Editor’s Note: When they say they’re sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust, I hear: “We’re sick and tired of you making it hard to be antisemitic.” Jews are taught that in every generation they will rise against us. Well, here they are. Elana Gomel’s Going East is an urgent warning about where we might be going, and who is trying to take us there. — David Michael Slater
July 17, 1941
I’m going east. I may be excused for feeling slightly nervous. A strange phrase is haunting me: a poisonous wind from the east that blows no good. The phrase is trailing a billowing yellow cloud.
July 20, 1941
The smell of ashes is in the air. This place is a shambles. There was a dead cat in the street, emaciated, with patchy ginger fur falling out. Laura used to work on a schmalzig wall hanging of two kittens playing with a ball; not in the best of taste, but she never finished it anyway.
Cats have no loyalty and no race: they are all the same. Unlike dogs and people.
August 3, 1941.
Yesterday I went over the draft of my research paper. Not bad at all! Overly ambitious perhaps but all advances in science begin with impossible dreams. If I can prove, scientifically prove, that races are indeed different species, what a boost this will give to our enterprise! (Not to mention my own career taking off). I know I’m right. All I need is tangible proof.
August 5, 1941
The weather is horrid: wind and lashing rain. Kremer tells me that the best way of overcoming the nausea that seizes me when I see corpses is to keep looking. Then it becomes a habit.
August 10, 1941
I have torn up Father's letter. It’s a miracle that it passed the censor. What was the old fool thinking?
You are destroying everything I have dedicated my life to studying and understanding," he wrote. "How can you do it? You grew up with medieval Hebrew manuscripts and rare Yiddish chapbooks. Have you forgotten it all? Do you remember what happened when you were six, when I received my Jewish Studies appointment at Leipzig? Your mother baked cookies with Hebrew letters on them to celebrate. You ate the letter 'Aleph' straight from the oven and burned your mouth.
Now you burn books. How soon will you begin to burn people?
Sooner than you know, Father. But this is what you have never understood, will never understand: they are not people.
Yes, I remember the cookie. And I remember how you locked yourself in your study and pored over those spidery alien letters while we survived on potato peels and ersatz coffee. Your family starved but you had money for your books!
Well, no matter. My parents have bequeathed me the only inheritance that matters: the purity of my blood. Blood is everything; letters – nothing.
October 20, 1941.
A limited action today. The Jews have to be sorted out. The chaos can no longer be endured.
The Jews were ordered to gather in the market square. Lists had been made of the skilled workers and their families. Those were separated from the rest, the unproductive population. Of course, it all degenerated into a complete mess. Cries, screaming, stench… finally, Kremer had a bright idea and told everyone to lie face down on the ground.
The site was in the woods, some distance away. The people marched in surprising quiet. Their screeching stopped once they began to move. We drove past them but suddenly I told my driver to stop.
On the edge of the column walked a young woman who, all my anthropological instincts told me, was a pure Aryan. Disregarding the grumbling of the policemen, I pulled her aside and examined her. Slender, long-legged, dolichocephalic, light gray eyes, almost white hair, straight narrow nose. I did not want to remove her clothing in the presence of the jeering policemen but I had no doubt that I would find all the markers of Nordic femininity: small upright breasts, a clear division between the thorax and the pelvis, long firm thighs.
“What are you doing here?” I said indignantly. “You don’t belong with them!”
She replied in Viennese German.
“I do.”
And she thrust her documents at me. According to them, she was Lila Sara Schwartz, originally from Vienna, relocated to the General Government of Poland in 1940. Her second name was a giveaway: according to the law of 1938, it was added to the names of all female Jews.
Documents may be forged but the body does not lie!
"Get into the car!" I commanded.
The local policemen snickered but I paid no attention. How can sub-humans like them understand a scientist's dedication?
The woman, Lila, obeyed and we drove on until we came to the place. The ground was covered with what seemed to be drifts of snow. In fact, it was shredded documents and paper money; the Jews were tearing them up, God knows why. There was a scent of pine resin in the air. Everything seemed to be peaceful and orderly compared to the mess at the gathering point.
Kremer staggered away from the ditch and was sick.
Some people prayed but not many. An old man stood before me, his stomach slack, grizzled hair covering his chest. He said: “What do you want from me? I’m only a composer.”
