book of modern midrash—the ancient Jewish tradition of telling the stories between the Hebrew Bible’s lines. The women I thought I knew have come alive in these gorgeous and captivating stories, and they are unlike anything I expected. Their bravery and radiance remained in my mind long after I finished reading.”

  —DARA HORN, winner of the National Jewish Book Award and author of A Guide for the Perplexed and The World to Come

  “This is such an unusual book—how shall we begin to think of women behind the stentorian voices of the men who rule the scriptures—to think of them cooking slaughtered animals and caring for the children, to think of them being instructed constantly about how to behave, to live, to obey…who can possibly guess now what their real-time lives were like? Lemberger does a heroic job. What she gives us is an idea of what real women—women not unlike us—might have felt and thought in those times.”

  —MERRILL JOAN GERBER, author of The Hysterectomy Waltz and The Kingdom of Brooklyn

  “Lemberger deepens our understanding of the stories we have heard many times and thought we knew. The women of the Bible come alive in all of their vulnerability and power. The stories in this book are a work of modern midrash—so necessary and so beautifully done. Bravo, Michal Lemberger, and may your stories inspire many more.”

  —RABBI SUSAN GOLDBERG, Wilshire Boulevard Temple

  “Lemberger’s stories are marvelous compounds of scholarship, imagination, and empathy. Brought to life with rich historical detail, these biblical women, sidelined and silenced for centuries, prove to be audacious, utterly relatable, and spellbinding companions.”

  —MICHELLE HUNEVEN, author of Blame and Off Course

  “Imaginative leaps, the stories in After Abel transport the reader into fully realized biblical landscapes where we discover the experiences of characters whose shadowy presence in Hebrew scriptures inspire Lemberger’s creative speculation. Like the classical midrashist, she elaborates the spaces between the text’s choices, and by giving fullness of life to female presences merely hinted at in the Bible, she participates in the contemporary enterprise of bringing gender balance to the world of our mythic origins.”

  —LORI LEFKOVITZ, Ruderman Professor of Jewish Studies, Northeastern University

  “These short stories about biblical women are moving, often ingenious, and even gripping. Lemberger combines an insightful knowledge of biblical women and their stories with an acute ability to more fully imagine their lives in ways that feel true to the biblical text. She answers many of the questions readers have long wanted to know. What did Lot’s wife think about her husband’s plan to offer his daughters to the men of Sodom? What about Haman’s wife? Lemberger writes extremely well, with a touch of humor and plenty of compassion. This is a great read and the perfect choice for book groups and sisterhoods of all sorts.”

  —ADRIANE LEVEEN, Senior Lecturer in Hebrew Bible at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion and author of Memory and Tradition in the Book of Numbers

  “A gorgeous book of inspired reimaginings, full of heartbreak and courage and piercing beauty.”

  —BEN LOORY, author of Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day

  “With a delightful play of the imagination, Lemberger has brought to life biblical characters and episodes that the Bible authors never dreamed of, while remaining gracefully faithful to the cultural ‘atmosphere’ of biblical times.”

  —OSCAR MANDEL, California Institute of Technology Professor Emeritus of Literature and author of Otherwise Fables

  “The Hebrew Bible tells only the outline of most of its stories, and over the centuries many have filled in the white spaces with their own notions of back stories and behind-the-scenes drama. Yet rarely have those voices included those of women. In Lemberger’s book, these blank spaces are filled in by the stories of women: brave, frightened, loving, and taking extreme measures to protect their children. The women are real, their stories are heartbreaking, their courage undeniable. After Abel and Other Stories is a truly welcome addition to understanding what the Bible could mean by looking at a side of the story rarely considered: the story of women.”

  —TAMMI J. SCHNEIDER, Professor of Religion and Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at Claremont Graduate University and author of An Introduction to Ancient Mesopotamian Religion

  “After Abel and Other Stories is a gem. For readers who enjoy the Bible as literature and compelling storytelling, Lemberger’s exploration of the biblical women who are mentioned but then left without their own narratives is welcome and deeply engaging.”

  —SUSAN STRAIGHT, author of Between Heaven and Here and Highwire Moon

  “Lemberger liberates the voices that are trapped beneath the text. A reimagining of the biblical tales done with artistry and erudition.”

  —RABBI DAVID WOLPE, Rabbi of Sinai Temple and author of David: The Divided Heart and Why Faith Matters

  Copyright © 2015 by Michal Lemberger

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Prospect Park Books

  2359 Lincoln Avenue

  Altadena, CA 91001

  www.prospectparkbooks.com

  Distributed by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution

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p; www.cbsd.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lemberger, Michal.

