Café Shira by David Ehrlich, translated by Michael Swirsky; Syracuse University Press © 2022; ISBN 9780815-611424; 200 pages; 22.95.
SAN DIEGO – As a rule, novelists don’t make a lot of money unless their works become international best sellers. For Israelis who write in Hebrew, the odds against global literary success are quite high. Novelists like the late David Ehrlich were required to have steady, non-literary sources of income. In his case, it was a combination bookstore and café in Jerusalem called Café Tmol Shilshom (Only Yesterday), which the poet Yehuda Amichai used to frequent. The café was named after a book written by another of Israel’s literary lions, S. Y. Agnon.
We learn the backstory of the novel in a comprehensive foreword written by Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, who had been Ehrlich’s professor—and later friend and mentor—at Hebrew University.
Ehrlich’s Café Shira is an imaginative series of vignettes that take place in an establishment much like Café Tmol Shilshom, wherein the regulars at each table have their own stories. Sometimes they are interwoven with the stories of waitresses Rutha and Rona and café owner Avigdor; other times, they are in a world of their own, made known to us only by the remarkable insight and intuition of the hard-working, extremely empathetic Rutha.
One might get the idea from this book, translated into English by Rabbi Michael Swirsky, that those who frequent such cafés are either frustrated writers or frustrated lovers, or a combination of both. Something about the place lures customers with unfulfilled, even unspoken, dreams. In this ersatz home, they can stay as long as they like, amid strong coffee and well-worn books, especially if they have with them laptops for writing or for pretending to be writing.
There are characters marvelous to ponder. There are twin sisters who have stopped talking to each other, but continue to show up at the café on the same day each week to sit in silence at nearby tables. There is a French Christian pilgrim who believes that the Jerusalem experience will prepare him to become a priest, but he finds himself smitten with dreams of Rutha. He is not the only customer who is attracted to the tall, smiling waitress. Naor, a man of many unfinished projects, can’t muster the courage to talk to her, but he has been researching her life. He even has traveled to her home village, where he learned that she looks like neither of her parents.
There is a mayor of a small Israeli town who can never get a moment of peace at home, but at the café he is free to dream and meditate. There is a man who used to come to the café with his mother, but now that she is dead, he comes back to their favorite table where he communes with her spirit.
Rutha likes the tall French pilgrim, but he is too shy to speak to her. After more than two decades of serving customers, Avigdor pines to do something else. On one occasion, dressed in drag, he visits another café, just to enjoy being a different persona. But he is recognized by a waitress there, who long ago had worked for him. Is there no escaping this life for one with more excitement?
Like Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” all these vignettes come together in a full-blown composition. Instead of from painting to painting, we march from table to table. But whereas the musical composition had us proceed in a straight line from one to the next, in Café Shira we sometimes double back to take another look at the patrons, who after all, are not static works of art but complicated, ever-changing, flesh-and-blood humans.
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Donald H. Harrison is editor emeritus of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com