October 21, 1941.
I did the anthropometric measurements of Lila. Beautiful, she is very beautiful.
I gave her some food, which she ate daintily despite her malnutrition. Seeing this only confirmed my belief that she is human.
I sat her in front of me and demanded to know why she pretended to be a Jew. To put her at ease, I added (perhaps incautiously):
"You can be open with me. I know how one can be beguiled by them. My own father, pure Aryan that he is… was a Hebraist."
She knew what it meant, which supported my theory that she is an educated woman, somehow ensnared by their alien wiles. But her reaction was disconcerting. She laughed.
"A Hebraist?" she repeated. "So you must be a real authority on Jews."
"I know some things," I replied huffily. "Enough to see that you're not one of them."
"Who am I, then? One of you?"
"Undoubtedly. Science is infallible."
"But scientists aren't. What if I am a half-breed?"
"A Mischling? Well, since your Aryan blood obviously predominates, you're entitled to life. Perhaps you can be sterilized…"
She laughed again, showing those perfectly even, sugar-white teeth. The only flaw in that beautiful face is its color, or rather the lack of it: her skin, her eyebrows and lashes, even her eyes, seem to be bleached. But suddenly her transparent irises sparkled with icy, diamond lights and I felt a strange slow shiver go through me. I did not immediately realize what it was.
"Sterilize me?" she said mockingly. "Well, that would be quite a feat! Do you know how many children I've already borne?"
She must be mad; that explains it all. But I was not at this moment concerned with her mental state for I knew what was happening to me, my body presenting me with irrefutable proof.
I snatched up my gun and pushed it under her chin. But as my finger tightened on the trigger, a liquid instability washed over her face and for a moment I saw Laura's blue eyes look into mine, and her soft pink lips go white with fear. I dropped the gun.
"Go away!" I screamed.
For a moment everything went black and when I came to my senses, she was gone. I questioned my orderly: he claims he had not seen anybody.
[Later that night]
I've given most of my schnapps to Kremer but I have one emergency bottle left. A man is entitled to oblivion after such a dream.
There was a steaming red sea in it, languidly lapping at the pinkish shore.
There was a woman coming out of the sea, her body diamond-shiny, diamond-sharp.
She bent down, so that her white hair covered her face, and pulled a baby from between her thighs. She lifted it into the air. It didn't cry; it smiled, and she dropped it into the red sea and it floated peacefully on its viscous swell. And with every step she brought forth more and more babies.
My orderly came in when he heard my shriek, the idiot! I told him it was a nightmare. A childhood nightmare. An SS officer has to be civil, even to his underlings.
The worst thing is that if it becomes known, the comrades will think the strain of the action is to blame. They will see me as a weakling, a crybaby.
I did not lie. It is indeed a childhood dream. I first had it after Father had received his appointment in Leipzig. I was too small to realize the shame of his profession. But old enough to be frightened by those poisonous Talmudic tales he told me, the tales of Adamn’s first wife, Lilith, a vampire succubus who does not share in the curse of the exile from Eden.
It is said she gives birth to a hundred babies each day. Enough to fill the world with her litter of imitation people. To make them, she steals the seed of men. She is so beautiful no man can resist her.
How could he do it? Poison my mind with that Jewish trash…?
March 15, 1942
Laura and I are married.
November 21, 1942
I woke up with a terrible hangover. Never again!
Yesterday I had to assist the police force of the town named Talnoe. They wanted a racial expert to examine the children of mixed marriages.
The Russian and Ukrainian women with their offspring were locked up in three rooms at the local school when I arrived. There were about a hundred people. Even a cursory examination of the children (ages 0-15) confirmed my theory. I pointed out the specimens I wanted to add to my collection and the commandant – unfortunately, I forgot his name – immediately agreed to ship them to my headquarters after processing.
A woman was sitting quietly in the corner, holding a sleeping toddler. A typical Ukrainian peasant, large, raw-boned, with puffed-up weepy eyes. I diagnosed trachoma.
“Is this your child?” I asked through the translator.
“No,” she replied, unexpectedly in decent German, but with a harsh, grating accent. “I’m his nurse.”
The child woke up when I took him but did not cry. He was relatively plump, but his coordination was deficient. Nevertheless, his expression seemed almost adult, and he looked at me as if he understood who I was.
