Ehud Havazelet was the award-winning author of the novel Bearing the Body (2007) and two story collections, What Is It Then Between Us? (1988) and Like Never Before (1998), which was a New York Times notable book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book. In addition to the Whiting, he was awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations. He taught in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon. Havazelet passed away in 2015.
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Like Never BeforeStoriesFrom"Lyon"
It was 1943. The agency that helped smuggle Jews into Switzerland had sent them, this third trip, to collect money from the rich and—for the time being—protected Jews in the Italian Zone. Tomorrow they would be returning with enough money for six families to escape to Geneva. Maxim wondered what this farm girl would make of such information. He wondered when his name, and his mother’s and brother’s, would reach the top of the list. He wondered if she would do more than kiss him if he tried. He looked at her, her full lips and pretty face. She turned onto her side and pulled her jacket closer.
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Like Never BeforeStoriesFrom"Pillar of Fire"
“You broke into my car?’
She was off the hood in an instant, the car between them, hands up as if he were about to rush her. “We didn’t,” she said.
He looked at her a moment, then at the younger girl, still sitting in the car. She hadn’t moved. An odd, sweet smell came off her, as if she’d been eating candy all day. “It was open, sir,” this girl said, looking up. “We just sat in it to wait.”
“You left the keys,” the other girl said, keeping her distance. She reached in her jeans and came out with his keys. She tossed them at him. “Someone could have stolen it. We watched it for you.”
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Like Never BeforeStoriesFrom"Eight Rabbis on the Roof"
At the stove three old men tend a cooking pot. They hover, hold ladles, wooden spoons, a spatula. Birnbaum steps closer and sees, in the pot, tea bags, all he had, maybe three dozen, flailing in the brown swirl like drowning men coming up for air. The old men sniff, carry spoonfuls to their noses, poke each other’s bony ribs, and smile. They are in holiday clothing, unbelievably tattered, fur hats that look gnawed on, long coats with peeling colored patches, fringes the color of cat’s teeth trailing to the floor.
Like Never Before:Stories
“Havazelet is a writer who takes huge risks, who challenges us—and himself—to love those who are the most unlovable, the most deeply and humanly flawed . . . Havazelet's novel won't make you happier, unless it cheers you to admire a writer who doesn't merely describe but actually reproduces experiences that seem simultaneously universal and intimate . . . It can hurt to be shown reality, to be told the truth. But Bearing the Body reminds you that there's nothing else like it.” —Francine Prose, The New York Times
“Reading several of the stories at a time is a little like thumbing through an old album of family snapshots, that lightly undertaken but perilous activity, when illuminated and frozen moments unexpectedly summon up the submerged links and tensions that have lain humming through the darkness between them . . . As dense, intricate, and sophisticated as they are, these stories flow easily along. The author has given us only the essential; the prose is graceful and direct. Although the materials of the book are generally those of daily life, there's an exciting velocity and bounce to the work, owing in part to zooming shifts of perspective and perception . . . Havazelet is a master at locating life's hinges, at depicting the astonishing and exquisitely painful divergence between the way we fit into our worlds and the way we need to think we do.” —Deborah Eisenberg, Bookforum [on Like Never Before]
“Extraordinary. . .The 10 interrelated stories of Like Never Before move inexorably toward a sadness that cracks the heart, and a hard-won reconciliation that affirms the human spirit.” —Sanford Pinsker, The Washington Post
Selected Works
