Aaron Kreuter's "Tel Aviv—Toronto Red Eye: A Dialogue" from Rubble Children
Short Fiction | Issue 38
Excerpt from Rubble Children
Tel Aviv—Toronto Red Eye: A Dialogue
Dear Stephanie: Congratulations! We’ve decided to accept your short story “Tel Aviv—Toronto Red Eye” for publication in Moose and Seal. One of our senior editors will write you shortly with some minor editorial suggestions. Sincerely, Chelsea Smith Fiction Editor Moose and Seal: Canada’s National Magazine
Dear Chelsea: This is great news! I’m thrilled to have my story appear in the magazine. I’ve been tweaking and submitting this particular story for a long time now. After all the rejections, all the doubt, having it accepted in a journal like Moose and Seal really means a lot to me. I look forward to the edits. Please let me know if there’s anything else you need from me in the meantime. Excitedly, Stephanie
Dear Chelsea: Hi. It’s Stephanie again. I’ve been walking around in a state of nerve-tingling excitement ever since I got your email. This will be, by far, the biggest publication I’ve ever had. But then I realized that I never submitted “Tel Aviv-Toronto Red Eye” to your magazine. I double-checked in my submissions notebook, and it’s true; I never submitted it. Needless to say, I’m pretty confused. Did you hear about the story from somewhere else (though where that somewhere else could be I have no idea)? If you could fill me in, I’d greatly appreciate it. Best, Stephanie
Dear Stephanie:
Milton Green here, senior fiction editor. I’m looking forward to working with you on this story. Does it really matter where we first encountered it? The fact is that we love it, and can’t wait to publish it! Can’t beat that. Before we embark on the dark and perilous journey that is known as the editing process, I do have one small niggling question about the story that we should get out of the way first. Why, on page 3 of the story, does your narrator—who we assume, of course, is a thinly veiled version of yourself—say that she feels “more Jewish when on a plane flying home to Toronto from South Florida than when she’s flying home from Tel Aviv?” I can’t quite grasp what you’re getting at here. Please advise.
Cheers,
Milton Hi Milton: Thanks for writing. I’m not really sure I understand your question, but I’ll try to answer. For starters, it’s meant to be a joke, commenting on the complicated network of movement between Jewish communities worldwide. But, on a deeper level, I suppose, it’s about the deeply diasporic, deeply American, nature of Jewish South Florida, which is quite different than the national, macho Israeli culture. The whole story is meant to interrogate this tension between Israel and the Diaspora, which is one reason it takes place on an overnight flight between Tel Aviv and Toronto. Hope this helps! Stephanie
Thanks for your quick response. I’m sorry to say that we’re still not understanding the “joke” as you put it. Are you saying that South Florida is more Jewish than Israel? Why would you have a character say such an obviously false thing? It basically implies that the narrator of the story, and therefore you yourself, don’t think Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state. Is that true, Stephanie? And another thing. Why, in the climax of the story, does your Palestinian-American character have sex with your Jewish character in the washroom—both of them women, might I add—while everybody waiting in line calls them derogatory names? Why have a Palestinian character in a story about Israel at all? And one that takes place on a plane, nonetheless? Isn’t that extremely triggering for your story’s potential Jewish readers? I found it triggering. Quite triggering. Pardon my language, but what the fuck is going on here? The whole story is about how false the borders are between Palestinian and Jew, Israel and Canada, settler-colonialism here and settler-colonialism there. And in answer to your last question, no, I do not think having a Palestinian—who is a human being just like any other human being—on an airplane in a story is triggering, and frankly, I’m surprised you would say such a thing.
No need to get testy. We just don’t like, nor understand, this scene at all. In fact, we’re recommending that you alter it/remove it entirely. There are things that a Jewish writer should not write about. You know this, Stephanie. You should know this. We gave you the benefit of the doubt, but it seems that the antisemitic tendencies we located in the story are more than just a writerly flourish. Milton, I’m sorry for swearing in my last message, it’s just that I’m pretty frustrated. This has turned from an excellent week into an exceedingly strange week; never before have I felt like my fiction has come alive, tripped me as I walked down the street. Does writing about the complexities of the Jewish experience, does acknowledging the existence of Palestinians, really make one an antisemite? Not to me they don’t. As a Jewish writer who happens to live in Canada, I deeply believe that my fiction should go to these uncomfortable places, should say what has for the most part remained unsaid, should expose in order to move towards something better. I’ve always loved the fiction in Moose and Seal for this very reason.
So you admit that you’re a self-hater? We had our suspicions. What do you know about Israel, anyways? What, you think because you’ve read a couple of Tom Segev books you’re an expert now? Well, I’m afraid if you are not willing to remove the following items from your story, we’re going to have to retract our offer of publication, and the *very handsome* payment that would have gone along with it. Not to mention the Canada-wide exposure. Please excise from the story: The aforementioned scene in the bathroom.