“I want him too,” I said to the commandant and then told the nurse she could go home.
“You are taking them to the local slaughterhouse,” the nurse said. I did not know where the designated site was but the translator nodded. She smiled. Her teeth were white, perfect, and frightening in that dusky seamed face.
“Release the mothers,” she said. “I will stay with the children.”
I was suddenly aware that the hubbub of shrill voices had died down. Everybody was looking at us: the mothers, clutching their spawn; the local policemen; the two SS men.
“Do as she says,” I ordered.
She addressed the mothers in Ukrainian. I don’t know what she said; the translator later claimed not to have heard. And the women, who had been tearing their hair and clutching their heads, got up quietly, one by one, kissed their children, and went out. None of the children cried as they clustered around the nurse.
I don't know what prompted me to do it. I had my lunch with me, a hunk of rye bread and a piece of salt pork wrapped in a newspaper. I offered it to the nurse.
She looked at me but did not touch the food and I felt a strange burning in my eyes, as if her disease had communicated itself to me.
"You should know better than to offer me salt, Unterstrurmfuhrer," she said. "The children are quiet now. Do you want them to start crying again?"
I stared at her stupidly. I don't know how long I would have stood there, destroying my self-respect as a German officer, had not the translator tugged at my arm. It is an index of how lost I was that I was actually grateful to him.
In the morning the policemen took the children to the slaughterhouse where they were terminated. They went quietly and without fear. The nurse refused to be parted from them. She was terminated too.
Why should I be surprised that she knew the legend? This is where they all originated, those venomous, debilitating, polluting superstitions, here, in the miasma of the shtetl. It is not surprising at all that she knew the legend of the astri, a ghostly nurse who takes care of orphans. The astri's true face, sinister and simian, is only revealed when she is forced to taste salt.
That was the only story I had liked as a child.
February 5, 1943
Laura is pregnant! Finally! I can confess now that I had begun to worry. An SS officer whose wife is childless can kiss his career goodbye. But everything is going to be fine now.
Her letter was less enthusiastic than I expected: full of vague fears, feminine shilly-shallying, and damp hints of depression. I wrote back to her immediately, trying to sound reassuring but firm. I am a little disappointed in her.
I am going to call my son Günter, a good Germanic name.
March 12, 1943
Today we are cleaning up the “small ghetto”. No exemptions this time, no skilled workers to preserve, no Mischlinge to merit mercy. Everybody, everybody must go!
The sky is feverish-bright with the reflection of fires. There are no more than 3,000 Jews left but somehow this action seems to be going on forever.
I have been handing out triple doses of sleeping pills. We are overtaxed and undermanned; there are too many of them.
In the morning I walked along the main street. The snow was gray with red veins. The pavement looked as if an immense garbage bin had been upended over the entire town. Rags and open purses trampled into the slush; a dirty baby shoe; a pacifier; a rat gnawing a half-eaten apple.
Suddenly I noticed a scatter of black spiders crawling on the sidewalk. I stopped and looked down: these were twisted Hebrew letters, a large "Aleph" among them.
I fairly jumped up. Fortunately, nobody saw me tiptoeing around the Jewish gravestones that Kremer had ordered to be used for pavement. Eventually, I got a grip on myself and walked straight. The writing was obscured by the dirty slush anyway.
The burial crew sat on the sodden ground, guarded by Klemke. One of them looked at me. Arkady, a stonemason by trade.
“My wife, son, and daughter are dead,” he said, painstakingly stringing German words together. It is horrible to hear them speak; as if a mouse in a mousetrap addressed you with a plea for mercy. Klemke barked something and pulled the trigger, striking the iron fence a couple of meters away.
“Stop it, you idiot!” I yelled.
The fence consists of dense ironwork perched on widely spaced stone pillars. The ironwork ends about twenty-five centimeters off the ground. I heard shuffling at the same time as I saw the heads of mounted policemen appear above the fence. I idly watched the feet passing by, trying to guess their owners’ sex and age. It was not difficult. There were the gaping shoes of old men held together by twine; the dainty sandals of girls, toes curled from the cold; the pompon’ed booties of children, their bright colors dimmed by dirt. And then I saw something else.
