Necessary Stories
by Haim Watzman


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Twenty-four stories of Israeli and Jewish life, chosen from the more than one hundred Haim Watzman has written over the last nine years in his &#x201c;Necessary Stories&#x201d; column in the The Jerusalem Report. Bookended by a flashback to his first weekend in Israel forty years ago and a storytelling encounter on a recent flight back home from the US, these stories&#x2014;funny, meditative, and sad, set in immigrant camps, the army, and the author&#x2019;s own neighborhood in south Jerusalem&#x2014;uniquely capture what it is like, in our age, to be an Israeli and a Jew.<br /><br /><br /><strong>Praise for Haim Watzman:</strong><br /><br />&#x22;His stories detail the lives of ordinary Israelis, often touching on current events … The dialogue, though written in English, has the distinct feeling of Hebrew speech &#x2014; that unmistakable combination of impatience and warmth.&#x22; &#x2014; Naomi Zeveloff, Forward<br /><br />&#x201c;Watzman knows that every encounter, no matter how fleeting&#x2014;a conversation in a cemetery with a long-dead Talmudic sage; Felix Mendelssohn&#x2019;s great aunt scolding the young prodigy; four Jews on a plane discussing the Bible, the Zohar and Wuthering Heights&#x2014;is a matter of life and death. Necessary Stories is a quietly beautiful work, haunting in places, gently funny in others, written by a graceful, thoughtful, eloquent man who understands that life itself is not enough. One must live to tell the tale.&#x201d; &#x2014; from the Introduction by Joseph Skibell<br />