"Seeds in the Desert" - A Short Story by Mendel Mann- originally published in Yiddish in 1966 -translation Copyright 2019 Heather Valencia

 Born: December 9, 1916, Płońsk, Poland

Died: 1975, Paris, France

Today's Story may be read in the sample of the Kindle Edition of the book

"Seeds in the Desert" - A Short Story by Mendel Mann- originally published in Yiddish in 1966 -translation Copyright 2019 Heather Valencia

"Seeds in the Desert" opens in The Bedouin market in Beersheba, Israel. The narrator's account of his time lets us see his reaction to a place in which he is both occupier, refuge, and observor:

"Lying on my bed in the shabby little hotel in the Moroccan quarter of Beersheba, I find myself bursting into bitter, defiant laughter. I go and throw open the window. Again I hear the noise of the blaring radio. Now the tables are occupied by women with double chins, and in the gutters children are playing with abandoned cigar butts and poking about in the rubbish Lying on my bed in the shabby little hotel in the Moroccan quarter of Beersheba, I find myself bursting into bitter, defiant laughter. I go and throw open the window. Again I hear the noise of the blaring radio. Now the tables are occupied by women with double chins, and in the gutters children are playing with abandoned cigar butts and poking about in the rubbish from the Bedouin market. Prams stand beside the café tables. Hookahs. A young mother has taken out her breast, round and white like a full moon, and she thrusts the nipple into the mouth of a crying baby. The sharp neon light falls on the tables. I stare at the mother’s moon-breast with the tiny child sucking on it. I am scared of the screams that will pierce the heart of the night like a knife. I know they will soon begin. I pray to almighty God that He will protect us. The silence also frightens me, for I constantly seem to hear sinister footsteps"

The narrator converses with an older man, a Jew who immigrated to Israel from India. We see struggles to fit into a new homeland 

MANN, MENDEL (Mendl Man ; 1916–1975), Yiddish novelist and painter. Mann was born in Płonsk, Poland. He died in Paris.When his art education in Warsaw was interrupted by the Nazi invasion, he fled eastwards and enlisted in the Red Army, in which he witnessed the siege of Moscow and the occupation of Berlin. After the war he settled in Łodz and published a volume of verse, Di Shtilkayt Mont ("Silence Calls," 1945). Following the Kielce pogrom, he moved to Regensburg in 1946, where he edited a Yiddish dp newspaper. He immigrated to Israel in 1948, where he published Oyfgevakhte Erd ("Awakened Earth," 1953), a collection of stories reflecting the lives of Jewish refugees living in a former Palestinian village. From 1949 he was a co-editor of Di Goldene Keyt. The novel, In a Farvorloztn Dorf ("In an Abandoned Village," 1954), is based on the life of Zionist emigrants to Palestine from Jewish villages in the vicinity of Płonsk. His most outstanding work is a trilogy of novels reflecting his wartime experiences. The constituent volumes are Bay di Toyern fun Moskve (1956; At the Gates of Moscow, 1963), Bay der Vaysl ("At the Vistula," 1958), and Dos Faln fun Berlin ("The Fall of Berlin," 1960). The action deals with fighting on the Eastern Front seen through the eyes of Jews serving in the Red Army (whose contribution is minimized to indulge Stalin's prejudice), the reactions of the Russian and Ukrainian population as the Nazis approach Moscow, the instinctive patriotism of ordinary Soviet soldiers and their aspirations for greater freedom after the war. The Nazi leaders are portrayed as histrionic charlatans. Further important prose works are Nakht iber Glushino ("Night over Glushino," 1957), Di Gas fun Bliendike Mandlen ("The Street of Almond Blossoms," 1958), a collection of stories set in Palestine, Al Naharoys Poyln ("By the Rivers of Poland," 1962), and a further volume of stories, Der Shvartser Demb ("The Black Oak," 1969). In 1961 Mann moved to Paris and became the editor of Undzer Vort. He built up a significant art collection and became a friend of Marc Chagall. In 1963 he edited the Yiddish section of Sefer Plonsk ve-ha-Sevivah, the Płonsk memorial volume. There were exhibitions of his paintings in the 1930s in Warsaw and in 1967 in Paris. His works have been extensively translated into French and German. From the Enclopedia Britanica website