What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

This collection of eight short stories explores Jewish identity, Holocaust memory, moral ambiguity, and the tensions between secular and religious life.

The title story, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank," is narrated by an unnamed Jewish husband in South Florida. He and his wife, Deb, host Mark and Lauren, a couple who moved to Israel and became ultra-Orthodox Hassidim (devout Orthodox Jews), now going by Yerucham and Shoshana. Lauren is Deb's closest friend from their days at a yeshiva, an Orthodox Jewish school, in Queens. Mark provokes friction, lecturing about the Israeli occupation and telling an anticlimactic story about his Holocaust-survivor father that disappoints Deb, who has a deep preoccupation with the Holocaust. The four drink vodka and smoke marijuana from a stash Deb found in their 16-year-old son Trevor's laundry hamper. Tensions rise when Mark declares Trevor does not "seem Jewish" and calls intermarriage "the current Holocaust." A tropical rainstorm breaks the mood, and the four dance in the rain. Afterward, in the pantry, the narrator reveals Deb's habit of planning secret hiding places in their home, modeled on Anne Frank's. This leads to a game Deb and Shoshana played as girls: In the event of a second Holocaust, which Christian friends would hide them? Mark decides his Mormon friend would. The narrator and Deb agree he would hide her. When the game reverses, Shoshana stares at Mark for a long time and pulls back her hand, unable to say he would. No one speaks what this silence means. The four remain in the pantry, afraid to release what they have discovered.

"Sister Hills" spans four decades, tracing two families who found a Jewish settlement on facing hilltops in the West Bank. In 1973, Hanan leaves for the Yom Kippur War and is killed. His wife, Rena, stays alone on their hill, where she begins chopping down a large olive tree to improve her security sightlines. A boy from the village below insists the tree belongs to his family. Their neighbor Yehudit arrives with her critically ill baby daughter and begs Rena to "buy" the child in an old-country superstition: If Death believes the baby belongs to someone else, it will pass over her. Rena purchases the baby for a single worthless bill. The baby recovers. Over the following decades, the settlement grows into a city, but Rena loses all three sons: two in combat and one in a car accident. When her last son dies, Rena claims Aheret, Yehudit's eldest daughter and the baby she once purchased, now a 27-year-old woman who has never been told the story. Yehudit insists the transaction was mere superstition, but a rabbinical court, persuaded by Rena's argument that her contract is as binding as other symbolic transactions Jewish law considers valid, rules in her favor. That night, the Second Intifada, a new wave of Palestinian-Israeli violence, erupts. Rena chops down the contested olive tree and collapses with a heart attack. Aheret offers a trade: her freedom in exchange for calling an ambulance. She judges Rena not in immediate mortal danger but likely to face severe disability without prompt care, making a phone call on a holy day potentially impermissible. Rena refuses. In a final section set in 2011, prospective apartment buyers see an old woman in a wheelchair pushed by a drawn middle-aged woman. A real estate agent describes them as a devoted daughter caring for her mother. The true history remains invisible.

"How We Avenged the Blums" follows Jewish boys in Greenheath, Long Island, tormented by a neighborhood anti-Semite who beats the smallest boy, Zvi Blum, unconscious. The boys seek help from Ace Cohen, the toughest Jew in town, who refuses. A Russian Jewish immigrant named Boris begins teaching them Krav Maga, an Israeli martial art, but his training produces more bravado than results. After the bully attacks Mrs. Blum, the boys set a trap using Zvi as bait and convince Ace to deliver one punch that breaks the bully's jaw. Standing over the fallen bully, the narrator reflects that being broken feels better to him than breaking, and none of them knows when to run.

"Peep Show" follows Allen Fein, a lawyer who has shed his birth name Ari Feinberg along with his Orthodox upbringing. He enters a peep show on 42nd Street and touches one of the women. On his second token, the women are replaced by four rabbis from his old yeshiva who confront him about abandoning his faith. On the third token, his mother and his pregnant Gentile wife, Claire, appear onstage; his mother nearly betrays her disapproval of Claire but catches herself, and Claire takes her mother-in-law's hand in an unexpected alliance. On the final token, Allen undresses, steps onto the stage, and offers himself to a stranger, moving forward with the detachment of an object of desire.

"Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother's Side" is a sequence of 63 numbered vignettes in which a narrator named Nathan assembles his fragmented family history, urged on by his Bosnian girlfriend, Bean. He uncovers buried truths: an uncle said to have died of a brain tumor actually died of an infection from an untreated car-accident wound, and another relative said to have been killed in the war actually died in a gun accident after the fighting ended. The narrator obtains a letter in his grandfather's handwriting requesting the return of his dead brother's personal effects and weeps alone on his couch. Threaded throughout is his dissolving relationship with Bean, which ends because he needs her presence to avoid being alone with himself rather than needing her specifically.

"Camp Sundown" follows Josh, the new director of a summer camp divided between children and elderly Jewish campers. He replaced Rabbi Himmelman, who was removed for molesting children. Two elderly survivors, Agnes Brown and Arnie Levine, insist that Doley Falk, a quiet bridge player, is a Nazi camp guard Agnes recognizes from the concentration camps. Josh dismisses the accusation. Agnes and Arnie recruit six others into the "Book Group Eight" and escalate their campaign with a burning Star of David made of memorial candles. Josh, enraged, throws books into a bonfire, then realizes he is conducting a book burning. On the final night, Josh discovers the group has drowned Falk in the lake. Arnie presents Josh with a choice: report the murder or cover it up, just as the board covered up Himmelman's crimes. The story ends without resolution.

"The Reader" follows an aging, once-celebrated Author on a disastrous book tour. His latest novel, 12 years in the making, draws no audiences. At each empty store, one ancient man with dyed black hair appears and insists Author read. Author oscillates between gratitude and resentment for this lone devoted reader. In Seattle, a confrontation erupts: Author calls the man a stalker, and the man calls himself a patron. Author recalls his mother reading him Isaac Babel in Russian as a child and recognizes in this old man the same bond between writer and reader. He pulls out a secret notebook with notes for a new book and reads from it through tears.

"Free Fruit for Young Widows" begins during the 1956 Sinai Campaign, a brief war between Israel and Egypt. Israeli Private Tendler shoots four Egyptian commandos seated at a captured mess table in identical French-supplied uniforms. His squad mate, Shimmy Gezer, a Holocaust survivor, tackles Tendler, insisting they could have been taken prisoner. Tendler beats Shimmy badly. Years later, Shimmy runs a fruit stand in Jerusalem and gives Tendler free produce every Friday, the same kindness he extends only to war widows. When his son Etgar turns 13, Shimmy explains why. Tendler survived the death camps by hiding among corpses. After liberation, he returned to his childhood village, where Fanushka, his family's former nursemaid, was living in his parents' house. She welcomed him warmly, but he overheard her instructing her sons to kill him before morning so he could not reclaim the property. Tendler waited until the household slept, then shot every family member, including the baby. Shimmy tells Etgar that context matters and asks what Etgar would have done. Etgar concedes he might have killed the adults but cannot accept the baby's death. Shimmy shakes his head and asks, "And whoever are we, my son, to decide who should die?" Etgar spends his life working the stand, concluding that Tendler is both a murderer and a pitiable man. He continues giving Tendler free fruit, even after Shimmy has died.