Mixed into this procession of feet that crawled past me like an alien caterpillar were bare extremities so deformed they appeared scarcely human. They resembled a bird’s scaled talons, except they were of a size no living bird could match. Grayish or sand-colored, with a rudimentary spur, they scratched the pavement as their owners passed along the fence. There was more than one pair.
“Halt!” I yelled and ran to the gate.
The column dissolved into a confused melee, the people turning to watch me with wild or apathetic eyes. The policemen grumbled. But I was not to be deterred. I ordered the prisoners to stand in a row and went along, examining their feet. I did not care that I must have looked like a crazed Prince Charming looking for his Cinderella. I looked for something far more beautiful: scientific truth.
I reached a slender youth and stopped before him. Dark curly hair, full lips, a typical Oriental physiognomy. He was barefoot and his feet, heavily splattered with mud, looked no different from everybody else’s. But as I looked at him, something peculiar happened, a moment of double vision, as if a different body flickered into being, superimposed upon this young vermin: his real body that was in no way human.
I told him to stand aside and went on. Passing twice along the row, I discovered three more: two women and a boy. I told the policemen to proceed with their task and took the specimens to the dissecting room.
One of the females was a girl of about sixteen, the other an older woman, between thirty and thirty-five. The boy was about six. They all appeared undernourished and suffered from skin diseases. As ordinary a group of Jews as one is likely to encounter, with nothing to distinguish them from their racial brethren. But I knew what I had seen and my heart was racing wildly in presentiment of a major discovery.
I waved the policeman out of the room and addressed the four as they stood against the wall, nude, their hands crossed over their genitals.
“I know who you are,” I said, not bothering with the pretense that they could not understand my German. “I have penetrated your disguise. I am the first one to see what the Fuhrer has divined in his genius: that the Jews are shape-shifters, alien parasites taking on a human form to deceive and destroy. If you tell me how you do it; how you manage to adhere to your form even after death, maddening our soldiers; how you insinuate yourself into our families, mate with our women — I will let the four of you live. In fact, I guarantee you will survive as precious proof of the rightness of our cause. You will not be allowed to breed, of course, but you will be well taken care of. I give you my word.”
They exchanged glances. And oh, how my heart drummed when the girl addressed me in my own language, a fluent, beautiful speech, and yet tinged with something indescribably alien, as if a cat or a fox cried out with a human voice.
“You are destroying our people anyway,” she said. “What proof do you need?”
“I want to know the truth!” I responded.
“The truth is in the eye of the beholder,” said the child.
“No!” I protested. “The truth is absolute and I have dedicated my life to serving it.”
“Is this why you take the lives of others?” asked the youth.
“I take no human lives!” I cried. “I’m not a murderer! Show me who you really are! Show me your true faces!”
“You’ve tasted the sweetness of the letter,” said the woman. “You may see.”
A strange shudder went through the four of them, a ripple as if the ice-cold air in the room had gone through them like an electric current. And then they began to change. Their flesh flowed together like mud, off-white and pink, the gleaming bones poking momentarily through the viscous flood, and then the streams separated and crawled up the bony frames like a congerie of snakes, interweaving and clothing the skeletons anew.
Their trunks retained a roughly human appearance, but the skin was of a dead pinkish-gray, thick and pitted like an orange peel. The overall impression was of the bodies melted down and congealed in random shapes. But below the hips even this residual humanity was lost: the trunks were perched on scrawny chicken-like legs and splayed fleshless feet with curving talons, scrabbling in the dust on the floor.
And their faces! Scaly skin tightly stretched across deformed skulls, lash-less watery eyes with a brilliant, icy flame burning in each pupil, slit-like mouths, stretched open to reveal pointed fangs. And yet, the most horrifying aspect was precisely the degree to which they retained their deceptive individuality so that one could still recognize in these ghastly masks a young girl’s sullen prettiness, a woman’s tired resignation, a teenager’s desperate courage, a child’s pathetic bewilderment.
I surveyed this ultimate proof of the rightness of our cause, this acquittal from the charge that I had never quite dared name to myself. This was the moment of justification. But such is the deviousness of the enemy that precisely at that moment I was overcome by a shameful, unmanning flood of pity. I pitied them in their nakedness as I had not pitied the women, the children, the old men, the babies, the wounded soldiers, Arkady with his dead family, the bullet-riddled mother buried with her living son…
"You recognize us," said the woman. "You know who we are."
