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…

Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 1 of a new online serial novel, Without a Trace, by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every Thursday or Friday. 

Zevi flipped the pillow over to the other side, hoping that perhaps this simple act would achieve something, although he knew the chances were slim. One would think that this side of the pillow had something that would help him finally fall asleep. He was nearing despair. Was it possible to not fall asleep the whole night?

The silence that enveloped the room irritated him. His three roommates were the type who got into bed, said Krias Shema, turned over, and after a moment or two were sound asleep. He usually dropped off easily as well, but lately, he had been having trouble. Strange. He had long gotten over the adjustment of his new yeshivah.

Or perhaps not. He sat up with a sigh, and swung his legs over the side of the bed so his feet touched the floor. Yehuda Levy turned over in his bed on the other side of the room, while the seventeen-year-old youth quickly stuck his feet into the shoes waiting beside the bed and laced them quietly. Yehuda continued tossing and turning, and then suddenly he raised his head and queried, “Oww oh ah?”

Zevi raised a surprised pair of eyes. “Aah!” he cried. He had been sure, for some reason, that he was the only one in the room awake. Apparently there were others who sometimes had trouble falling asleep, too, but they did it in a quieter fashion than he did. “Ah uh huh!” he replied.

Regardless of whether he understood or not, Yehuda burst into typical “Yehuda” laughter. Zevi couldn’t help but join him. There was something contagious about Yehuda’s laughter, and there was undoubtedly something very humorous about this situation. Two yeshivah bachurim sitting on their beds at half past two or three in the morning, conversing in such an odd way—a stranger entering the room would no doubt be convinced that he had happened upon an institution for deaf-mutes. Of course, that would only be if he didn’t realize that both boys had already recited Hamapil.

Yehuda fell suddenly silent and pointed to the half-open door. “Mmmm?” he asked, and Zevi provided a nod in response, watching as Yehuda shoved his feet into his slippers. The two boys rose, stretched, and together made their way toward the door.

Keep Reading…