Haim Watzman “Don’t look,” said my friend Alon. “But the former Shin Bet chief just sat down at the table to our right.” I gazed intently into my soy latte and then, without moving my head, squinted over in the direction of said table. “All I see is a blur,” I said. “I think I [...]

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Haim Watzman Dani held his coffee glass up to the sky. The residue the Turkish coffee grounds left on the sides filtered the rays of the late March sun like a gossamer veil that brings to light precisely what it hides. Nuriel, Dani, and I were on our bellies on the top of a desert [...]

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Haim Watzman The sniffles turned into sobs during the dissonant piccolo solo. The Israel Philharmonic was about four minutes into the first movement of Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony and the weeping distracted me from the conductor, Gianandrea Noseda, who seemed not so much to be cuing the orchestra as to performing a long slow death dance. [...]

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Haim Watzman I almost stopped reading Aurelie Sheehan’s short story “Recognition” after the first sentence. Oh, God, another piece of fiction about a writer, written by a writer who only knows how to write about writing for an incestuous circle of other writers. But I had a rare opportunity to dip into some short fiction [...]

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Haim Watzman “Can I get some cooperation here?” asks Yoel in the firm but plaintive voice of a reserve platoon commander. Tourjeman, Brosh, and I are sitting like three monkeys (bald, sandy blond, bearded; wiry, fit, and flabby) on a small mound at the foot of the dusty spur that we’ve been charging up all [...]

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Haim Watzman I think it was my senior year in high school in which my friend Dave first discovered the truth. And since I was his best friend, he was determined to impart the truth to me as well. It was a cover story in Time magazine, I’m pretty sure, that set Dave off. It [...]

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Haim Watzman “The air is unexpectedly cool and damp for early September when I emerge from Terminal 3 and cross over to the AirTrain. I’m alone and there are no human sounds, only the roar of traffic on the highway. Even that is muted as the elevator door shuts.” I look up from 60C on [...]

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Haim Watzman My translation of Nurit Kotler’s short story, “Next to the Traffic Signal, Under the Streetlight,” has just been posted on the Zeek website, after appearing in the Summer 2010 issue. Set in Paris, the story tells of an unscheduled and unlooked-for encounter between a nervous Israeli expatriate and an elderly Jewish man. Good [...]

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Haim Watzman A couple weeks ago I published my first short story. That’s an important milestone in my career as a writer, since up until now I’ve only published journalism and non-fiction. But, in fact, it’s less of a breakthrough than it sounds, because I made my fiction debut in the pages of a news [...]

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Haim Watzman Back in the 1980s, when I was still a relatively new reader of Hebrew, I picked up an anthology of short stories that had been published in Iton 77, a literary magazine that had commenced publication a year before my arrival in 1978. The journal had a good reputation and this book, I [...]

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