"Of course! You are Jews!"
"No, we are the Jews' nightmares. We are the demons of the people you're destroying. We have preyed upon them for millennia. We have been nourished by their fears; we have eaten their desires. But now their fears and desires are ashes. Your madness is consuming our people like a raging fire. And we have to go down with them into the darkness, to be their comfort, for they have no other."
"I don't believe in demons!" I cried. "It's another of your filthy deceits. But science will dispel your lies! Science will reveal you for what you are!"
"You don't believe in demons, Klaus?" said the boy. "How come? You believed in us well enough after you ate a cookie with an Aleph on it. Don't you remember me? I used to be your playmate, little Klaus. I used to come at night and we'd play hide-and-seek. Don't you remember how you spread flour on the bedroom floor one night and the next morning there was a chicken's footprint in it? But Father didn't believe you; he laughed at you, and you were so angry you tore up one of his Hebrew manuscripts. He spanked you. And afterward, you didn't want to play with me, little Klaus. You turned away and threw a pillow at me when I came in…"
I don't know how my gun leaped into my hand. I don't know how I pulled the trigger. I don't know which of them fell first.
But I remember I stood in sudden silence. It’s not too bad, I keep telling myself, for in death they would be as much proof as in life, I only need to start their autopsies immediately…
I dropped the gun and knelt over the bodies.
Lying in the spreading pool of blood were four ordinary executed Jews, a youth with a bullet hole in his forehead, a young girl, a woman, and a child. All naked, all starved and filthy, all dead.
I think I screamed at Kremer who came in, having heard the shots. I pulled him toward the bodies; I lifted their sore-covered feet and pushed them in his blank face. And he did not even bother to shame me or bring me to my senses. He turned around and walked out.
November 15, 1943
I am on home leave. It's fortunate since Laura is about to give birth.
Our reunion was not all I had hoped it would be. Why do women have to swell like sacks of rotting grain in pregnancy? Yes, nature would have her due, but does it have to include blotched skin, dull hair, bloated ankles, bad temper, and random tears?
I didn't tell her this is a compassionate leave. After my supposed nervous breakdown, I was given a pep talk and told, in a sickeningly false paternalistic tone, to make the SS proud with my newborn son. Unofficially they also suggested I should pop the next bun into the oven as soon as possible. Not bloody likely!
I am not mad! I saw what I saw!
[Later the same day]
Laura went into labor. I sent for Frau Richter, the neighborhood's best midwife. She is in the bedroom now with Laura. I've steeled myself for a long wait. I don't expect an easy birth; she's let herself go physically and she is hysterical and frightened. I expect her to start screaming any moment now.
But I won't go outside. I'll do my duty as a German father, even if she is less than a German mother. Perhaps my fortitude will rub off on her.
Strange; the midwife has been inside for over half an hour and I hear no cries. Everything is quiet, deadly quiet. Perhaps I should go in – I'm a doctor, after all.
Suddenly the door opens and Frau Richter stands on the threshold, beaming.
"Herr Schlosser," she says, "come and see your son!"
November 23, 1943
I'm to be court-martialed tomorrow. I'm lucky: normally an SS Court of Honor would sentence me to death. But I can expect clemency. They say that Reichsfuhrer Himmler himself has been troubled by reports about the psychological deterioration of Einzatsgruppen members. He now puts his trust in gassing.
Yesterday I had a visitor, another sign of special consideration. Father.
He came in and I was struck by how old and thin he looked, the slackened yellow skin of his face like a rumpled suit.
"So, Klaus," he said, "it was too much for you, after all."
"No!" I spat. "I want to fight! I'm not a deserter. I hope they'll send me to the front. I don't care for my rank; I'll go as a simple soldier, as long as they give me another chance to fight the enemy!"
"The war has been lost," he said softly.
"This is treason!"
"What will you do? Denounce me? Will they listen to you, a…"
"A madman? Don't be afraid to say it, Father. I know what they think of me. And I know I'm perfectly sane. It's just that I've seen the truth, which they still cannot accept. They mouth the Party line but they refuse to believe what they say. But they'll see it one day, and I'll be vindicated."
He peered at me from out of those pale washed-out eyes in their nest of wrinkles.
"I’m afraid you’re right,” he said. “A madman would be easier to talk to.”
