Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 3 of a new online serial novel, Dance of the Puppet, by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every week. Click here for previous chapters. 

Copyright © Israel Bookshop Publications. 

The moon had already sunk behind the buildings, and faint rays of light began to glow on the horizon. Bentzy had been screaming for more than an hour, and Yaffa really had nothing left to do but cry with him. She sat on a kitchen chair so that Elchanan wouldn’t wake up, and hugged Bentzy. The windows were closed; the neighbors weren’t to blame for the fact that her baby had decided to give a concert tonight. He’d drank his bottle, had been changed from head to toe because she thought perhaps he was hot, and then had been changed again ten minutes later because she worried that maybe he was cold. They’d paced up and down the kitchen floor, the porch—where there was almost no room to move, the short hallway, and even the bathroom. She’d almost decided to give him a bath, but trembled in fear at the thought of doing it without Chaya or Elchanan. In the end, both she and the baby fell asleep on the chair in the kitchen.

“Yaffa?” Elchanan was standing in the doorway, squinting his eyes. “He’s going to fall in a second. You should put him into bed.”

“What?” She opened her eyes in alarm when she saw the pale light coming through the window, and immediately realized that Bentzy was sleeping on her lap. “Oy!” she cried, grabbing him tightly. “Oh my goodness!”

“Did he cry a lot last night?” Elchanan asked, entering the kitchen. “Why didn’t you wake me up?” Keep Reading…

Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 2 of a new online serial novel, Dance of the Puppet, by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every week. Click here for previous chapters. 

Copyright © Israel Bookshop Publications. 

Elchanan arrived home at one-thirty punctually, as usual. Sophie had only just recently left. He was greeted by a delicious aroma, one screaming baby, and one tired, confused wife.

“I don’t know what she wants from me,” Yaffa said. She put the bread down on the table and brushed invisible crumbs off her housecoat. “Do you think it’s so terrible to leave school when you’re doing so poorly there anyway?”

Terrible?

“It’s a very good, smart move,” her teacher had told her at the time, when she had come to school the day after the vort, walking straight into a classroom full of excited, albeit slightly uncomfortable, girls. “I wouldn’t be telling this to a lot of girls, but you, Yaffa, really are very mature.”

It was nice to get the compliment, which had helped drown out the wave of whispers that had exploded the minute her engagement had become public knowledge. She was so young, only at the end of eleventh grade, and not a soul had known it was going to happen.

“I don’t ask friends for information,” Elchanan’s mother had said with her strong French accent. “What do girls know at this age? Nothing, absolutely nothing.”

Her friends, almost all of them, really wouldn’t have been able to give information about Yaffa. They simply knew nothing about her. During lessons and oral tests, Yaffa’s voice went silent. During recess, the girls also hardly heard her. Was it because she was refined?

She seemed to take written tests, but no one had ever seen her grades, not even the one or two girls who were considered her real friends. Was it because she was a poor student?

The girls knew that she had lots of nieces and nephews in Elad and Yerushalayim, that she was the youngest at home, and that she helped out her married sisters a lot. Did that mean that she had a good heart?

One minute—there was also the time she had volunteered—or her services had been volunteered—for that annoying job of collecting money for a teacher’s gift, but she’d delegated the reminders and the nudging and the actual purchase of the gift to someone else. So did that mean that she was or wasn’t responsible?

What was she? Read More…

Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 1 of a new online serial novel, Dance of the Puppet, by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every week.  

Copyright © Israel Bookshop Publications. 

Shuli didn’t like the new tiles. The old ones were much easier to wash; a rinse and she’d be done. But since the renovations, there’d been so many new rules in the house that Shuli didn’t even remember all of them. “First, wax…” she said, looking gloomily at the dirty floor. “No, first we pour the water! Ugh!”

“Stop it,” her mother said as she got ready to leave the house. “A girl your age has to help out at home in whatever way she can. When I was thirteen, I was already carrying cases in the market with my father. Be happy that you’re a Bais Yaakov girl who doesn’t have to work at a market stand after school, and all you’re being asked to do is clean a bit. What’s the big deal?”

To Shuli, selling in the market seemed to be much more exciting than cleaning the new marble floors. But no one was asking her. She bid her mother goodbye, and the door closed.

“And the kitchen cabinets!” Shuli said to Baruch, who turned away from her and made a face. “How did you get them so dirty? The old brown cabinet doors never showed such stains!” She entered the kitchen with her rag and attacked the gleaming doors angrily. Read More…

Israel Book Shop presents  a new online serial novel, Dance of the Puppet, by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every week. 

How does it feel to be on stage, in the limelight, holding a most prestigious title…when you’re really nothing more than a puppet, directed by the real power-that-be figures in your life?

Enter Yaffa Levinsky’s world. Though married and with a child of her own, Yaffa still has not found her own voice…until a most absurd turn of events, which lands her with a position that she never, in her wildest dreams, would have ever thought would be hers…

Can the puppet really do a dance of its own?

Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 40 of a new online serial novel, Without a Trace, by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every week. Click here for previous chapters.