Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 11 of a new online serial novel, Without a Trace, by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every Thursday or Friday. Click here for previous chapters.

The hall in Yerushalayim was buzzing with excited chatter of conversations trying valiantly to make themselves heard over the thudding of the drums, the glass plates clinking onto the table, and the clatter of cutlery attempting to cut the schnitzels that had cooled down during the round of dancing which had just come to an end. Chasida sat at one of the tables, one hand sticking the last bits of the challah roll into her two-year-old niece’s mouth, and the other patting the baby’s back.

She was playing full-time babysitter this evening. Yitzchak’s younger sister-in-law was getting married tonight, and had she not promised her sister-in-law Faigy that she’d come to help her with the little ones, she would have been glad to stay at home. But Faigy didn’t have any big daughters who could help her—only big boys—and she had really pleaded with Chasida. And Mrs. Dresnick had added that there was no way Chasida could not come to Tzivia’le’s wedding. After all, she was the mechutanim’s youngest child. So Chasida had closed the store half an hour early to be able to travel to Yerushalayim.

The mechuteiniste, Faigy and Tzivia’s mother, thanked her effusively for coming and gave her an emotional brachah, but it wasn’t hard to discern the young kallah’s unease. At Yitzchak and Faigy’s wedding, more than twenty years earlier, she had been ten months old. Chasida clearly remembered the blue-eyed baby who refused to part with her mother for even a minute; when the mothers walked around the chassan with Faigy under the chuppah, Tzivia had howled so much that her mother had had no choice, and the little girl had joined the last two revolutions. And then there was the missing pacifier that half the guests spent several long moments on the floor looking for, until one of Faigy’s brothers had run to find an open store so they could buy another one.

But Chasida didn’t even dream of repeating these incidents to the young, excited kallah. They likely didn’t interest her at this moment, and besides, it’s not pleasant to see people discomfited and know that it’s because of you. This twenty-three-year-old kallah, who had indubitably endured her fair share of worrying that she would become an old spinster, did not need to see Chasida up close right now.

“Eat, eat, it’s good,” her mother told Malka’le, who kept stubbornly closing her mouth as the fork approached. Keep Reading…

Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 10 of a new online serial novel, Without a Trace, by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every Thursday or Friday. Click here for previous chapters.

It was almost two days after Gavriel had found a small bag on the door when Shevi went down to the Dresnicks. The bag had held a tiny bottle and a note, which said, “Shevi, it was very nice to meet your mother in the garden, but it’s a shame she had to come under such circumstances. She told be about your ear. These are drops that I’ve heard are very effective. I don’t remember how many drops you need and how often, but just read the instructions. Refuah sheleimah, Chasida.”

Shevi didn’t know if it was the natural drops or the doctor’s antibiotics, but she was finally feeling well enough to go downstairs to say thank you. No one answered her knocks, and although it wasn’t during regular store hours, Shevi decided to try the Dresnicks’ store. She passed the large tree, touching it gently, and wondering if perhaps she should try to draw it, as her mother had suggested. Miri gave her enough free time, and the tree branches looked complex enough to keep her busy sketching for a long time. Maybe she could even open an art group… No, she had no professional training, and to just teach girls to draw a house and a path—their mothers could do that just fine without paying her their hard-earned money.

Just behind the tree, with her back to the trunk, stood Chasida. She was wearing an outfit that Shevi did not recognize, and something about her hair was strange. “I never understood why,” Chasida’s voice said, “and I’m always the worrywart among us!” She moved a bit and then Shevi saw the second person. It was also Chasida, but with her regular auburn hair and her ubiquitous navy ensemble. Keep Reading…

Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 9 of a new online serial novel, Without a Trace, by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every Thursday or Friday. Click here for previous chapters.

Shevi’s mother scraped the last plate and placed it on the counter. Her daughter sat at the table, following her mother’s moves silently, in a near dreamlike state. Her mother wanted to wash the dishes? Fine. Nothing really made a difference to her right now. The dishes could dance in circles in the sink or wash one another, for all she cared.

“It’s a good thing Gavriel called me!” her mother said as she bent down to the cabinet under the sink, where, like at home in Haifa, the cleaning supplies were stored. “My daughter feels like this, and no one should help her?” She took out the bleach. “For the chagim I will buy you a dishwasher, do you hear me, Elisheva? A dishwasher! Who washes dishes these days?”

“Gavriel, sometimes,” Elisheva said weakly, and lay her head down on the table. She raised it almost immediately. The pain in her ear only grew worse in that position.

