“Women we called grandma were fifty. The palm tree trunks dripped sweat even in the dark. The water tasted of sugar and cinnamon. Our hands were twelve. Our legs were twelve. All of our organs were twelve and completely unaware of being organs.”

“I went with Sarah my mother to the Strauss Clnic on Balfour Street and they’d give me a shot every week with the giant needle and after my portion of torments, we’d leave there, go down to Allenby Street, and Sarah my mother would buy me an ice cream at the Shnir and call it “some consolation” for what I had gone through.”

As Christians all over the world celebrate Christmas, we travel to the Galilee region of Israel through the eyes of the novelist Anton Shammas.

“The bed knew many things. What was buried underneath, the weight of bodies, hot memory. It knew positions and breaths of relaxation and fervor and further it knew how to dream and draw inventions from the subconscious. Is there anything beyond its imagination?

“Grandma weeps. The angel of the breathing machine industriously drones a rhythmic song. In the hallway the nurses shout. beyond the window I see roofs of ugly buildings gnawing at the sun until it is no more.”

“The schmaltz, the Jew, the wife…We really are a special people, aren’t we, my friends? You just can’t compare any other nation to us Jews. We’re the chosen People! God had other options, but he picked us!”

“In a house empty and cold like a Beckett play / The children, bubbling like Coca Cola, / Were shuttered behind the door. / Her breaking point shattered like a bell jar. / Now I close my eyes and nurse a hidden dream behind rose eyelids.”

“We spoke in the plural. That’s how we were born, that’s how we grew up, forever. Our horizons were strange, bent.”

“She didn’t hear the whole Haftorah because the window was full of birds that flew to faraway countries and the skies were clouded, and Clara cried into her embroidered handkerchief until her mother jabbed her with her elbow and whispered in her ear, but she didn’t understand what her mother was saying.”