Tel Aviv Stories

Book excerpt: "Tel Aviv is a place of contradiction, an urban dream of the Middle East where sleek European cafes sit beneath stone minarets; where Berlin-style hipsters sip coffee next to black-hatted rabbis; where charity, sex, conflict and controversy overflow the streets. In Tel Aviv Stories, Israel's "White City" is revealed. Through a tale of city madness in Spinoza Street, and the beggar's comedy, On Allenby; telling the secrets of an "urban witch" in White Hair Woman and showing the still-life of a young immigrant family in Mother, Father, Child; in the tragedy of twinhood in the novella Rivkah & Rebecca, and by tracing the footsteps of a lost life in Little Old Lady With the Flowers; and in a personal story of exile in Night of Grief, author Ashley Rindsberg gives outsiders entree into a strange world of Russian street virtuosos, flower selling whores, polyglot bums and the "Backwards Rabbi," as well as the middle-class immigrants and children of wealth who people Israel's tangled urban heart.""