  [Short stories. Selections]

  After Abel & other stories / Michal Lemberger ; foreword by Jonathan Kirsch. -- First edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-938849-48-0

  1.Women in the Bible--Fiction.I. Title. II. Title: After Abel and other stories.

  PS3612.E454A6 2015

  813’.6--dc23

  2014041274

  Cover design by David Ter-Avanesyan.

  Book layout and design by Amy Inouye, Future Studio.

  For Anina and Lula

  In men’s stories her life ended with his loss.

  She stiffened under the storm of his wings to a glassy shape,

  stricken and mysterious and immortal. But the fact is,

  she was not, for such an ending, abstract enough.

  —Mona Van Duyn, “Leda”

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD by Jonathan Kirsch

  After Abel

  Lot’s Wife

  Drawn from the Water

  The Watery Season

  Zeresh, His Wife

  City of Refuge

  Shiloh

  Saul’s Daughter

  And All the Land Between Them

  AUTHOR’S AFTERWORD: The Book of Ruth

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FOREWORD

  The Bible may not be the oldest artifact of the human imagination, but it is the starting point for three world religions and, perhaps even more impressively, a work of authorship that still casts its long shadow across our global civilization. That’s why the stories of the Bible have inspired men and women to engage in daring acts of reinvention, a tradition that begins within the pages of the Bible itself, where later-added texts put a new spin on older ones, and continues across the last several millennia. In that sense, The Alphabet of Ben Sira, a medieval collection of sometimes-bawdy Bible stories, and God Knows, a modern novel styled as the autobiography of King David as reimagined by Joseph Heller, are all examples of the same phenomenon.

  And so is After Abel and Other Stories by Michal Lemberger. She comes to the Bible honestly, by which I mean that she is willing and able to penetrate the veil of piety that conceals some of its most fascinating and consequential secrets, and she has mastered the intricacies of biblical scholarship that allow us to understand when, why and by whom the Bible was written in the first place. Above all, she is able to enter and inhabit characters who exist for us today only as stray lines of text in the Bible, and she allows us to see the biblical landscape through their eyes.

  Lemberger sets herself a lofty goal: “I imagined myself into characters and situations that are well known by dint of being in the most popular book ever published,” she explains, “but from an angle that, I suspect, most have never considered.” Her exercise in empathy is more than a literary conceit; it can be understood as a reverential act that honors one of the core values of the Bible: “You know the heart of the stranger, for you were once strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Exod. 23:9). But it is also a courageous effort to crack open the ancient text and allow the reader to glimpse new meanings in the ancient scriptures.

  From the first page of her narrative, and throughout the nine stories collected here, we hear voices that originate in the pages of the Bible and yet, at the same time, ring with passion and candor that is the handiwork of the author. She starts each story with a spare line of biblical text and draws from it a marvelous vision of real people in a real world, and she spins her stories with such conviction and audacity that they come fully alive.

  “This won’t make it into the official telling,” Eve confides to the reader. “The men who will come later to write it all down will leave this part out. Something always gets left out.” The Bible tells us that Adam named all of the animals, but it is Eve, in Lemberger’s telling, who names the parts of the human body: “Shoulder, elbow, nipple, stomach, shaft, scrotum.”

  After Abel also belongs in another and more recent biblical tradition. Women have been (and still are) excluded from the study and teaching of the sacred texts in certain circles of all three Bible-based religions. Lemberger, however, is to be counted among the women who assert the right to engage in the work of biblical scholarship and have distinguished themselves by their achievements. It is no accident that Lemberger has chosen the most intriguing women of the Bible to write about, some of them deeply familiar—Lot’s wife, Miriam, Hagar—and some, like Zeresh, wife of Haman, who have been almost entirely overlooked. Each woman in After Abel, however, is depicted with a narrative richness that is mostly lacking in the Bible. The Bible repeatedly shows us that men are privileged to talk to God, for instance, but in Lemberger’s stories, women enjoy the same opportunity and exercise it in defiant ways. “You won’t trick me again,” Hagar says to God or his emissary. “I know your ways now.”

  Like the best examples of modern midrash, Lemberger’s stories can and should be read in conjunction with the passages of the Bible from which they grew and flowered. I suspect, as the author surely intended, that the comparison between the sparse biblical text and Lemberger’s lush narratives make a point about how women were regarded by the original authors and editors of the Bible. She has liberated these remarkable women from the constraints imposed on them by the priestly custodians of the sacred text, and she has given them a new birth as figures of flesh and blood, heart and brain.

