THE GREATEST JEWISH AMERICAN LOVER
IN HUNGARIAN HISTORY
MICHAEL BLUMENTHAL
ALSO BY MICHAEL BLUMENTHAL
No Hurry: Poems 2000–2012
Sympathetic Magic: Poems
Days We Would Rather Know: Poems
Laps: A Book-Length Poem
Against Romance: Poems
To Woo and To Wed: Poets on Love & Marriage (editor)
Weinstock Among the Dying: A Novel
When History Enters the House: Central European Essays, 1992-1996
Dusty Angel: Poems
And Yet: Selected Poems of Péter Kántor
All My Mothers and Fathers: A Memoir
Correcting the World: Selected Poetry and Writings of Michael Blumenthal
And: Poems
Unknown Places: Poems by Péter Kántor (translator)
Just Three Minutes, Please: Thinking Out Loud on National Public Radio
“Because They Needed Me”: The Incredible Struggle of Rita Miljo to Save the Baboons of South Africa
© 2014 by Michael Blumenthal
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher:
Etruscan Press
Wilkes University
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Wilkes-Barre, PA 18766
(570) 408-454
Published 2014 by Etruscan Press
Cover design by Michael Ress
Interior design and typesetting by Laurie Elizabeth Powers
The text of this book is set in Times New Roman.
First Edition
14 15 16 17 18 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Blumenthal, Michael
[Short stories. Selections]
The greatest Jewish American lover in Hungarian history / Michael Blumenthal.
pages cm
Summary: “Blumenthal draws both a humorous and heartrending portrait of expatriate life in Europe and Central Europe, as well as the hazards and confusions that confront a European sensibility living in contemporary America. In venues as diverse as Israel, Hungary, Paris, Cambridge and, even, Texas, the stories testify to the work of an American in an increasingly connected and globalized world”-- Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-0-9886922-6-8 (eBook)
1. Short stories, Jewish. I. Title.
PS3552.L849G74 2014
813’.54--dc23
Please turn to the back of this book for a list of the sustaining funders of Etruscan Press.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
This book is printed on recycled, acid-free paper.
for Isabelle & Noah, this not-so-great Jewish-American lover’s greatest loves
“I had affairs with a few girls of my own age, and they taught me that no girl, however intelligent and warm-hearted, can possibly know or feel half as much at twenty as she will at thirty-five.”
— Stephen Vizinczey, In Praise of Older Women: The Amorous Recollections of András Vajda
Author’s Note
In my “real” life, I am a law professor, pledged and committed to seeking and finding the truth as best as we mere lawyerly humans can, and helping those who are its possible beneficiaries. In my “other” life, I am a writer, committed to another kind of truth—perhaps deeper, more nuanced, and certainly often more difficult to achieve—and to the pleasure and moral self-scrutiny of my readers.
What follows are works of fiction, howsoever they may depend for their genesis and some of their details on actual occurrences and actual people in my life, myself included. What they are decidedly not, dear readers, are mere autobiographical vignettes disguised as something else. We fiction writers are not, like Bartleby, copyists—we are, rather, embellishers, inventors, liars, exaggerators, people who, as the poet, Robert Pack, once put it, tell personal lies in order to tell impersonal truths. The fiction writer and the lawyer, blessedly, bow to different gods, and I try, in my happily divided life, to remain devout to those I worship in each domain. So—here’s hoping you will worship with me, and not find yourself expecting to encounter the wrong god in the wrong place, as I hope I haven’t either.
The Greatest Jewish American Lover in Hungarian History
The Greatest Jewish American Lover in Hungarian History
The Whores
My French Wife
Tomorrow
Good Night and Good Luck
The Translator
They: An Anti-Romance
Il n’y a pas d’Amour Heureux
Netanyahu’s Mistress
Vajda’s Resurrection
The Life You Hate May Be Your Own
He Had Tried
The Letter
Acknowledgments
Several of the stories included in this selection have previously appeared in the following periodicals, to whose editors the author is profoundly grateful.
| The Chattahoochee Review | “Tomorrow” |
| Formations | “The Translator” |
| International Literary Quarterly | “Three Beds” |
| Legal Studies Forum | “The Life You Hate May Be Your Own” |
| One Story | “The Death of Fekete” |
| Ploughshares | “She and I” |
| Story Quarterly | “He Had Tried” |
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