“Nu, but he has his learning. There’s no reason for either of you to have to stand at the sink. If you don’t have a dishwasher, then at least use paper goods!” She glanced at her daughter. “Do you want to go lie down a bit? You’re pale.”

“The ear hurts much more when I lie down…” Shevi replied tiredly. Just a few days earlier she had parted from her parents, regretting that their visits were so rare, and now her mother was already here again.

“An ear infection,” the doctor had said in a surprised tone. Apparently he didn’t often have young women with ear infections—and in the summer to boot. Ear infections were much more prevalent among children, and in the winter. But Shevi wasn’t surprised; she knew she had always had sensitive ears that reminded her of their existence at least twice a year. Infections in the summer were not especially out of the ordinary for her.

Elinor came into the kitchen holding the broom. “Where’s your dustpan, Shevi?” Keep Reading…

Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 8 of a new online serial novel, Without a Trace, by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every Thursday or Friday. Click here for previous chapters.

Zevi was searching for his comb, which seemed to have disappeared. It wasn’t in his case, nor in his drawer or on the dresser. Where could it be hiding? The silence in the room was broken only by his rapid breaths. The clock—that traitor. How could it creep ahead calmly for two hours, and then suddenly, in the last fifteen minutes, run so wildly, without giving him a second to breathe?

Yehuda Levy burst in, hair wet. “Eight more minutes!” he shouted. “Do we have candles?”

“I don’t,” Zevi said, finally pulling out the missing comb from under a bunched-up pajama top in the closet. “Maybe Yisrael bought some.”

“Even if he did, I have no intention of going through his closet to find them,” Yehuda said, rummaging in his own bag. “Clean socks, where are you? Ouch!” he cried as his bandaged finger slammed onto the open zipper. “When you have a second, Zevi, run and ask someone on this floor for candles.” Keep Reading

Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 7 of a new online serial novel, Without a Trace, by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every Thursday or Friday. Click here for previous chapters.

“I think we were too tough on him.”

“Nonsense!” Minda Dresnick turned around angrily from the sink, switching to Hungarian, like she always did when she was upset. “Who was tough? Like butter you were, Zalman, too much so. You know what Chasida would say if she’d hear you now.”

“Chasida?” Zalman waved his hand. “Let her hear. She doesn’t know Hungarian well anyway. And besides, what does she understand about what was then? She was just a girl at the time.”

“At the time.” Minda wiped her hands on her apron. “And today? And fourteen years ago?” Her husband’s silence was significant, and it got on Minda’s nerves more than all the words that he could have said but didn’t. “You’re always sure that we made all the mistakes, but Eliyahu himself was very wrong and you know it.” She whipped off the yellow apron and hung it on the hook. “I won’t say anything about his mother, aleha hashalom, because I know that you don’t like it when I talk about her, but if I would send our Yitzchak to grow up in his uncle’s house, he would have behaved differently!”

“Yitzchak is Yitzchak and Eliyahu is Eliyahu,” Zalman said placidly, yet firmly. Keep Reading…

Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 6 of a new online serial novel, Without a Trace, by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every Thursday or Friday. Click here for previous chapters.

“Come to us for Shabbos, Chasi,” Shoshi said to her sister on the phone. “The children miss you.”

“And you?” Chasida joked.

“I do, too. Will you come?”

“I’ll think about it.”

Chasida unwound the tangled phone wire and glanced at her watch. In five more minutes she’d be able to close, if the two women browsing through the store would finish their purchases by then. Through the advertising placards hanging on the front glass, she noticed Shevi Auerbach approaching the store.

“What’s doing, Shevi?” Chasida asked as she quickly rang up one of the customers’ purchases.

“Baruch Hashem, everything’s fine,” her younger neighbor responded, looking around. “Do you have something for swollen veins in the legs?”

“There are lots of ‘somethings.’”

“I mean something that will help.” Shevi smiled. One of the women finished paying and left. The second was hidden by the shelves toward the back.

“Who do you need it for?” Chasida inquired. Keep Reading…

Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 5 of a new online serial novel, Without a Trace, by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every Thursday or Friday. Click here for previous chapters.

“Not that we are happy with this step, Eliad,” Shevi’s father said with a resigned smile, “but we are giving you our blessing, just like we gave Shevi.”

“Elisheva,” her mother corrected from the porch, where she was sitting and observing her granddaughter doing what she did for most of the day—dozing in her navy blue carriage.