  — Jonathan Kirsch

  Jonathan Kirsch is the book editor of the Jewish Journal, a longtime book reviewer for the Los Angeles Times, a guest commentator for the NPR stations in Southern California, and an adjunct professor in New York University’s Professional Publishing Program. He is the author of thirteen books, including the best-selling The Harlot by the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible.

  AFTER ABEL

  “Adam knew his wife, again, and she bore a son and named him Seth, meaning, ‘God has provided me with another offspring in place of Abel,’ for Cain had killed him.”

  Genesis 4:25

  This won’t make it into the official telling. The men who will come later to write it all down will leave this part out. Something always gets left out.

  For so many years, it was just the two of us, and only God to talk to. He’s great and powerful, but He doesn’t have much to say. He talked enough to set this whole world spinning, but after that, shut His mouth. Now He parcels out His speech: a sentence here, question there, and short commands in between. And then Adam, trying his hardest to imitate Him, thinking he’s like God because he guards his words, as if exhausted by all that naming he did before I came along. It leaves a woman lonely.

  My first boy, Cain, his feet too soft for the hard earth at first, looked to his father for guidance. I thought his early babbles meant a change, but then he fell silent too, hoarded his words as if they were too precious to share. Only Abel, child of my heart, would fill the long nighttime hours with stories and songs. His voice was not pleasing, but it was a sound in this great empty world.

  Adam and I had to figure it all out ourselves, how our bodies fit together, what they were capable of. We got better over time, found a private language our bodies could speak, but in those early days of fumbling, it was all buck and roll over. Not much in it for me, to be honest. He thinks he has it so bad, all that work in the fields, but I’m right there beside him, sowing and harvesting, breaking my own back to get us fed. He never almost died from his labor the way I did the second time.

  Another thing that won’t make it into the final telling, I’m sure, is the way his labor can lay a man out at the end of a hard day’s work, irritable and hungry if the fields don’t give, the goats run away, but when I labored to give birth to Abel I bled so badly God Himself had to step in. That was my first witnessed miracle. If He hadn’t saved me, there’d be no more humans. No one around to feed the two babies I’d already birthed, either. No one to replace that one with this new on
e.

  Finally I’ve figured out how to put them to my breast. It’s only now, with Seth, that I’ve learned how to lift him without the bruising or swellings that hardened under my skin in the months after Cain and Abel were born. He bumps his head against me, mouth open and searching. He lays his hand against my skin as he suckles, smiles up at me, his mouth stretched around my nipple, sighs in pleasure. But it took losing Abel to learn it, and here’s me with no girls to teach it to. Just these boys, full of jealousy, and murderous. One dead, the other gone. Where to, I have no idea. We found the body in a field, his head bashed in, face and neck covered in blood already turning to brown, and his brother disappeared. I lost two in one moment, and I felt a gash open in my stomach at the sight of that boy, whom I had brought into the world at the cost, almost, of my own life.

  Who was there to teach me what a mother feels when she loses a son? Not God. He’d retreated somewhere beyond our vision. Not Adam, who clasped his hands together, looked down at the ground, and then spent the night with his back turned to me.

  When we first found him, I thought he would get back up, his skull would undent, and we four would go back to how we’d been, growing and tending to the land and animals. I think now that Adam understood at once, but it took me longer to recognize or admit to that fly-covered finality.

  It’s not that I hadn’t seen death. Animals died around us all the time. Mauled, torn apart by predators. Some fell sick or got old and curled up under bushes to depart in peace. One bad winter, we lost almost all the lambs. Adam took those deaths so personally at first, each a brief disappointment. Maybe it hardened him, crushed his first impulse to label, to name each creature as it came before him. Which is why it was left to me to find the right names for my sons.

  I didn’t make the connection between that body lying twisted on the ground and our own brief lives. I thought people lived by a different set of rules. God spoke to us, after all, even if less and less often as time wore on. Surely that made us special. Surely that meant we’d live forever. Scraped, bruised, broken, yes, but we lived. Adam never lost his limp after a fall off a rock shelf on our travels east out of the Garden, but it didn’t kill him. It barely slowed him down. That very night he mounted me with an intensity I had never seen in him before. Not a year passed, and I got rounder and rounder, with rumblings under my heart and God mum on what was happening or why.