The Palestinian character.
The discussion of Israel’s nuclear arsenal.
The argument between the Orthodox man and the secular woman about messianic time that ends with them giving each other handjobs.
The contention that living in diaspora could possibly be better than living in a utopic country such as Israel.
The daydream about the ethical potential of intermarriage.
The entire ending—and most of the beginning—will have to be rewritten as well.
We actually recommend that you change the entire plot. Why not have it be about a young Jewish man afraid of commitment falling in love with a tough-around the edges Israeli sabra? And have the pilot a raging Israel-hating antisemite? Now there’s a recipe for comedy and romance! Or, instead of it taking place on a plane, why not at a Bedouin tent during a birthright trip? Now that would be a story! What? What are you talking about? Why would I change the whole story?
Because you are a good Jewish writer and you want to write good Jewish stories. Wait a minute. You accepted the story for publication. Why did you do so if you don’t even like the story? I’ve been speaking to some of my writer friends (and non-writer friends, not to mention my therapist), and you are behaving very unprofessionally. Normally, I would probably just go along with it, but “Tel Aviv-Toronto Red Eye” is very important to me. I’m seriously thinking of pulling the story.
Now Stephanie, don’t get excited. You think you know how you feel about Israel, but do you really? Remember the nights awake, full of doubt? Remember your own time in Israel, thinking, maybe it’s not as bad as all that? Remember how you felt when you saw that Palestinian man at the Nakba Day rally wearing a shirt that said “The Zionists Did 9/11”? Think of that man whenever you want to write a story that extols the virtues of intermarriage. What does that one sad, crazy man have to do with anything? And no, I will not make those changes. I refuse to soften my writerly vision for your fear of upsetting your Zionist readers, or whatever the hell is going on here.
Well then, Stephanie. Sorry to say. You will never publish at Moose and Seal, or any other major Canadian magazine again. I’ll see to that, believe you me. Enjoy being on the wrong side of history.
Fine. That’s just fine. No big deal. No big deal at all. … Wait. Wait a minute! I’ve changed my mind. Okay? I’ll do it. I’ll make the changes! You’re right, setting it at a Bedouin tent makes much more sense. I’ll do it all! Just please, please, please, publish my story. Hello? Milton? Hello? Hello? Hello?
Excerpted with permission from Rubble Children: Seven and a Half Stories by Aaron Kreuter (University of Alberta Press, 2024).
Aaron Kreuter is the author of four books, including the 2022 Governor General's Literary Award shortlisted poetry collection Shifting Baseline Syndrome. He lives in Toronto and teaches at Trent University.
Rubble Children: Seven and a Half Stories by Aaron Krueter University of Alberta Press
In seven and a half interlinked stories, Aaron Kreuter’s Rubble Children tackles Jewish belonging, settler colonialism, Zionism and anti-Zionism, love requited and unrequited, and cannabis culture, all drenched in suburban wonder and dread. Sometimes realist, sometimes not, the book revolves around Kol B'Seder, a fictional Reform synagogue in the Toronto suburb of Thornhill. In these stories, the locked basement room in the home of the synagogue’s de facto patriarch opens onto a life-altering windfall; visions of an omnipotent third temple terrify; rhythms of the Jewish and scholastic year collide in bong rips and hash hits; alternate versions of Israel/Palestine play out against domestic drama. In the title story, a group of Jewish girls obsessed with the Holocaust discover that they are far from the only people who live in the rubble of history. Engaging, funny, dark, surprising, Rubble Children is a scream of Jewish rage, a smoky exhalation of Jewish joy, a vivid dream of better worlds.
Praise for Rubble Children
"What if the worldview you were raised in turns out to be monstrous? In the stories that form Rubble Children, Aaron Kreuter examines a Jewish community in flux, caught between its historical fealty to Israel and a growing awakening and resistance to it. Rubble Children is a book of great range: at once political, communitarian, empathetic, funny, revolutionary, touching, and hopeful. This is a work that is essential for our moment." Saeed Teebi, author of Her First Palestinian
“The stories simultaneously ground themselves in the immediate, lived experience of the Jewish community in Toronto and leap beyond it into possible futures, following flights of imagination that curl back on the present, revealing its hidden dimensions. Rubble Children breaks what is essentially new ground for the Canadian short story. Urgent, topical, and contemporary, it makes for genuinely exhilarating reading.” Aaron Schneider, author of The Supply Chain
"A solid and provocative collection that needles all the contradictions in one Jewish community north of Toronto. The story ‘Rubble Children’ is jam-packed with scrappiness, turmoil, and revelation." Tamara Faith Berger, author of Yara
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