Lovely stories.

I would like to put some short stories and essays here that I like.
Let's start with an essay published in Jerusalem Post newspaper. It is something about teaching...



By Yedidya Meir

Ten o'clock recess, beginning of winter, sixth grade. Blackboard, small chairs, walls painted an ugly green color, schoolbags, notebooks, and a wintry aroma of tangerine peels. Recess ends and the principal enters the classroom. In our school the principal was also the history teacher and the composition teacher. That was the scariest thing because when the man came in, you never knew whether he was about to kick someone out of school or had only come to tell us about World War I.

But on this particular day he came in to teach composition. "Write me a composition of a page and a half on the yoreh" - the first serious winter rainfall - the principal ordered as he was still coming through the door. As though a kid could write even a page about the yoreh. As though an adult could write a page about the yoreh.

I actually did pretty well on these compositions. And not because I knew how to write. Not at all. I simply did what the teacher said. He told us that a good composition has to open with something that generates interest, some sort of fascinating cry of amazement, otherwise it's worthless. And that is exactly what I did. Here, for example, is the particularly stimulating opening I wrote on the topic of "A trip to the Safari Park": "'Yay, yay,' the children called out, 'soon we will give bananas to the monkeys.'" Or, for example, "'Oy! Oy!' came a shout from the staircase," which was the opening of a composition on the subject of "My brother broke his leg." I especially liked writing compositions about births: "'Mazal tov! Mazal tov!' Dad said. You have twin brothers!" (Why twins? Because one baby is not stimulating enough to make the reader keep going.) Naturally, the composition teacher was turned on by these prologues and praised my sense for literature.

But in our class we also had Yehiel. A good boy, very quiet. He lived in a community of Yemenite immigrants. All this happened less than 20 years ago, at the beginning of the 1990s, but Yehiel, who came from a family of 11 children, looked as though he had just that morning alighted from some magic carpet: black eyes, long curly earlocks, and also a gentle smile framed by a dimple. Like all the other pupils, Yehiel had nothing to write about the yoreh. But because he was a good boy, he gave it a try, wrote something and handed it to the principal - namely the history teacher, namely the composition teacher.

The time for writing was over, and as in every lesson, the principal launched into his creative writing course. There was a permanent routine: He took a particularly bad composition, read it out loud and tore it to pieces. Of course, this was not complete without the class being told who the writer of the work was.

And the boy whose composition was chosen out of all the others that day, in that class, was Yehiel. The principal started to read out the composition, sentence after sentence: "The yoreh is the first rain. The first rain is the yoreh. When it rains after the summer everyone is happy and they call it the yoreh."

The principal read it out with mocking intonation and the whole class laughed. As though someone else had written something better. And I have to admit that I laughed, too, because it was funny. And even if it wasn't, everyone laughed, so I did, too. Then suddenly I noticed that there was one kid who wasn't laughing. Yehiel. Not only was he not laughing, he suddenly started to cry. You know, the way kids cry in school - head on the desk, sobbing. In the dark.

Nearly 20 years have gone by since then, but to this day, when the first rain after the summer comes and everyone is happy and they call it the yoreh, I remember Yehiel's highly precise writing: The yoreh is the first rain. The first rain is the yoreh.

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