"At Your Gate" by Dina Rubina, summary Automatic translate

"At Your Gate" is a 1993 novella written by Dina Rubina shortly after emigrating to Israel in 1990. It’s autobiographical fiction, narrated in the first person by a Russian-speaking writer who recently settled in Jerusalem with her husband, Boris, and their two children. The text itself is labeled "unedited" — not a disclaimer, but an artistic design: the diaristic intonation, syntax errors, asides, and self-irony inform the narrative.

The action unfolds across two time periods that flow into one another: the first weeks and months of life in Jerusalem — with adaptation, everyday chaos, and linguistic helplessness — and the eve of the Gulf War, when the city had already been issued gas masks and the windows were sealed. Both periods are stitched together by memories of her former life in Russia and observations of Jerusalem street life.

The first days in Jerusalem

The narrator’s family arrives in the country and falls into a state she compares to typhoid fever: fever, delirium, the sensation of being on a speeding train. They rent an apartment in the religious neighborhood of Ramot, on a hilltop overlooking Mount Scopus and the Jordan Mountains. The furniture is junk from storage: rickety chairs, a sofa with someone else’s leg, and a huge desk, in the top drawer of which a note in Russian is found, "Don’t forget to water the flower." The refrigerator, a gift from the neighbors, is older than the state of Israel itself and never turns off. On the very first evening, the neighbor to the right brings a robe and a washed Israeli flag — her son demands the flag be hung on the balcony immediately.

Her husband, Boris, attends synagogue with his religious Jewish neighbors and returns three hours later completely devastated. The narrator records how they both fall silent: not clinging to each other as they had before leaving Russia, but simply silent, each alone with their unnamed illness.

Getting to Know Timak

The poet Grisha Sapozhnikov, aka Zvi ben Nachum, finds work for the narrator — a man who manages to combine Moscow Orthodox drunkenness with hardcore Hasidism. He advises her to contact Yasha Khristiansky at the Timak publishing house and warns her not to mention that her books have been published in Russia and to endure "an inspection."

The firm "Tim’ak" — an acronym for the Hebrew words "Rescue of the Lost" — rents a space on the second floor of the Middle East Courier building. The space is partitioned off into a maze of cubicles. The firm is financed by the Canadian millionaire Brombardt and is patronized by the World Jewish Congress. The chairman of the board of directors is listed as former refusenik Yehoshua Apis, known as Gosha.

Yasha Khristiansky, the editor-in-chief and a member of the board of directors, is a red-haired, languid man with an aquiline nose and a sword belt. He wears a completely unbelievable surname, overlaying his Orthodox Judaism. For "testing," he gives the narrator a sheet of paper containing a Ministry of Absorption brochure about burial benefits for repatriates. The official phrase "the inalienable right of every Israeli citizen is the right to be buried at the state’s expense within 24 hours" proves uneditable, and the narrator, exhausted, writes in the margins: "God forbid, of course, but if you die, don’t worry…" Then Yasha takes her for a walk and spends two hours retelling historical research from his magazine "Daring" — about the chronology of the Persian kings and the Samaritan Sanballat — and only while eating a pastry at the pastry shop does he get to the novel "Topchan," which he’s writing himself.

Female employees

The narrator immediately feels closest to her colleagues. Rita is unflappable, with short hair, and speaks slowly, as if searching for additional meaning in her words. She experienced culture shock on the second day after her arrival: on the bus, she saw an old Sephardic Jew picking his nose — and from then on, Israelis became "they" for her. Katya, a former Muscovite from Savelovsky, has a PhD in statistics or cybernetics, speaks French like a native, and within a month, she can already read Hebrew. She is consumed by the fire of social justice: she is convinced that first you punch someone in the face, and then, if the person turns out to be good, you can apologize. The refrain of all her conversations is: "What an idiotic country!"

The third character, Reb Chaim, is a former refusenik whom Gosha brought from Russia and placed at Timak as a personal pensioner: once a week, he stuffs envelopes with copies of "Derznovenie" magazine and receives a check at the end of the month. Fima Pushman, a freckled giant, is Gosha’s secretary, a former talented photographer from Gorky who, in Russia, popularized the custom of the working masses taking photographs with the deceased in the coffin before death distorted their features. Now Fima acts as a courier between the think tank on Ben Yehuda and the work floor, meticulously misplacing addresses and losing paychecks.

War

A missile strike on Israel begins in the middle of the night. A siren — one of the most powerful amplifiers — is mounted directly on the roof of their house, and the narrator perceives this harmonious, soaring wail as the trumpets of the Last Judgment. The family locks themselves in a sealed room and dons gas masks; the fifteen-year-old son rushes about excitedly, while the daughter cries and tears off her mask. The radio plays tender songs, prepared in advance: "Next year we’ll sit on the balcony and count the migratory birds…" The husband dances in a gas mask to cheer up his daughter, dragging the narrator into a silly tango. After lights out, she picks up the phone, and it’s Yasha Khristiansky on the other end — calling to admire her gas mask and kiss her hand through the phone.

The next day at the office, Yasha spreads a map of the Middle East on the floor and confuses everyone with military terminology. Meanwhile, a scandal erupts: Rabbi Eliyahu Puris, editor of the newspaper "Hello, Saturday!", yells at Khristiansky, calling him a "klum" (zero, a cosmic void). Katya jumps out of the booth and defends Yasha, nearly ripping out the rabbi’s sidelocks; Rita and the narrator barely restrain her.

The end of the company and the holiday of Purim

"Hello, Saturday!" is gone — the company’s main order is lost. Soon, the narrator loses her job: Yasha flees to the military reserves, Timak effectively ceases to exist, and the salary is not paid in full.

But just then, Purim arrives. The narrator wanders through Jerusalem at night in a carnival crowd with the librarian Gedaliah — the same one with whom she returned from classes the day before the war. Children dressed as high priests carry a stretcher with a boy dressed as Queen Esther; angels with battered wings wave to the crowd; music thunders from all sides. Gedaliah points out that the song the children are singing is a good couple of thousand years old and leaves in a taxi, shouting from the window, "Chag Sameach!"

The next morning, Katya calls: she’s found a job in her field at the Bank of Israel, complete with a car and a dollar account — she wasn’t hired for a similar position in Russia because she was Jewish. Katya offers the narrator a thousand shekels a month "from them and Shneerson" and forbids her from cleaning the villa of her neighbor, Avi Bardug — a man with a last name like that, Katya figures, is sure to grab her by the ass. Then the narrator calls Yasha: the wise Lyalya answers and announces in a tragic voice, "Yasha has gone to miluim" — which sounds like "he’s gone to a monastery." Finally, a delivery boy in a red wig brings the narrator a basket of peach-colored roses from her husband — incredibly beautiful and incredibly expensive. Choked by the smell and the cost, she screams in Russian down the stairwell, "I’ve lost my job!!" — and the messenger from below shouted back: “Hag sameakh!”