“Not exactly,” Eliad said, wrinkling his nose. “You sent her to Bnei Brak more happily.”

“Well, of course. Do you expect me to be happy that you’re going to the army and not to Hesder?”

Eliad wrinkled his nose again. “I’m eighteen already, and I’m sick of studies. In the army I’ll have more opportunities.”

“Well, this argument really is superfluous right now,” Abba said placidly, but Shevi, sitting beside him, discerned the nervous twitch on the bottom of his cheek. Yes, Eliad was right. Abba and Ima had had an easier time coming to terms with the changes in her life.

“Elisheva?” Ima rose from her rocking chair. “Do you want to come and see my latest picture?”

“What a question!” A visit to her mother’s workroom was always a special treat, both because it happened so rarely, and because of the smells, the scenes, and the myriad colors that surrounded her when she entered. “Is this the original one?” she asked, hurrying to keep up with her mother’s rapid pace.

“Last chance!” Eliad announced, following her. “There are three takers for this picture. Ima’s planning to sell it this week for two and a half thousand dollars. Can I also come in, Ima?” Keep Reading…

Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 4 of a new online serial novel, Without a Trace, by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every Thursday or Friday. Click here for previous chapters.

Yehudah gave the receiver in his hands a strange look, as though it was responsible for the bizarre conversation he was in the midst of. “His legs?” he repeated incredulously.

“Yes, as in, his feet.”

Yehudah rubbed the creases in his forehead with two fingers. “Do you suspect that he has chicken feet, by any chance?”

“No,” the man replied shortly. “But have you seen his feet?”

“Let me think a minute…” Yehudah said slowly, but not because the additional minute would help jog his memory. He knew very well that he had never seen Zevi Bloch’s feet, and he strongly suspected that no other bachur in the yeshivah had either. Zevi Bloch never took his shoes off during the day, not even during the afternoon rest period. At night he slept curled up, and his feet never peeped out from beneath his blanket. But Yehudah had no intentions of telling anything of the sort to the curious person on the phone. He looked at the receiver in his hand again and remained silent.

“Nu?” Eliyahu asked, fed up with waiting. Keep Reading…

Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 3 of a new online serial novel, Without a Trace, by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every Thursday or Friday. Click here for previous chapters.

“Excellent,” Ilana Auerbach, Shevi’s mother-in-law said, when she heard that Shevi’s father had found a reliable renovations contractor for them. “A friend of your father’s, Shevi? Then let’s hope that that will move things, and within two weeks, give or take, you’ll be able to move in already.”

“Yes,” Shevi said. “Let’s hope. Yes.”

Ilana smiled with satisfaction. “I’m really happy you bought this apartment. It’s a great apartment and the location is also good. It’s not too Chareidi there, right, Gabi?”

“Right,” Gavriel said with a slight smile, looking at the package of cookies in front of him without reaching for it. “But don’t worry, Ima, we’ll get there, too, eventually.”

“You and your jokes. And why aren’t you eating? Soon you’ll tell me the hechsher isn’t good. It’s made with flour from after Pesach, did you know that?” She held little Miri and tried to picture her ten years down the line with tights and long braids. She shuddered at the thought.

“The hechsher is perfect,” Gavriel said, and quickly reached for the package, knocking into Shevi’s coffee cup on the way and splattering light brown drops all around it. “Sorry, Shevi. I’m just not that hungry, Ima.”

“You don’t eat cookies because you’re hungry.” His mother sniffed. “When you’re hungry, you eat normal food, but when you come to Ima and don’t eat anything because you’re sure her kitchen is treif, then you have no choice and you eat cookies.” Keep Reading…

Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 2 of a new online serial novel, Without a Trace, by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every Thursday or Friday. Click here for previous chapters.

The friendship that blossomed between Yehuda and Zevi after that night was unquestionably an interesting one. It began the morning after their nocturnal encounter.

“Zevi, I think your mother’s waiting for you outside.”

“My mother?” Zevi was surprised.

“She asked me to call you. Go check.”

He went and checked, and was pleased to discover his mother standing on the sidewalk outside, leaning on the gate. “Hello. Did you eat?” she asked when he was still several feet away from her. A light, end-of-winter breeze blew around them. Small yellow bursts of color, peeping between the scraggly grass in the unkempt yard behind them, heralded the imminent arrival of spring.

“Yes.” He smiled. “I just bentched. Hello, Ima, how are you?” Keep Reading…