"Never mind! I don't want to discuss metaphysics with you. I just want to see Gunter. Ask them to bring him to me."
"Gunter?"
"My son!"
"Your son's name isn't Gunter," said Father. "It's Adam."
"What kind of name is it? It's not a German name!"
"This is what his mother wanted to call him."
"Laura? You talked to Laura?'
"Of course. We became very close during her pregnancy. She asked me to take care of my grandson. She was afraid she'd die in childbirth. How ironic!"
I should have known. Father, dripping poison into Laura's ear, polluting her weak mind with his Jewish tales…
"Father," I said, "I saw them."
"Who?"
"Your Jewish demons. Creatures from the stories you told me. The astri, the vampire nurse; the chicken-footed ghosts; and… and Lilith, the succubus, who gives birth without pain…"
Yes, I saw her. When I walked on trembling legs into the birthing room where my wife lay in bed, radiant, her face unmarred by labor, her eyes clear, and the midwife was swaddling the loud baby and babbling on about the miracle, the easiest birth she'd seen in her thirty years, no pain at all, just came out as sweetly as you please, like a cork from a bottle. And Laura, smiling at me… before her puffy cheeks thinned out, adhering to the diamond-sharp bones, her blue eyes paling to the unnatural transparency of ice, her blond hair turning as white as the pillow on which it was spread…
I didn't shoot my wife. I shot Lila, Lilith, the eternal deceiver. That they found Laura's body riddled with bullets proves no more than the seemingly human bodies buried in the mass graves in the East.
I expected Father to react as they all did, with mingled horror and pity: the emotional alms thrown by the sane to the mad. But he didn't.
"You saw them?" he asked seriously.
"Yes, I did. And I killed them — I killed all of them. They are no more."
Father’s smile was tired and pale.
"You killed the demons of the Jews," he said. "But Jews still live. And now you've become their demon. When they wake up at night, it's you they'll see in the darkness. The last and most horrifying specter of them all."
I gaped at him. He got up.
"I'll take care of Adam," he said. "I'm sorry, son."
[Undated]
Is he right? Has the war been lost? Will our struggle to rid humanity of parasites come to nothing?
I have questioned myself again and again, and my conscience is clear. I am not a murderer! I am not a baby killer!
If the proof eluded me, then it is the scientist who failed, not the science. Another will come and show the world what I've seen.
And yet, as I lie here on this stinking bunk bed, I keep seeing my father, walking into a billowing yellow cloud. He is carrying a swaddled baby. Adam. His name begins with an "Aleph" in Hebrew: I still remember that much, a poisonous, accursed knowledge that permeates me like filth, like sweat. I will never be rid of it, no matter how hard I try.
My father and my newborn son disappear into the cloud. And I follow.
There are still Jews there, I know. A people cannot live without its demons. And so here I am, going east.
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Born in Ukraine and currently residing in California, Elana Gomel is an academic, an award-winning writer, and a professional nomad. She is well-known in the academy for her work on speculative fiction and narrative theory. Twelve years ago, she published her first fantasy novel and has never looked back. She is the author of more than a hundred short stories, two collections, several novellas, and eight novels. She writes dark fantasy, dark SF, fairy tales, and hard-to-classify dreamlike stories. Her latest novel Nine Levels is out now.
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What are five tiny delights that lift your spirits and make you happy?
1. A cup of very strong black coffee in the morning.
2. Remembering my dream from last night and writing it down while having the said cup of coffee (all my stories and novels have their origin in dreams)
3. Looking at my bookshelves (real or virtual) and realizing I will never run out of books to read.
4. A former student showing up on social media and telling me that they still remember a class I taught.
5. Packing for an upcoming trip.
What are five tiny JEWISH delights that lift your spirits and make you happy?
1. The smell of orange groves in the hot dusk of Tel-Aviv.
2. Real pita and hummus (preferably in Jaffa)
3. Hearing Hebrew in the streets of London
4. Ladino and Mizrahi music
5. Rereading Jean Amery's essay "On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew"
I was amazed by the skillful storytelling, the unreliable narrative, the ambiguous magical realism of this haunting piece. Kol hakavod, Elena Gomel and fiction editor David Michael Slater!
I studied narrative theory with Elana Gomel in Tel Aviv University. I loved that course.