What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories by Nathan Englander

couldn’t believe it. A mighty son lost to boys throwing stones.
    She was still sitting shiva. And in contrast to when she’d lost her husband and sat three days alone in her doorway like Abraham himself, it was the populace of a small city that now passed through her home. The town had stayed close enough to its roots to revere its founder with something like faith.
    The visitor who’d traveled farthest to see her was her youngest, Tzuki, her last living son—though he was already his own kind of casualty to Rena. Tzuki had driven from Haifa, where he lived as a liberal, a secularist, and a gay. He shared an apartment with another boy he’d met at yeshiva. And Tzuki told his mother, with a flash in his eye, that from their balcony they looked upon the water.
    To look at her son, as much a founder of their settlement as she was, Rena could not believe how people transform in the span of one life. There he sat, receiving the town with a yarmulke perched on his head, like it was the first he’d ever worn. Where tzitzit would go, a black T-shirt showed through his button-down shirt. And on his arm, exposed for all the world to see, was a tattoo of a dolphin—like the ones that mark the trash who sit and drink beer on the beach in Tel Aviv.
    When he’d told her of his lifestyle, she’d sworn never to meet the boy he called his partner. And Tzuki had said that wouldn’t be a problem, as he’d sworn never again to cross the Green Line from Israel proper into the territories it held. When his last brother died, she did not think he’d come to see her. And yet, here he was at her side. For this, she put a hand to hishand, and from there they wove fingers. To her son, she said, “It’s nice of you to do this for Mati.”
    “For my brother and for you,” he said. Then he stood and joined the men in the grove who’d gathered together to hear him recite the prayer for the dead.
    III: 2000
     
    How things change, you wouldn’t believe. Another thirteen years pass and those sister hills now cap a metropolis. With the aid of a small bridge of new land, the settlement had merged with a younger community to the west and now looked, on the army maps, like a barbell. And this was exactly the nickname the battalions of Israeli soldiers sent to defend it now used. Along with the new territory came a small religious college that gave out, in handfuls, endless degrees in law. There was a mall with a food court, and a multiplex within it that showed all the American films. There was a boutique hotel and a historical museum and a clinic that could do anything short of transplanting a heart. And along both edges of the connecting roadway between old and new city, there were dunam after dunam of hydroponic tomatoes set in greenhouses. An operation watered by robot, tended by Thai worker, and whose plants somehow grew with their roots at the top and fat fruit hanging down.
    A core group of idealists still remained in that expansive settlement. There were the families of those first seven boys, and the seventy that followed. There were Rav Kook stalwarts, and old-school Messianists, and religious Zionists of every stripe. But this didn’t stop the colony’s transformation into the bedroom community it had become. Behind the bougainvillea-covered balconies lived professors who drove to Be’er Sheva toteach at the big university, and start-up types who commuted every day to the technical park in Jerusalem, as well as venture capitalists who used Ben Gurion Airport as if it were the Central Bus Station, flying to Europe for a lunch and making it back late the same night. And there was a subset among those new neighbors that the founding residents, the farmers and fighters, could hardly understand: the healthy grown men, pale and soft in the middle, who lived on Japanese and Indian and American clocks, making trades or writing code, supporting large families without ever stepping out into the light.
    They came for the tax breaks. They