an old writer and his words

  • HILLEL AT THE GOLDEN DRAGON

    I am honored that this poem was just published in the Fall/Winter Issue of the  Atlanta Review, I had dinner the other night with Rav Hillel in a small Chinese place just off Mott Street. I asked him what it was like in the afterlife, after all the years. It gets a bit boring, he…

    Lou Faber

  • HANGING BY A THREAD

    In Riga, my grandfather was a master tailor, the great and the rich would come to his shop some bringing bolts of fine cloth and others trusting him knowing that wools and silks were not beyond his reach. Even after they marked his home as that of the Jew, the Captain, who rode through the…

    Lou Faber

  • ASHES

    When I die, my friend Larry said one morning in the third inning of a double header of stoop ball, I want to be burned, not that I intend it to happen any time soon, but when it does. They burned my grandfather I think it was Dachau, but unlike him, I want to kick…

    Lou Faber

  • ALMOST PASSOVER

    It is almost Pesach, early this year so I will get a birthday cake not the rubbery sponge cake of matzoh meal, eggs and ginger ale, covered in fruit. We are peeling the applies and chopping them for the charoset for the communal seder most to be thrown away along with the paper plates and…

    Lou Faber

  • AND CHARITY

    Faith, or is it hope, seems directly proportional to the need we have to believe in what some would call a miracle. In Hebrew the word for charity can also be translated justice. Faith, he says, is hope with a Godly intervention for hopes can easily go unfulfilled, but faith lingers, and isn’t given up…

    Lou Faber

  • KNOT WHAT YOU THINK

    “Trying to explain the Old Testament is like trying to untie a series of Gordian Knots.” He said that often, and few argued with him. Whether they did not argue because they agreed, or simply wanted to avoid his unwillingness to cease pushing until the other or others conceded whatever point he was making hardly…

    Lou Faber

  • NARA

    It was inside Nara that it finally slipped away. Its tether had grown ever weaker, the first slip was decades before, a book, brief meetings an answerless question. It stretched further in Tokyo, basin incense under the watchful third eye and hung perilously by fewer and fewer threads until, with the monks’ gentle bow, it…

    Lou Faber

  • INTO THE DESERT

    His is six and deeply confused, and asks questions to end that state. He wants to know if Adam and Eve had two sons, and one killed the other, where did all of the people come from? Ask your father seems and easy answer, but one he cannot accept, too easy for a mind that…

    Lou Faber

  • PAPAL EDICT

    She said “now what they’ve taken away limbo” sounding a bit depressed, “not that you proceed express to the ferry dock, but that was a snap, all you were carefully taught is suddenly wrong or irrelevant. “It would be like Isaac,” I say, “climbing Mount Moriah with Abraham finding a ram tethered to a waiting…

    Lou Faber

  • AN OFF YEAR

    The was a winter, once where even in the north the snow refused to fall and ice rejected jamming the culverts, the sky stared down in amazement. That was the year trees would not bud and flowers fled deeper into the sweetness of the earth, grass singed and lay indolent. It was a year my…

    Lou Faber